Paul Krugman writes today about the dangers of the American extreme right and raises the prospect of right wing extremists making the United States ungovernable during the (ongoing) economic crisis. This thesis is something akin to closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

The hard right has already done severe damage to the United States on many fronts, including governability. During Cheney's watch, they already drove America over most of the rubicons that separate civilized countries from despotisms: kleptocratic looting of the public purse, abridgment of the rule of law, rigged elections, institutionalized torture, effective revocation of habeas corpus, pervasive surveillance, aggressive war, show trials of political opponents, and concentration camps. Some of these abuses have been curtailed under Obama but the odds are very good that all of this will come back as soon as the White House is recaptured by the Republican party.

More narrowly, the line of ungovernability was crossed a long time ago. What remains of American governance is a broken shell that is only capable of moving forward with legislation that is rammed through the legislative process by massive bribes from business interests. While the wealthy are able to advance their interests through government, the system has not been able to pass any legislation that benefits ordinary people for many years now. America has so far avoided complete collapse because it has not been faced with any existential crises that 1) haven't caused businesses to buy corrective legislation and/or b) cannot be handled by the more automatic components of government.

The hard right has already done so much damage to American governance that the appropriate questions are not when the US will become ungovernable but rather how steep the remaining downward trajectory will be and if the end result will be an existential collapse (a la the USSR) or failure into a permanent low-level equilibrium of limited political freedoms and widespread poverty.

To answer the question of when the right wing will make America ungovernable, look backwards. It has already happened.

The former head of the CIA unit tasked with capturing Osama bin Laden was recently quoted to say that "the only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States."

It's no wonder Osama bin Laden was never caught when the people tasked with catching him are instead wishing for him to succeed.

A commenter on BoingBoing sums the issue up nicely:

I used to think being a conservative was a political persuasion. Sadly, it is now a mental disorder.

Since January, congressional Democrats have used excuse of Senate Republican fillibusters to explain why they haven't moved forward with policy initiatives that are supported by Democratic voters but are opposed by the Democrats' constituency among the oligarchs. With the seating of Al Franken, however, the Democrats have a fillibuster proof majority in the senate and have lost the fillibuster excuse.

It'll be most amusing--in the sense of black humor--to see what new excuses the Democrats come up with now to explain selling the interests of Democratic voters down the river to protect the interests of major Democratic campaign contributors.

At Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith asks if America's "besieged" middle class will snap in the face of upward wealth transfer on a scale described as "rape and pillage."

In the medium term, the prospects for genuine reform in the United States are slim to none. The American middle class does not have he cohesion to 'snap' to the left and force American elites to abandon their thirty year project to shift wealth from the poor to the rich. Rather, there is a risk of the middle class 'snapping' rightward into the arms of a demagogue who will further transfer wealth to the rich while claiming to protect the middle class.

In order to get somewhere against an entrenched elite that feels itself under no obligation to bow to public opinion, the baseline requirement is organized protest on the scale of what Solidarność and allied groups did in Poland in 1988-89.

Getting to the stage of general strikes requires a strong civil society movement, including in part unions but also other grassroots groups that create social cohesion across cultural, economic and political barriers. Without strong civil society, the most that can happen when people are pushed too far are isolated acts of rage that amount to nothing in the overall scheme of things.

America doesn't have a civil society worthy of the name. What passes for American civil society is far, far too fragmented, weak, and co-opted to be able to do something on the scale of the Polish protests. The most opposition that to economic looting we'll ever see from the left-populist side are isolated, insignificant, acts of rage. The social organization does not exist to do anything more from the left of the political spectrum.

This is not, however, to say that radical change won't happen. While America has no civil society, it does have a very strong astroturf movement. Consider, for example, the 'grass roots' tea parties organized by American business interests and the millions of rubes who happily voted for McCain-Palin. As things get worse for the average American there is a dangerously high risk of a right wing demagogue being astroturfed into power on a platform of fixing the economic crisis with a flat tax, spending cuts, the cancellation of elections, and the imprisonment/extermination of some unpopular scapegoat group upon whom the economic crisis can be blamed. America, in other words, is ripe for a Mussolini or a Hitler.

If things get rapidly worse in America then there will be change. It just won't be change for the better. America is already too far gone for that.

Paul Krugman writes:

Anyone who thinks that Limbaugh’s current antics will exile him to permanent irrelevance should bear in mind that he’s always been like this — that he went from accusing the First Lady of murder to being lauded by the Washington Post’s media critic as a “mainstream” conservative who mainly talks about policy, without in fact changing his style at all.

Limbaugh draws an audience of 13 million+ and is the largest talk radio operation in America. With those kind of numbers he is mainstream by definition. The real problem isn't that people like Limbaugh are erroneously described as mainstream. The problem is that there are enough crazy Americans out there to make people like Limbaugh mainstream.

America is in deep trouble not just because the right wing leadership (Limbaugh, Palin, Gingrich, etc) are crazy but because half the electorate, most of the politicians, and most of the media are crazy enough to follow them over the cliff.

In America, crazy has become so thoroughly mainstreamed that it is the new normal.

From Crain's New York Business:

In a keynote speech at the annual PricewaterhouseCoopers Entertainment and Media Outlook event Tuesday, Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton raised the rhetoric a notch, calling the Internet search giant a vampire “sucking the blood” out of the newspaper business, and promised that new developments would level the playing field.

From Boing Boing Gadgets:

“I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet,” said Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton. “Period.”

Ruling elites hardly object to advances in communications technologies that bankrupt the middle class by allowing white collar jobs to be outsourced to the third world. Strangely, however, advances in communications technologies that threaten to bankrupt elites themselves are unacceptable 'vampires' that must be regulated or shut down entirely.

Is it too much to ask to have ruling elites who are capable of keeping up with the rate of social change they are forcing on the rest of us rather than merely standing astride history and screaming 'stop' whenever change threatens their sacred cows?

From news.com.au:

Man 'pushed suicide jumper off bridge'

Lai Jiansheng was detained by police for pushing a man named Chen off the bridge in Guangzhou city that has been the site of 12 suicide attempts since the beginning of April, the China Daily said.

None of the suicide attempts have been successful, the paper said, but traffic over the bridge has been jammed for hours during each attempt as police sought to talk the people out of ending their lives.

Jiansheng's actions are completely understandable given the disproportionate police response to suicide attempts on bridges. Tying up an urban area for hours causes severe public inconvenience, prevents emergency services from reaching legitimate emergencies--fires, accidents, heart attacks--and, in a warm climate, puts thousands of trapped motorists and passengers at risk of heat stroke. One life is not that important. If somebody wants to jump, let them jump and let everyone else get on with their lives.

No address was given to contribute to supporting Jiansheng's legal defense.

From Robert Reich:

The March employment numbers, out this morning, are bleak: 8.5 percent of Americans officially unemployed, 663,000 more jobs lost. But if you include people who are out of work and have given up trying to find a job, the real unemployment rate is 9 percent. And if you include people working part time who'd rather be working full time, it's now up to 15.6 percent. One in every six workers in America is now either unemployed or underemployed.

According to American conservatives, however, none of this counts. From Think Progress:

CALLER: I can really debate about how about that economic crises is because I look around and I don’t see people spending any less money than they have been.

[RNC chair Michael] STEELE: I’ve heard a number of people say that across the country. [LAUGHTER] The malls are just as packed on Saturday. [LAUGHTER]

CALLER: The malls are just as packed. … You still can’t get seat in a restaurant.

Meanwhile in Italy, the Guardian reported:

The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, today sparked controversy when he said the 17,000 people made homeless by Monday’s earthquake should think of themselves as being on a “camping weekend”.

There are ever fewer reasons not to characterize right wing conservatism as a subclinical form of antisocial personality disorder characterized by a marked lack of empathy. Conservatism is a disease and a parasite on the body politic.

From The Times of London:

The IMF said in January that it expected the deterioration in US-originated assets to reach $2.2 trillion by the end of next year, but it is understood to be looking at raising that to $3.1 trillion in its next assessment of the global economy, due to be published on April 21. In addition, it is likely to boost that total by $900 billion for toxic assets originated in Europe and Asia.

Perhaps the best thing that regulators outside of the United States could do to protect their banking systems from future financial meltdowns would be to ban systemically important institutions from investing in the United States.

If the Americans wish to leave their financial system vulnerable to systemic fraud then that is their choice. There is no good reason for the rest of the world, however, to make themselves unduly vulnerable to American mismanagement by allowing systemically important domestic institutions to invest in a financial system that has become little more than a toxic casino.

Police State: Canada

From The Globe and Mail:

Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Canadian citizen, poses so grave a threat to Canada that he can't come back, Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon said yesterday, abruptly reversing the government's written promise of an emergency one-way travel document less than two hours before his flight home was to depart from Khartoum.

...

Canada's antiterrorism agency and the RCMP have both ... cleared Mr. Abdelrazik.

Apparently, the explicitly declared constitutional right for Canadians to enter and leave the country is void where prohibited by ministerial fiat.

Police State: USA 1

From Dallas CBS Channel 11:

Court records show Verizon first went to the FBI this past January, alleging some North Texas web server providers were cheating them and AT&T out of millions of dollars.

The FBI's response to Verizon's complaint? They seized an entire data center and are now 'analyzing' servers used by upwards of 50 businesses the FBI knows to be uninvolved.

Police State: USA 2

From The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Pittsburgh's and the state's largest bank recently began asking customers to take off their hats, sunglasses and other items that might conceal their identity while inside its branches.
...
A few weeks ago, a Muslim woman complained to the Council on American-Islamic relations after she was asked to leave a line at a credit union in southern Maryland and be served in the back room
...
The policy potentially could cause problems for ... blind customers who wear sunglasses or people undergoing cancer treatment
...
"It's hard to quantify the effect" of the program, Mr. Spitzer said, "but law enforcement loves it."

In other words, the very real discriminatory and degrading effects of forcing Muslims, the blind, and cancer patients to the back of the bus into a back room is irrelevant compared to the mere possibility of reducing criminal activity for the simple reason that law enforcement 'loves' the idea.

Many in law enforcement would love the idea of being able to summarily execute anyone acting 'hinky.' What law enforcement loves shouldn't dictate public policy because what law enforcement 'loves' is frequently unacceptable in a free society.

Police State: USA 3

From The Times (London):

LAW enforcement agencies are seeking scientists to develop an artificial nose that can detect the smell of fear as terrorists pass through security at airports.
...
they are trying to create a version that can isolate the tangy smell of adrenaline, the stress hormone, so that nervous passengers or those with a guilty conscience can be singled out.

Yep. Let's target everyone who has high adrenaline levels because they're afraid of flying, have just had a fight with family, have an endocrine disorder, have an anxiety disorder, or have high adrenaline levels because they've been running to catch a plane....

Yet another brilliant idea brought to you by people who are terrified of 125ml shampoo bottles, bottled water, blueberry pies, and oranges.

Police State: USA 4

From The Arizona Republic:

[Jeff] Pataky ... believes his online criticism of the [Phoenix police] department ... led officers to serve a search warrant at his home last week.
...
Investigators confiscated computer material and other items from Pataky's north Phoenix home.

"We have heard internally from our police sources that they purposefully did this to stop me," Pataky said.
...
"They took my cable modem and wireless router. Anyone worth their salt knows nothing is stored in the cable modem."