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.

An Obscene Value System

Hardware Over People at the Pentagon (Again)

by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch APRIL 19, 2012

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/19/hardware-over-people-at-the-pentagon-again/

For a good example of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex’s (MICC’s) value system — which is hardware before ideas and people — read this New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof.

Note his opening paragraph:

Here’s a window into a tragedy within the American military: For every soldier killed on the battlefield this year, about 25 veterans are dying by their own hands.

And here is Kristof’s penultimate paragraph:

We refurbish tanks after time in combat, but don’t much help men and women exorcise the demons of war. Presidents commit troops to distant battlefields, but don’t commit enough dollars to veterans’ services afterward. We enlist soldiers to protect us, but when they come home we don’t protect them.

In between, Kristof supports these statements with horrific detail.

Kristof’s op-ed is symptomatic of a deeper problem — one that evolved in the MICC’s cultural DNA during the give and take of budget battles fought over 40 years of Cold War and the subsequent 20 years of warmongering since 1991. This DNA shapes the MICCs behaviour, as I explained in The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War, in Challenge: The Magazine of Economic Affairs (January-February 2011).

The proper order of priority in any military force should always be People – Ideas – Hardware, in that order — the opposite of that implied in Kristof’s penultimate paragraph

But you won’t won’t see P-I-H value system reflected in the actual decisions made in the Pentagon, the defense companies, or on Capitol Hill, or the mass of the juiciest stories in the defense media (like Aviation Week, Armed Forces Journal, Inside The Pentagon, etc. (or much of the mainstream media, to boot). By far, most of the energy, money, words, and time is spent debating the merits of the individual weapon systems, like the problem plagued, $500 billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

During my 33 years in Department of Defense, this warping of values became steadily worse over time, notwithstanding the empty flag-waving rhetoric of supporting our troops. At the same time the nation has become ever more dependent on an the higher personnel costs needed to support an all volunteer force — a standing permanent military, something the Framers of the Constitution would have abhorred.

The growing costs of the all-volunteer force eat into the budget and displace money needed for new weapons. So, there is constant pressure to reduce the size of the force and training tempos, and reallocate the money to higher priority items, like the ever-more-expensive Joint Strike Fighter.

In the 1997 and 1998, the insensitivity of these priorities became transparently obvious. Secretary of Defense William Cohen, in one of stupidest faux pas I have ever witnessed — and I have seen many — approved a poster celebrating Armed Forces Day that inadvertently became a metaphor for the MICC’s deeply entrenched, perverted value system.

What is missing?

People!!!!

Think of it. A day set aside to acknowledge the valor and sacrifices of our servicemen was announced by an official Defense Department poster that celebrated Hardware and ignored people.

If you think this mentality was an artifact of the Clinton Administration or the Democrats, think again. It was and remains bi-partisan. Ironically, Cohen was formerly a pro-defense Republican Senator from Maine (read shovel money to the warship builders at Bath Iron Works). After leaving the Spendagon, he flew through the revolving door and today, he is a high-powered consultant and ‘senior stateman’ making money by helping to lubricate the flow of funds through the halls of Versailles on the Potomac.  He was and remains an advocate of monstrous defense budgets.

When he took the job in 1997, Cohen promised to oppose President Clinton, if Cohen felt the Defense Department was being short shrifted. Moreover, in the 1980s, as a Republican senator, Cohen claimed to be a a member of the bi-partisan Military Reform Caucus. Of course, like most Senators, he never attended its meetings, because if he had, he might have realized the motto of the Reform Caucus was People – Ideas – Hardware — in that order!

But Cohen was not alone in poster obscenity. Significantly, at the time, no general or admiral in any military service objected publicly to this slanderous poster. In fact, it was not even noticed by anyone in the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill, or in the press, for a very simple reason:  The poster accurately accurately reflected the business-as-usual, core values of the MICC. After the second poster came out in 1998, Colonel GI Wilson, then an active duty Marine and close friend, and I went ballistic. We raised holy hell in emails, on the Internet, in meetings, in the halls, with news reporters, and any one who would listen.

We both can say with satisfaction that the poster outrage ended up in the dustbin of history, and by 1999, we had a poster with people on it.  When you consider the fact that we are proud of the fact that helped to people back on the Armed Forces Day poster, you get an idea of how deep the rot is.

If you think this is ancient history, read Kristof’s article carefully, in its entirety, and you will see that the value system that produced the obscene 1998 Armed Forces Day poster remains in place.   Then go on the Internet and google articles describing the current round of service downsizing plans (which means pushing people out the door) to make room for high cost cold-war inspired turkeys like the Joint Strike Fighter, nuclear submarines, ballistic missile defense systems, etc., simply because the rate of growth in the defense budget is being cut back.

And the next time you hear someone in the MICC waving the flag and saying the MICC’s top priority is supporting the grunts, slugging it out in mud and dust of war, remember the poster — and follow the money.

So I ask you, can there be any wonder why we neglect our veterans trying to cope with PTSD in the manner that Kristoff described or the ominous problems of moral hazard described by Major Tyler Boudreau in this paper?

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

Wait Till the War Really Comes Home

The Afghan Disaster

by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch, WEEKEND EDITION APRIL 6-8, 2012

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/06/the-afghan-disaster/

The PR disasters over the last three months — including pictures of American troops urinating on Afghan corpses, the burning of Qurans, and the massacre of Afghan civilians, including women and children, by at least one deranged American soldier — have morphed into a grand strategic debacle.  From the perspective of the Afghan insurgency, these are gifts that will keep on giving.

Why do I use the modifier grand strategic?

Because these incidents have (1) increased the moral strength of the Afghan insurgents by handing them a coup to rally supporters and attract the uncommitted to their cause.  They also widen the existing rift between the United States military and the Karzai government, which in any case is viewed by many Afghans as a corrupt, illegitimate, quisling lapdog of the US.  And (2), they are visibly weakening the rapidly crumbling solidarity at home.  Recent polls in America, for example, suggest the already overwhelming majority of Americans who now think it is time to exit the Afghan enterprise is growing again.  Moreover, an increasing number of politicians and editorial boards are now beginning to reflect the views of the majority of American people.  These incidents have magnified the already widespread perceptions among Afghans of a grotesque mismatch between the ideals we profess uphold  and what we do.

Readers unfamiliar with the idea of grand strategy and the central importance of moral effects in any kind of conflict will find brief introduction to the criteria of a sensible grand strategy here.  Use these criteria to judge for yourself whether or not our dismissal of these incidents as isolated occurrences and apologies will counter the damage described above.

You will see that these shifts at the moral level of conflict are about as bad as it gets when it comes to grand strategy.  The emerging moral asymmetries between the US and its insurgent adversaries go well beyond trite comments about staying the war weariness and make a mockery of Defense Secretary Panetta’s wildly optimistic claim that we reached a turning point thanks to the 2011 surge.  The US is leaving Afghanistan, the only questions left are how soon and how messy the departure will be?

Two recent essays help one grapple with some implications of these questions:

The first is an op-ed, “Why the Military needs to leave Afghanistan, and Soon,” by Phil Sparrow in the Sydney Morning Herald.  Sparrow explains why people who argue we should remain in Afghanistan, because the Afghan people don’t want us to leave, simply don’t know what they are talking about.  Certainly, the one per cent living in fortified compounds who have profited from the corruption unleashed by the torrent money we have poured into that impoverished country have been enriched by our presence want us to stay, but what about the other 99 per cent?

In addressing this question, Sparrow demolishes the argument for staying the course.  Bear in mind, it is written by a man who has lived in Afghanistan in local housing since 1999.  He explains why the time to leave has arrived, and the sooner we depart the better. Sparrow’s op-ed was emailed to me by a highly educated Afghan friend from a distinguished Pashtun family, a man who is working for the restoration of a multicultural neutral Afghanistan, sans warlords and kleptocrats, whatever their ethnicity.  He prefaced it by saying, “Finally, the truth.”  Bear in mind, the individual making this comment is a longtime admirer of America, going back to our aid in the Helmand River irrigation project during the Eisenhower Administration.  Read Sparrow’s essay and make your own judgement … then compare it to other points of view which can be found here and here, and ask yourself who is making the strongest argument.

“Afghanistan: A Gathering Menace” is a deeply troubling essay by Neal Shea in the current issue of the American Scholar.  Shea has been writing about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2006, where he has been spent most of his time embedded with NATO units.

He paints a grim portrait of how the confrontation dynamics of the Afghan guerrilla war are evolving violent psyches in some of the American troops who are being tasked to carry out the endless patrols and night raids.  These search-and-destroy operations have morphed the aim of winning hearts and minds into a futile attrition strategy aimed at of killing insurgents faster than the local population can replace them … and according to Shea, the unfocused violence emerging from this strategy is having frightening side effects on the psychology of some of our soldiers.

If Shea is close to being right, the reality at the pointy end of the spear is very different from that perceived by the lounge lizards and neoconmen inside the beltway think tanks who calling for more time because our strategy is slowing winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people

Left hanging, but implicit in the title of his essay, is the question of what this menacing acculturation implies for the future of America.  That is … what will happen when those afflicted return home, with no wars to expend their aggressive energies on?  Add in the numbers of returning American mercenaries laid off by American contractors as their Afghan honey pot dries up, and the prospect becomes ominous indeed.

To be sure, Shea is only one observer at the microscopic level of organization, but he has been around, and if his observations are close to being right, the leaders of our military and government, who are debating when to leave, had better start thinking about how to contend with the kinds of post-combat stress problems posed by acculturation Shea describes, whatever its magnitude.

But that kind of contingency planning is not going to happen any time soon.  The politicians and generals are too busy scrambling to save their reputations by devising some kind of face-saving exit strategy from a quagmire of their own making. (Shades of Nixon’s promise of ‘Peace with Honor’ in Vietnam?)

No one in Versailles on the Potomac is thinking about how to ameliorate the potentially explosive domestic blowback from the targeted killing strategy that landed America in this pickle.  What will have happen, for example, to our demobilized young veterans, after they are downsized by the milcrats in the Pentagon to make budget room for cold-war inspired turkeys like the $500 billion F-35 fighter program?  Many of these soldiers and marines joined the all-volunteer professional military, because they needed a job — this is their profession.  What skills can be transferred to the private sector?  Guarding gated communities or serving in private armies owned by the super rich banksters, speculators, and globalization titans who helped so much to reduce their job prospects to begin with? What does this dilemma tell us about the wisdom of maintaining a large professional all-volunteer military in a democratic republic?

History has seen this peculiar kind of unemployment affliction before — for example, the unemployed hoplites in ancient Greece, selling their killing services to the highest bidder, or the unemployed German soldiers after World War I donning the brownshirts — and the results are never pretty.

Goodbye Occupy: Political Engineering the Police State

The politics of fear in insecurity are now the staple of American politics.  They were used habitually during  the Cold War to create powerful vested interests in a permanent war economy.  These interests are clearly reflected in the pattern of political practices of the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex (MICC) that maintains and increases the flux of money flowing through the MICC.  It is this flux that gives the MICC its form and vitality.

By 1990, the MICC's political practices had been honed to the point that they became self-sustaining and the cold-war-level defense budget proved impossible to turn off when the Cold War ended and the grossly inflated Soviet threat evaporated in 1991. In the Pentagon, we sarcastically referred to the unstoppable budget steamroller as the Pentagon's self-licking ice cream cone.[1]  

The self-licking ice cream cone was in place, morphed, and survived.   An after some some fits and starts in alternative threat inflation options during the 90s (e.g., the wars of the Yugoslav Succession, theories of being a indispensable power and humanitarian intervention), 9-11 provided the MICC with a political cover to morph its marketing appeal into fighting what it called the long war on terror.   But 9-11 was also exploited cynically as a justification to create another political cash cow, which can be though of as domestic spinoff to the MICC, since many of the same players are involved -- the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), thus expanding the MICC's network of vested interests and bringing them more directly into the domestic arena. The attached op-ed in the Guardian by Naomi Wolf gives a hint of where this evolution is headed -- and if you think she is being alarmist, note particularly her brief description of DHS's emerging self-licking ice cream cone (highlighted in yellow near the end of her essay). 

The long war in terror may be winding down, and the alleged need for a DHS is evaporating, but like the MICC, the 'DHS self licking ice cream cone' is likely to exhibit the kind of adaptability needed live on in a pathological mutation of its supposed intent. [2] 

For those readers with a synthetic bent of mind, think about the implications of Wolf's op-ed in the context of the questions I will pose at the end of the next blaster.

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[1] New readers will find detailed albeit overlapping explanations of how the MICC's self-licking ice cream cone operates here, here, here, and here.

[2] There is another, more subtle dimension to the these political-economic evolutions: Over time, the economically pathological but politically expedient practices of the MICC undermined the commercial competitiveness of the manufacturing companies involved in weapons making.  The employees and owners of these companies became ever more dependent on government money flows for their survival and growth.  But, as Seymour Melman correctly predicted in his 1983 book Profits Without Production, the MICC's practices also contributed materially, together with deleterious effects of financialization, deregulation, speculation, and globalization, to deindustrialize and hollow out the high-income US economy.  This political-economic evolution led directly to the Wall Street Casino that crashed in 2007-8.  It is now clear that the pathological transformation of the great American economic engine took off in the late 70s, and it produced the  stagnation of middle class wages and the grotesque inflation of the income disparity between and poor and rich, especially the super rich that lies at or very near root of our economic problems.  So, the politics of fear are now melded seamlessly with the politics of economic insecurity (reflected in dependency, anger, and scapegoating) to shape the political discourse of the lower 80% (who are struggling to make ends meet and provide a future for their children while paying off a huge debt burden) as well as the super rich who fear the masses will rise up against them to take their wealth ... it is this melding that is feeding the political and legal selection pressures underpinning the kind of evolution described by Ms. Wolf.

Sexual Humiliation, a Tool to Control the Masses

By Naomi Wolf, Guardian UK

06 April 2012

http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/10831-sexual-humiliation-a-tool-to-control-the-masses

n a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the "trespass bill", which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.

Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to "turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks." He said he felt humiliated: "It made me feel like less of a man."

In surreal reasoning, justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices' decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest – that is, who are not yet convicted – haven't been introduced into a prison population.

Our surveillance state shown considerable determination to intrude on citizens sexually. There's the sexual abuse of prisoners at Bagram – der Spiegel reports that "former inmates report incidents of … various forms of sexual humiliation. In some cases, an interrogator would place his penis along the face of the detainee while he was being questioned. Other inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex". There was the stripping of Bradley Manning is solitary confinement. And there's the policy set up after the story of the "underwear bomber" to grope US travelers genitally or else force them to go through a machine – made by a company, Rapiscan, owned by terror profiteer and former DHA czar Michael Chertoff – with images so vivid that it has been called the "pornoscanner".

Believe me: you don't want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. History shows that the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations.

The political use of forced nudity by anti-democratic regimes is long established. Forcing people to undress is the first step in breaking down their sense of individuality and dignity and reinforcing their powerlessness. Enslaved women were sold naked on the blocks in the American south, and adolescent male slaves served young white ladies at table in the south, while they themselves were naked: their invisible humiliation was a trope for their emasculation. Jewish prisoners herded into concentration camps were stripped of clothing and photographed naked, as iconic images of that Holocaust reiterated.

One of the most terrifying moments for me when I visited Guantanamo prison in 2009 was seeing the way the architecture of the building positioned glass-fronted shower cubicles facing intentionally right into the central atrium – where young female guards stood watch over the forced nakedness of Muslim prisoners, who had no way to conceal themselves. Laws and rulings such as this are clearly designed to bring the conditions of Guantanamo, and abusive detention, home.

I have watched male police and TSA members standing by side by side salaciously observing women as they have been "patted down" in airports. I have experienced the weirdly phrased, sexually perverse intrusiveness of the state during an airport "pat-down", which is always phrased in the words of a steamy paperback ("do you have any sensitive areas? … I will use the back of my hands under your breasts …"). One of my Facebook commentators suggested, I think plausibly, that more women are about to be found liable for arrest for petty reasons (scarily enough, the TSA is advertising for more female officers).

I interviewed the equivalent of TSA workers in Britain and found that the genital groping that is obligatory in the US is illegal in Britain. I believe that the genital groping policy in America, too, is designed to psychologically habituate US citizens to a condition in which they are demeaned and sexually intruded upon by the state – at any moment.

The most terrifying phrase of all in the decision is justice Kennedy's striking use of the term "detainees" for "United States citizens under arrest". Some members of Occupy who were arrested in Los Angeles also reported having been referred to by police as such. Justice Kennedy's new use of what looks like a deliberate activation of that phrase is illuminating.

Ten years of association have given "detainee" the synonymous meaning in America as those to whom no rights apply – especially in prison. It has been long in use in America, habituating us to link it with a condition in which random Muslims far away may be stripped by the American state of any rights. Now the term – with its associations of "those to whom anything may be done" – is being deployed systematically in the direction of … any old American citizen.

Where are we headed? Why? These recent laws criminalizing protest, and giving local police – who, recall, are now infused with DHS money, military hardware and personnel – powers to terrify and traumatise people who have not gone through due process or trial, are being set up to work in concert with a see-all-all-the-time surveillance state. A facility is being set up in Utah by the NSA to monitor everything all the time: James Bamford wrote in Wired magazine that the new facility in Bluffdale, Utah, is being built, where the NSA will look at billions of emails, texts and phone calls. Similar legislation is being pushed forward in the UK.

With that Big Brother eye in place, working alongside these strip-search laws, – between the all-seeing data-mining technology and the terrifying police powers to sexually abuse and humiliate you at will – no one will need a formal coup to have a cowed and compliant citizenry. If you say anything controversial online or on the phone, will you face arrest and sexual humiliation?

Remember, you don't need to have done anything wrong to be arrested in America any longer. You can be arrested for walking your dog without a leash. The man who was forced to spread his buttocks was stopped for a driving infraction. I was told by an NYPD sergeant that "safety" issues allow the NYPD to make arrests at will. So nothing prevents thousands of Occupy protesters – if there will be any left after these laws start to bite – from being rounded up and stripped naked under intimidating conditions.

Why is this happening? I used to think the push was just led by those who profited from endless war and surveillance – but now I see the struggle as larger. As one internet advocate said to me: "There is a race against time: they realise the internet is a tool of empowerment that will work against their interests, and they need to race to turn it into a tool of control."

As Chris Hedges wrote in his riveting account of the NDAA: "There are now 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies that work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, the Washington Post reported in a 2010 series by Dana Priest and William M Arken. There are 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances, the reporters wrote, and in Washington, DC, and the surrounding area 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2011."

This enormous new sector of the economy has a multi-billion-dollar vested interest in setting up a system to surveil, physically intimidate and prey upon the rest of American society.

Now they can do so by threatening to demean you sexually – a potent tool in the hands of any bully.

Obama & Netanyahu: Are 2 Scorpions Trapped in a Bottle ...

or are they engaged in a mutual backscratching operation?

My good friend Pierre Sprey took exception to the attached analysis by Immanuel Wallerstein, which I distributed in my last blaster (and is repeated below for convenience of reference). Readers may recall that I noted Wallerstein did not address the universal influence of domestic politics in shaping a nation's foreign policy.  Pierre addresses the implications of that oversight in the attached comment:

Chuck,

Wallerstein's heart is in the right place and he is certainly right that neither Netanyahu nor Obama have the slightest illusions about the ridiculous uselessness of bombing Iran. 

Despite that, I couldn't disagree more with Wallerstein's idea that the two leaders are locked in a lose-lose trap and that "neither Netanyahu nor Obama can figure out what really to do, and how to maintain their own political interests internally." Nor do I see how he can seriously discuss Iran and the balance of power among Mideast players without ever breathing a word about oil.    

Given that neither Obama nor Netanyahu (or any other elected leaders) give a fig about foreign policy per se, from their respective points of view there is no lose-lose problem at all: 

1. By endlessly bloating the Iranian bogeyman, Netanyahu is succeeding with Israeli voters, distracting American attention from Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing and settlement expansion, and forcing Obama into ever more draconian sanctions to strangle the Iranian economy. 

2. By pretending to take seriously Netanyahu's saber-rattling and the need to squeeze Iran into submission, Obama keeps the Zionist money flowing into his campaign coffers; enjoys perfect political cover for simultaneously reducing the world supply of oil, running up the price of gas and grossly enriching his Big Oil campaign sponsors; and makes the Saudis, Qataris and UAEs deliriously happy by giving them a larger share of the world oil market at an even more extortionate price per barrel while helping them in their scramble to keep their thrones by cutting off the head of the Shia snake.

So, outside of the poor bastards in the Arab street and those elsewhere in the world who have to heat their houses, put gas in their tanks or buy oil for their companies, where's the lose-lose?

Pierre

For the record, I agree with Pierre's comments about the implications of domestic politics and those about the implications of Wallerstein's omission of any reference to oil. 

Chuck Spinney

Barcelona

Israel: Its Fantasies and Its Realities

by Immanuel Wallerstein, Agence Global, 15 Mar 2012

http://www.agenceglobal.com/Article.asp?Id=2753

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel visited the United States in the beginning of March 2012. He came to say, once again, that a nuclear Iran would pose an existential threat to Israel, and that Israel reserved the right to take timely action to counter this. President Obama asserted just as vigorously that, yes, a nuclear Iran would pose an existential threat to Israel, and that the United States could not countenance this, but that the timing of Netanyahu was off. Non-military action against Iran should be exhausted first before thinking of other action.

Let us examine the premises. Why would Iran, with nuclear weapons, pose an existential threat to Israel? That is, who believes that, if Iran had nuclear weapons, the Iranian authorities would use them to bomb Israel? Actually, no one in any position of responsibility in Israel, in the United States, or elsewhere in the world believes this. They only say they do.

Let us start with the ostensible arguments. Israeli officials point to the fact that Pres. Ahmadinejad and others have said that they wish to "wipe out" (or some such phrase) Israel. Of course, many experts have pointed out that the translation is incorrect. But even if it were accurate, does that do anything more than repeat the long-standing position of large numbers of people in the Middle East opposing the concept of a Jewish state and favoring various other outcomes to the long-standing dispute?

Why on earth would Iran bomb Israel? They would kill at least as many Arabs as Israelis, if they did. They would be subject to immediate retaliation by Israel, which is well-armed in nuclear weapons. Iran bombing Israel is a fantasy that no responsible leader believes.

So, if they don't believe it, why do they say it? The answer seems to me clear. Were Iran finally to have a few nuclear weapons, it would indeed change something. It would change the geopolitical balance in the Middle East and weaken politically the position of Israel. It would probably also lead to the rapid acquisition of nuclear weapons by a number of other countries. I think of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey, to begin with.

Were either Israel or the United States to bomb Iran preemptively, there would be enormous political consequences immediately. First of all, it would almost certainly be relatively inefficacious in terms of stopping the Iranian project. Secondly, it would weaken politically the position of both Israel and the United States in the whole world. The two reasons together explain why there is so much opposition by the military and intelligence services of both Israel and the United States to the whole military discourse. What they fear is that the discourse would catch on and permit some political leaders not presently controlling the Israeli or U.S. governments to be foolish enough to start the war.

What Israel and the United States are locked into is a lose-lose situation. Whatever they do, they will lose politically. I believe they are aware of this, and neither Netanyahu nor Obama can figure out what really to do, and how to maintain their own political interests internally. So they spend their time blaming each other and blackmailing each other. In the meantime, the Iranian leadership uses the discourse to wave the patriotic banners and strengthen its internal position, which had been under serious assault not so long ago.

Meanwhile, back to Palestine, which remains a real issue for Israel, not a fantasy issue. Hamas has now made the decision to link its strategy to Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood, which seems to be on the point of controlling the Egyptian government. Fatah clearly fears, correctly, that it might lose control of the West Bank to Hamas. Caught between Hamas and the U.S. government, President Abbas of the Palestine Authority is also in a lose-lose position and also does not know what to do. So he dithers, which does not seem to be the best survival tactic.

The future is with the Palestinian street. And I simply do not believe that it can be kept quiescent. Can Israel come to terms with the Palestinian street? We shall soon find out.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).