Author: US is in ‘permanent state of war’

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Jon Stewart talked to Eugene Jarecki about his new book, “The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril.” Jarecki told Stewart that the U.S. is in a “permanent state of war” and it doesn’t matter which party controls the White House.

Jarecki said, “The forces that control whether we go to war or not honestly don’t care who is in the White House, don’t care who is in the Oval Fffice. They care that the paradigm, the idea of american power in the world, how we assert ourselves a spread our footprint continues.”

Jarecki believes that voting alone won’t lead to the needed changes. Jarecki wrote, “Unless we see our vote as part of a commitment to involve ourselves consistently and unrelentingly in the political process, our vote is wasted. This is because the forces that have led us to this economic, military, and political precipice exert such awesome power over the mechanics of Washington that no single candidate or group of legislators, whatever their intentions, can possibly go up against them unless armed with an irrepressible public mandate.”

In a interview with Amy Goodman, Jarecki said that if Obama is elected he won’t have a clear mandate from the public but will get a mandate from the “enormous forces” that want to continue a culture of war.

“You’ve got to take some of that time and figure out how to direct it toward social change, because if all you do is vote at election time and sort of wake up and go, ‘Oh, my god, something’s happening; I’ll throw my vote in,’ it services your conscience, it services your feel – your desire to feel like you’re doing something, but the actual practical implications of that are that a single candidate, up against the incredibly tangled corruption of this system, is hopeless. And they’re made more hopeless by the fact that we are disengaged, because without a public mandate, somebody like Barack Obama will enter the White House, and, as you see, it’s already happened in the evolution of his policy paradigms, he’ll enter the White House without a mandate. And if he doesn’t have a mandate, those enormous forces of power will give him a mandate. They’ll give him a very clear mandate.”

This video is from Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, broadcast October 20, 2008.

Download video via RawReplay.com