The Empire wimps back

We forget that President BHO voted against sending ground troops to Iraq; he campaigned to shut down the operation of the Guantanamo Base prison unless it opened its determined martial persistence to civil law.

The politics of oil defines U.S. military engagements in Asia and Africa. The events after 9/11 were not just a nation’s kneejerk response to a rude wake-up call. Bush II, egged by Cheney’s gang, policed the world to ensure oil supply. Where corporate power sees gain in the extraction of black gold behind military might, BHO gets in trouble.

Now, it is not just the WH occupant but also a congressional report decrying intelligence agencies’ practices after the 9/11 national frenzy that slid us into a War on Terror. Top spies discredit the Senate report, though it recommends no prosecution of wrongdoing. The UN, however, demands that those responsible for systematic crimes be brought to justice, with CIA and Bush administrative figures subject to arrest outside the U.S.

Mr. Obama affirmed what is essentially decent in the U.S.’ stance. We are a nation capable of accepting what we did wrong, say it so, and find ways not to do it again. Not to do it again is futuric; to hold one “accountable” so that someone is punished is blood hounding!

We are a reluctant empire, given that prerogative after the value of the American economy surpassed that of England following the U.S. Civil War. With the Monroe Doctrine, norte, sud, y centro America came into the U.S. sphere of influence. Also, oilfield! Maracaibo, for all practical purposes, was a Texas county across the waters!

China this year ascended to being the largest economy in the world. That should not come as a surprise; one in every five residents in the planet is Chinese. There are almost four-and-a-half Chinese for every American in the U.S., and China can claim the longest ongoing civilization in the world, a political unit more than 10 times the age of the 238-year experiment on socioeconomic polity that America represents.

We are not comparing China with the United States, a useless exercise akin to putting grapes and apples on the same count. We are after the behavior of an “empire,” of a political unit that imposes its selfhood on other nations. American exceptionalism features in our stated manifest destiny to police the world!

China was imperial in its behavior in mainland Asia when Qin Shi Huangdi took the Warring States. After Admiral Zhang He’s adventures more than a millennium later, the Ming Dynasty decided to fold inward; it joined the Great Wall to protect itself from northern marauders, called itself Zhongguo, the middle kingdom under mandate of heaven, and assumed the rest of the world would pay it homage!

The Middle Kingdom closed out with the Qing Dynasty even as Imperial Japan hoisted its rising sun at the end of the 19th century, resulting in world wars that saw nuclear warheads on the second round before the TNT dusts settled.

The American Empire now foists the Keystone XL pipeline of dirty Albertan tar sands, with the wealth of majority leaseholders Texas’ Koch brothers financing the down payment. WH Obama’s executive will is not an ally; and although the dramatic decline of oil price is attributed to punish Putin’s Russia, it might just reflect the market. Kuwait sits on a rich pool to the advantage of Anglo-American oil interests but the IS of Iraq actually does us all a favor by lowering the cost at the pumps to match production expense.

Of empires, a U.S. “imperial” feature is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). We had universal health care in socialist Saskatchewan, Canada in the 70s. My optical practitioners advised me to care for my good sight, counseling that the use of fashionable sunglasses I wore deprived my eyes of the exercise it needed to adjust to dark and bright lights each time I went in and out of shadows. The ophthalmologist and optician did preventive medicine and they kept folks like me focused on health rather than on cosmetic accoutrement, or worse, on fear of traumatic care.

Obamacare is the first legislative attempt at universal health care since Medicare made it into law in the 60s. Anything “socialized” is an ideological specter in the corporate psyche and the ideology of fear prevailing in the U.S., so the Afro-Am “socialist” in the WH is not spared protest on his signature legislation.

BHO is not an empire builder; so far, he has been an empire dismantler. MIT Dr. Gruber’s candor on the WH tactic to get Obamacare passed got the conservative nay-nay crowd into a tizzy. Yo! Lawmaking fudges on the edges when necessary. You win some, lose some, dude.

The American Empire ends, not because it’s American but because it’s dated. A new kid in the block smart phones and the democratic impulse goes far, calling Cubans “Americans”, and welcomes them in America’s summit.

The Empire wimps, long limps the Empire! Exceptionalism is dead; America lives!