A Queda do Império Americano

[Aranha]

The Sack of Washington

Comparisons of America and Rome are everywhere these days, whether deploring an over-extended military, social decadence, or illegal immigration. A more disturbing—and largely ignored—similarity lies in the wholesale privatization of the U.S. government, which has blurred the line between public good and personal gain. In an excerpt from his new book, Cullen Murphy charts a dynamic that is more dangerous than corruption, unprecedented in scale, and visible everywhere from Hurricane Katrina to the Iraq war, to the justice system.
by Cullen Murphy June 2007

Excerpted from Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, by Cullen Murphy, to be published this month by Houghton Mifflin; © 2007 by the author.

President and emperor, America and Rome: the matchup is by now so familiar, so natural, that you just can't help yourself—it comes to mind unbidden, in the reflexive way that the behavior of chimps reminds you of the behavior of people. Everyone gets it whenever a comparison of Rome and America is drawn—for instance, the offhand allusion to welfare and televised sports as "bread and circuses," or to illegal immigrants as "barbarian hordes." If reference is made to an "imperial presidency," or to the deployment abroad of "American legions," no one raises an eyebrow and wonders what you could possibly be talking about. Invoke the phrase "decline and fall" and thoughts turn simultaneously to the Roman past and the American present.

To be sure, a lot of Rome-and-America comparisons are glib, and if you're looking for reasons to brush parallels aside, it's easy enough to find them. The two entities, Rome and America, are dissimilar in countless ways. But some parallels really do hold up, though maybe not the ones that have been most in the public eye. Think less about decadence, less about military might—and think more about the parochial way these two societies view the outside world, and more about the slow decay of homegrown institutions. Think less about threats from unwelcome barbarians, and more about the powerful dynamics of a multi-ethnic society. Think less about the ability of a superpower to influence everything on earth, and more about how everything on earth affects a superpower.

One core similarity is almost always overlooked— it has to do with [u]"privatization," which sometimes means "corruption," [/u]though it's actually a far broader phenomenon. Rome had trouble maintaining a distinction between public and private responsibilities—and between public and private resources. The line between these is never fixed, anywhere. But when it becomes too hazy, or fades altogether, central government becomes impossible to steer. It took a long time to happen, but the fraying connection between imperial will and concrete action is a big part of What Went Wrong in ancient Rome. America has in recent years embarked on a privatization binge like no other in its history, putting into private hands all manner of activities that once were thought to be public tasks—overseeing the nation's highways, patrolling its neighborhoods, inspecting its food, protecting its borders. This may make sense in the short term—and sometimes, like Rome, we may have no choice in the matter. But how will the consequences play out over decades, or centuries? In all likelihood, very badly.

A little more than 50 years ago, the Oxford historian Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, a radical thinker and formidable classicist, decided to take a close look at the change in connotation over five centuries of the Latin word suffragium, which originally meant "voting tablet" or "ballot." That change, he concluded, illustrated something fundamental about Roman society and its "inner political evolution."

The original meaning went back to the days of the Roman Republic, which had possessed modest elements of democracy. The citizens of Rome, by means of the suffragium, could exercise their influence in electing people to certain offices. In practice, the great men of Rome controlled large blocs of votes, corresponding to their patronage networks. Over time Rome's republican forms of government calcified into empty ritual or withered away entirely. Suffragium meaning "ballot" no longer served any real political function. But the web of patrons and clients was still the Roman system's substructure, and in this context suffragium came to mean the pressure that could be exerted on one's behalf by a powerful man, whether to obtain a job or to influence a court case or to secure a contract. To ask a patron for this form of intervention and to exert suffragium on behalf of a client would have been a routine social interaction.

Now stir large amounts of money into this system. It is not a great conceptual distance, Ste. Croix observes, to move from the idea of exercising suffragium because of an age-old sense of reciprocal duty to that of exercising it because doing so could be lucrative. And this, indeed, is where the future lies, the idea of quid pro quo eventually becoming so accepted and ingrained that emperors stop trying to halt the practice and instead seek to contain it by codifying it. Thus, in the fourth century, decrees are promulgated to ensure that the person seeking the quid actually delivers the quo. Before long, suffragium has changed its meaning once again. Now it refers not to the influence brought to bear but to the money being paid for it: "a gift, payment or bribe." By empire's end, all public transactions require the payment of money, and the pursuit of money and personal advancement has become the purpose of all public jobs.

Looking back at the change, from ballot box to cash box, Ste. Croix composes this epitaph: "Here, in miniature, is the political history of Rome."

The arc traced by suffragium covers not just the political history of Rome but its social and military history. It goes to the heart of a question that is only just starting to be asked in America: Where is the boundary between public good and private advantage, between "ours" and "mine"? From this question others follow: What happens when public and private interests are not aligned? Which outsiders, if any, should be allowed to put their hands on the machinery of government? How can governments exert collective power if the levers and winches and cogs lie increasingly outside public control?

The phenomenon with which all these questions intersect was called the "privatization of power," or sometimes just "privatization," by the historian Ramsay MacMullen in his classic study Corruption and the Decline of Rome (1988). MacMullen's subject is "the diverting of governmental force, its misdirection." In other words, how does it come about that the word and writ of a powerful central government lose all vector and force? Serious challenges to any society can come from outside factors—environmental catastrophe, foreign invasion. Privatization is fundamentally an internal factor. Such deflection of purpose occurs in any number of ways. It occurs whenever official positions are bought and sold. It occurs when people must pay before officials will act, and it occurs if payment also determines how they will act. And it can occur anytime public tasks (the collecting of taxes, the quartering of troops, the management of projects) are lodged in private hands, no matter how honest the intention or efficient the arrangement, because private and public interests tend to diverge over time.

FONTE: Vanity Fair

Abraços,

[Ricardo Correia]

Preocupa-me o desmantelamento das nações em curso, o bem comum, peça fundamental de uma nação é colocado em causa pela primazia da economia, onde o capital não tem nação.
O individualismo levado ao seu extremo, diluindo o sentimento de um colectivo, de pertença a uma nação é na minha opinião o que levará ao fim do poder Ocidental e dos EUA em particular.
Nos EUA o sistema do cada um por si tem funcionado, por se ter constituído uma classe média prospera.
Tem-se no entanto assistido a uma evolução no sentido de se eliminar a classe média, criando um fosso entre beneficiados e desprovidos ( o descontentamento costuma dar em rebelião).
Aparenta estar em crescendo o número de americanos desejosos por verem um sistema de saúde, pensões de reforma garantidos pelo estado.
Não faça ideia do que se passará, felizmente vivemos tempos interessantes de incerteza.

[Aranha]

- Os Ultra-Liberais do fórum não vão nem me mandar a merda !?!?!?!?!

[O ENCOSTO]

- Os Ultra-Liberais do fórum não vão nem me mandar a merda !?!?!?!?!

Abmael, vá a merda.

[Aranha]

- Os Ultra-Liberais do fórum não vão nem me mandar a merda !?!?!?!?!

Abmael, vá a merda.

- Até que enfim alguém com consideração....

[Xicao]

- Os Ultra-Liberais do fórum não vão nem me mandar a merda !?!?!?!?!

Abmael, vá a merda.

Se queres IR A MERDA, vais.....


Tem gosto para tudo.....

[Aranha]

- Os Ultra-Liberais do fórum não vão nem me mandar a merda !?!?!?!?!

Abmael, vá a merda.

Se queres IR A MERDA, vais.....


Tem gosto para tudo.....

- Agradeço a colaboração.

Abraços,