Will Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex Heave the Middle Class Off the Fiscal Cliff?

America’s Defense Dependency

by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, COUNTERPUNCH, WEEKEND EDITION NOVEMBER 16-18, 2012

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/16/americas-defense-dependency/

[note: a shorter version of this posting appeared on 13 Nov 12 at this link]

The essay — America the Third World Nation in Just 4 Easy Steps, (Truthout, 10 Nov 2012) — describes how our political addiction to the free-trade ideology of neoliberal economics has helped to de-industrialize America and thereby impoverish much of the American middle class. My 24 Sept essay in Counterpunch describing decline of manufacturing employment gives you a sense of the mind-boggling magnitude of what has happened. While “4 Easy Steps” makes passing references to the increasing dependence of the manufacturing sector on military spending, as well as the financialization of economy (but not the latter’s siamese-twin ‘managerialism’), the authors did not develop these points. Without implying any criticism of their excellent essay, my aim today is to tweak your interest in these omissions, particularly America’s defense dependency.

The late Professor Seymour Melman (Columbia Univ.) wrote a prescient book, Profits Without Production (Knopf, 1983) that explained how the militarization and managerialization of our economy were becoming the central causes of the decline in America’s manufacturing competitiveness.  This decline started in  the 1970s, but Melman showed how it grew out of seeds planted by the permanent military mobilization of a huge defense industry in the 1950s.

The permanent war economy was born on 30 September 1950.  On that day, President Truman officially signed NSC-68, a document that became the blueprint for the containment strategy for waging the Cold War.  Central to this strategy was the  establishment of a large, permanently mobilized defense manufacturing sector. The authors of NSC-68 justified the permanent mobilization, in part, with an economic rationalization reflecting their contention that the WWII production miracle proved the multiplier effects of Military Keynesianism.  They suggested these benefits were likely to repeat themselves.  In their words: “the economic effects of the [NSC-68] program might be to increase the gross national product by more than the amount being absorbed for additional military and foreign assistance purposes.”

The post WWII economic boom in the US (note: our competitive performance was aided in part by the lingering effects of the WWII  damage to the US’s other major industrial competitors) hid the adverse economic effects of the economic diversion attending to the permanent war economy unleashed by NSC-68.  Nevertheless, by early 1961, the accumulating economic and political damage caused by the diversion concerned some insiders: President Eisenhower famously warned the nation about the rise of misplaced power posed by the rise of a large permanent standing arms industry, which he said pointedly was new in our national experience.

The accumulating damage wrought by the permanent war economy  started to accelerate in the 1970s, and by 1980, the cancer metastasized: militarization and managerialization began to openly thrive and grow at the expense of the traditional high-wage manufacturing sector, in effect, siphoning off money flows via a combination of government handouts and favorable tax treatment that in effect rewarded both the looting of the tax base and the draining of competitiveness and ingenuity from the civilian manufacturing sector (via the increased defense subsidy, leveraged buyouts, offshoring of jobs, emphasizing short-term focus to pump stock prices, etc.) The combined results of the growing defense dependency, managerialization, and financialization was a decreasing international competitiveness in the manufacturing sector. At the same time, our global competitors were increasing their competitiveness.  The net effect can be seen in the US merchandize trade deficit; it went into free fall after 1980.

Those who believe that subsidized defense technologies spill over into the commercial sector to improve international competitiveness might want to consider the obvious fact that the huge increases in the defense spending between 1977 and 1987 and 1998 and 2012 clearly did nothing to ameliorate the free fall.

In America, this political-economic evolution has created a weird political situation where a peculiar political darwinism (taking the form of a corporatist alliance of big business and the federal government) co-exists with the neo-liberal ideology of social darwinism. The former stresses mutual dependency and government subsidies for survival while the latter stresses individuality and survival of the fittest in a Hobbesian Universe.  Yet the contradiction between the two modes of belief does not impede the ideologues from promoting both simultaneously, and in so doing, continue the looting and draining operations.

That cognitive dissonance  is now poised to grow much worse in the next few months, if as is likely, the threat of a budget sequester induces the government to impose neoliberal austerity economics on the middle class, while government becomes more imbedded with and protects the banksters, the defense contractors, and its other corporatist allies.  That is because the only way to practice America’s peculiar mix of social and political darwinism at the same time is to fling what is left of the middle class off the fiscal cliff by defunding social security, medicare, infrastructure modernization, education, etc.

Much has been written on the economic distortions created by the financialization of the economy, but aside from Melman’s pioneering work, little has been written on economic distortions created by the increasing dependency of the manufacturing sector on military spending — which is really a huge government subsidy – and the rise of managerialism, financialization’s deadly siamese twin.  Both sets of distortions  exist side by side with, but in sharp contrast to, the ideological neoliberal fantasies of a free market.

The attached graphic provides a hint — but only a hint — of how the hidden distortions that have been insensibly creeping into the economy: the graphic illustrates how rates of growth in the industrial shipments of military durable goods increased at a much faster rate than shipments of nonmilitary durable goods  since 2000.

This difference in growth rates reflects the accumulating effects of the huge increases in the defense budget that began in 1998.  These differences have worked to increase the disproportionate large share of the de-industrializing manufacturing economy that has been soaked up by the defense industry over time.  For example, defense spending (base budget + war costs) in 2011-12 amounted to about 4.4% of the GDP.  About one-quarter of this spending was applied to the salaries of military and civil servants.  That implies the other three-quarters or about 3.3 percent of GDP was spent on defense goods and services in the private sector.  Yet this 3.3 percent of GDP spent on defense goods and services soaked up 11 to 12 percent of America’s total capital goods shipments over the last two years.

There are other indicators of the economic distortion caused by the defense dependency: For example, fifty-five percent of the federal R&D budget is now allocated to defense-related activities. In the early to mid 1990s, nationwide employment of scientists and engineers in the defense sector soaked up about 30 percent of the total scientific and engineering talent (public and private sectors).  Given the rapid growth in the defense budget and the decline in the manufacturing share of GDP since then, the ratio is likely to be even higher today.  Unfortunately, there is little current academic research aimed at understanding the size and meaning of these hugely important preemptions of resources, production capabilities, and human skills.

Indeed, most contemporary economists, like the authors of NSC-68, still think of military spending in Keynesian terms as being a general economic stimulus and job creator.  But Military Keynesianism, if it ever worked, is certainly not working in the 21st Century.

To wit: the largest sustained increases in the defense budget since the end of WWII began in 1998, but this spending binge was accompanied by (1) a sluggish recovery from the March-November 2001 recession to the onset of the Great Recession that began in late 2008 and its even more sluggish recovery; (2) an acceleration in the rate of decline of employment in the manufacturing sector after 1998 (see Figure 2 here); and (3) the unprecedented plummeting of the merchandise trade balance (discussed earlier). There is also academic research suggesting defense spending is one of the least effective way to create jobs via the ‘Keynesian multipliers’ flowing out of government expenditures (see this Univ. Mass study, for example).

Nevertheless, lest you think the NSC-68′s faith in Military Keynesianism is forgotten ancient history, President Bush was still spouting its soothing nostrums as recently as February 2008,  when he told NBC’s Ann Curry, “I think actually, the spending on the war might help with jobs. … because we’re buying equipment, and people are working. I think this economy is down because we built too many houses.”

Defense companies now make up a very substantial part of America’s much diminished industrial base — and these giant defense companies are hooked on the narcotic of defense spending.

That is to say, defense manufacturers cannot survive without the defense subsidy.  Since the end of the Viet Nam War, many have tried to convert some of their efforts to competitive production of non-defense goods, and most have failed. One of the most spectacular flops being Grumman’s attempted diversification into hi-tech flexible buses for New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The buses had to be withdrawn from service after only three years, because they broke down repeatedly.  As Melman explained in the early 1980s, defense companies simply do not have the marketing, managing, engineering, and manufacturing skills to compete successfully in global commercial markets; and when their business practices spill over into the private sector, they often hurt competitiveness and productivity.*

By 1990, even the industrial leaders in the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC) fully understood Melman’s point.  No less an authority than William Anders, CEO of General Dynamics publicly admitted to the truth of Melman’s argument in 1991, when he explained the reasons for the high failure rate in excursions into competitive commercial markets.  Anders said (pg. 13),

“This isn’t surprising. Defense industry management teams generally have little commercial experience and market savvy. Most have been ‘cost plus’ and ‘mil spec’ trained. In short, most don’t bring a competitive advantage to non-defense businesses. Frankly, sword makers don’t make good and affordable plowshares.”

That, in a nutshell, is why Grumman could not make reliable and affordable buses.  That is why the private sector made the internet affordable, reliable, and easy to use, not the DoD which invented it.  For interested reader, the essay Why Boeing is Imploding provides a stunning example of how the defense-related engineering and production practices (in this case, political engineering or the  practice spreading subcontracts around to build political support for a program) have spilled over to infect Boeing’s civilian production practices.

One thing Anders did not mention is that the defense industry is very skilled in lobbying the federal government to increase the public subsidy for making its increasingly unaffordable weapons.  Nor did he mention that you buy what you subsidize.  In a ‘cost-plus,’ ‘mil-spec’ed,’ single-buyer economy, you subsidize cost growth, so you ‘buy’ costs — the cost overruns in the hugely expensive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter being an outstanding current example (here is just one example in the F-35’s ever growing shop of horrors).

Anders made his amazing admission in the 1991 keynote address to the twelfth annual conference sponsored by Defense Week, then a very influential newsletter in the MICC.  His intent was to explain why, at the end of the Cold War, General Dynamics had chosen not to diversify its business into the non-defense sector — i.e., why GD was not interested in converting swords into plowshares.  Instead, Anders proposed to undertake a takeover strategy to increase its market share in a (temporarily, as it turned out) shrinking defense market.

Anders was not alone in thinking along these lines. In fact, his speech was a precursor to the industry-wide, government-subsidized “Pac-Man” consolidation strategy. This strategy was promoted by President Bill Clinton’s then deputy secretary of defense, William Perry, at a 1993 meeting with the defense titans, a meeting dubbed the “Last Supper.”  Perry’s strategy led to a rash of industry-wide mergers beginning in the mid-1990s.

Significantly, when the defense budget began to grow rapidly after 1998, there has been no undoing of the consolidations, even though rising defense budgets eventually grew to levels exceeding the highest budgets of the Cold War, even after removing the effects of inflation.

Today, the defense industry is dominated by three giant all-purpose weapons manufacturers—two of which now have their headquarters in the Washington, DC, area, and the third (Boeing) with a major government relations office in the DC area as well—to more closely supervise their most important corporate activity: the lobbying efforts that influence the money flow out of the Pentagon, Congress, and the White House.

Together with the banksters, these immensely powerful companies, their smaller brethren, and the huge supporting cast of gucci-shoed K Street lobbyists, pro-defense think tanks, and the defense trade press are poised to pounce on President Obama and Congress to protect their fiscal honey pot, while the rest of country is heaved over the fiscal cliff.

If you want to learn more about the important but little examined subject of the economic distortions caused by the defense dependency, and by extension, learn more about why America is becoming a third world nation, the best introduction is still Melman’s** elegantly argued eleven-page prologue to Profits Without Production, aptly titled  ”How the Yankees Lost Their Know-how.”

If that essay does not peak your interest in this hugely important subject, nothing will.  Unfortunately, you will have to go a used bookseller to find it.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. He be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com

* At this point, I should note that Melman believed it was possible to convert defense manufacturers to civilian production on a large scale, but such a massive conversion program would require large scale government sponsored industrial planning.  This kind of planning is a highly toxic subject to believers in free-market capitalism.  So, it should not be surprising that military conversion — i.e. turning swords into plowshares — is not only an exceedingly complex but also a highly controversial subject. The possibility or impossibility of conversion is not at issue in this essay.  My focus is on the short term response of any grand bargain to dodge the effects of the looming budget sequester: namely how in the next few months the defense dependency may induce the politicians, who have been captured by it, to fling the middle class off the fiscal cliff (i.e., by cutting back expenditures for Social Security, Medicare, Medicade, infrastructure modernization, education, etc.)

** Caveat emptor: Melman was my friend and I made some minuscule contributions to the research in this book.

Why It's a Distinction Without a Difference

Who Will Create More Jobs: Romney or Obama?

by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, COUNTERPUNCH

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/24/who-will-create-more-jobs-romney-or-obama/

My prediction: The eventual answer will turn out to be a distinction without a difference.  Here’s why.

Both political parties and their candidates for President now accept neoliberal ideology as being the incontrovertible truth.  This belief is more theological than scientific, because neoliberalism has a thirty year track record of not producing the high-paying jobs for the middle class its promisers say it will produce.  Quite the reverse would be a more accurate description.

According to neoliberal dogma, the only way to stimulate the growth of high-paying jobs for Americans is to unleash the private sector by getting government off the back of business.  Therefore, given this truism, the government’s economic purpose is simply to make it easier for the private sector to invest in productive capacity at home — or to use a popular but vacuous buzzword: to invest in the ‘supply side’ of the economy.

To this end, the neoliberal policy soup always includes a mix of tax cuts to the investor class, investment incentives and (de)regulations to make life easier for big business, and austerity economics  by federal and state governments.  Examples include regressive tax cuts, deregulation of oppressive externalities (like environmental protections), union busting (to make wages more flexible on the downside), wage stagnation (no increases in the minimum wage), policy incentives encouraging financialization to increase flexibility of the investor class (rescinding Glass-Steagall), and cutting deficits via offsetting cuts in Federal, State, Local government spending, especially social safety-net programs, while protecting defense production, etc.

After over thirty years of trying and failing to create high-wage, middle-class jobs with various mixes of neoliberal snake oil, one might think neoliberal economics would be an issue in the current campaign for president, particularly in view of the fact that each candidate is claiming only he can create jobs.  The mismatch between past predictions and performance is mindboggling.  Even a superficial look at economic data collected by the Bureau of Labour statistics suggest that the real world behaves very differently from that imagined by the high priests of neoliberal theology.

If the contradictions between theory and reality remain unaddressed by the candidates in this presidential election year, you can bet what little is left of your IRA on a prediction that the real problems dragging down the lower 99% will continue to worsen for the foreseeable future.

Consider please the following:

From the end of WWII to the early 1970s, the prime engine of our prosperity was the economic vibrancy of a huge and growing high-wage manufacturing sector, which incidentally, was heavily unionized.  The quality and quantity of US production was the envy of the world.  And benefits spilled over into the other economic sectors, creating a virtuous cycle that made a growing proportion of the American middle-class better off economically than at any time in human history.  To be sure, all was not roses in the Leave-It-To-Beaver America of the 1950s and early 1960s.  There were horrible festering sores in our society, particularly segregation and racial persecution, which arbitrarily kept a large portion of our population disenfranchised and in abject poverty.  There were also pockets of intractable white poverty in rural America, particularly Appalachia and the Deep South.  Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the post-WWII American economy had mutated into a vibrant consumer society, the likes of which were unprecedented for a majority of the working class.

In addition to creating large numbers of high-wage manufacturing jobs, the manufacturing sector became the driver of beneficial spillover effects that fed back on and magnified the larger economy, ranging from supermarkets to suburban construction to larger local tax bases supporting social infrastructures, etc.  The total size of the American work force grew faster than manufacturing employment, and manufacturing’s share of the total work force declined, even as the absolute number of manufacturing jobs increased.

Figures 1 and 2 are designed to give the reader a sense of the magnitude of some of the astounding changes that have taken place since the end of WWII.

Figure 1

Figure 1 depicts the growth in manufacturing employment (the blue line) and in total non-farm employment (a private sector measure that accounts for about 80% of the total jobs in the U.S., including those in the manufacturing sector).  Figure 1 makes clear the extent to which total non-farm employment (the maroon line measured on the left scale) grew faster than manufacturing employment, even though the latter grew in absolute terms between 1939 and 1979, before slipping into a long-term decline.  Manufacturing employment is depicted by the blue line, also measured on the left scale — we will look at this measure more closely in Figure 2.   The red line (measured by the percentages on the right scale) says it all.  It compares the size of manufacturing employment to the size of total non-farm employment in percentage terms.  It has been declining steadily since 1943.

In 1950, for example, Figure 1 tells that 31% or almost one out of three jobs in America was in the manufacturing sector.  In 1979, manufacturing employment reached its all time high, yet its share of the total workforce had declined to 22%.  By 2011, that share plummeted to 9%., or less than one out every ten jobs.  One might think the stability of the steadily declining percentage in Figure 1 suggests a kind of normalcy.

Such and interpretation would be a grotesque mistake, because it turns out that 1979 was an interesting year in the history of manufacturing jobs. After 1979, what was normal became abnormal or perhaps a “new normal,” to borrow yet another vacuous buzzword.  This is not obvious in Figure 1, because the relative flatness of the blue line is driven by the scale of the maroon line.  Figure 2 peels back the next layer of the onion.

Figure 2

(note the range of the vertical axis is 9 to 20 million)

Figure 2 enables us to look more closely at the blue line in Figure 1 by re-plotting on an expanded vertical scale ranging from 9 million to 20 million employees.  The numbers behind the blue lines in Figures 1 and 2 are identical.   Figure 2 shows more clearly how the dynamics of growth and decline in the manufacturing sector changed over time.  To this end, I added the shaded area merely to give the reader a sense of the how the size of short term fluctuations changed over time.  After World War II, the total number of manufacturing jobs rose in absolute terms from 13 million in 1946 to an all time high of 19.4 million in 1979. This is an astounding number for peacetime, exceeding that maximum of the WWII’s “arsenal of democracy” employment of 16 million by 20%!

The total increase between 1946 and 1979 was of 5.9 million jobs or 44%. After 1979, the total declined to 11.7 million jobs by 2011, a reduction of 40% from a much larger base. What is even more stunning is that employment in the manufacturing sector today is almost half a million people smaller than the 12.1 million employed by the manufacturing sector in January 1, 1941, eleven months before Japan bombed Pearl Harbour, even though the current U.S.  population exceeds that of 1941 by 152 million people!

But there is more that can be sniffed out of Figure 2, now that we have the benefit of 30 years hindsight. The flat growth and wild swings in employment data (indicated by the greater width of the blue shaded area) show this engine of prosperity began to sputter around 1970 (perhaps because of over heating caused by the guns and butter policy in Vietnam ???), before moving into a more coherent pattern of long-term decline after 1979.  So, the 1970s turned out to be a period of transition.  This is hinted at in the pattern of data in Figure 1:  First, note how the pattern of decline became more stable after 1979, with the magnitude of the short term fluctuations being much reduced compared to those of the 1970s.  This stabilization also hints at the introduction of deeper causal factors, but does not tell us what they are.  Note also that no lost ground was ever fully recovered after the peak in 1979.  Each major cyclical short term term peak in employment rose to a level that was less than its predecessor (in one minor case it was about the same).  This is even true for the sustained economic growth period of the Clinton Administration, which Democrats like to compare to the Kennedy-Johnson expansion during the 1960s.  The failure to recover from successive downturns is yet another hint of long-term causal factors.

Regarding these deeper factors, much has been written about de-industrialization, and there is no need to repeat it here.  Suffice to say the onset of the stagnation of middle-class wages in the late 1970s corresponds to the loss of high wage manufacturing jobs in a de-industrializing manufacturing sector, reflected by decline after after 1979 in Figure 2.  The onset of the explosive growth  of consumer debt and the growing inequality of income corresponds with the decline in manufacturing.  For those who drank the kool-aid about the information society displacing the manufacturing society, I note that computers and software industries are included in the employment figures of this chart. Indeed, given the quality of the jobs debate by Mssrs. Obama and Romney, one could argue America has entered the post-information age.

If either Mr. Obama or Mr. Romney is going to turn around the high-wage job meltdown, they need to explain to the American people how their policies will create a new virtuous cycle of expansion begetting expansion, either by (1) reinvigorating the domestic manufacturing sector, which is a proven engine of virtuous growth, or (2) by inventing a new engine of virtuous growth to replace the role that manufacturing served between the end of WWII and the early 1970s.  Creating jobs to flip hamburgers at McDonalds or slosh ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s will not do the trick.  Military Keynesianism — i.e, shoveling money into weapons manufacturing — certainly worked in WWII, and it may have worked more modestly in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, although given the anguish of Eisenhower’s farewell address, my guess is that he may have thought Military Keynesianism created more problems than it solved.  Whether or not that was the case by 1961,  one thing is clear from Figure 2 in this regard: Throwing money at the Pentagon over the last 30 years has been a total bust in terms of stimulating any growth in manufacturing employment, not to mention Military Keynesianism’s complete failure to re-igniting anything remotely similar to a virtuous cycle of prosperity begetting prosperity.

There is a reality-free normalcy now driving American politics.  Both parties would rather fiddle with Karl Rove’s soothing “create-your-own-reality” political meme than douse the ideological fires of neoliberalism that are torching the American economy and impoverishing the middle class. With politics this boorish, is it any wonder that people are tuning out?  A better way for understanding what ails our political class would be to begin with one of the most elegant quotes in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, because as he explained … “Their credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.”

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. 

The Ramifications of Romney's Choice of Paul Ryan

Get Ready for the Slaughter

by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY. Counterpunch, 12-14 August 2012

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/12/get-ready-for-the-slaughter/

Gaeta, Italy.

Romney’s choice of the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Congressman Paul Ryan, as his running mate mirrors John McCain’s disastrous choice of Sarah Palin four years ago, although Ryan is probably a more able politician.  Being smarter than Palin, Ryan’s plutocracy-enriching budget proposals suggest he is also a more hypocritical politician, although such a distinction in Versailles on the Potomac during the summer of 2012 may be a case of splitting hairs.

It is a well known fact that like his predecessor candidate for President, John McCain, Romney will never be trusted by hard-right populists energizing the looney base of the Republican Party.  So, like McCain, Romney has picked a superficially attractive hard-right nutcase as a running mate in a forlorn attempt to energize his party’s crazy base.  Once again the mainstream media is going gah gah over the brilliance of the choice.  If you doubt this, google the choice of Palin and compare that gushing to today’s gushing.  In so doing, Romney, like McCain, is setting himself up for a slaughter by Mr. Obama, whose historical role is rapidly becoming one of being the Great Enabler of the oligarchy that is taking over the United States.

Obama, if nothing else, has proven himself to be a brilliant exploiter of his opponent’s political weaknesses.  Barring some unforeseen exogenous disaster, like a terrorist attack or another Wall Street collapse, Mr. Obama’s looming slaughter of Romney is almost a certainty.

I am not saying that Obama deserves to be elected, only that he will be elected. Why do I say this?  Consider please the following:

In a moral sense, Romney is far slimier than McCain: McCain, for all his political warts, did distinguish himself under torture as a POW.  On the other hand, Romney, unlike those who avoided Vietnam for moral reasons, is just another creepy Chickenhawk draft dodger who professed warlike support for Vietnam, while using his religion (rather than graduate school or marriage with children) to the avoid the pain and inconvenience of that war.  Whereas McCain spent his entire life in what he can legitimately view as patriotic (if sometimes misguided, IMO) national public service, Romney can only view himself as a patriot in the shallowest, most opportunistic sense of the term.  It is a well established fact that Romney is really a member of the unpatriotic global plutocratic elite who worked assiduously to enrich himself at America’s expense by doing his bit to destroy the American job machine while protecting his ill begotten gains in offshore tax havens.  Therefore, at the moral level of political conflict, Romney is far more vulnerable than McCain, and as I explained in November of 2008 in The M&M Strategy: How Obama Won, Mr. Obama waged a brilliant political campaign to maneuver Mr. McCain into destroying himself at the moral level of political combat.  Obama has proven he intuitively understands the moral game.  Yet, by pandering to his base, and repeating McCain’s  strategic mistake, Romney has pitted his own weakness against Obama’s demonstrated strength.  The last thing we need is a warmongering President who does not understand Sun Tzu.

If Romney is such bad news, would an Obama landslide 2012 be good news for America? Consider please the following:

As I suggested in the The Enablers, my review of Mike Logren’s important new book, The Party’s Over, Mr. Obama is just another enabler of the plutocratic power that is destroying America.  An Obama landslide will work also to shore up the ongoing entrenchment of that power.  At the same time, an Obama landslide will fuel the mistrust, alienation, and racist anger of the Right, and therefore work to increase its control of the Republican base during Obama’s second term.  This dynamic will very likely set  the stage for a repeat performance by some other Democratic enabler in 2016.

On the other hand, my guess is, unlike his first landslide, another Obama landslide will not generate much in the way of coattails in Congress.  Mr. Obama and the Democrats in control of Congress between 2008 and 2010 had squandered their first set of coattails by 2010, and the same crowd is not likely to get a second chance.  So, we can expect  yet more gridlock and more of the same, and while enabler Democrats get an increasing lock on the Presidency and the crazies strengthen the control of the Republican base, the bloated plutocrats can laugh all the way to the bank.

Despite this rosy scenario for enriching plutocratic power in the coming years, history tells us that sooner or later, the insatiable greed of any oligarchy overreaches itself and becomes intolerable to impoverished masses who think they have or should have a voice in selecting their political leaders.  When that tipping point is reached, the political system becomes ripe for revolution.  In our case, I think a more likely result will be an American version of a fascist revolution on the right than a social justice revolution on the left.  The vanguard of a neo-fascist revolution will be the impoverished, radicalized, middle class, minority white men who need jobs, but feel their opportunities have been screwed by the alien “others” in our increasingly diverse population.  This is an outlook that can be easily exploited by ruthless politicians to shift the focus of their anger onto other victims of the very same plutocrats who created the intolerable conditions in the first place.

Of course, the vanguard of an American neo-fascist revolution, like the brownshirts of the 1920s and 1930s, will be snookered into working for the further entrenchment of the oligarchy, perhaps eventually opening the door for an election victory (via another stolen election like that of 2000?) of a right wing fanatic instead of an enabler.  Whoever he or she might be, the fanatic, like the Enabler, will be beholden to the oligarchy; but unlike the Enabler, the fanatic will be far more predisposed to go all the way toward establishing an overt police state, giving the thuggish domestic policing jobs (in the military, police forces, and private security firms guarding our gated communities, etc) initially to members of the angry mob .  If such a scenario unfolds, it is a virtual certainty that it will be accompanied by an even more militaristic foreign policy, because war (and the patriotism and money flows it engenders) is the surest way to distract the attention of the increasingly impoverished masses from the reality of their growing disenfranchisement.

It seems to me that some kind of neo-fascist evolution will be far more likely at this point than a revolt led by the fops of the enervated left, who are more at home in the brie and chablis salons of the Upper West Side, Versailles on the Potomac, and in the gated communities springing up across America than in the diners of Akron or Steelton or in the poor black/hispanic urban and rural ghettoes spreading across our land.

Is such an evolution our pathway into the future?

No one can say.  But, it seems to me that Romney’s idiotic choice, coupled with the dynamics of Democratic enabling are setting up an interplay of chance and necessity that makes this kind of evolution more and more possible, if not probable.

Ironically, as I write about this dismal prospect early on a Sunday morning, I am lying at anchor (my home is now a small sailboat) in Gaeta, Italy, next to the USS Mount Whitney, flagship of the Navy’s 6th Fleet (she is home ported here) listening to the Star Spangled Banner accompanying the morning flag-raising reveille.  The music and ceremony still sends a chill up my spine and I am reminded of my days in uniform which I am still very proud of.

The Enablers

The Central Role of Faux Republicans in the Anatomy of Decline

by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch, Weekend Edition August 10-12, 2012 

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/10/the-central-role-of-faux-republicans-in-the-anatomy-of-decline/

Gaeta, Italia.

Readers beware;  what follows is a biased book review.  The author Mike Lofgren (bio) is a very close friend of mine, and, as some of you may may already know, I have been flogging his  important new book,  The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted. Mike is a conservative of the now forgotten old school, more at home with the likes of Robert Taft, Eisenhower, and Lincoln than right wing ideologues like Newt Gingrich or plutocratic highway robbers like Mitt Romney.

Casual readers of Lofgren’s aptly titled book may well conclude that he is harder on Republicans than Democrats.  In a technical sense this is true.  Having served on the Republican staffs of the House and Senate Budget Committees, he was in a much better position to observe and understand their hijinks than those of the Democrats.  So, it is not at all surprising that his book has more detail describing how the ideological Republican crazies created the current political-economic mess that is poisoning our culture and wrecking our economy.  But it would be a great mistake to conclude that Mike is arguing that the Republicans are THE culprits.  This book is about how the Republicans and Democrats worked together to sell out the middle class.

The author is a modest, unassuming individual, who at first glance would appear unlikely to write such a book.  He never sought the kleig lights.  He never hung out with the gucci shoe crowd to pave his way into high paying lobbying job on K Street.  Lunch for Lofgren was not at the Prime Rib or Capital Hill Club, but a simple sandwich in a brown bag.  This modesty of life style and demeanor hides a principled intellectual, who has the character to go where his reasoning and observation take him.  And a pen in Lofgren’s deft hands, combined with his deep understanding of political history and acid sense of humor, becomes a sharp, deeply penetrating harpoon aimed at the heart of his subject.  In addition to harpooning the bloated degenerate Republican whale, Mike harpoons the Democrats by demonstrating subtly, yet persuasively, how their growing “uselessness” arose out of an enervating sense of entitlement to power.

That sense of entitlement mutated Democrats into what we in the Pentagon would call THE ENABLERS of Republicans.  The Democratic enablers unwittingly played a crucial role in the demolition of the American dream, not unlike that played by infiltration troops in blitzkrieg.  Infiltration troops soften up the front by wiggling through defenses to create holes and weak areas for the tanks to roar thru and reap chaos and destruction in the enemy’s rear area.  Only in this case, the rear area being ruined is the American middle class and the role of tanks is taken up by the flow money supplied by the oligarchs who feather their nests by buying Democrats as well as Republicans in one seamless auction.

Put bluntly, to protect their sense hereditary entitlement to the power bequeathed by the coattails of FDR and the New Deal, the Democrats abandoned their progressive heritage and moved to Wall Street, Big Pharma, Defense, etc.,  insensibly becoming faux Republicans.  If you doubt this, look at the enervating, quasi-neoliberal ramblings of the self-inflating Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) or the cynical triangulations and warmongerings of Messrs. Clinton and Obama.  Their abdication of progressive principles gave Republican crazies more room to get even crazier, and together the faux Republicans and the real crazy Republicans reinforced each other to create a rightward shift in the American political dynamic that unleashed the evolution of a new gilded age, together with the re-emergence of a plutocracy that Russian oligarchs would envy.  And this happened in a remarkably short time of 30 to 40 years.

In so doing, the Democrats sold out their constituency and colluded in the historic swindle that brought the great American middle class to the brink of impoverishment and debt peonage.

If you think collusion is too strong a term, I would urge you to think about Bill Clinton’s (the DLC’s choice for president in the 1992 election) collusion with Republicans in the nullification of the Depression era Glass-Steagle Act in 1999, which was one of the main deregulatory initiatives that unleashed the excesses that led to the 2007-8 financial meltdown.  Clinton, by the way, did not pick up his grips and retire to a modest house in Independence Missouri like Harry Truman; he chose instead to join the plutocratic elite, where he is now well on his way to becoming a card-carrying member of the one-tenth of one-percent club of the mega rich.    The bottom line: the Democrats’ sense of entitlement and the consequent corruption of their progressive principles have been a necessary, if not sufficient, cause of the current political-economic mess that is destroying what is left of the middle class in our good ole USA.  It would be a great mistake to allow the hilariously disgusting Republican hijinks in Logren’s masterpiece brand it as an anti-Republican polemic and miss his main message.

Mike, of course, states clearly that his subject is how the madness of the Republicans and the uselessness of the Democrats reinforced each other over the last 30 to 40 years to hose the American People.  It is the degenerate nature of this symbiotic relationship that is his and should be the Left’s call to arms.

I do not count on this happening.  I expect the faux Republicans will try to exploit the embarrassment of riches in Mike’s book for a narrow short-term political advantage, in yet another demonstration of the hypocrisy that is a consequence of their losing mentality.

In closing, I ask readers to think about the fact that this laudatory review of The Party Is Over  appeared in Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine, not some Democratic rag trying to get leverage in the coming Presidential election.  That should be taken by the Left as an example to emulate.   The real question in my mind is whether progressive counterparts to the American Conservative will use Mike’s call to arms to summon the curiosity and the courage to explore the ramifications of Lofgren’s subtler analysis of the “enablers” of decline.

Eisenhower's Nightmare

Reprinted with permission of Counterpunch editors

March 3, 2010

The MICC Moves to Hose the Taxpayer One More Time

Eisenhower's Nightmare Arrives

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney03032010.html

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Dwight D. Eisenhower,
President of the United States
Farewell Address, 17 January 1961

As I indicated in CounterPunch on 3 February 2010, the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) just released by the Obama Pentagon is a bad joke. That bad joke is about to be given the good housekeeping seal of approval by a special panel appointed jointly by the Secretary of Defense and the defense barons of the Armed Services committees in Congress. When this happens, rest assured, any desire to get control of the out-of-control defense budget will plunge far below its already low level. Chalk up another victory in the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex’s (MICC’s) war on the Constitution, the American taxpayer, and programs like Social Security and Medicare, which are hallmarks of civilized society.

To understand why this QDR review panel is gearing up to paint lipstick on the QDR pig, it is first necessary to describe what the QDR did not do.

Today, the Pentagon is now spending more in inflation-adjusted dollars than at any time since the end of WWII to support a military force structure that is much smaller and older than at any time since the end of World War II. But the QDR did not even acknowledge the three mutually reinforcing problems that are now combining to produce a catastrophic meltdown of the Pentagon’s budget plans, let alone the cynical modes of conduct that virtually guarantee even more force structure reductions, even if defense budgets will continue to increase:

First, with a few exceptions, the Obama QDR approved a defense budget and a long range program plan that will not buy enough new weapons to replace the weapons in the inventories of the military forces in a timely manner. Consequently, the average age of these weapons, already at a post WWII high, will continue to get older at an accelerating rate. Given this situation, the only way to reduce the growth in average age will be to retire the oldest weapons without replacement, thereby shrinking the size of the forces yet again, in effect continuing a devolution that began as early as 1957 (see Defense Death Spiral, especially pps. 21-25).

The economic roots of the force structure meltdown lie in the MICC’s obsession with modernizing with ever more costly and technically complex weapons. This obsession creates a political economy wherein unit costs (i.e., the cost of the “parts”) always rise faster than budgets (i.e., the cost of the “whole”). This creates a situation a little like cancer cells metastasizing in a body; something has to give.

The asymmetric economics of defense lead to the declining production rates and age growth described above which, in turn, create extortionary political pressure (caricatured by vacuous slogans such as the “hollow military” in the late 1970s or the so-called “procurement holiday” in the mid 1990s) to justify increases in the total defense budget. But increasing the budget, as we did after 1976 and after 1994, actually accelerates the rate of cost growth and thus restores the cancerous asymmetry between cost and budget growth, albeit at a higher budget level. This sets the stage for yet more political pressure to increase the defense budget even further, as the extortionary loop folds back on itself to amplify itself -- over and over. Over time, cynical gaming strategies, evolved though trial and error, create and/or exploit this pattern of economic behavior that benefits the “parts” at the expense of the “whole.” Whether these strategies, now known as front loading and political engineering, are the “chicken” or the “egg” is now immaterial, because today, they are ubiquitous and lie at the center of an organic, self-regulating devolution.

So, the asymmetric economics of cost growth greater than budget growth create continual political pressure to bail out a collapsing modernization program. There are essentially two short-term ways for responding to this pressure: (1) decision makers can reduce current readiness for combat in order to transfer money out of, or by slowing the future rate of money growth into, the operating budget (by reducing training tempos, purchases of spare parts, etc.) and then pump the “savings” into the modernization budget, or (2) they could simply increase the total defense budget. Generally, decision makers opt for a combination of both in the short term, but over the long term, the only option is to change their obsessions, which is unthinkable, or to increase the budget, which is the real name of the game.

Second, the Obama QDR also failed to address how the modernization problems described above (i.e., increasing technical complexity + increasing age of weapons) mutually reinforce each other to compound the DoD’s economic problems by creating a phenomenon known as the rising cost of low readiness. This makes it ever more difficult to rob the readiness budget to pump up the modernization budget. The subtle cause and effect relationships underpinning the rising cost of low readiness are explained in the Defense Death Spiral, especially pps. 24-45. For our purposes, it is sufficient to say that the net result is that unit operating costs (i.e., the cost of operating the “parts”) also grow faster than defense budgets (i.e., the cost of the “whole”) and the economic effect becomes a variation on the cancerous theme described above.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the Obama QDR failed to even acknowledge, let alone address, the related problems posed by unauditable, corrupt, financial management systems -- by this I mean both the historical accounting systems and the program planning systems of the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System or PPBS.

As I explained in both the Defense Death Spiral and my last statement to Congress, not to mention in a public hearing over nineteen years earlier, in March 1983, before the Armed Services and Budget committees of of the Senate -- a hearing that resulted in a cover story for Time Magazine (7 Mar 83 issue), cynical bureaucratic gaming strategies systematically corrupt the information flowing though the Pentagon’s central management information system (i.e., the PPBS), which in any event is logically flawed (see, for example, my statement to Congress, beginning on page 15). This makes it impossible to assemble the information needed to sort out the first two problems and to devise appropriate recovery strategies that are based on an understanding of those problems. In this sense, the corruption of the Pentagon’s PPBS can be thought of as bureaucratic grease lubricating the political-economic engine that is protecting the status quo. So, it should not be surprising that our political system is unable to shape rational defense policies and strategies in response to changing conditions, such as adapting our forces while providing a peace dividend to reflect the changes brought about by the end of the Cold War.

Put bluntly, the Pentagon’s corrupt bookkeeping system is the turd in the national security punchbowl. All the players in Versailles on the Potomac have known about it for years, but no one wants to do anything about it, because flushing it out would end their party.

It is not fair to blame President Obama’s political appointees in the Pentagon for this state of affairs, because as I have endeavored to show, it has very deep roots. On the other hand, it is eminently fair to blame Obama’s inept Office of the Secretary of Defense, particularly the spectacularly incompetent Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, for not even acknowledging these problems in a QDR it spent almost a year putting together.

It would be absurd for the Obama Pentagon to plead ignorance for its obscene omission.

After all, Obama’s QDR is only the most recent variation of a bad joke begun in the Clinton Administration with its publication of the fatally- flawed first QDR on 19 May 1997. Of course, the Clinton Administration was merely continuing the pathological planning practices of the Reagan Administration, which I described in excruciating detail during the March 1983 congressional hearing. And bear in mind, the Reagan Pentagon was merely continuing the bureaucratic pathologies the military reformers began to document in the 1970s -- behavioral pathologies that we now know reached back at least to the inception of the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1961 and probably earlier.

Given the staying power of the defense power games, no one should be surprised that the end of the Cold War resulted only in temporary marginal reductions in the defense budget; nor should we be surprised that twenty years later, the United States is spending more on defense than it did at the height of the Cold War, when we stood toe to toe with the Soviet nuclear-armed superpower, yet had enough extra resources to fight very hot wars in Korea and Vietnam; nor should we be surprised that today we are spending as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. Bear in mind, as I showed in my 2002 statement to Congress, the so-called global war on terror has very little to do with this current budgetary state of affairs. It should be clear, therefore, that the Pentagon has deep systemic problems, and that the most recent QDR, like its predecessors, papered them over, to put it charitably.

Now, with this background in mind, let’s turn our attention to the QDR review panel that is about to “fix” this disastrous state of affairs. Congress created a special review board in 2006 to analyze the 2010 QDR in order -- don’t laugh -- to provide the Congress with what it called an independent alternative view of the QDR. The 20 members of this review board were to be appointed by the Defense Secretary (12) and the senior Republicans and Democrats of the Senate and House Armed Services committee’s (8).

On 1 March 2010, Ray Locker and Ken Dilanian of USA Today authored a front page report that described and analyzed the makeup of the 20 members of the QDR review committee. Locker and Dilanian showed that “eleven out of twenty members “work for defense contractors as employees, consultants or board directors,” raising obvious questions of conflict of interests. Foremost among these is the panel chairman, William Perry, a long time Democratic defense operative who served in the Carter and Clinton administrations and made a fortune in the defense industry when he moved back and forth through the revolving door. Perry has been one of the most vocal and slickest salesmen of high tech defense systems, especially robots. While Secretary of Defense, Perry did nothing to correct the three problems described above, and in fact, he made them far worse by promoting new cold-war inspired high complexity, high-cost weapons just as the Cold War was ending -- most significantly, the problem-plagued Joint Strike Fighter, which is on track to be the most expensive program in the Pentagon’s history. Today, the Obama administration’s Pentagon is well populated with Perry’s proteges.

Locker and Dilanian did an adequate job of identifying contractor connections for the eleven members of the panel; that is bad enough, but their report dropped the ball on highlighting the likely biases of the other members.

In addition to the eleven members who are affiliated with the defense industry, at least six other members work or have worked as defense “intellaaaaactuals” for pro-defense not-so-thinking thinktanks:

* Center for New American Security (CNAS): John Nagl, president. Nagl has been closely tied to the Obama administration’s advocacy of the AFPAK war and his organization serves as a mouthpiece for the Pentagon's war policies. There is no indication Nagl knows anything about the decision making pathologies discussed above. But his predecessor as president of CNAS, Michelle Flournoy, is now the Under Secretary for Policy in the Pentagon and can be regarded as the key architect of the QDR.

* The Center for American Progress (CAP): Senior vice president, Rudy De Leon, is a former Deputy Secretary of Defense in in Clinton Administration. De Leon did nothing to clean up the Pentagon’s bookkeeping mess as DEPSECDEF, even though he was well aware of these bookkeeping problems from the mid-1980s forward, when he worked for Congressman Nick Mavroules (who ended up in the slammer for racketeering).

* Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA): Eric Edelman was the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy between 2005 and early 2009. In this role, he was responsible for the vapid, unmemorable 2006 QDR, which is perhaps why Congress demanded the establishment of an independent review panel to “analyze” subsequent QDRs. Now he serves as Distinguished Fellow at CSBA, an organization long associated with promoting the Pentagon’s equally flawed theory of a high-tech, high-cost Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), whose contemporary incarnation in using robotic drones in a collateral-damage-prone strategy to assassinate Taliban and al Qaeda leaders is creating enemies faster than we can kill them.

* Heritage Foundation: James Talent, the former Senator from Missouri and long time porker for McDonnel-Douglas-Boeing (St Louis), one of our largest defense contractors. The Heritage Foundation has ceaselessly flogged the “benefits” of ever growing defense budgets, since it produced its only critical report, “Ending Defense Stagnation” in 1982. Since then, to the best of my knowledge, it has not produced a study that questioned the Pentagon’s inability to pass financial audits in accordance with the requirements of the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990, not to mention the Constitution -- apparently setting aside the supposed conservative predilection of preserving the original intent of the Framers of the Constitution.

* Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA): General Larry Welch, former Chief of Staff of the AF, did nothing to fix the Air Force’s airplane aging problem when he had a chance to shape the Air Force’s future. As President of IDA, he headed up a not for profit organization whose main customer was the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon. During his tenure, the IDA economic analysis office produced no recommendations that would have made the Pentagon’s books more auditable or dealt constructively with the power games causing the meltdown, particularly the cynical use of “learning curves” to support the Pentagon’s front loading operations.

* Center For Naval Analysis (CNA): A not for profit thinktank that is effectively a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US Navy.

So, there we have it: 17 out of 20 members of the QDR review panel have close ties to the status quo Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex. None of them, to the best of my knowledge, has ever discussed, much less analyzed, the three interconnected problems that have produced the Defense Death Spiral or the stunningly flawed QDRs. None of these people have ever tried to step up to the hard decisions needed to fix these problems. Of the remaining three members of the panel, the only one I have any familiarity with is Lt General Paul Van Riper, a former reformer and I believe a truth teller (even reformers occasionally make general). But even if he tries to fix things and the other two members side with him, my guess is that the three of them will be voices in the wilderness and have little or no impact on the outcome -- too much money is at stake, and the 17 other members of the panel are card carrying protectors of the status quo.

A QDR review panel where at least 17 out of 20 members have a vested interest in protecting the status quo certainly will not ask the question: Is there an alternative to protecting the status quo?

For what it is worth, here is my answer.

Probably the only way to incentivize the Pentagon to really clean up its act will be to take the money away and force it to think.

Setting aside the question of ending our misbegotten wars (an issue I have discussed in several Counterpunch articles), we should freeze the core, i.e., the non-war related, defense budget in current dollars, or better, reduce that level by two percent a year. Keep this policy in place at least until the Pentagon can pass an audit in compliance with the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 and the Constitution. (This is only a starter; we could do much more: Readers interested in one way the Pentagon could go about producing the information needed to fix the mess can read the last section of my statement to Congress at the aforementioned link. No doubt, there are other ways.)

Some naysayers might argue that we can not freeze the defense budget, because we are at war, and we must support the troops. This is an emotional red herring. It is a suicidal logic that implies we should continue a dysfunctional status quo that will make us ever weaker, because we are at war. If deemed necessary, we could always continue a variation of Mad King George’s practice of paying for these wars on a pay as you go basis through supplemental appropriations (which in contrast to my proposal, he used to protect the self-destructive status quo by pumping up the core budget).

Other naysayers might argue that reducing the budget by two percent per year will gut the Pentagon, because the Pentagon is not required to pass an audit until 2018, and the compound effect of -2% per a year for eight years would be devastating. This kind of claptrap is precisely the kind of non-thinking that works to perpetuate the status quo.

With deadlines like 2018, the Pentagon has no incentive to clean up its act.

Moreover, the MICC has a habit of pushing inconvenient deadlines ever further into the future. Consider the track record of how the Pentagon routinely “bow waved” its auditing problems into the future: John Hamre was Chief Financial Officer (i.e. Comptroller) of the Pentagon in the early 1990s during the Clinton Administration; in that capacity, he promised Congress he would fix the books by 1997, a promise that was conveniently forgotten when 1997 arrived. When Dov Zakheim became the first DoD Chief Financial Officer in Bush administration in 2001, he promised to fix the books by 2007. Zakheim’s successor in the Bush Administration, the inept and eminently forgettable Tina Jonas, extended Zakheim’s promise to fix the books by 2016. Congress has now told Obama’s Comptroller, Robert Hale, to fix the books by 2018.

So, given the Pentagon’s behavior and the makeup of the panel, how much do you want to bet that the QDR review panel even mentions, let alone tackles a bookkeeping issue that is widely acknowledged but has been treated with contempt by decision makers in the Pentagon and Congress for at least fifteen years? This behavior is nothing less than a systematic assault on the Appropriations and Accountability Clauses of the Constitution (see Article I, Section 9, Clause 7), which each member of the Defense Department has taken a sacred oath to defend and uphold.

That is why the MICC’s desire to feed its voracious appetite by continuing its assault on the Constitution reflects exactly the kind of misplaced power that President Eisenhower warned America about in his farewell address.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com

GOP Strategy: Exploit Palinism to Delegitimize Obama

I asked a friend -- a seasoned Republican political operative who must remain anonymous -- to comment on New York Times columnist Frank Rich's recent analysis of the Tea Party phenomenon, Republican faux populism, and its chief spokesperson du jour, Sara Palin (see Rich's Palin's Cunning Sleight of Hand also introduced below).  My friend, call him Republican Operative X, has been very critical of the witty albeit accurate criticisms Rich has used to poke fun at both these subjects as well as their Republican adherents.  Operative X has warned me repeatedly that Rich was being too light hearted about what was a very dangerous movement toward a demagogic strand of populist authoritarianism that could move this country toward the darkness of an "inverted totalitarian" dictatorship.  But this op-ed by Rich is different.  Attached are my friend's reactions to Mr. Rich's latest handiwork and some political prognostications.


A Political Analysis of Inverted Totalitarianism 

by Republican Operative X

February 14, 2010

I suppose Rich gets it now.

1. As I said about 6 months ago, the GOP strategy is to delegitimize Obama and make it impossible to govern -- then sweep into power amid the chaos they they themselves partly created. A "chaos" strategy is the only thing they've got (rather than rational alternative policies), but it's an effective strategy given the intellectual qualities of the American people, effective GOP control of large segments of the media, and the Democrats' propensity to play into their hands.

2. Psychological testing has shown that for people with deeply held but false beliefs, empirical demonstration that their beliefs are false does not cause them to renounce those beliefs; on the contrary, they dig in and believe them more firmly, and invent conspiratorial rationalizations as to why the empirically demonstrated facts are wrong. That's a good profile of the Palinistas.

3. I am already making odds that the GOP will sweep into power, at least in one house of Congress in 2010, and the whole shooting match in 2012. It probably won't be Palin, but the party will be in her image. The Palin GOP will make the Bush GOP look like the Mensa Society.

4. I go back and forth on how radically authoritarian the Bush presidency was: was it sui generis in American history, or did it just incrementally intensify already-evident aspects of cold war and post-cold war America? Conceivably, under the shock of 9/11, a Gore presidency might have adopted similar unilateral and authoritarian measures. And Obama has shown little propensity to roll back the main thrust of Bush's policies. Some people called the Bush administration fascist, but Sheldon Wollin's term "inverted totalitarianism" might be more applicable: intensifying authoritarianism under a façade of normal life. Much of the propaganda function of authoritarian government was done not directly but through corporate intermediaries: advertising, corporate-owned cable "news," etc.  Rather than mobilizing the population a la classic fascism, inverted totalitarianism seeks to make them distracted and politically apathetic: e.g., Bush telling Americans to go out and shop after 9/11.

5. While Bush represented the classically corporate model, the Palin Party will blend in a (faux) populism and a leather-lunged lower middle class white male resentment. A GOP in power in 2018 is going to have more of the trappings of what we think of as traditionally fascist: political witch trials; xenophobia and racism (for reasons having to do with free trade ideology and Eastern elite upbringing, Bush was not xenophobic or racist); political mobilization via the tea parties (or whatever their successors are); and God knows what else.

6. It will finish us off as a great power, for whatever damage the populist side of Palin's GOP does to civil liberties, the social fabric of the country, and foreign relations, the corporate side of the party will be back at their old tricks: they will thoroughly and irrevocably wreck the government's finances, destroy social security, and drain even more of the nation's wealth into the hands of an even more entrenched oligarchy.

Anyway, that's how I think it could happen.