Few of us stop to ask if this assumption is warranted. When facts arise that threaten this worldview we acknowledge them and move on. Democracy is imperfect, but it’s the best solution we’ve got. Errors happen, but reform can fix them.

Anything else, we say, is idealistic. Those who question the integrity of our systems as a whole are generally seen as outsiders or fringe elements, unable to appreciate the hard-nosed pragmatism that comes with an adult understanding of reality.

Is this really the case? In this issue we invite readers to ask what we have termed “the threshold question.” There are many different ways of stating it, but they all get at the same thing. “How big does a contradiction have to get before it stops being the exception and becomes the rule?” Or put another way, “How bad is bad enough?”

Some will undoubtedly cling to what they see as the pragmatic response, shunning the threshold question as too idealistic to be useful. To those of you considering such a response, I have a simple question. If your ideals aren’t worth fighting for, why bother believing in them?

In this issue we invite you to consider seriously whether the current state of affairs reflects your core values. And if it does not, we ask that you consider whether internal reforms will be sufficient to address your concerns or if more radical action is required.

My own article criticizes the profit-first construction of our economy and the complete capture of our government by financial elites. With a detailed analysis of how capitalism creates unemployment, I call for new coalitions between the far left and far right to reorient our society towards democratic justice.

Ralph Paone’s piece interrogates how the conditions of so-called “knowledge work” constrain our ability and desire to organize for social change. He calls for inventive experimentation in blockades, strategic mapping, and the redeployment of knowledge-based skills to reactivate the knowledge-classes in social struggle.

Prashanth Kamalakanthan’s extended feature offers a detailed analysis of the largely hidden American war machine and the extraordinary power to assassinate-at-will that President Obama has grabbed. With a private military and the power to kill without public oversight, it’s unclear what power this system leaves for the people.

We hope you find this issue engaging, and thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Bobo Bose-Kolanu

(Lead image courtesy of Tom Page)

What Jobs Used To Be

In the post-World War II era American jobs were golden, comparatively speaking. Unions’ demands for higher wages and increased benefits were so successful that a single bread-winner (often a male) could support an entire family.^[1] Working conditions improved with overtime provisions and workplace safety regulations passing as a result of labor organizing^[2]. Overall a job was a ticket to steady income, promotion with time, and the means to support a family.

While this picture sounds good it is important to note that racial and gender discrimination were much higher, with women usually economically dependent on men due to wage discrimination and black Americans facing second-class citizenship with few protected civil rights, widespread segregation, and lynchings.^[3]

Along with high wages and benefits, corporate taxation was the highest in American history. As a result the rich/poor gap was at an all-time low, with economic growth being shared more evenly among the classes.^[4] These corporate taxes helped pay for a variety of social assistance programs including welfare, Medicare, and Social Security. By redistributing income the government provided a safety-net for the unemployed, the sick, and the elderly. Critically this safety net also helped the economy. Those who might otherwise not be economically productive could still contribute to the economic cycle by generating demand through consumption.

What Jobs Are Now

Things today are much worse for the American worker. Unemployment is at 8%, the highest since the Great Depression, with a record number of job-seekers remaining unemployed after 6 months.^[5] The rich/poor gap in America has returned to Great Depression levels, with the top 1% of Americans receiving over 20% of pre-tax income nationally, ranking America 93^rd in the world for income inequality behind the likes of China and Iran.^[6] Predictably social mobility (the likelihood of becoming richer than your parents) is at a historic low with the top 1% of Americans controlling 42% of the nation’s wealth, and the top 5% controlling nearly 70%.^[7]

The jobs that are created are overwhelmingly part-time and low-wage, with one-fourth of working Americans making less than two-thirds of the median national hourly wage.^[8] Between 1981 and 2008 the richest 10% took home on average 96% of income gains only to capture 100% of income gains between 1997-2008 with the wages of the bottom 90% declining.^[9]

The poignant story of Tyree Johnson draws these statistics into sharp focus. Johnson receives $8.25/hour, while the CEO of his employer McDonalds took home $8.75 million this year. Specific strategies are in place to ensure Johnson remains poor. He is transferred between locations, his wage-scale is restarted upon change of ownership to avoid promotion and raises, and he is unable to get a full 40 hours of work each week and thus does not qualify for full-time benefits.^[10] After working at McDonalds for 20 years Johnson still makes minimum wage.^[11]

At an all time high are third quarter corporate profits this year, reaching a record high of 11.1% of the U.S. economy.^[12] Since 1978 CEO pay has increased 27 times faster than worker pay, with outsourcing and the decline of organized labor paving the way for fatter executive bonuses.^[13]

Advanced tax dodging schemes continue to allow corporations to get away without paying their fair share, or in some cases paying any taxes at all. Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt openly defended the practice, saying “It’s called capitalism. We are proudly capitalistic. I’m not confused about this.”^[14] According to Citizens for Tax Justice’s “Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodgers 2008-2010″ report, Boeing, DuPont, Capital One, and General Electric all paid a negative effective tax rate in 2010.^[15]

How Did We Get Here?

The specific historical reasons are complex and varied, but two large trends stand out. Both are consequences of the same structural flaw of our economy. The flaw has to do with how capitalism creates profit.

Used here, profit refers to “economic profit,” or the return on investment made by investing capital in a specific venture as opposed to any other venture.^[16] In other words, calculating economic profit helps someone decide where to invest their capital.

Profit happens when workers continue to work beyond the cost of their wages. For example, if a factory worker earns the cost of his wages in there hours, but works eight, five of those hours are “surplus value,” or profit for the factory owner. Viewed this way, surplus value is a tax the worker pays the capitalist for the right to have a job. The capitalist collects this tax simply by happening to own the means of production, like the machinery required for a factory to operate. Because the laborer cannot afford to start his own factory, he must pay the capitalist in the form of free work in order to have a job.

For a capitalist seeking to increase profits only two options are available: make workers work longer, or increase the productivity of labor. Union-based labor struggles established maximum working days with overtime laws and worker safety provisions in the United States. This led to the small rich/poor gap of the post-WWII era but also encouraged capitalists to find new ways to extract profit.

Automation provided a means for capitalists to increase worker productivity, thereby extracting the same amount of labor while employing fewer workers and keeping a larger share of production in the form of profit.

The agriculture industry provides a case-in-point example. Agriculture employed roughly 70% of American labor in 1840, 10% in 1950, and employs only 2% today.^[17] The manufacturing and service industries will soon follow suit as technological advancements in automation render much of labor irrelevant to the production process. Structurally capitalism attempts to eliminate the worker in order to maximize profits.

Labor, It’s What’s For Dinner

As it eliminates labor from production, capitalism then proceeds to extract profit directly from the fate of the unemployed:

1. High unemployment keeps wages low, since others can take the place of workers who would organize for higher demands. (Despite this key obstacle Black Friday strikes hit WalMart stores in 100 cities throughout 46 states this year.^[18])

2. Borders keep labor chained to its country of origin but allow goods to move freely to find the highest price. Companies exploit differences in purchasing power to buy labor cheap and sell their goods high. Borders create a literal stock market out of human bodies for corporate exploitation.

3. The booming prison and mass surveillance industries are worth approximately $8 billion yearly, with secondary industries like domestic arms sales, security systems, and media and advertising likely pushing the total much higher.^[19] Each of these industries depends on peddling a discourse of dangerousness that sensationalizes problems and rejects informed discussion about holistic solutions in favor of fear-based purchases and policy. America is roughly 5% of the global population, but one in four prisoners worldwide are American.^[20]

Of course one may object that without laborers drawing adequate wages demand cannot sustain the economy. This is why we saw a shift from redistributed income providing demand in the 1950′s-70′s to a debt-based financing model from the 1980′s onwards. This debt model imploded with the subprime mortgage crisis as home values plummeted and credit dried up, triggering a global recession through which we are still suffering today.^[21]

And of course, don’t forget the bailout. Crucially it is not the American worker who received substantial economic aid from her taxes, but instead the banks and hedge funds whose predatory lending practices and irresponsible loan repackaging precipitated the crisis in the first place.^[22]

Most Americans are aware of the $700 billion Troubled-Assets Relief Program (TARP) the Treasury Department dispensed to banks following the downturn. TARP already represented a kind of socialism in reverse, where profits remained private and losses were borne by the public. Without asking Congress and without telling the public, the Federal Reserve gave an additional $7.7 trillion to the banks.^[23]

That number is over half the yearly total economic output of the United States.

How To Move Forward

In the face of such overwhelming capture by financial elites it is difficult to continue calling the United States a democracy. Change through the existing two-party system is politically unimaginable as Democrats, traditionally viewed as the pro-union party, prepare to join Republicans in slashing Social Security.^[24]

Even if one of the parties were willing to do an about-face on 30 years of political history and defend effective corporate taxation to support the American Dream, it is unclear that such an economy would present a long-term solution to the structural bias capitalism displays for unemployment. While mixed economies can dampen some of capitalism’s excesses domestically, those problems almost always shift abroad as capital moves to seek the highest return on investment, in turn deflating the domestic economy it leaves.^[25]

Instead, those on the far left and far right must join together and build a new coalition that places people above profits. Communists, socialists, anarchists, queer/race/gender activists, libertarians, and those Christians who actually support ministering unto the poor all agree on the core value of self-determination, though they have differing ideas about what this freedom looks like and how to achieve it. Perhaps even more importantly, all these groups demand a basic value (liberty, the common good, or love) takes precedence above profit extraction, and this requires resistance against capitalism. Together this coalition could present a strong force for positive change in our nation.

While plotting a program for cooperation in advance remains unlikely, one thing is clear. Sustained dialogue across ideological enclaves will be necessary to invent a new language that abandons hardened dogmas in favor of practical steps to reorient our society and our economy towards justice.

The title of this article is a play on the uber-successful Clinton election catchphrase “It’s the economy, stupid!” Under President Clinton effective corporate taxation fell precipitously.

Lead image courtesy of Steven Damron.

Bobo is a writer, artist, and aspiring business owner. He currently researches human-machine interaction at Duke University.

Historically, the cubicle has hardly been a site for radical political struggle.

Demands for revolutionary social change have grown either in places slightly removed from the demands of the economy (e.g. universities, art collectives) or places where people are violently exploited by their work (e.g. factories). Within these struggles, knowledge workers are generally viewed as at best irrelevant and at worst a hindrance for transformative action.^[2] However, as the American economy continues to shift towards this non-unionized, highly cerebral form of labor, we need to start taking the political potential (or lack thereof) of the knowledge worker seriously.

Knowledge Work Dissected

The basic rhythm of knowledge work is a rushing staccato. The worker’s attention is set on high-alert and made to process a variety of mentally stressful tasks throughout a given day. The scope of this problem is underlined by the emergence of entire economic theories of attention and self-help books with ominous titles, such as Death by Meeting and Boring Meetings Suck.^[3]  As Italian thinker Franco “Bifo” Berardi laments, “everywhere, attention is under siege.”^[4]

(Nadine Fraczkowski via World of Photographers)

This scarcity of attention has serious consequences for how workers communicate and process information. A 2011 study from the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London finds that the multi-tasking required by a typical knowledge worker job decreases worker IQ by an average of 10 points. Torn between different projects, mountains of email, and endless meetings, the knowledge worker comes to demand efficiency over provocation. This transformation is brilliantly encapsulated by Ian Parker’s writing on PowerPoint:

PowerPoint…is software you impose on other people…there are great tracts of corporate America where to appear at a meeting without PowerPoint would be unwelcome and vaguely pretentious, like wearing no shoes. In darkened rooms at industrial plants and ad agencies, at sales pitches and conferences, this is how people are communicating: no paragraphs, no pronouns—the world condensed into a few upbeat slides, with seven or so words on a line, seven or so lines on a slide.^[5]

Flying through work in a state of distraction, communicating with coworkers is like trying to talk to someone at a noisy bar. Brief, direct exchanges of information take the place of more thought-provoking and considered dialogue. One is barely able to keep all of the information flowing, much less step back to consider the broader context in which this information exists.

The Comfort Economy

Sweeter notes punctuate the maddening tempo of knowledge work; fancy nights out, a wider variety of entertainment options, spas, yoga and drugs. Just as knowledge workers must be ready-at-hand for any updates on their projects, diversions to ease their stress must be available On Demand. Savvy corporations are well aware of this need. In developing the Google Zurich office, the design firm, Camenzind Evolution, “applied ‘emotional comfort’, an approach to design that takes personalities and sensibilities into account. The research based design process was enhanced by a psychologist who analyzed the functional and emotional needs of the Zooglers (i.e. Googlers in Zurich).”^[6]

 (Stefan Camenzind of Camenzind Evolution via Office Snapshots)

 (Stefan Camenzind of Camenzind Evolution via Office Snapshots)

Confronted with diffuse sources of stress and anxiety, knowledge workers are taught to unplug through a plethora of comforts and conveniences. As former President George W. Bush put it in a 2006 speech on spurring economic growth, “go shopping more.”

Our obsession with comfort contributes to apathy and disdain towards those pursuing radical social change. Consider a common complaint about the occupations: ‘Isn’t there a quieter, less disruptive way for protestors to voice their concerns? One that doesn’t disrupt my life?’

Consumable Politics

The interplay of stress and comfort creates a closed circuit that keeps many knowledge workers operating in a space removed from broader socioeconomic struggle. The mental intensity of knowledge work reduces the capacity and desire for complex inter-personal communication, while also training workers to prefer simple, easy to consume bits of information. At the same time, a culture of comfort and consumption submit activism to the rule of maximum convenience. These two phenomena create a negative feedback loop that maintains a cycle of anxious consumption while lowering the capacity for questioning the economic and political structures that dominate society.

In this environment, politics is reduced to an act of consumption. Every couple of years, people are presented with a choice between two relatively similar candidates and asked to pick a side. Each party spends an excessive amount—an estimated $6 billion in the 2012 Presidential Election—to differentiate their candidate and ensure voters make the right decision.^[9] At the end of yearlong campaigns, people mark a ballot one way or another and go back to their normal lives.

In a society suffering from attention fatigue, even radical modes of political resistance are undermined. Strikes, union disputes and protests become objects of consumption. Struggle is consumed as a spectacle and then spit out for lacking coherence.^[10] Recall a popular critique of Occupy Wall Street: ‘What’s their goal?’ This line of criticism assumes politics comes as a ready-made brand to consume, wear, etc. Like an impatient boss who’s running late to a meeting, we demand protestors get to the point, with little empathy or willingness to get involved in the process.

However, the power of movements like Occupy lies in not in the message but the action. As Bifo summarizes, “the main stake of street actions is the reactivation of the body…bodily sensibility, blurred and stressed by precarity and competition, are finding new modes of expression, so that desire may begin flowing again.”^[11] The revolution “out there” is made a media spectacle in order to keep the knowledge worker “in here,” where it’s nice and cozy with plenty of work to be done. What possibility exists for disrupting complacency and alienation amongst knowledge workers?

 (Sandi Bachom)

 Class Consciousness is Not Enough

In other types of work class consciousness plays a key role in fighting oppressive structures. As with the recent Walmart strikes, workers bound together by shared experiences of exploitation unite as a class and begin acting in a collective manner, whether that means placing explicit demands on management or simply refusing to work.^[12]

This concept of class consciousness is utterly inadequate for addressing the situation of knowledge workers. Most knowledge economy jobs lack the infrastructure of collective communication and shared experience necessary for true class consciousness. Management structures are flat and decentralized. Teams often consist of less than ten people. This structure localizes frustrations and potential communication. Conflicts die in the capillaries of the organization without the larger organization or management being made aware.

More fundamentally, the focus on the individual worker stands in opposition to traditional models of class organization. Workers are hired not just based on a checklist of skills but a series of intangibles. This somewhat personality-based approach individualizes workplace struggle. What could be considered generalized problems with a forum of work—being over-worked, too many meetings, nasty clients, etc.—become personal challenges to overcome. Struggle is internalized.

Reactivating Political Potential

Resisting the cerebral modes of control facing knowledge workers starts by reclaiming mental space. As Micah White proclaims, “The future of activism is an insurrection of the mental environment–a movement that appropriates tactics reserved for physical battles and applies them to the battle to protect our mental environment.”^[13] While there is no program for this process, White’s proposal suggests a couple of areas for exploration.

For starters, we should think about placing mental blockades on both the attention-sapping technologies of knowledge work and the consumption of comfort. This could take the form of leaving work e-mail and computers at the job site instead of bringing them home. It might also mean instituting zero-spending days, as many May Day protestors practiced this past year. Creating separation from the negative feedback loop of attention fatigue and convenience is necessary to open mental space for new thinking to emerge.

Second, we should think about creating better strategic maps for the problems facing knowledge workers. Rather than looking at attention fatigue as a personal problem, we should consider these problems as shared structural aspects of knowledge work. Collective mapping of mental workspaces may help reveal generalized conditions that knowledge workers can organize around.

Finally, we should consider redeployment of our knowledge skills for justice-focused purposes. One extremely inspiring example of this is Occupy Design, a decentralized group of designers who organized in the fall of 2011 to provide an ever-growing, striking visual language for the 99%.

 (Occupy Design)

 Skill-based collectives like Occupy Design offer knowledge workers a way to utilize their knowledge in new context. They demonstrate the power of applying skills that may have been learned in work contexts to radical social struggle.

Although there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problems faced by knowledge workers and further experimentation is undoubtedly necessary, each of these interventions holds the potential to begin breaking through complacency and activating knowledge workers towards building a better society.

Yet widespread anti-U.S. anger continues to surprise Americans.^[7] Election after election, the American voter is led to believe that U.S. militarism is a force for global good, benefiting foreigners as well as Americans. We are fed this message by politicians captured by a defense industry that annually boasts record-breaking profits and unprecedented sums spent on political lobbying.^[8] Both parties package military spending in the language of freedom, democracy, and human rights.

The glaring logical inconsistency should be read at its face. U.S. military spending directly benefits only military contractors and the politicians whose reelection campaigns they fund. At home and abroad, the U.S.’s unrivaled militarism cripples entire societies. Recognizing this contradiction requires moving beyond domestic party politics and the mainstream media locked firmly in its shadow.

War, on the Ground

To wage war in modern times is to accept the premise that the men, women, and children of another country have intrinsically less valuable lives than those of our own. But this idea is too repellent to be sold directly. Today, the prevailing rhetoric underpinning American militarism is “counterterrorism.” Protecting our own, we are told, requires killing others. Thus, thousands of ordinary foreign citizens continue to be slaughtered and starved to benefit American military and economic interests. This logic of counterterrorism is as malignant as terrorism itself. More dangerously, it directly exacerbates the problem it purports to solve.

To recall a recent example we might consider the 2003 U.S-led invasion of Iraq, universally condemned by international lawyers and human rights experts^[9] as an illegal war of aggression^[10] motivated primarily by geostrategic interests but cloaked in the standard language of freedom, security, and democracy. Historically, the U.S. happily funded Saddam Hussein’s genocide and chemical warfare in Kurdistan, in which he massacred thousands, and stopped only when the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait threatened oil-rich U.S. ally Saudi Arabia.^[11] Later we learned that in the course of the 2003 war buildup the White House knowingly lied about Iraqi WMDs, forging official documents to wage war under false pretenses.^[12],[13]

In the years since the invasion of Iraq over 120,000 civilians have died. These are the officially disclosed deaths, but further analysis of the Wikileaks “Iraq War Logs” may bump the figure past 132,000.^[14] Using only the conservative estimate, quick math shows that since March 19, 2003, an average of 33 civilians have died daily in occupied Iraq. All the while, America’s longest war (remember Afghanistan?) continues escalating, with civilian death tolls accelerating amid plummeting general health outcomes.^[15] Yet recent reports suggest the Afghan War may stretch well past the advertised withdrawal date of 2014: maybe 2017,^[16] maybe even 2024.^[17]

How should members of any society react to such catastrophic destruction experienced firsthand everyday for a decade? “Counterterrorism” as executed can never succeed in combating terrorism, but it has already provoked global hatred of America, perpetuating a state of permanent war propelled by select defense contractors.

Expanding our focus beyond the official war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan makes this picture clearer.

A Portrait of Global Empire

The U.S. military has undergone such stunning growth in the past fifty years that an accurate count of the number of U.S. bases globally is unavailable. Most credible estimates place the figure between 1,000 and 1,200.^[18] Overall U.S. military expenditures are similarly outsized, accounting for 46% of the world’s total military spending.^[19] In terms of GDP-proportional military allocations the U.S. is in illuminating company. At 4.06% (considering only basic Pentagon spending, a very narrow scope) we occupy a similar range as Angola, Syria, Chad, Oman, and Turkmenistan, edged out only by Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, and North Korea.^[20] Just last year the U.S. tripled its global arms sales, cornering roughly 78% of the world market, followed next by Russia with a paltry 5.6%.^[21]

As disturbing as the readily available facts are, the war machine extends far deeper than these initial figures suggest. U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) forces now conduct an average of seventy covert missions each day in 60% of the world’s countries, doubling their Bush-era presence in sixty countries to an undisclosed list of 120 or more under Obama.^[22] Established in 1987, SOCOM carries out the U.S. military’s most secret missions. In recent years it has snowballed into a full-fledged shadow paramilitary, described by outgoing SOCOM chief Eric Olson as “a microcosm of the Department of Defense, with ground, air, and maritime components, a global presence, and authorities and responsibilities that mirror the Military Departments, Military Services, and Defense Agencies.”^[23] Since 9/11, the SOCOM budget has quadrupled to $9.8 billion, and its number of personnel deployed abroad has also increased fourfold.^[24] While almost entirely opaque, SOCOM is highly sophisticated. “Black ops” troops conduct kill/capture campaigns across the Greater Middle East, while so-called “white” forces regularly conduct secret joint-training exercises with client militaries worldwide.

Especially disconcerting among the SOCOM spectrum are the activities of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a clandestine sub-command tasked mainly with the tracking and killing of suspected terror suspects.^[25] Reporting directly to the President, JSOC effectively functions as the President’s private global army, maintaining an extrajudicial hit list that includes American citizens.^[26] John Nagl, a counterinsurgency advisor to ex-CIA director David Petraeus, has called it “an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine,” completely outside of any democratic accountability.^[27]

Constant War, Everywhere

It is difficult to overstate the scope of the American military. What analysts have described as the U.S.’s “new ‘Scramble for Africa’” again underlines its true global reach.^[28] The U.S. has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in military infrastructure this past year across Africa. An average of 5,000 U.S. military and Department of Defense personnel are now deployed at any one time, monitoring drone wars as far as Mali and Somalia, while ground troops conduct operations in Uganda and Ethiopia.^[29]

The pattern on display in Africa — significant military action in undeclared conflict zones, underreported and virtually unknown to the American public — illustrates the shadowy paradigm under which U.S. militarism largely functions. The message of protecting freedom does not begin to square with the reality of multiple secret wars violating foreign countries’ sovereignty across continents.

In Iran, the push for military action continues building despite an overwhelming lack of evidence justifying intervention. Iranian civilians continue to suffer under crippling sanctions^[30] intended to dissuade their government from pursuing a nuclear weapons program that most credible sources — including the U.S.’s own official National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs)^[31] — agree does not exist. The sanctions on Iranian civil society flagrantly violate U.N. prohibitions on torture and collective punishment. In addition to targeting civilians economically, the U.S. continues to expand its military presence in the region^[32] despite a sea of bases in the Gulf that already encircle the country.^[33]

Troublingly, the buildup augments an ongoing covert war led by the CIA and Israel’s Mossad that has been underway for years. Like SOCOM, the CIA in recent years has become yet another paramilitary arm of the U.S. government, waging war under false or totally absent pretexts. U.S. officials have openly stated^[34] that the Mujahadin-e Khalq (MEK), a cult terrorist organization, has worked alongside Mossad operatives to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists in shootings, car bombings and poisonings.^[35] Earlier this year, revelations were made that JSOC secretly trained MEK operatives in Nevada as early as 2005, while they were still officially listed as a terrorist organization.^[36] A Foreign Policy report shows how Israeli agents, supplied with CIA intelligence, have coordinated a number of mosque bombings and deadly explosions at nuclear facilities.^[37] And since 2009, a joint U.S.-Israel cyber warfare campaign has seen at least three virulent worms damage nuclear centrifuges.^[38]

It should come as no surprise that the hypocritical funding of terrorists in the name of counter-terrorism breeds distrust and resentment globally. The logical connection is obscured, however, by a mainstream American press that effectively keeps these details secret. Why, they reason, would we want to report on policy developments so uncontroversial in Washington? Thinking along these lines, the mainstream media has itself become complicit in the U.S.’s growing militarization, offering no third voice of reason outside of the captured parties.

Extrajudicial assassinations such as those authorized by the CIA showcase the tragic consequences of this tripartite silence. Once, George W. Bush’s policy of indefinitely detaining terror suspects without charges at Guantanamo Bay was controversial. But since his Democratic successor cemented and superseded this practice a suffocating mainstream silence has prevailed.

Pakistan is an official U.S. ally in the war on terror. Nonetheless, U.S. drones have killed over 3,000 Pakistanis from 2004-2012, of whom 600-800 were civilians, including 176 children.^[39] A recent collaborative study by Stanford and NYU’s law schools documents the severe social toll of drone strikes, noting a “breakdown in the region’s basic social engagements.”^[40] Afraid of the ever-present threat of a drone strike, people avoid congregating in groups of three or four. Parents fear sending their children to school. Ancient social gathering places like the jurga, community dispute resolution councils, are now largely avoided. Journalists and medical doctors will not go to the scene of an attack for six hours afterward, fearing a secondary drone strike known as a “double tap,” a second missile designed to eliminate those assisting victims. The U.S. government has in the past derided such assaults as heinous terrorist acts despite itself repeatedly targeting civilian mourners at victims’ funerals.^[41] Even more troublesome under international human rights law is the growing use of  “signature strikes,” which are carried out on unknown targets based on “patterns of life,” though these criteria remain opaque.

For years, the Department of Justice has refused to formally justify drone killings while publicly insisting they reduce the threat of terrorism.^[42] Testimony from actual terrorists and basic social science data suggest the polar opposite.^[43] The study notes only 2 percent of those killed by drones have been identified as high-value targets, meaning 98 percent are either low-level insurgents or civilians. Unsurprisingly, drones are immensely unpopular among the Pakistani people, with 97% of informed Pakistanis opposed. In fact, the U.S. remains the sole country in the world where a majority of people favor drone use.^[44]

War Abroad, Decay at Home

At home, our President’s institutionalization of drone killings into a “kill list” and then a “disposition matrix”^[45] has cemented executive paramilitarization at historic heights. Constitutional lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald summarizes the situation succinctly: “If you believe the President should have the power to order people, including U.S. citizens, executed with no due process and not even any checks or transparency, what power do you believe he shouldn’t have?”^[46]

The candidate that ran on a “sunshine” transparency policy has classified more documents than any other prior administration, while using the WWI-era Espionage Act to persecute more government whistleblowers than all other previous administrations combined. Simultaneously, his own officials leak information perceived as politically advantageous, making the expansive New York Times hagiography of the President and his “kill list” possible.^[47]

While seemingly unlimited funds are pumped into the American war machine and interest-free Federal Reserve loans to prop up swollen banks, an austerity-rotten economy continues to eat away at ordinary Americans’ lives. For the first time in U.S. history, white Americans’ lifespans have actually shortened,^[48] and overall U.S. life expectancy has plummeted to 49th in the world.^[49] Child poverty rankings place the U.S. 31^st out of 34 OECD countries,^[50] while for the first time since the Great Depression children can expect to be poorer than their parents, on average by 12%.^[51] More Americans now toil through low-wage jobs than in any other developed society.^[52]

Yet Obama’s drastic expansion of global war evokes remarkably little mainstream controversy, emphasizing the need to escape the bipartisan framework. If we are to reclaim our captured country and the world that it is in turn attempting to capture, we must join the global mainstream. Identifying the giant economic forces driving U.S. militarism — defense contractors, energy multinationals — and highlighting the odious activities they make possible is the first step. The next step is to hold our elected representatives individually accountable for their complicity in these crimes, withholding our support for a system that has proven itself incapable of doing so.

Politicians on the campaign trail like to posture and paint themselves as “tough on terror,” working to “keep America safe.” Destruction of societies at home and abroad does not do either of these things. Let’s accomplish this the right way. We can keep our communities, schools, and collective futures safe by standing together firmly against American militarism.

Lead image courtesy U.S. military. U.S Soldiers detonate firebombs in an Iraqi palm grove, Dec. 22, 2008. Photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Walter Pels, Joint Combat Camera Center Iraq.

Prashanth Kamalakanthan is a junior at Duke University, where he is studying political science, environmental policy, and film. Prashanth is chair and co-founder of Duke Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a student activism group, and an avid documentary film enthusiast.