Tom Burghardt: "Final Curtain Call" in America" and the Death of Democracy!

Over decades, the maintenance of power and class privileges by corporate, financial and political elites have relied on covert and overt forms of violence, oftentimes in unspoken arrangements with transnational criminal networks, the global drug trade, or intelligence connected Far-Right terrorists, the Minions who staffed and profited from Operations Condor and Gladio come to mind. Once viewed as the proverbial "tip" of the imperial spear that advanced elitist dreams of "full-spectrum dominance," the "plausibly deniable" puppeteering which formerly characterized such projects now take place in full daylight, with nary a peep from bought-off guardians of our "ersatz" democratic order, or a public narcotized by tawdry spectacles. Take your pick! Mixing intellectual and moral squalor in equal measure with the latest high-tech gizmos on offer from Silicon Valley or Chengdu, the general societal drift towards total data totalitarianism, once the hallmark of police states everywhere, is a backdrop where "too big to fail" is a code for "to important to jail". With the current global economic crisis, brought on in no small part by private and public actors resorting to various frauds and market manipulations which reward privileged insiders, we have reached a social endpoint that analyst Michel Chossudovsky has accurately described as the "criminalization of the state," that is, the historical juncture where "war criminals legitimately occupy positions of authority, which enable them to decide 'who are the criminals', when in fact, they are the criminals." It should hardly surprise us then, that American "hero," Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, accused of murdering 17 innocent Afghan civilians, including 9 children and then burning their bodies, joined the Army after the 9/11 attacks not out of a sense of patriotic "duty," but because he was a thief and a swindler!