"Systems operate according to system-logic, not the speeches and promises of a single man or party platform. Structures matter more than the individuals who occupy those structures, so long as those structures are allowed to remain intact."

When the socialist camp unraveled in the late 1980s, thus ending the Cold War, the US was the sole remaining superpower, the greatest empire in history, comparable only to Rome at its peak. Unlike Ayn Rand's Atlas, the US did not shrug. On the contrary, it has reveled in its supremacy. Freed of having to deal with socialist rivals, with vibrant unions (whose membership and influence would drop sharply as the former socialist and quasi-socialist nations were now open to exploitation by international capital), and freed of movements inspired by the existence of states that didn't espouse capitalist values, capitalism was now the only game in town. As the Ancient Greeks and Romans used to say, however, those that the gods would destroy they first make all powerful. Puffed up by triumphalism, Milton Freidman acolytes fanned out and sprang up all over the globe, dispensing their suddenly essentially uncontested wisdom that capitalism and so-called free markets are the Once and Future King.

Government regulations were replaced by reliance on corporate self-policing and executives' salaries and bonuses went on a ride like the rising section of a roller coaster. Only in this roller coaster, there's no down. Instead, in good times and bad, profitability or bringing the company to the edge of bankruptcy and only being saved by massive government bailouts to survive, it didn't and doesn't matter - their salaries have been rising like an asymptotic curve.

In the 1987 film 'Wall Street', tycoon Gordon Gekko declared, "Greed is Good:"

"You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you're not naive enough to think we're living in a democracy, are you buddy? It's the free market."

Power resides in two arenas: the political and the economic. Most people, however, when they think about power, pay attention almost exclusively to the political arena, and the political arena's public face at that. The behind the scenes activities of politics is rarely seen: where the real decisions are made and when the people get a peak behind that front stage to the backstage, they are only allowed to see it fleetingly, as through a glass darkly. Political scandals, when the protagonists are in very sharp disagreement about how to carry out policy and when one or more of them break the gentlemen's rules between them, such as what occurred in the Watergate scandal, allow a partial and short-term view of the inner realm of politics. Then there are the whistleblowers, who provide a glimpse into the inner workings of politics too. These glimpses, however, are all too easily forgotten by most people and are not enough by themselves absent a deeper theoretical and practical understanding of how political power actually operates. As Howard Zinn, bless his heart, wrote in the Introduction to my book, Impeach the President: The Case against Bush and Cheney, pointing to yet another more fundamental point, you cannot have a political democracy if you don't have an economic democracy. Since the socialist camp's dismantling, we have never been further from an economic democracy than we are now, and with every passing day, more and more so.

In the early 2000s, unrestrained by any international rival, the US declared war on countries with militaries two to three generations behind in military hardware: the US proceeded to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, under false pretences and against international law, and launched drone attacks (upon candidate Barack Obama's recommendation) upon Pakistan. Obama's original suggestion for these drone attacks was, incidentally, initially greeted by Bush with incredulity, and for a time Obama was getting criticized as too bellicose by Bush, of all people. In a few months, however, Bush secretly and then openly adopted Obama's suggestions to send drones into Pakistan. These drone attacks, since Obama has assumed the White House, as everyone knows, have increased. They have spent trillions on these wars that they cannot win, but like Monty Python's Black Knight who keeps on defiantly fighting despite losing all of his limbs, they soldier on, convinced that they cannot lose as long as they spend lavish amounts of money and use enough violence. This is, after all, the mighty United States of America. These wars of empire have resulted in the deaths to date of 1.3 million Iraqis, thousands of Afghanis, hundreds of Pakistani innocents, and close to fifty thousand American soldiers who have died either of combat wounds or from suicides, killing themselves at the rate of eighteen per day according to the VA itself.

The US government embarked upon these wars even while the White House and Congress passed tax cuts of over $1 Trillion during W's regime, with by this year over half of these tax breaks going to just the top 1% of the population. I'll say that again, more than $500 billion dollars in tax cuts are going to the richest 1% of the population.

Like a carnivore that has lost any predator to threaten it, US imperialism has been rapidly consuming its food sources as if there were no end. The planet is its turf and it and the rest of the industrialized and industrializing countries have already, according to Dr. James Hansen, the world's foremost expert on global warming, passed a point of no return and the situation is past desperate. Yet the Copenhagen summit on the environment essentially said that they weren't going to deal with it. The earth and its atmosphere and its seas are yet another limit on their power that imperialism and capitalism are incapable of properly recognizing, let alone coping with sufficiently before the looming disaster engulfs us and our fellow terra firma residents, with many species being wiped out forever.

Only ten years after its victory over its chief rival, socialism, only ten years after declaring ultimate victory for capitalism's "virtuous" greed, in 2000, Wall Street, the very embodiment of capitalism, crashed, and then crashed again. The housing bubble burst spectacularly not long afterwards, and the term "toxic assets" entered people's everyday vocabulary. The US government had to carry out unprecedented measures to rescue the giants of Wall Street. Had these too big to fail titans been allowed to fall, a worldwide economic disaster would have ensued: how tangled this web of finance based on phony, pumped up assets whose values no one could ascertain had become, as banks half-way around the world were interwoven in the US housing market.

Henry Paulson, previously Goldman Sachs' head and Bush's last Treasury Secretary, given powers worthy of a dictator in order to save capitalism from itself, threatened Congressional Representatives that if they didn't vote for the bailout that martial law would be declared. The House, which had resisted the pressure to pass the nearly $800 billion bailout the first time because of massive constituent opposition, knuckled under to this draconian arm twisting the second time around and passed the bailout.

Paulson, when Goldman Sachs' Chief Executive, had been instrumental in substituting SEC oversight with investment banks' self-regulation and in raising the legal limits on how much leverage and risk exposure investment banks could operate under. This action in 2004, however, was only the latest in waves of deregulation that began under Reagan and continued under Clinton and, of course, Bush 41 and 43. Testifying before Congress, former seer Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted that he had been wrong to believe that free markets would take care of everything.

In this system crisis, with millions losing jobs and their homes, with Bush and Cheney's criminal indifference and incompetence dramatically displayed in Hurricane Katrina, and whose wars after the initial flush of victory became and remain quagmires, what had previously been unthinkable happened, a black man became president of the United States, riding a wave of revulsion for Bush and Cheney and their policies. Obama, we should remember, won precisely because he promised to undo what Bush and Cheney had done.

What has Obama done? Carrying the hopes of most of the nation, Obama has, for those who have been paying close attention and not been misled by surface appearances and fancy words, not done what so many people thought that he would do. And this should not be a surprise, especially to sociologists. Systems, after all, operate according to system-logic, not the speeches and promises of a single man or party platform. Structures matter more than the individuals who occupy those structures, so long as those structures are allowed to remain intact. Obama has proceeded not to undo the Bush policies but to rebrand many of those policies. He is carrying forward the wars, citing as his justifications for them the same rationales offered by Bush, continuing rendition, continuing a number of the black CIA gulags where torture continues. He has banned waterboarding, but allowed other forms of torture to be used, and who knows what is going on in the dark chambers reserved for those who have been renditioned. He is shielding the torturers and war criminals from prosecution, saying that he is looking "forwards, not backwards," and by not prosecuting them for these monstrous policies and practices, and by not airing the fullness of their crimes, sealed the fate for us in the future. For what president in the future can be kept from engaging in the lawlessness that so marked the Bush years, and go even further, since the perpetrators of these monstrosities have been unpunished and remain unrepentant? Obama's DOJ is blocking in court every challenge by torture victims to the Bush regime's policies of torture and detention and using the same and even worse arguments to justify it. Obama has in fact gone even further than Bush dared, declaring, for example, "sovereign immunity" for his surveillance - the government has no limits on what it can spy upon, and it cannot be sued, unless it can be shown that the government acted willfully and purposefully to damage someone by publicly revealing information they collected by their warrantless spying.

Obama has moreover given himself and the government and any successive White House occupants the power to assassinate anyone - including US citizens, and just this week specifically named an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who they accuse of being involved with Al-Qaeda. He has declared for himself the power to detain anyone - including American citizens - the government deems a threat, hold these individuals indefinitely without charges, without recourse to habeas corpus or trial and hold them even if they've been exonerated in a trial. For those who still trust Obama, they may not yet be upset about this, even though they should, thinking that he will not abuse these extraordinary and illegal powers, even though he has obviously been doing so. But let us assume the best of Obama and assume for the sake of argument that he hasn't and won't abuse his further unfettered powers. The question can and should then be asked, of those who are OK with Obama, do you trust Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney with these same powers where the government is unchecked and unsupervised in its designation and treatment of who the enemies of the state are? Do you trust every last president from here to eternity, given that the rule of law has been replaced by the anything-goes-rules of the "War on Terror?" Why should we not expect that a Republican president would also use such powers when they are in office and go even further? How much further can they go beyond that? They can do what is now pending in the Senate and the House, the Enemy Belligerents' Bill, introduced on March 4, 2010 by McCain and Lieberman and in the House by a Democrat from California, Howard McKeon, on March 19.

Not a single mainstream media source has covered these bills. To my knowledge, not a single politician has expressed outrage over these bills or even mentioned it to anyone outside of Congress. Most people in this country, therefore, do not even know of these bills' existence. In the Senate version, the president is given the power to order the military to arrest and detain anyone the president deems a "high value detainee," no Miranda Rights will be observed, and the person can be held without charges, without habeas corpus rights, indefinitely. From the Act:

"[A]n individual is captured or otherwise comes into the custody or under the effective control of the United States who is suspected of engaging in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners through an act of terrorism, or by other means in violation of the laws of war, or of purposely and materially supporting such hostilities, and who may be an unprivileged enemy belligerent, the individual shall be placed in military custody for purposes of initial interrogation and determination of status in accordance with the provisions of this Act."

This bill and these actions of Obama's are the logical extension of the logic of the "War on Terror." Obama accepts the "War on Terror." He made that clear when he was in Congress when he declined to block the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that legalized torture. He should have filibustered it if he really was against torture instead of voting No, all the while knowing that his no vote meant nothing because the bill would pass anyway without a filibuster.

What is the premise of this "War on Terror?" Its premise is that Americans' lives are more precious than non-Americans and that any measures, including torture, massive warrantless surveillance, and ending the rule of law are acceptable in the defense of putative American lives. And, of course, since the war on terror is a war on a tactic, it is a war that can never end.

When the US under Bush launched shock and awe upon Iraq and adopted wholesale a torture regime together with American gulags at Gitmo, Bagram and many black CIA sites, they expected to crush their opposition. And in the initial stages of the war, the Iraqi government did fall quickly with its military offering no significant resistance. Bush famously mounted the stage of an aircraft carrier, sporting a flight suit, with the banner behind him bragging "Mission Accomplished." Yet here we are now, seven years later in Iraq and eight years later in Afghanistan and the wars and occupations drag on. Political power is obtained through establishing legitimacy, which is undermined by the use of repressive violence. The Wikileaks' video "Collateral Murder" released in April 2010 shows US forces treating Iraqi civilians and Reuters reporters as if they were virtual victims in a video game, mere computer simulations rather than real, living human beings with families, children, spouses, and friends. This video released by Wikileaks is not an aberration, but a snapshot of the day-to-day reality of these wars.

Hubris doesn't win sporting contests and hubris destroys empires. Within the very nature of the systems operating according to its inherent logic are the seeds of its undoing. But it requires consciousness expressed by the people to overthrow empires, as empires don't fall of their own weight. That is a consciousness that is dawning like the tiny shoots of a new tree. It is fragile now here in the US, but it has broken through the surface.

In the famous 1949 film 'White Heat,' the police in the film's climactic scene corner James Cagney, playing gangster Cody Jarrett. Jarrett stands perched on a platform high up in a chemical plant. Even though hit multiple times by police bullets, he is still alive and standing and deliberately empties his pistol into the huge gas-tanks behind him. Raising his arms to the sky, as he is about to go up in a mushroom cloud of a gas explosion he yells:

"Made it, Ma!
"Top of the world!"
"Cody Jarrett. [Fallon, the cop who shoots him]
"He finally got to the top of the world.
And it blew right up in his face."

Dennis Loo is co-editor/author of Impeach the President: The Case against Bush and Cheney, Professor of Sociology at Cal Poly Pomona, and a National Steering Committee member of the World Can't Wait. He specializes in the analysis of media, public policy-making, and crime. He can be reached via his blog at http://dennisloo.blogspot.com.