Jonathan M. Feldman, in The U.S. as a “Failed State” (http://www.counterpunch.org/feldman09032005.html), writes, “It’s obvious that the New Orleans tragedy has revealed that urban areas, particularly those housing the poor and African Americans, are regarded as disposable by corporate and government elites. . . . The U.S. went into Iraq to “save it” and now can barely save itself. . . . We now must ask ourselves, isn’t the U.S. a failed state?” And he obviously believes that the answer is, “Yes.” He goes on to say, ”The solution to this crisis requires several forms of remedial action. One such action would be intervention by a consortia of European States who provided not only economic aid, but some kind of political intervention (in the form of think tanks, grants and other material support) to promote and extend democracy in America.”

Bernard Chazelle, in “The Case for a New Progressive Creed” (http://www.counterpunch.org/chazelle04022008.html) provides a great deal of evidence to support the view of America as a failed state: “By virtually any measure, the United States is the least progressive nation in the developed world. It trails most of Western Europe in poverty rates, life expectancy, health care, child care, infant mortality, maternity leaves, paid vacations, public infrastructure, incarceration rates, and environmental laws. The wealth gap in the US has not been so wide since 1929. The Wal-Mart founders’ family owns as much as the bottom 120 million Americans combined. Contrary to received opinion, there is now less social mobility in the US than in Canada, France, Germany, and most Scandinavian countries. The European Union attracts more foreign students than the US, including twice as many from China. Its consensus-driven polity, studies indicate, has replaced the American version as the societal model to which the developing world aspires.” And he provides these neat comparisons:

* (a) The US is the world’s richest nation; (b) the US outranks only Mexico in child poverty among OECD countries.(28)

* (a) America’s GDP per capita is 11 times higher than Sri Lanka’s; (b) life expectancy for African-American men is 3 years shorter than for males in Sri Lanka.(29,30)

* (a) African-Americans have been the force behind this country’s most influential musical genres; (b) one third of all black men will go to prison at some point in their lives.

* (a) The US scoops up more Nobel prizes in medicine than any nation on earth; (b) 18,000 Americans will die this year for lack of health insurance.

But things are really far worse. Not a single political or social institution in America works. The Congress cannot pass effective legislation, the criminal justice and judicial systems routinely convict the innocent, Social Security and Medicare are grossly inadequate and the commercial health insurance system is dysfunctional. The War on Drugs is stalemated. Our borders are sieves. Immigration control is non-existent; not only is illegal immigration prevalent; many who come here legally merely overstay their visas and no one knows who or where they are. We incarcerate more people per capita than the U.S.S.R. placed in gulags. Only about half of our school children graduate. The university system is open to the stupid wealthy but not the bright poor, and it absolutely fails to instill reverence for truth and goodness in the students it graduates. Scholarships go to athletes who are not scholarly, and scholarly students are graduated with heavy burdens of debt. Our churches instill neither piety nor compassion nor moral behavior. Racism, although perhaps regressing, is still a major denier of civil rights. The infrastructure is in severe disrepair, and the business community can neither manufacture nor market products of high quality. Salesmen regularly argue over who can sell products that don’t work best. Governmental agencies, ostensibly created to protect the public, instead protect the very people Americans need to be protected from. When hazardous products are imported from China, there is a hue and cry but not much action. The Chinese, on the other hand, have banned imports of cheese from Italy because of one batch that was poisoned. The Federal Reserve aids and abets fraudulent financial institutions, and when their fraud is exposed and they are about to collapse, it commits taxpayer dollars to bail them out. The press routinely reports governmental lies and fails to report the news that Americans really need to hear. What the president says is reported even when its significance is no greater than reporting that Leona Helmsley’s now famous dog barked, but the number of Iraqi civilians killed by the American invasion goes unreported. Whenever Hamas kills an Israeli, we are told about it, but we’re rarely told how many Palestinians have been killed by the Israelis. We’re also never told how much America is borrowing from China and other countries to pay the aid we give to Israel. We’re aiding foreign governments with borrowed money and fighting two wars with it too. Official lying has become a common practice, and documents are classified not to protect national security but the hide the malfeasance of officeholders. And our electoral process is regularly corrupted by its complexity and inefficient practices; yet we have the audacity to criticize other nations for their corrupt practices.

Those are the facts, and the United States of America is, by every definition, a failed state. It is a nation built around an 18th Century ideology trying to become a 19th Century empire in the 21st Century.

Yet no one has isolated the reason for this failure. It is that the American Constitution has been nullified by an end run by non-constitutional institutions that have taken control of the nation—faction, which the Founding Fathers thought they had rendered ineffective, lobbying which is erroneously justified by citing the Constitution’s right of the people to petition the government for the redress of grievances, not advantage, and by the Supreme Court’s decision that makes political contributions a form of speech, thereby making metaphorical interpretation an accepted practice. So much for strict construction!

How could this have happened? After all, the Federalist Papers more than adequately demonstrated the dangers of faction. Why did those in government who succeeded the Founding Fathers ignore entirely their teaching and arguments?, a question which, of course, is impossible to answer. But the way of fixing America is not through the intervention of foreign nations, it lies in merely controlling these three misguided institutions.

Faction is the Dark Vader of constitutionalism. The Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution what they thought was a system of checks and balances, but when one faction controls all three branches of government, there are no checks and therefore no balances. When the need for money to finance political campaigns is predominant, Congressman are easy marks for the corrupting influences of special interest. The government then ceases to function as one “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” But even controlling the influence of faction, lobbying, and campaign financing is not sufficient. The Congress must change its ways.

Membership in the Congress is predominantly held by members of the legal profession. Not a single one of these attorneys would advise a client to sign a contract without reading all of it’s fine print; yet they routinely vote on legislation they have not read. This practice is absurdly insane! Laws that the Congress produces are so voluminous that no one can be expected to have read them. Certainty and promulgation are necessary characteristics of law if it is to be effective. But no one who hasn’t read a law can be certain of its provisions, and huge laws can never be adequately promulgated. Being told to obey laws that no one knows the provisions of is an oxymoronic absurdity. Such laws provide the unscrupulous with an infinite number of possible ways to game the system. And indeed the system has been gamed, the Constitution has been subverted, and the result is that America is a failed state.

No, foreign intervention can not change things. What’s needed is seriousness on the part of Americans. As long as we allow factionalism and its consequences to endure, as long as we allow the Congress to enact legislation that is ineffective even in form, the nation’s future will be grim. Unfortunately seriousness does not appear to be a characteristic of American culture.

© 2008 John Kozy