Imperial Blues: On Whitewashing Dictatorship in the 21st Century

[Judi Lynn]

May 31, 2016
Imperial Blues: On Whitewashing Dictatorship in the 21st Century

by Miguel A. Cruz-Díaz

“For goodness sakes, this is the 21st century. We’ve got to get over what happened 50, 100, 200 years ago and let’s make money for everybody.”

— Hillary Clinton

It seems as though empires also get the blues from time to time. Sometimes empire, like the rest of us, suffers from a crisis of confidence and needs to find itself, and it looks like our American empire has finally found a more relaxing way of flexing its muscles other than bombing brown people in the Middle East. On Friday the 19th of May MSNBC joyously celebrated the push towards a bipartisan deal to approve a bill that would provide Puerto Rico with much needed debt relief for its economic woes. The title of the article says it all: “Despite some issues, Democrats get behind Puerto Rico bill”. Even Hillary Clinton, the Democrat’s presumptive nominee, came out in favor of the bill: “without any means of addressing this crisis”, Clinton said, “too many Puerto Ricans will continue to suffer”. Clinton expressed that she had some “concerns” regarding the nature of the oversight committee that would rule over the island, but nevertheless she supports the bill. All hail bipartisanship! What a stroke of luck that the Puerto Rican debt crisis has joined both parties in their attempt at providing debt relief! Isn’t there a disarming nature to that? No relief effort could be bad. Itch relief, pain relief… all of these things are great. Yet this bill seems awfully familiar, and that familiarity quickly becomes full recognition after a passing glance at it. Regurgitation, it seems, is an old political ploy, and it is present here in full force. The more things change, right? First it was H.R. 4900, and now it’s H.R. 5278. Indeed, this is a second attempt at passing the beloved “Promesa”.

Hillary Clinton’s support for the “Promesa” bill should not be at all surprising. Clinton has time and again trampled on Puerto Rico. The Democratic Party’s Clintonista wing’s preferred scare-tactic revolves around a Donald Trump presidency, but Trump is a symptom of current political indolence, the product of McCarthyism, the Red Scare, and Fox News. Clinton is a vector of transmission of this disease. She is against the release of our political prisoner, Oscar López Rivera. She represents the most reactionary conservative elements of her party and is inexcusably tied to the neoliberal agenda of Wall Street. Is it at all surprising that she would support a bill that seeks to impose a neocolonial Congressional dictatorship on Puerto Rico?

Recognizing the second-hand wolf in shiny new wolf’s clothing explains an overpowering and nauseating sense of déjà vu that I cannot seem to shake off as I write this column. I blame those imperial blues that force this constant revisiting of why these “debt relief” bills are such insults to the very idea of democracy. It is a draining experience that always leaves me feeling as if I were standing in the middle of a field of manure. We have inherited and maintained a neoliberal political class that seems hell-bent on shoveling an ever-expanding pile of feces as a main course all the while the corporate media presents it all tied up in a neat little bow. It is exhausting and demoralizing to the extreme. And yet here we are once more, pushed face-first into the open-air sewer of empire under the cover of “relief”. The rancid stench of waste is what passes for the political system of this here United States in its entire late neoliberal splendor. It is the excrement of a system bought and paid for by vulture capitalists that is being shoveled down the throats of over three million of its citizens, some of whom welcome such a contemptuous feast with rapturous fervor. Any scraps from our masters are, certainly, always welcome are they not?

Before I continue I do believe that some clarification is in order. While my political character is heavily indebted to anti-nationalism and anarchism, my cultural identity as an individual is first and foremost as a Puerto Rican. Our American citizenship was only granted to my forefathers and mothers in 1917, nearly twenty years after the United States invaded the island. I’ve always seen this move as conveniently expedited on the eve of the United State’s entry into the First World War, so that Puerto Ricans could swell the number of troops being massacred in the European killing fields. That citizenship has been paid in blood time and time again. And make no mistake that it’s a second-class citizenship built on a colonial lie that claims that my people have self-determination. Bills like “Promesa”, resurrected in any shape or form from the dead and pushed back into abhorrent life, thoroughly destroys any notion of self-rule.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/31/imperial-blues-on-whitewashing-dictatorship-in-the-21st-century/