William Rivers Pitt: First Steps on a Long Road

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
- C.S. Lewis

So Bush is out and Obama is in and change has come, and you've probably read or heard this enough times already, so let's move on, because reality must sadly intrude.

Confronting every American citizen is the existence of three dominant factors which have become part of the nation's DNA over the course of the last century and a half. Each of these factors holds muscular sway over the doings of government and has a direct effect upon all our lives. None of them are going away any time soon, and that is fact.

One of these three is the existence of something called "corporate personhood," the legal theory established by a number of Supreme Court cases, including the 1886 Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad, which grants 14th Amendment rights to corporations. In essence, it is a legal shield that grants the same rights and privileges of citizenry enjoyed by you and me to faceless, on-paper corporate constructs. This has given rise to what can only be described as corporate super-citizens, entities with our rights but with the enormous financial ability to press, and indeed distort, those rights for their own purposes.

Another factor we currently endure is the lingering existence and aftereffect of the establishment of legalized political bribery, best represented by the 1976 Supreme Court decision in Buckley v. Valeo. In short, due to decisions like the one in Buckley, the payment of millions of dollars to political parties and candidates amounts to "free speech." Combined with the existence of corporate personhood, the result was corporate super-citizens pressing their "rights" by purchasing politics wholesale. Corporations seeking the dismantling of media ownership rules, the deregulation of banking and financial strictures, and the denuding of environmental protections merely purchased enough politicians via "free speech" contributions, and they got what they wanted.

The third factor takes us all the way back to World War II, and is where the confluence of those first two factors truly came together to form a juggernaut that marks every part of our national landscape. In order to gear up for the kind of colossal manufacturing output required to defeat two massive military powers on opposite ends of the globe, President Roosevelt placed our national economy on a wartime footing. With the establishment of the Truman Doctrine to confront Soviet communism, and the passage of the National Security Act in 1947, America's wartime economic footing became a permanent thing that remains at the nucleus of our national economy to this day.

Put plainly, much of the health of the American economy today requires the permanent preparation for and fighting of wars. The corporate persons who profit from defense spending have made sure, by way of their "free speech" spending on pet politicians and acquirement of major media outlets, that nothing interferes with the financial processes of this arrangement. Their politicians and media spokesmen terrify the people with the golems of imminent national doom, the money rolls in, and the world gets more dangerous by the day.

These three legs are the tripod upon which our national reality currently stands, and not to put too fine a point on it, but President Barack Hussein Obama isn't going to put even a tiny dent in the way things are. No president can, not completely, and certainly not now. Fixing this self-destructive arrangement cannot be accomplished in one fell swoop, but will require the slow, steady, patient dedication of a lifetime ... along with victories in many more elections to come, of course.

That sounds terribly depressing, and it is, but there's also this.

President Obama's plans to stimulate the economy and create new jobs will give needed tax breaks to a lot of people who really need them, not just to the people who really want them, and there is a world of difference between the two. Our national infrastructure and technological capacities will be greatly enhanced, and the current economic slump will be blunted when all those new paychecks start to flow in the proper direction. President Obama's plans are far from flawless, but they represent a strong move in the direction of helping working- and middle-class Americans who have spent the last eight years being roundly ignored.

President Obama's first official act in office was to repair the damage done by the Bush administration's wildly devious and dishonest practices. As Dan Froomkin reported in The Washington Post on Thursday, "Obama issued three memos: one establishes bold new rules regarding transparency and open government; another instructs executive-branch officials who enforce the Freedom of Information Act to err on the side of making materials public rather than looking for reasons to legally withhold them; and the third freezes pay of White House staffers making over $100,000. He also signed two executive orders: one establishing strict ethics rules for his political appointees and another making presidential records more accessible."

President Obama has ordered the closing of America's detention center in Guantanamo Bay, and has ordered the end of the use of torture against detainees. As Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball reported in Time on Thursday, "In perhaps his most far-reaching and potentially controversial move, Obama ordered that the CIA immediately cease using any interrogation techniques that are not already authorized in the Army Field Manual. He also ordered the CIA to close, 'as expeditiously as possible,' any secret detention facilities overseas and begin immediate compliance with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits 'humiliating and degrading' treatment of prisoners."

The import of these latest moves by President Obama was best detailed by Glenn Greenwald, who wrote, "Barack Obama will have spent his first several days in office issuing a series of executive orders which, some quibbling and important caveats aside, meet or actually exceed even the most optimistic expectations of civil libertarians - everything from ordering the closing of Guantanamo to suspending military commissions to compelling CIA interrogators to adhere to the Army Field Manual to banning CIA "black sites" and, perhaps most encouragingly (in my view): severely restricting his own power and the power of former presidents to withhold documents on the basis of secrecy, which has been the prime corrosive agent of the Bush era."

Finally, science has been rescued from the dungeon of Bush administration idiocy. The Financial Times reported on Friday that, "US regulators have approved the first use of embryonic stem cells in humans. The move raises the prospect of a groundbreaking approach to medical treatment that had been blocked since 2001 by George W. Bush as president. Just two days after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, who opposed his predecessor's ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, the Food & Drug Administration authorised Geron, a US biotech company, to begin clinical trials for patients with severe spinal cord injuries." For millions of Americans who suffer from diabetes, multiple sclerosis and other debilitating maladies, the promise of stem cell research cannot be overstated.

The big stuff isn't fixed, and fixing it all will require a great deal of hard work, patience, perseverance and electoral diligence from all of us. In the meantime, torture has been abolished, secrecy has been curtailed, the rule of law has been buttressed, and the national economic crisis will soon be addressed.

We're at the beginning again, and moving in the right direction. The final resolution, in every meaningful sense, depends almost entirely on us.

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William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know" and "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence." His newest book, "House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation," is now available from PoliPointPress.

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