Sam Smith
It's only a week after the inauguration and already post-partisan depression is settling in. It turns out, to the amazement of the Obama administration and much of the media, that a lot of people besides the president have ideas as to how to handle the fiscal crisis.
Part of it is partisan as should have been expected. After all, the only place post partisanship really exists is under a dictator. And the political dissent is not just coming from Republicans, but also from progressives who are quickly facing up to their differences with the new president.
This is the way a democracy is meant to work and it is far from a childish thing to put away.
But that only tells part of the story. Obama and his top aides are indubitably of high intelligence, but so is much of Washington. What is lacking at times like this is a sufficiency of common sense, the sort of social intelligence that used to characterize the good politician before the lawyers took over the trade.
I have argued in the past that Washington is run these days by high functioning autistics, suffering a sort of political Asperger's Syndrome, who can't seem to connect the data in their minds with the realities of life.
A example: after clipping all the latest best stories I could find on the fiscal crisis, I searched for two words: "small business." They didn't appear because no one seems to notice the importance of small business if you want to create jobs.
But a year ago the Small Business Administration reported that small businesses (less than 500 employees) employed 51% of nation's private non-farm workforce. From 2003 to 2004 companies with less than 20 employees created roughly 1.6 million net new jobs. Companies with 20 to 499 employees created around 275,000 net new jobs. Meanwhile, employment at companies with more than 500 employees shrank by 214,000. The SBA also reported that over the last 20 years small businesses have created roughly 3 out of 4 net new private non-farm US jobs.
Why this indifference? Three possible reasons are that small business people are poorly represented in Congress, they're weak in lobbying and they don't give enough money to candidates.
But it is also true that as a greater percentage of power players become lawyers, MBAs or financial whizzes, a lesser percentage even pause to think about small business. And this is not a partisan issue; both major parties ignore the smaller firms.
Trained in theories that assume life is directed from the top, they gravitate naturally towards policies and solutions that reflect their education. The first bailout was as gross a reflection of this as one could imagine, but even the Obama version stumbles under the weight of grand presumptions that will supposedly trickle down to main street.
Thus we found initially little interest in decentralizing to bankruptcy judges the decisions on foreclosures as being proposed by John Conyers. Today's Washington Post, for example, shoved the story onto the business page, noting that "Democrats have backed off efforts to include the provision in the economic stimulus package that's making its way through Congress."
Why the reticence? Something like it worked for FDR, it's common sense, and it would even make Obama look good. But it's not the sort of thing you learn about in law and business school. And it's too close to the ground for comfort. And the banks don't like it.
Which brings up a final problem with what's happening in Washington - beyond the political Asperger's syndrome and beyond the distortions that come with too many years hanging around academics. The problem is that well educated people make more money and thus inevitably class begin to affect judgment.
I've been struck, for example, by how little Democrats talk about foreclosures anymore, by how the words poor and poverty seem to have become politically incorrect, and how bored liberals become when you mention single payer healthcare.
There is absolutely no doubt that if Lyndon Johnson and Adam Clayton Powell were drafting a bailout it would be dramatically different from what Obama has come up with. And politics has surprisingly little to do with it. It is far more about what and who you care about most. As Roosevelt demonstrated, you can overcome the liabilities of intelligence or social and financial success with common sense, good judgment and a well directed heart, but you have to work at it.
Keith E. Stanovich has written a book called What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, published by Yale University Press.
Writes Kacie Glenn in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
"Stanovich suggests that IQ tests focus on valuable qualities and capacities that are highly relevant to our daily lives. But he believes the tests would be far more effective if they took into account not only mental 'brightness' but also rationality - including such abilities as 'judicious decision making, efficient behavioral regulation, sensible goal prioritization ... [and] the proper calibration of evidence.'
"Our understanding of intelligence, he writes, has been muddled by the discrepancy between the vague, comprehensive vernacular term, which encompasses all the functions and manifestations of 'smarts,' and the narrower theories that 'confine the concept of intelligence to the set of mental abilities actually tested on extant IQ tests.' The latter conceptualization allows intelligence to coexist with foolishness because IQ tests do not measure the rationality required to abstain from dumb decisions, according to the author. . . In an earlier work, Stanovich coined his own term - dysrationalia - for 'the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence.' That 'disorder' he suggests, might afflict some of the smartest people you know."
So if things don't go quite right with the latest bailout and the recovery in general, don't chalk it all off just to politics. It's also about how people connect their knowledge to real life, the judgments they make, and what and who they really care about most.
January 28, 2009
January 22, 2009
THINKING ABOUT OBAMA
Sam Smith
Once again I'm in trouble and once again it has little to do with politics or ideology. I just don't think right about Obama.
Most people of power are inherently deductive thinkers. They have learned a set of respected principles by which those of power can continue to have power by applying these principles to the facts they find around them.
These principles change from time to time, which is why we have things like the op ed pages of the Washington Post that helpfully inform us, for example, when the age of the "free market" is over and it's okay to quote Keynes again.
Sometimes key principles have to be dispensed with in a less elegant manner, such as the "domino theory" of the Vietnam war or the "weapons of mass destruction" that took us into Iraq.
And sometimes key principles prove a bit shaky at which time it is fitting and proper to have them undergo thoughtful reexamination by approved theorists as is happening now with the "war on terror." These theories are typically either reconfirmed or replaced with others, preferably of three or less words.
In each instance, the key element is a theory that is presumed to be true, even if lacks empirical confirmation.
For example, in the case of Barack Obama, one theory is that he will be a great president because he is our first black president. Everyone is either too polite or too enthralled by the theory to ask such simple questions as: would this be true if our first black president were Clarence Thomas?
Another theory is that he will be a great president because he is a great man, a subset of the theory that history is the purview of great men [sic], which overlooks the role of chance, culture, the environment, and lesser souls such as those who created the decline in the birth rate or the anti-slavery, women's, labor and environmental movements.
Another theory, particular popular among the Washington elite, is that he will be a great president because he preaches centrism, even though there is no historical evidence that centrism produces anything much more than the status quo and even though, in America's case, most profound and progressive improvements have been the result of a raucous and irrepressible left.
I don't buy such theories. My learning disability is not that I'm of the wrong political persuasion, but that I think inductively. In other words, I move from evidence towards the theory rather than the other way around. While there are some academic fields where inductive reasoning gets respect - social history and anthropology, in which I majored, being among them - it is widely thought of as unprofessional empiricism at best, conspiracy theory at worst.
In fact, the term 'conspiracy theory' was invented by elite media and politicians to denigrate questions or critical presumptions about events about which important facts remain unrevealed.
The intelligent response to such events is to remain agnostic, skeptical, and curious. Theories may be suggested - just as they are every day about less complex and more open matters on news broadcasts and op ed pages - but such theories should not stray too far from available evidence.
Conversely, as long as serious anomalies remain, dismissing questions and doubts as a "conspiracy theory" is a highly unintelligent response. It is also ironic as those ridiculing the questions and doubts typically consider themselves intellectually superior to the doubters. But they aren't because they stopped thinking the moment someone in power told them a superficially plausible answer.
There is the further irony that many who ridicule doubts about the official version of events were typically trained at elite colleges where, in political science and history, theories often take precedent over facts and in which substantive decisions affecting politics and history are presumed to be the work of a small number of wise men [sic]. They are trained, in effect, to trust in theories and benign confederacies. Most major media political coverage is based on the great man theory of history. This pattern can be found elsewhere in everything from Skull & Bones to the NY Times editorial board to the Council on Foreign Relations. You might even call them beneficent conspiracy theorists.
Homicide detectives and investigative reporters, among others, are inductive thinkers who start with evidence rather than with theories and aren't happy when the evidence is weak, conflicting or lacking. They keep working the case until a solid answer appears.
The inductive thinker considering Obama is naturally drawn to things like his record and his statements on various issues. I compiled these over the campaign and came up with around 30 issues with which progressives might disagree. However you might argue each case, one fact is indisputable: the media did not let the voters in on the secret. Thus, most of the one million plus enthusiasts on the Mall during the inaugural celebration were cheering a theory rather than facts, supported by the almost universal absence of the mention of actual issues when the fans were interviewed by roving TV crews.
In philosophical terms, Barack Obama might be called a beneficent conspiracy theory, a black helicopter come to save rather than endanger us.
The irony is that I suspect he knows this, because he has achieved his success in part by being an inductive reasoner in practice and a deductive one in rhetoric. Cleverly ignoring Mahalia Jackson's warning against being a "saint in church and a devil under cover," Obama is street smart in his walk and ethereal in his talk. And in the latter, he is blessed by being able to draw on the grand theories of both the white Ivy League and black theology. It is this combination of intellectual and Christian theory that appeals to those inclined to faithfulness.
I learned about the Ivy League approach when I attended Harvard. Later I would write:
"Whatever intelligence I possessed did not seem the sort required to excel at Harvard. Long afterwards I would figure out that much of what Harvard was about was a giant game of categories, in which real people, real events and real phenomena were assigned to fictitious groupings such as The Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, or the Freudian Tradition. To those immersed in this game, the imaginary assumed a substance of its own; as classics professor John Finley is said to have remarked, 'Sometimes, I fear my son thinks that life is real.'
"I had come to Harvard full of passion for phenomena I could see, feel and touch; now it was implicitly suggested that these were childish things to be put away. The educated man concerned himself primarily with what they meant, with which other phenomena they belonged, and what theories could best explain their existence in the first place. I didn't want to spend my life putting things into little boxes; I wanted to take them out, turn them over, examine them closely, do something with them, and tell others what I had found.
"If you were brazen enough to think inductively, that is to say to examine evidence and consider what it might all mean -- in short to use one's innate capacity to imagine, to dream and to create -- you risked being regarded ignorant, or at least odd. You were, after all, being educated to digest grand principles, major paradigms and random certainties and then to sort and file all of life's phenomena by these convenient categories.
"In such a cataloging system, the accidental, the chaotic, the imagined, the malevolent, the culturally unfamiliar, and the unique often got misplaced. I had come to Harvard with some vague notion that it would teach me how to use my own intelligence better, that I would learn how to educate myself. I didn't understand then, and wouldn't until many decades later, that the American establishment wasn't really all that interested in that sort of thing.
"From the intellectual epicenter of Cambridge to the political apex of Washington, education was something one received, rehearsed, and regurgitated. You didn't play with it, experiment with it, and you certainly didn't make it your own -- even if, like the shape of Harvard Square, it turned out not to be as officially described. Life at Harvard was thus several steps removed from life as I knew and hoped it to be."
The dean of freshman, F. Skiddy von Stade Jr, once said to me, "You people from Germantown Friends School look so good on paper. Why do you do so badly here?" It was a fair question; a number of GFS graduates were on probation and one had dropped out.
It took me decades to understand and appreciate the difference in two systems of learning, for at my Quaker high school I had been given few grand theories. Instead, in the 1950s I had been introduced to how the world really worked - for example, an 8th grade English course that included a segment on the secrets of advertising, a 9th grade course in anthropology and a 12 grade math course that explained the Boolean calculations of computers I wouldn't see for 20 years. The Quakers themselves were refreshingly devoid of grand theories - once a debate in Friends meeting over the divinity of Christ, for example, was gently diverted by one of the elders - but the respect and encouragement of critical thought and examination was far greater than I would find at Harvard or in the media I would late join.
Part of the problem with the grand theory approach to politics is that politics isn't a science. The deductive premises of science can be constantly tested, reviewed and dumped if necessary. In politics, these theories are not sanctified by the confirmation of experimentation and analysis, but primarily by the effectiveness of the propaganda those projecting them.
Besides, as Benjamin Franklin noted, you don't need to know the law of gravity to realize that a plate will likely break if you drop it on the floor.
The problem with inductive reasoning in politics is that you seldom come up with definitively accurate answers. But the same is true of deductive reasoning. The difference is that with the latter, it is easier to pretend that it is true. With inductive reasoning you are constantly reminded of the weakness of thought; with deductive reasoning it is too easy to become a prisoner of myth.
Evan Heit, in the Cambridge Handbook Of Computational Psychology describes the process well:
"How do you make a prediction about the unpredictable? Inductive reasoning is about drawing conclusions that are not certain or logically valid, but still likely. Let's say you are buying a new CD for your friend. It's impossible to know with certainty what she will like, and it doesn't seem that the rules of logic will tell you which CD to buy. There's no correct answer. Nonetheless, you can make an informed guess, and indeed she will probably like the CD that you buy. The more you know about her taste in music, and which categories of music she likes and does not like, the more likely it is that your prediction will be correct. Our everyday experiences are filled with predictions of this nature - we use inductive reasoning to make likely but not certain predictions about how people will act and about things we have not seen, e.g., that when we open a door to a room, the room will have a floor and ceiling. In spite of the uncertainty, we manage to be fairly successful in our predictions - we can buy gifts that our friends will enjoy and avoid walking into rooms without floors. When it comes to making predictions about the unpredictable, computational models are in a similar position to people. Because the judgments being modeled are themselves uncertain, it's unlikely that models of inductive reasoning will be perfectly correct. Any computational model of inductive reasoning could probably be improved by taking account of more knowledge or more principles of prediction. Nonetheless, current models of inductive reasoning already do a fairly good job."
So if I do not react to Barack Obama the way you would like, do not consider me cynical. It's just that where others see a god, I see a politician; where others feast on adjectives, I dine on facts and where some find faith sufficient, I prefer the Missouri motto that some say stems from an 1899 speech by Congressman Willard Vandiver, when he declared, "I come from a country that raises corn and cotton, cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I'm from Missouri, and you have got to show me."
Once again I'm in trouble and once again it has little to do with politics or ideology. I just don't think right about Obama.
Most people of power are inherently deductive thinkers. They have learned a set of respected principles by which those of power can continue to have power by applying these principles to the facts they find around them.
These principles change from time to time, which is why we have things like the op ed pages of the Washington Post that helpfully inform us, for example, when the age of the "free market" is over and it's okay to quote Keynes again.
Sometimes key principles have to be dispensed with in a less elegant manner, such as the "domino theory" of the Vietnam war or the "weapons of mass destruction" that took us into Iraq.
And sometimes key principles prove a bit shaky at which time it is fitting and proper to have them undergo thoughtful reexamination by approved theorists as is happening now with the "war on terror." These theories are typically either reconfirmed or replaced with others, preferably of three or less words.
In each instance, the key element is a theory that is presumed to be true, even if lacks empirical confirmation.
For example, in the case of Barack Obama, one theory is that he will be a great president because he is our first black president. Everyone is either too polite or too enthralled by the theory to ask such simple questions as: would this be true if our first black president were Clarence Thomas?
Another theory is that he will be a great president because he is a great man, a subset of the theory that history is the purview of great men [sic], which overlooks the role of chance, culture, the environment, and lesser souls such as those who created the decline in the birth rate or the anti-slavery, women's, labor and environmental movements.
Another theory, particular popular among the Washington elite, is that he will be a great president because he preaches centrism, even though there is no historical evidence that centrism produces anything much more than the status quo and even though, in America's case, most profound and progressive improvements have been the result of a raucous and irrepressible left.
I don't buy such theories. My learning disability is not that I'm of the wrong political persuasion, but that I think inductively. In other words, I move from evidence towards the theory rather than the other way around. While there are some academic fields where inductive reasoning gets respect - social history and anthropology, in which I majored, being among them - it is widely thought of as unprofessional empiricism at best, conspiracy theory at worst.
In fact, the term 'conspiracy theory' was invented by elite media and politicians to denigrate questions or critical presumptions about events about which important facts remain unrevealed.
The intelligent response to such events is to remain agnostic, skeptical, and curious. Theories may be suggested - just as they are every day about less complex and more open matters on news broadcasts and op ed pages - but such theories should not stray too far from available evidence.
Conversely, as long as serious anomalies remain, dismissing questions and doubts as a "conspiracy theory" is a highly unintelligent response. It is also ironic as those ridiculing the questions and doubts typically consider themselves intellectually superior to the doubters. But they aren't because they stopped thinking the moment someone in power told them a superficially plausible answer.
There is the further irony that many who ridicule doubts about the official version of events were typically trained at elite colleges where, in political science and history, theories often take precedent over facts and in which substantive decisions affecting politics and history are presumed to be the work of a small number of wise men [sic]. They are trained, in effect, to trust in theories and benign confederacies. Most major media political coverage is based on the great man theory of history. This pattern can be found elsewhere in everything from Skull & Bones to the NY Times editorial board to the Council on Foreign Relations. You might even call them beneficent conspiracy theorists.
Homicide detectives and investigative reporters, among others, are inductive thinkers who start with evidence rather than with theories and aren't happy when the evidence is weak, conflicting or lacking. They keep working the case until a solid answer appears.
The inductive thinker considering Obama is naturally drawn to things like his record and his statements on various issues. I compiled these over the campaign and came up with around 30 issues with which progressives might disagree. However you might argue each case, one fact is indisputable: the media did not let the voters in on the secret. Thus, most of the one million plus enthusiasts on the Mall during the inaugural celebration were cheering a theory rather than facts, supported by the almost universal absence of the mention of actual issues when the fans were interviewed by roving TV crews.
In philosophical terms, Barack Obama might be called a beneficent conspiracy theory, a black helicopter come to save rather than endanger us.
The irony is that I suspect he knows this, because he has achieved his success in part by being an inductive reasoner in practice and a deductive one in rhetoric. Cleverly ignoring Mahalia Jackson's warning against being a "saint in church and a devil under cover," Obama is street smart in his walk and ethereal in his talk. And in the latter, he is blessed by being able to draw on the grand theories of both the white Ivy League and black theology. It is this combination of intellectual and Christian theory that appeals to those inclined to faithfulness.
I learned about the Ivy League approach when I attended Harvard. Later I would write:
"Whatever intelligence I possessed did not seem the sort required to excel at Harvard. Long afterwards I would figure out that much of what Harvard was about was a giant game of categories, in which real people, real events and real phenomena were assigned to fictitious groupings such as The Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, or the Freudian Tradition. To those immersed in this game, the imaginary assumed a substance of its own; as classics professor John Finley is said to have remarked, 'Sometimes, I fear my son thinks that life is real.'
"I had come to Harvard full of passion for phenomena I could see, feel and touch; now it was implicitly suggested that these were childish things to be put away. The educated man concerned himself primarily with what they meant, with which other phenomena they belonged, and what theories could best explain their existence in the first place. I didn't want to spend my life putting things into little boxes; I wanted to take them out, turn them over, examine them closely, do something with them, and tell others what I had found.
"If you were brazen enough to think inductively, that is to say to examine evidence and consider what it might all mean -- in short to use one's innate capacity to imagine, to dream and to create -- you risked being regarded ignorant, or at least odd. You were, after all, being educated to digest grand principles, major paradigms and random certainties and then to sort and file all of life's phenomena by these convenient categories.
"In such a cataloging system, the accidental, the chaotic, the imagined, the malevolent, the culturally unfamiliar, and the unique often got misplaced. I had come to Harvard with some vague notion that it would teach me how to use my own intelligence better, that I would learn how to educate myself. I didn't understand then, and wouldn't until many decades later, that the American establishment wasn't really all that interested in that sort of thing.
"From the intellectual epicenter of Cambridge to the political apex of Washington, education was something one received, rehearsed, and regurgitated. You didn't play with it, experiment with it, and you certainly didn't make it your own -- even if, like the shape of Harvard Square, it turned out not to be as officially described. Life at Harvard was thus several steps removed from life as I knew and hoped it to be."
The dean of freshman, F. Skiddy von Stade Jr, once said to me, "You people from Germantown Friends School look so good on paper. Why do you do so badly here?" It was a fair question; a number of GFS graduates were on probation and one had dropped out.
It took me decades to understand and appreciate the difference in two systems of learning, for at my Quaker high school I had been given few grand theories. Instead, in the 1950s I had been introduced to how the world really worked - for example, an 8th grade English course that included a segment on the secrets of advertising, a 9th grade course in anthropology and a 12 grade math course that explained the Boolean calculations of computers I wouldn't see for 20 years. The Quakers themselves were refreshingly devoid of grand theories - once a debate in Friends meeting over the divinity of Christ, for example, was gently diverted by one of the elders - but the respect and encouragement of critical thought and examination was far greater than I would find at Harvard or in the media I would late join.
Part of the problem with the grand theory approach to politics is that politics isn't a science. The deductive premises of science can be constantly tested, reviewed and dumped if necessary. In politics, these theories are not sanctified by the confirmation of experimentation and analysis, but primarily by the effectiveness of the propaganda those projecting them.
Besides, as Benjamin Franklin noted, you don't need to know the law of gravity to realize that a plate will likely break if you drop it on the floor.
The problem with inductive reasoning in politics is that you seldom come up with definitively accurate answers. But the same is true of deductive reasoning. The difference is that with the latter, it is easier to pretend that it is true. With inductive reasoning you are constantly reminded of the weakness of thought; with deductive reasoning it is too easy to become a prisoner of myth.
Evan Heit, in the Cambridge Handbook Of Computational Psychology describes the process well:
"How do you make a prediction about the unpredictable? Inductive reasoning is about drawing conclusions that are not certain or logically valid, but still likely. Let's say you are buying a new CD for your friend. It's impossible to know with certainty what she will like, and it doesn't seem that the rules of logic will tell you which CD to buy. There's no correct answer. Nonetheless, you can make an informed guess, and indeed she will probably like the CD that you buy. The more you know about her taste in music, and which categories of music she likes and does not like, the more likely it is that your prediction will be correct. Our everyday experiences are filled with predictions of this nature - we use inductive reasoning to make likely but not certain predictions about how people will act and about things we have not seen, e.g., that when we open a door to a room, the room will have a floor and ceiling. In spite of the uncertainty, we manage to be fairly successful in our predictions - we can buy gifts that our friends will enjoy and avoid walking into rooms without floors. When it comes to making predictions about the unpredictable, computational models are in a similar position to people. Because the judgments being modeled are themselves uncertain, it's unlikely that models of inductive reasoning will be perfectly correct. Any computational model of inductive reasoning could probably be improved by taking account of more knowledge or more principles of prediction. Nonetheless, current models of inductive reasoning already do a fairly good job."
So if I do not react to Barack Obama the way you would like, do not consider me cynical. It's just that where others see a god, I see a politician; where others feast on adjectives, I dine on facts and where some find faith sufficient, I prefer the Missouri motto that some say stems from an 1899 speech by Congressman Willard Vandiver, when he declared, "I come from a country that raises corn and cotton, cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I'm from Missouri, and you have got to show me."
INAUGURATION EVE
Sam Smith - On Inauguration eve I returned home after midnight and, two blocks from my Capitol Hill home, noticed four soldiers on patrol in cold weather gear huddled together in the dark drinking coffee. Leaning against one of the men's boots was a large bag labeled Dunkin' Donuts. The men were standing on the corner of 8th & A NE in the same block as my office a long time ago. I recalled the last time I had seen soldiers on that street. It was right after the 1968 riots. The scene was familiar but how its meaning had changed.
January 15, 2009
WHAT A REAL STIMULUS MIGHT LOOK LIKE
Sam Smith
- Reduce credit card interest. As one politician once put it, "I'd frankly like to see credit cards rates down. I believe that would help stimulate the consumer and get consumer confidence moving again.'' Another politician responded by offering a bill in the Senate to cap credit card interest at 14%. The Senate voted for it 74-19. The first politician was that radical president, George Bush, in 1991. The other politician was that well known progressive, Alfonze D'Amato. Why are Obama and the Democrats more conservative than Daddy Bush and D'Amato?
- Start a movement to nationalize banks. Progressives led by Robert LaFollette did this in the 1930s, giving FDR cover for his more moderate solutions. Today, all the political pressure is coming from Wall Street, which tilts policies in that direction.
- All measures must put the interest of the ordinary citizen first. Neither the GOP nor the Democrats are doing that.
- Deemphasize tax cuts. They are far less effective than many think.
- Emphasize programs that will cheer people up and where they can see things changing for the better. Among the Wall Street bailout scam's many faults was that no one could tell what was happening as a result. Good economies need optimism.
- Use revenue sharing. It's a quick way to get money down to the states and cities and to the people who live there. Sure, some of it will get corrupted but far less than is already happening with the phony stimulus packages. The upside is that citizens have a better idea of what is being done on their behalf and have some say in how it is done.
- Fund public works project that have large spin-off benefits and which will be heavy in blue collar employment. These would include new mass transit service and a massive growth of America's rail system. It would deemphasize fixing up existing systems because the spin off benefits are far less. Would it include the much discussed new energy projects? We haven't seen any serious discussion of this. What is the blue collar employment potential of such projects?
- Institute a shared equity program for homeowners in distress under which the federal government buys a portion of the mortgage, renegotiates interest rates with the lenders and then gets its part of the equity back when the house is sold. A similar program could be used for building new homes.
- Decentralize decisions and negotiations on foreclosures and real estate interest rates, using local courts and similar bodies as was done in the 1930s.
- Give the government preferred stock in companies it aids. At one point in the New Deal, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation owned bank shares that would be worth at least $20 billion today.
- Reduce credit card interest. As one politician once put it, "I'd frankly like to see credit cards rates down. I believe that would help stimulate the consumer and get consumer confidence moving again.'' Another politician responded by offering a bill in the Senate to cap credit card interest at 14%. The Senate voted for it 74-19. The first politician was that radical president, George Bush, in 1991. The other politician was that well known progressive, Alfonze D'Amato. Why are Obama and the Democrats more conservative than Daddy Bush and D'Amato?
- Start a movement to nationalize banks. Progressives led by Robert LaFollette did this in the 1930s, giving FDR cover for his more moderate solutions. Today, all the political pressure is coming from Wall Street, which tilts policies in that direction.
- All measures must put the interest of the ordinary citizen first. Neither the GOP nor the Democrats are doing that.
- Deemphasize tax cuts. They are far less effective than many think.
- Emphasize programs that will cheer people up and where they can see things changing for the better. Among the Wall Street bailout scam's many faults was that no one could tell what was happening as a result. Good economies need optimism.
- Use revenue sharing. It's a quick way to get money down to the states and cities and to the people who live there. Sure, some of it will get corrupted but far less than is already happening with the phony stimulus packages. The upside is that citizens have a better idea of what is being done on their behalf and have some say in how it is done.
- Fund public works project that have large spin-off benefits and which will be heavy in blue collar employment. These would include new mass transit service and a massive growth of America's rail system. It would deemphasize fixing up existing systems because the spin off benefits are far less. Would it include the much discussed new energy projects? We haven't seen any serious discussion of this. What is the blue collar employment potential of such projects?
- Institute a shared equity program for homeowners in distress under which the federal government buys a portion of the mortgage, renegotiates interest rates with the lenders and then gets its part of the equity back when the house is sold. A similar program could be used for building new homes.
- Decentralize decisions and negotiations on foreclosures and real estate interest rates, using local courts and similar bodies as was done in the 1930s.
- Give the government preferred stock in companies it aids. At one point in the New Deal, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation owned bank shares that would be worth at least $20 billion today.
January 14, 2009
ENOUGH OF LINCOLN, ALREADY
Sam Smith
I better say this before the new administration declares such statements an act of terrorism: Barack Obama is not the new Lincoln.
The only explanations for such an absurd claim is either dangerous delusion or deceptive propaganda.
Let's hope it's not the first. We have barely survived eight years living with a president who thought he was General Macarthur and deserve a break from high level pathology.
There is no doubt that Obama has a hyper inflated ego totally unperturbed by its underlying lack of achievement, experience or programs, but he is also the product of an era in which the ambitious see themselves as products of an era, which is to say some thing to market rather than a human to be.
Obama believes that, as a public figure, he doesn't really exist; he is an image and upon this recognition his successful campaign was based. The Association of National Advertisers, according to PR Watch, "voted for Obama's campaign over ad campaigns by major companies like Apple, Zappos, Nike and Coors. Ad Age called Obama's historic November 4 win the 'biggest day in the history of marketing,' saying marketers have a lot to learn from his campaign."
One way to think of Obama is as the only American vehicle to have ended the year with increased sales and larger market share - an ethnic hybrid that makes millions feel cool even if they don't know its miles per gallon, longevity, safety or reliability.
Of course, the fact that marketing creates an exaggerated or false image doesn't guarantee that the product itself is flawed. But it is a clue. A number of Obamaphiles have insisted to me that the president-elect is only palling with the right because he wants to soften them up. But if he is that manipulative why can't the left prove just as likely a victim?
Certainly his appointments - the most aggressively conventional of any Democratic president-elect of modern times - suggest that the change we need is no longer foremost on his mind; some are already referring to him as Status Quobama.
In any case, the fun is over. We have to live with our new hybrid until trade-in time. Reality has entered the story.
Obama, however, seems to think that any faults the vehicle may have can be overcome by even more marketing. The Lin Con is one of his favorite gimmicks that is reaching new fervor even as we struggle to find out real things like where the second $350 billion bailout is going.
From the London Telegraph:
"After he is sworn in and delivers his inaugural speech. . . he will then repair for a formal lunch modeled on foods enjoyed by Lincoln and eaten off replicate china picked out by his wife for his first inauguration in 1861.
The menu opens a seafood stew in puff pastry in honor of Lincoln's love of seafood, while the main course of duck breast with sour-cherry chutney and herb-roasted pheasant is a nod to the game that Lincoln enjoyed growing up in Indiana.
"The 200 guests seated in the statuary hall in the Capitol building, including supreme court justices, members of the cabinet and congressional leaders, will end with a dessert of apple cinnamon sponge, recalling Lincoln's fondness for apples.
"On Saturday, Obama will reprise part of the train journey taken by Lincoln before his swearing-in, traveling from Philadelphia, the first capital after independence, to Washington and stopping to meet ordinary people on the way."
From ABC News:
"President-elect Obama be sworn in using the Bible that was used to swear in President Abraham Lincoln, he will dine like Lincoln as well.
"The first course will even be served on replicas of the china picked out by then-first lady Mary Todd Lincoln at the beginning of her husband's term in office. . .
"Mr. Obama has often invoked Mr. Lincoln on the campaign trail, from his candidacy announcement in Springfield, Ill., where Lincoln once toiled as a state legislator, to the 16th president's 'team of rivals' in his Cabinet, which Mr. Obama has replicated by putting three former Democratic presidential primary opponents in his, to his pick of Bible for the swearing-in."
Perhaps the most misleading aspect of the endless Lincoln analogies is the claim that Lincoln was a uniter, just what we need now. This ignores a few things like the Civil War and, further, that there is absolutely no reason to seek a middle ground between common sense and the decent on the one hand and the most corrupt, incompetent and nasty administration in American history. That Obama should consciously pursue this such a goal is not only misguided, it is deliberately deceptive.
If Obama really wants to associate himself with Lincoln, there is a far better place to start than apple cinnamon sponges, moldy old Bibles and sucking up to conservative columnists: don't tell lies.
I better say this before the new administration declares such statements an act of terrorism: Barack Obama is not the new Lincoln.
The only explanations for such an absurd claim is either dangerous delusion or deceptive propaganda.
Let's hope it's not the first. We have barely survived eight years living with a president who thought he was General Macarthur and deserve a break from high level pathology.
There is no doubt that Obama has a hyper inflated ego totally unperturbed by its underlying lack of achievement, experience or programs, but he is also the product of an era in which the ambitious see themselves as products of an era, which is to say some thing to market rather than a human to be.
Obama believes that, as a public figure, he doesn't really exist; he is an image and upon this recognition his successful campaign was based. The Association of National Advertisers, according to PR Watch, "voted for Obama's campaign over ad campaigns by major companies like Apple, Zappos, Nike and Coors. Ad Age called Obama's historic November 4 win the 'biggest day in the history of marketing,' saying marketers have a lot to learn from his campaign."
One way to think of Obama is as the only American vehicle to have ended the year with increased sales and larger market share - an ethnic hybrid that makes millions feel cool even if they don't know its miles per gallon, longevity, safety or reliability.
Of course, the fact that marketing creates an exaggerated or false image doesn't guarantee that the product itself is flawed. But it is a clue. A number of Obamaphiles have insisted to me that the president-elect is only palling with the right because he wants to soften them up. But if he is that manipulative why can't the left prove just as likely a victim?
Certainly his appointments - the most aggressively conventional of any Democratic president-elect of modern times - suggest that the change we need is no longer foremost on his mind; some are already referring to him as Status Quobama.
In any case, the fun is over. We have to live with our new hybrid until trade-in time. Reality has entered the story.
Obama, however, seems to think that any faults the vehicle may have can be overcome by even more marketing. The Lin Con is one of his favorite gimmicks that is reaching new fervor even as we struggle to find out real things like where the second $350 billion bailout is going.
From the London Telegraph:
"After he is sworn in and delivers his inaugural speech. . . he will then repair for a formal lunch modeled on foods enjoyed by Lincoln and eaten off replicate china picked out by his wife for his first inauguration in 1861.
The menu opens a seafood stew in puff pastry in honor of Lincoln's love of seafood, while the main course of duck breast with sour-cherry chutney and herb-roasted pheasant is a nod to the game that Lincoln enjoyed growing up in Indiana.
"The 200 guests seated in the statuary hall in the Capitol building, including supreme court justices, members of the cabinet and congressional leaders, will end with a dessert of apple cinnamon sponge, recalling Lincoln's fondness for apples.
"On Saturday, Obama will reprise part of the train journey taken by Lincoln before his swearing-in, traveling from Philadelphia, the first capital after independence, to Washington and stopping to meet ordinary people on the way."
From ABC News:
"President-elect Obama be sworn in using the Bible that was used to swear in President Abraham Lincoln, he will dine like Lincoln as well.
"The first course will even be served on replicas of the china picked out by then-first lady Mary Todd Lincoln at the beginning of her husband's term in office. . .
"Mr. Obama has often invoked Mr. Lincoln on the campaign trail, from his candidacy announcement in Springfield, Ill., where Lincoln once toiled as a state legislator, to the 16th president's 'team of rivals' in his Cabinet, which Mr. Obama has replicated by putting three former Democratic presidential primary opponents in his, to his pick of Bible for the swearing-in."
Perhaps the most misleading aspect of the endless Lincoln analogies is the claim that Lincoln was a uniter, just what we need now. This ignores a few things like the Civil War and, further, that there is absolutely no reason to seek a middle ground between common sense and the decent on the one hand and the most corrupt, incompetent and nasty administration in American history. That Obama should consciously pursue this such a goal is not only misguided, it is deliberately deceptive.
If Obama really wants to associate himself with Lincoln, there is a far better place to start than apple cinnamon sponges, moldy old Bibles and sucking up to conservative columnists: don't tell lies.
January 13, 2009
MUZIM MUSIN' - HOW TO KEEP PEOPLE GOING TO MUSEUMS
The financial problems of several of Washington's museums has got me thinking more about museums than I usually do. I don't rank as a museum expert, still I suspect I'm somewhere in the middle of the pack of those the experts are trying to attract. I love some museums, couldn't care less about others, and prefer to have fun on a Saturday afternoon rather than engage in premeditated acts of somber self-education.
There are plenty of troubled museums around the country that need more people like me. But they don't seem to have the touch. Are museums - like daily newspapers with their declining circulation - simply victims of changing technology and public tastes? Will television and the Internet damage the Louvre as well as the Washington Post? Or are museum designers and curators simply not reacting well enough to the changes around them?
For example, last fall I went to see the new American Indian Museum and was sadly disappointed. The post-modernists, it appeared, had even infiltrated the ranks of "community curators" and created exhibits that seemed the work of magazine cover designers. One felt endlessly trapped in introductions to something without ever getting to the real thing.
The verbal abstractions were numbing, the repetition tedious, and the lack of good stories odd, given their role in Indian culture.
Here was yet another building filled with annoying verbiage and distracting design intended to instruct you on how you should feel about something without giving you a chance to actually feel it. On the other hand, a couple of months later I went to an exhibit of Dutch art at the National Gallery and every label told me something interesting and useful about the painting next to it without ever being patronizing or dully didactic and I left not only feeling good but knowing more. The lack of pretentious abstractions and snooty adjectives didn't hurt.
My own museum experience started with the stuffed animals at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and was later encouraged by lightning flashes and crashes and other scientific paraphernalia at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where I learned to call such places 'muzims.' Decades before computer games there was also a black coupe you could get into and "drive" into the movie being shown in front of you. You turned the wheel and braked and at the end received a punch card that told you whether you had an accident or not. Best of all you didn't need a license, which was, for me, still years away.
I learned to like things that were life sized whether they were stegasauri or steam engines. I looked for surprises often concealed among the stodgier adult matter. I liked being taken someplace else. . . to another land or a another time or to outer space. Sometimes after looking at the tigers or the baboons, I would stare at the backdrop of the diorama and imagine myself on that same veldt with those same creatures. Best of all, I liked the way the props all around me helped me imagine new things.
I still do. While at an impressionist exhibit at the Phillips Collection a friend, finished with her tour, handed me her taped guide machine. I don't care for these things, in part because they intrude on my reveries, but I took the machine and went into a room of abstract paintings by Rothko. I sat down on a bench and - staring at the huge mass of color before me - turned on the tape machine as it talked about the paintings downstairs. The resulting hallucinations were quite remarkable as I blended visual expressionism with aural impressionism. But how in the world do you justify such nonsense to a highly skilled curator?
While serving as Washington correspondent for the Illustrated London News, I once spent a week in the National Air and Space Museum. It would soon become the most visited museum in the world. Air & Space had been planned and built by engineers instead of by museum people and it was the only such institution in Washington that had opened three days early and a half million dollars under budget.
As I wandered about, I began noticing that the people who created this museum enjoyed it as much as I did. There was a mini-exhibit about the starship Enterprise. And there was a pie tin from the Frisbee Pie Company of Bridgeport, CT. The legend read: "Flown upside down, the tins were not as stable as modern plastic discs and their flights were highly unpredictable, but they did fly." I mentioned this to the deputy director, Melvin Zisfein. He immediately got up from his desk, went to the closet, pulled out a Frisbee, and then commenced to give me a pleasant lecture on the aerodynamics of the device. Later, I asked an official something about the DC-3, one of my favorites. He opened a big lateral file and as I looked down at the folders I noticed some model plane kits shoved amongst the data, waiting for someone to open them up and start building something over lunch. Then, at the end of the week, I interviewed the director, Noel Hinners, boldly remarking at one point that I had found something almost childlike in the museum. He was not bothered in the slightest but said, "There is nothing more stultifying than being pushed into the common conception of adulthood. If enthusiasm, hopes and dreams are associated with childhood, I hope we never grow out of them."
I remembered thinking: what other director of anything in Washington DC would say something like that?
I raised another risky point. We are taught that all art is done by artists. But in the air and space museum I found myself feeling that I was looking at beauty as well as technology. I asked Hinners if he had ever thought of Air & Space as an art museum. He replied, "To many of us, internally, airplanes and rockets - they're beautiful. You don't look at them as pieces of metal, but as a culmination of a challenge to do something."
And when that something is flying through space you come eventually to the rules of nature's own aesthetic in which all beauty has a purpose. The curator Walter Hopps agreed, telling me that the museum had "more aesthetic appeal to most people than most art museums do for most people. I think there is something very atavistic about it. One of the root themes in art is quest - exploration."
Today, the Air & Space Museum has two thirds more visitors than the Louvre or the British Museum. Both of the latter, incidentally, are roughly at a par with the Smithsonian's stuffed animal museum (AKA the Museum of Natural History) and its museum of trains, cars, and other large and interesting things from our past (AKA the Museum of American History).
Part of the problem today with many museums is that their directors are trained to do things like raise money, please major donors, express major themes, and show how socially conscious and profound they are. They lack the dramatic instincts of an entertainer, the good words of a writer, or the wisdom of a photographer who knows that if a picture is right, it doesn't even need any words.
Fortunately, I have a partial cure, which is to create museum advisory boards of 12 year olds - i.e. those most likely to enthuse about or get bored with exhibitions. After all, you can only pander to faux intellectuals and sober adults as long as you have sufficient things that are big enough, different enough, curious enough, or enjoyable enough to entice the 12-year-olds they have brought along or who happen to be in the room bothering them.
It can be educational but it must also be interesting. For example, I happily recall an 18th century house at Strawberry Bank that had each room fitted out for a different period of the structure's existence, ending with a 1950s parlor complete with an early television set. History in the house wasn't trapped in a time ghetto but took us on its own trip as we went from room to room.
So here are some of the suggestions for struggling museums that I would make if I were still twelve years old and served on one of these advisory committees:
- It's not the wrapping that counts. It's the present inside. Too much money has been blown creating the architectural gift wrapping of museums. I don't care what a museum looks like on the outside. After all, I'm paying to go in, not to stand on the sidewalk. Besides, once an architect does something, you're stuck with it. You can't take it down from the wall and put it into storage. Spend your money on the stuff inside.
- The interior of the building should also work for the visitor and not the architect. Tens of millions of dollars have been wasted making huge spaces that just delay or confound the visitor's approach to objects and their stories.
- The best museums are like the best attics. Everywhere you look there's something worth looking at.
- If you want to know how good an exhibit is, listen to it. The best exhibits get people talking and so the room will be noticeably louder.
- Take me somewhere. One of my favorite museums is the Tenement Museum in New York City. From the moment you step into the dark first floor hallway until you leave you are carried into that building's past. The Churchill bunker in London is the same way. Not just a visit but a voyage.
- In some house museums you wouldn't be surprised if the former owner suddenly walked through the pantry door; in others you might as well be in just another antique shop. Three of my favorite house museums are right here in Washington. In each case it is the ghosts' own contributions that make them work: the Frederic Douglass' little shed he called his "growlery," the beer parlor in brewmaster Christian Heurich's mansion, the mike for a seminal talk to the nation in Woodrow Wilson's home along with an icebox in the kitchen standing near one of the first refrigerators. Materials that connect the exhibits to real experience.
- Have some big things and put them in spaces that make them seem natural rather than captured objects. Zoos know this and even have a name for their larger creatures. They call them "charisimatic mammals." All museums need charismatic objects.
- Have lots of places where you can sit and think about what you are seeing while feeling what it would be like to have it in your own living room. A few uncomfortable benches in the middle of the room aren't enough.
- Have places where you can sit and read something about what you're seeing.
- Don't have too many small things. The eye tires of endless pots and pieces of jewelry behind glass.
- If you need to prove how culturally sensitive you are, show it with the exhibit and not with a badly written label.
- Don't tell me how to feel about something. Let me discover it for myself.
- There need to be lots of stories. Much of what we learn is by anecdote, not by carefully constructed outline and timeline.
- Design should never interfere with, nor replace, a good story.
- Have some buttons to push that cause things to happen. And make sure that they work.
- Make your exhibition less like a cathedral or a classroom and more like a fair.
If more museums were like this, more of them might not be in a mess.
January 12, 2009
WORDS OF EVIL
Sam Smith
Evil is not just the result of actions, but also of equivocations that permit it to flourish. One of the roles of the major Washington media is to provide cover for the powerful through the repeated use of such equivocations. It worked for the Clinton scandals, for Bush's war on Iraq, and now it's out in force to protect Obama as he waffles on the issue of torture.
A case in point is a recent article by Michael Abramowitz, Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus in the Washington Post. For starters, the word 'torture' is only used once and that is by Obama himself. Instead we have detention and interrogation policies and counter terrorism practices.
We are told that "Obama begins a perilous balancing act to fulfill his pledge to make a clean break with the detention and interrogation policies of the Bush administration while still effectively ensuring the nation's security."
The word 'balancing' is a classic clue. It is part of the basic code of the Washington establishment that those in power get to balance all rights and laws with something else whenever it's convenient. It wouldn't work if you were to face criminal charges in an ordinary criminal court as in, "Yes, your honor, I did kill those three people, but we have to balance that against all the good I have done previously and how lousy I was feeling that day."
In Washington, however, it works just fine. Despite the fact that neither the founders of the American republic nor the authors of the Geneva Convention intended for their enumerated rights or rules to be chipped away in such a fashion, in the capital it is considered proper to erode the right of free speech or the law against torture by simply claiming you have some higher purpose.
In this case, the balancing act is declared fit and proper even though the chief balancer himself has stated otherwise: "Under my administration, the United States does not torture. We will abide by the Geneva Conventions. . . . We will uphold our highest values and ideals. . . It is important for us to do that not only because that's who we are, but also, ultimately it will make us safer and will help in changing hearts and minds in our struggle against extremists."
But then he's just the new president. There are more important things in town. . . like CIA operatives. Thus, the Post article goes on to state:
"At the same time Obama intends to curb counterterrorism practices he considers excessive or even illegal, he will also come under great pressure to leave the CIA the kind of flexibility its operatives have long considered necessary to heading off another Sept. 11-style attack, current and former national security officials said."
There is, of course, no evidence that these 'counter terrorism practices' have done the country any more good than all the other sick policies of the past eight years. We do know that more Americans have died in Iraq than in the 9/11 attack, that our economy and reputation has collapsed, and that we have not engaged in a single significant positive action that might improve our situation with the Muslim world.
Obama is, however, not just the victim. For example, he has named key aides such as John Brennan and Eric Holder whose past statements indicate some support for torture and he has failed to say whether he will end the practice of renditions, another synonym of evil meaning the outsourcing of torture to other countries.
Further, Obama relies on still more cynical jargon to excuse his disinterest in pursuing the crimes of the Bush administration. He simply says we must look forward and not back.
Again, that sort of excuse only works for the Washington elite. Ordinary citizens are advised not to try it in court.
Evil is not just the result of actions, but also of equivocations that permit it to flourish. One of the roles of the major Washington media is to provide cover for the powerful through the repeated use of such equivocations. It worked for the Clinton scandals, for Bush's war on Iraq, and now it's out in force to protect Obama as he waffles on the issue of torture.
A case in point is a recent article by Michael Abramowitz, Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus in the Washington Post. For starters, the word 'torture' is only used once and that is by Obama himself. Instead we have detention and interrogation policies and counter terrorism practices.
We are told that "Obama begins a perilous balancing act to fulfill his pledge to make a clean break with the detention and interrogation policies of the Bush administration while still effectively ensuring the nation's security."
The word 'balancing' is a classic clue. It is part of the basic code of the Washington establishment that those in power get to balance all rights and laws with something else whenever it's convenient. It wouldn't work if you were to face criminal charges in an ordinary criminal court as in, "Yes, your honor, I did kill those three people, but we have to balance that against all the good I have done previously and how lousy I was feeling that day."
In Washington, however, it works just fine. Despite the fact that neither the founders of the American republic nor the authors of the Geneva Convention intended for their enumerated rights or rules to be chipped away in such a fashion, in the capital it is considered proper to erode the right of free speech or the law against torture by simply claiming you have some higher purpose.
In this case, the balancing act is declared fit and proper even though the chief balancer himself has stated otherwise: "Under my administration, the United States does not torture. We will abide by the Geneva Conventions. . . . We will uphold our highest values and ideals. . . It is important for us to do that not only because that's who we are, but also, ultimately it will make us safer and will help in changing hearts and minds in our struggle against extremists."
But then he's just the new president. There are more important things in town. . . like CIA operatives. Thus, the Post article goes on to state:
"At the same time Obama intends to curb counterterrorism practices he considers excessive or even illegal, he will also come under great pressure to leave the CIA the kind of flexibility its operatives have long considered necessary to heading off another Sept. 11-style attack, current and former national security officials said."
There is, of course, no evidence that these 'counter terrorism practices' have done the country any more good than all the other sick policies of the past eight years. We do know that more Americans have died in Iraq than in the 9/11 attack, that our economy and reputation has collapsed, and that we have not engaged in a single significant positive action that might improve our situation with the Muslim world.
Obama is, however, not just the victim. For example, he has named key aides such as John Brennan and Eric Holder whose past statements indicate some support for torture and he has failed to say whether he will end the practice of renditions, another synonym of evil meaning the outsourcing of torture to other countries.
Further, Obama relies on still more cynical jargon to excuse his disinterest in pursuing the crimes of the Bush administration. He simply says we must look forward and not back.
Again, that sort of excuse only works for the Washington elite. Ordinary citizens are advised not to try it in court.
January 08, 2009
THE CENTER: AMERICAN'S GREATEST POLITICAL THREAT
Sam Smith
As a navigator on a Coast Guard cutter, there were a couple of things I took for granted:
- You couldn't chart a course without knowing your destination.
- If you took a navigational fix and it put you on one side of a rock and then you took another fix and it put you on the other side of the rock, don't split the difference.
In Washington, however, it would be hard to find two rules more frequently broken as politicians and the media pursue the false god of moderation, centrism and post-partisanship.
Barack Obama's team of revivals is almost a parody of this search, based on the childish illusion that truth's safe passage lies halfway between the alternatives. The result, absolutely predictable, is a stunning lack of imagination, courage or simple willingness to try something different. And sometimes you run aground.
As Jerome Grossman put it in Populist America recently: "If the Democratic and Republican parties were to place top value on agreement, that would be a recipe for maintaining the status quo, for the easiest course would be to accept current conditions."
Although centrism is supposed to produce the best possible results this is seldom the case. Decades of post partisanship on health care, for example, has produced a system that nobody wants, yet now still another president proposes to tinker with the program and, if successful, will have postponed the logical solution, single payer healthcare, for another decade or two.
The fiscal bailout was a disastrous example of charting a course without a destination, An unknown amount of money was granted to unknown entities for unknown purposes with unknown oversight largely because so few on Capitol Hill had the slightest idea what else to do.
To be sure, compromise is frequently necessary, but if you don't have a final destination in mind then one has no way of judging the best compromise to make. For example, in healthcare, lowering the age of Medicare to 60 would not endanger the future of single payer the way that Obama's approach probably will.
But politicians in Washington seldom have a destination beyond the next election and hence their compromises have little to do with the actual issue at hand and far more with such matters as sources of campaign contributions. Which is why in the current financial crisis so much aid has been given to those who give politicians money - i.e. financial institutions - and so little to those who merely give them their vote.
Obama didn't invent the centrist scam even if he has engaged in it to the fullest. For example, the Clintonistas claimed the ability to arise above the petty disputes of normal life -- to become "post-ideological." For example, Clinton, upon nominating Judge Ginsberg to the Supreme Court called her neither liberal nor conservative, adding that she "has proved herself too thoughtful for such labels." In one parenthetical aside, Clinton dismissed three hundred years of political philosophical debate.
Similarly, when Clinton made the very political decision to name conservative David Gergen to his staff, he announced that the appointment signaled that "we are rising above politics."
"We are," he insisted, "going beyond partisanship that damaged this country so badly in the last several years to search for new ideas, a new common ground, a new national unity." And when Clinton's new chief of staff was announced, he was said to be "apolitical," a description used in praise.
Politics without politics. The appointee was someone who, in the words of the Washington Post, "is seen by most as a man without a personal or political agenda that would interfere with a successful management of the White House."
By the time Clinton had been in office a few months he appeared ready to dispense with opinion and thought entirely. "It is time we put aside the divisions of party and philosophy and put our best efforts to work on a crime plan that will help all the American people," he declared in front of a phalanx of uniformed police officers.
And Clinton, of course, was not alone. The Third Millennium, a slick Perotist organization of considerable ideological intent, called itself "post-partisan." Perot himself played a similar game: the man without a personal agenda.
The media also likes to pretend that it is above political ideology or cultural prejudice. Journalists like Leonard Downie Jr. and Elizabeth Drew don't even vote and Downie, former executive managing editor of the Washington Post, once instructed his staff to "cleanse their professional minds of human emotions and opinions."
Of course, in the postmodern society that Clinton and Obama have proposed -- one that rises above the false teachings of ideology -- we find ourselves with little to steer us save the opinions of whatever non-ideologue happens to be in power. In this case, we may really only have progressed from the ideology of the many to the ideology of the one or, some might say, from democracy to authoritarianism.
Among equals, indifference to shared meaning might produce nothing worse than lengthy argument. But when the postmodernist is President of the United States, the impulse becomes a 500-pound gorilla to be fed, as they say, anything it wants.
But there's an even great danger involved in the cult of centrism. With few exceptions, the major threats to American democracy have repeatedly come from neither right nor left but from the center.
From that internecine struggle of two factions of the American middle known as the Civil War to FBI assaults on activist organizations in the 60s and 70s, from the Palmer raids to anti-terrorism legislation of the Clinton and Bush administration, Americans have traditionally had more to fear from people they have elected than from those on the fringes of politics. In fact, the latter have often served largely as an excuse for the American center to tighten its grip on the political and economic system. This is not to say that the left and the right would not enjoy being just as violent and repressive given the chance, but the American center has rarely allowed that.
Even the KKK, so often cited as an example of the sort of threat the contemporary right poses, was powerful primarily because it was at the center, holding political and judicial and law enforcement office as well as hiding beneath its robes. In some towns, lynching parties were even announced in the local paper. And in the 1920s, both the Colorado governor and mayor of Denver were members of the Klan, the latter well enough regarded to have had Stapleton airport named after him.
Take one of our war stars as an example. A New Yorker review of the life of General Curtis LeMay, written by Richard Rhodes, noted that LeMay ran the air war against both Japan and North Korea, became head of the sacrosanct Strategic Air Command and was one of the military heroes of his time. Here are just a few of his accomplishments:
- The destruction of nearly 17 square miles of Tokyo with the loss of at least 100,000 civilian lives. The US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that "probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time in the history of man."
- The destruction of 62 other Japanese cities. Only Hiroshima and Nagasaki were spared -- reserved for a different sort of horror. In sum, more than a million Japanese civilians were killed. LeMay himself would admit years later, "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side."
- The bombing of North Korean cities, dams, villages and rice paddies. Civilian deaths: more than two million.
- In short, with the enthusiastic blessing of the American center, LeMay was directly responsible for the slaughter of about half as many civilians as died in the Holocaust. To this day, establishment Washington won't even face what happened at Nagasaki or Hiroshima, let alone even larger massacres occurring under the command of LeMay.
And LeMay had grander schemes. His plan for defeating the Soviet Union included the obliteration of 70 Soviet cities in thirty days with thirty-three atomic bombs and the deaths of 2.7 million citizens.
More recently, the Vietnam and Iraq wars, the most disastrous conflicts in American history, were the products of an American center including politicians, academics and the media. According to one study, while tens of thousands of American troops were dying in Vietnam, between 1963 and 1968 only 220 deaths occurred in the U.S. as the result of fringe violence on the left and right.
The collapse of the American economy, the unprecedented assault on constitutional rights, the disastrous war on drugs, and the appalling abuse of the environment all came from the center.
Worried about hate groups? Name those that have posed anywhere near the threat to American minorities as the Bush administration.
One of the greatest myths of America's elite is that it functions by logic and reason and that it is devoid of myth. In truth, elites function like other people; they choose their gods and worship them. The gods, to be sure, are different. For example, many in Washington believe fervently in the sanctity of data, the Ivy League, the New York Times op pages and the Calvinist notion that their power is a outer, visible sign of an inner, invisible grace.
They pose as wise and intelligent, yet their course is frequently a disaster and profoundly anti-intellectual for it denies inquiry, skepticism, new information and imagination.
If you ask important people in politics, think tanks or the media where they stand politically, many will say "in the center." A lot of these folks like the center because it makes them sound reasonable and moderate. It also allows them to call other people extremists or gadflies or wishful thinkers for disagreeing with the conventional wisdom of the moment. Some members of the American elite have made whole careers of being measured and cautious. They like to write somber columns asking pompous questions like "Can the Center Hold?" What they really mean is: can they hold on to their power?
They are the most dishonest of the lot in American politics. A true conservative is far more fun and useful to argue with, because they still believe in the need for argument as well as self-serving spin.
The centrists control our politics, our media and our campuses. They have directed the collapse of both the American empire and America democracy and yet are so self absorbed in their manic and destructive moderation that they don't even notice.
Not only is the center the major cause of our problems, our solutions have overwhelmingly come from the left, whether it be emancipation, women's rights, environmental consciousness, the labor movement or encouraging peace and sanity rather than war, the moderates' favorite immoderate tool.
As Susan B. Anthony put it so well:
"Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences."
As a navigator on a Coast Guard cutter, there were a couple of things I took for granted:
- You couldn't chart a course without knowing your destination.
- If you took a navigational fix and it put you on one side of a rock and then you took another fix and it put you on the other side of the rock, don't split the difference.
In Washington, however, it would be hard to find two rules more frequently broken as politicians and the media pursue the false god of moderation, centrism and post-partisanship.
Barack Obama's team of revivals is almost a parody of this search, based on the childish illusion that truth's safe passage lies halfway between the alternatives. The result, absolutely predictable, is a stunning lack of imagination, courage or simple willingness to try something different. And sometimes you run aground.
As Jerome Grossman put it in Populist America recently: "If the Democratic and Republican parties were to place top value on agreement, that would be a recipe for maintaining the status quo, for the easiest course would be to accept current conditions."
Although centrism is supposed to produce the best possible results this is seldom the case. Decades of post partisanship on health care, for example, has produced a system that nobody wants, yet now still another president proposes to tinker with the program and, if successful, will have postponed the logical solution, single payer healthcare, for another decade or two.
The fiscal bailout was a disastrous example of charting a course without a destination, An unknown amount of money was granted to unknown entities for unknown purposes with unknown oversight largely because so few on Capitol Hill had the slightest idea what else to do.
To be sure, compromise is frequently necessary, but if you don't have a final destination in mind then one has no way of judging the best compromise to make. For example, in healthcare, lowering the age of Medicare to 60 would not endanger the future of single payer the way that Obama's approach probably will.
But politicians in Washington seldom have a destination beyond the next election and hence their compromises have little to do with the actual issue at hand and far more with such matters as sources of campaign contributions. Which is why in the current financial crisis so much aid has been given to those who give politicians money - i.e. financial institutions - and so little to those who merely give them their vote.
Obama didn't invent the centrist scam even if he has engaged in it to the fullest. For example, the Clintonistas claimed the ability to arise above the petty disputes of normal life -- to become "post-ideological." For example, Clinton, upon nominating Judge Ginsberg to the Supreme Court called her neither liberal nor conservative, adding that she "has proved herself too thoughtful for such labels." In one parenthetical aside, Clinton dismissed three hundred years of political philosophical debate.
Similarly, when Clinton made the very political decision to name conservative David Gergen to his staff, he announced that the appointment signaled that "we are rising above politics."
"We are," he insisted, "going beyond partisanship that damaged this country so badly in the last several years to search for new ideas, a new common ground, a new national unity." And when Clinton's new chief of staff was announced, he was said to be "apolitical," a description used in praise.
Politics without politics. The appointee was someone who, in the words of the Washington Post, "is seen by most as a man without a personal or political agenda that would interfere with a successful management of the White House."
By the time Clinton had been in office a few months he appeared ready to dispense with opinion and thought entirely. "It is time we put aside the divisions of party and philosophy and put our best efforts to work on a crime plan that will help all the American people," he declared in front of a phalanx of uniformed police officers.
And Clinton, of course, was not alone. The Third Millennium, a slick Perotist organization of considerable ideological intent, called itself "post-partisan." Perot himself played a similar game: the man without a personal agenda.
The media also likes to pretend that it is above political ideology or cultural prejudice. Journalists like Leonard Downie Jr. and Elizabeth Drew don't even vote and Downie, former executive managing editor of the Washington Post, once instructed his staff to "cleanse their professional minds of human emotions and opinions."
Of course, in the postmodern society that Clinton and Obama have proposed -- one that rises above the false teachings of ideology -- we find ourselves with little to steer us save the opinions of whatever non-ideologue happens to be in power. In this case, we may really only have progressed from the ideology of the many to the ideology of the one or, some might say, from democracy to authoritarianism.
Among equals, indifference to shared meaning might produce nothing worse than lengthy argument. But when the postmodernist is President of the United States, the impulse becomes a 500-pound gorilla to be fed, as they say, anything it wants.
But there's an even great danger involved in the cult of centrism. With few exceptions, the major threats to American democracy have repeatedly come from neither right nor left but from the center.
From that internecine struggle of two factions of the American middle known as the Civil War to FBI assaults on activist organizations in the 60s and 70s, from the Palmer raids to anti-terrorism legislation of the Clinton and Bush administration, Americans have traditionally had more to fear from people they have elected than from those on the fringes of politics. In fact, the latter have often served largely as an excuse for the American center to tighten its grip on the political and economic system. This is not to say that the left and the right would not enjoy being just as violent and repressive given the chance, but the American center has rarely allowed that.
Even the KKK, so often cited as an example of the sort of threat the contemporary right poses, was powerful primarily because it was at the center, holding political and judicial and law enforcement office as well as hiding beneath its robes. In some towns, lynching parties were even announced in the local paper. And in the 1920s, both the Colorado governor and mayor of Denver were members of the Klan, the latter well enough regarded to have had Stapleton airport named after him.
Take one of our war stars as an example. A New Yorker review of the life of General Curtis LeMay, written by Richard Rhodes, noted that LeMay ran the air war against both Japan and North Korea, became head of the sacrosanct Strategic Air Command and was one of the military heroes of his time. Here are just a few of his accomplishments:
- The destruction of nearly 17 square miles of Tokyo with the loss of at least 100,000 civilian lives. The US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that "probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time in the history of man."
- The destruction of 62 other Japanese cities. Only Hiroshima and Nagasaki were spared -- reserved for a different sort of horror. In sum, more than a million Japanese civilians were killed. LeMay himself would admit years later, "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side."
- The bombing of North Korean cities, dams, villages and rice paddies. Civilian deaths: more than two million.
- In short, with the enthusiastic blessing of the American center, LeMay was directly responsible for the slaughter of about half as many civilians as died in the Holocaust. To this day, establishment Washington won't even face what happened at Nagasaki or Hiroshima, let alone even larger massacres occurring under the command of LeMay.
And LeMay had grander schemes. His plan for defeating the Soviet Union included the obliteration of 70 Soviet cities in thirty days with thirty-three atomic bombs and the deaths of 2.7 million citizens.
More recently, the Vietnam and Iraq wars, the most disastrous conflicts in American history, were the products of an American center including politicians, academics and the media. According to one study, while tens of thousands of American troops were dying in Vietnam, between 1963 and 1968 only 220 deaths occurred in the U.S. as the result of fringe violence on the left and right.
The collapse of the American economy, the unprecedented assault on constitutional rights, the disastrous war on drugs, and the appalling abuse of the environment all came from the center.
Worried about hate groups? Name those that have posed anywhere near the threat to American minorities as the Bush administration.
One of the greatest myths of America's elite is that it functions by logic and reason and that it is devoid of myth. In truth, elites function like other people; they choose their gods and worship them. The gods, to be sure, are different. For example, many in Washington believe fervently in the sanctity of data, the Ivy League, the New York Times op pages and the Calvinist notion that their power is a outer, visible sign of an inner, invisible grace.
They pose as wise and intelligent, yet their course is frequently a disaster and profoundly anti-intellectual for it denies inquiry, skepticism, new information and imagination.
If you ask important people in politics, think tanks or the media where they stand politically, many will say "in the center." A lot of these folks like the center because it makes them sound reasonable and moderate. It also allows them to call other people extremists or gadflies or wishful thinkers for disagreeing with the conventional wisdom of the moment. Some members of the American elite have made whole careers of being measured and cautious. They like to write somber columns asking pompous questions like "Can the Center Hold?" What they really mean is: can they hold on to their power?
They are the most dishonest of the lot in American politics. A true conservative is far more fun and useful to argue with, because they still believe in the need for argument as well as self-serving spin.
The centrists control our politics, our media and our campuses. They have directed the collapse of both the American empire and America democracy and yet are so self absorbed in their manic and destructive moderation that they don't even notice.
Not only is the center the major cause of our problems, our solutions have overwhelmingly come from the left, whether it be emancipation, women's rights, environmental consciousness, the labor movement or encouraging peace and sanity rather than war, the moderates' favorite immoderate tool.
As Susan B. Anthony put it so well:
"Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences."
January 06, 2009
TIME TO STOP BEING AFRAID OF ISRAEL
Sam Smith
Every time Israel does something mean, cruel or stupid you can almost hear the sound of liberals and progressives rushing for a place to hide. Strip away the rhetoric and the excuses and the problem basically comes down to the fact that people don't like being called anti-Semitic.
It's a great shtick the Israelis have used so effectively that behaving appropriately towards their country has cost the U.S. over $100 billion since Israel was founded. For gratitude we have been granted a plethora of unnecessary conflicts, anger in the Muslim world that contributed to 9/11 and the madness of the war on terror, as well as periodic spying on the U.S. by Israeli agents. What other country to whom we have given so much has been so loath to return the favor?
Israel's attack on Gaza, for example, is not only vicious, inexcusable and a violation of international law, it is a direct attempt to interfere with American politics by making sure Obama's hands are completely tied.
Yet, once again, the Israelis are getting away with it because even such supposedly enlightened corners of America as the media and liberal groups are afraid to take them on.
If, the other hand, one feels that it is far worst to support a cruel and unnecessary war than it is to be labeled an anti-Semite then it may be time to be as brave in the face of right wing Jewish accusations as we are confronting criticism by Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh. It is, after all, a partner in illogic - of the sort where unsupportable accusations are used to drown actual facts - such as the constant evocation of the Holocaust in which past victims are shamefully dishonored by using them to justify the creation of still more victims.
Once you take the simple liberating step of saying that you don't give a damn what Abe Foxman says about you, then the whole Mid East issue takes on a new look.
For example, you are suddenly free to wonder whether some sort of boycott against Israel might not be worthwhile. As UN General Assembly President, Miguel D'Escoto Brockman put it recently, "More than twenty years ago we in the United Nations took the lead from civil society when we agreed that sanctions were required to provide a nonviolent means of pressuring South Africa to end its violations. Today, perhaps we. . . should consider following the lead of a new generation of civil society, who are calling for a similar campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions to pressure Israel to end its violations."
Such a boycott might include all of the following: AOL Time Warner, Coca-Cola, Disney, Estee Lauder, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, L'Oreal, Nokia, Revlon, Sara Lee, Home Depot, Starbucks, Timberland, or McDonald's. Or it might include just one for ease of organizing.
Another approach would be a campaign to cut aid to Israel. A modest ten percent - $300 million - would start to make the point.
If you're not quite up to being at least as tough on Israel as Congress was on the auto workers, there are other ways to make your discomfort known - including sending some money to groups like the New Israel Fund that are trying to set an example of what a progressive Israel would be like.
But whatever the approach one prefers, we should all take a New Year's vow not to be afraid of pro-Israeli extremists anymore. They are bullies and it's long past time that we started treating them as such.
Every time Israel does something mean, cruel or stupid you can almost hear the sound of liberals and progressives rushing for a place to hide. Strip away the rhetoric and the excuses and the problem basically comes down to the fact that people don't like being called anti-Semitic.
It's a great shtick the Israelis have used so effectively that behaving appropriately towards their country has cost the U.S. over $100 billion since Israel was founded. For gratitude we have been granted a plethora of unnecessary conflicts, anger in the Muslim world that contributed to 9/11 and the madness of the war on terror, as well as periodic spying on the U.S. by Israeli agents. What other country to whom we have given so much has been so loath to return the favor?
Israel's attack on Gaza, for example, is not only vicious, inexcusable and a violation of international law, it is a direct attempt to interfere with American politics by making sure Obama's hands are completely tied.
Yet, once again, the Israelis are getting away with it because even such supposedly enlightened corners of America as the media and liberal groups are afraid to take them on.
If, the other hand, one feels that it is far worst to support a cruel and unnecessary war than it is to be labeled an anti-Semite then it may be time to be as brave in the face of right wing Jewish accusations as we are confronting criticism by Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh. It is, after all, a partner in illogic - of the sort where unsupportable accusations are used to drown actual facts - such as the constant evocation of the Holocaust in which past victims are shamefully dishonored by using them to justify the creation of still more victims.
Once you take the simple liberating step of saying that you don't give a damn what Abe Foxman says about you, then the whole Mid East issue takes on a new look.
For example, you are suddenly free to wonder whether some sort of boycott against Israel might not be worthwhile. As UN General Assembly President, Miguel D'Escoto Brockman put it recently, "More than twenty years ago we in the United Nations took the lead from civil society when we agreed that sanctions were required to provide a nonviolent means of pressuring South Africa to end its violations. Today, perhaps we. . . should consider following the lead of a new generation of civil society, who are calling for a similar campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions to pressure Israel to end its violations."
Such a boycott might include all of the following: AOL Time Warner, Coca-Cola, Disney, Estee Lauder, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, L'Oreal, Nokia, Revlon, Sara Lee, Home Depot, Starbucks, Timberland, or McDonald's. Or it might include just one for ease of organizing.
Another approach would be a campaign to cut aid to Israel. A modest ten percent - $300 million - would start to make the point.
If you're not quite up to being at least as tough on Israel as Congress was on the auto workers, there are other ways to make your discomfort known - including sending some money to groups like the New Israel Fund that are trying to set an example of what a progressive Israel would be like.
But whatever the approach one prefers, we should all take a New Year's vow not to be afraid of pro-Israeli extremists anymore. They are bullies and it's long past time that we started treating them as such.
December 30, 2008
AN EARLY BLACK VICTIM OF THE POST RACIAL SOCIETY
Sam Smith
The Illinois Senate appointment is a truly strange story. Or perhaps not. At the very moment when liberals are talking so smugly about moving into a post racial society, the Senate Democrats have voted not to admit a black man because they are embarrassed by the white guy who appointed him. Roland Burris would be the only black member of the Senate. If blacks were proportionally represented, there would be 13 of them.
The law is admittedly marginally debatable, but precisely because it is so, the wisest course would be to defer to the jurisdiction sending the legislator to Washington. Once the Senate and the House start making such choices, they become hardly distinguishable from a private club.
Forty years ago, this issue came up in Congress and, ironically, it also involved a black man, Adam Clayton Powell. Whatever Powell's personal failings, he would join another far less then perfect politician, Lyndon Johnson, in getting more good legislation passed in less time than anyone else in American history. But that didn't matter to the goo-goos who preferred the appropriate to the useful.
In a 1967 piece, "Keep the Seat, Baby," I argued:
|||| The punishment proposed for Mr. Powell is the loss of his congressional seat. A strong case can be made against such punishment on constitutional and other legal grounds. Furthermore, there is a good defense based on precedent.
As recently as 1956, a member of the House was convicted of income tax evasion, sentenced to jail and fined $10,000. Not only did the offending gentleman subsequently regain his seat, but his seniority as well. Senator Dodd has not been made to stand aside while more serious charges against him are examined. Nor were Mississippi's GOP congressmen unseated last session despite massive evidence of the disenfranchisement of Negroes in their districts. Congress has repeatedly declined to act in cases involving far more evil than that alleged in the instance of Mr. Powell. Even Senator [Joseph] McCarthy got off with censure.
Should the charges lodged against the former chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee be pressed with equal vigor against all other deserving legislators in the land, it would become difficult to raise a quorum in either house of Congress or for our state legislatures to exist at all. . .
There are too many fingerprints on the apple to justify the current display of public sanctimony in the case of Adam Powell. And if all we are going to get in return for Powell's riddance is more mealy-mouthed, psychologically blanched Negroes who sit respectfully at the back of party caucuses, then by all means let's save Adam. For in the long run, we must judge the man's politics more important than his morals.||||
A couple of years later the Supreme Court agreed with my position if not my arguments, finding, according to the New York Times, that "the House could not bar Mr. Powell, who had been accused of financial impropriety, if he met the constitutionally determined qualifications for age, citizenship and residency.
The Roland Burris case is far simpler. Not only is Blagojevich still the governor of Illinois and thus legally entitled to name a successor, to condemn his choice is an act of hypocritical excess that libels Burris by inference.
It is worth noting, for example, that Burris
- was the first black national bank examiner for the Office of the Comproller of the Currency.
- was National Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer for Operation PUSH
- was elected to the office of Comptroller of Illinois. He was the first African American to be elected to a statewide office in the state of Illinois. Burris was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 1984, losing to Paul Simon who went on to defeat incumbent Senator Charles Percy.
- was the second African American elected to the office of Attorney General in the United States.
- ran for mayor of Chicago, losing to incumbent Richard M. Daley. In 1998 and 2002
- was Vice-Chairman, Democratic National Committee Chairman
- was named by Southern Illinois University one of its Ten Most Distinguished Alumni
Instead of some modicum of decency, he is being dissed by the incompetent and useless Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, joined by the other members of the Senate Democratic caucus, using a weak and narrow legal argument to slap a black politician accused of nothing worse but being appointed by the wrong man. The motivations behind this move - although couched as a moral judgment - are in fact nothing more than sucking up to public outrage over Blagojevich and trying to rig the seat their way. If the Democrats really want a post racial society, showing a little respect of the most ordinary variety would be a good place to start.
The Illinois Senate appointment is a truly strange story. Or perhaps not. At the very moment when liberals are talking so smugly about moving into a post racial society, the Senate Democrats have voted not to admit a black man because they are embarrassed by the white guy who appointed him. Roland Burris would be the only black member of the Senate. If blacks were proportionally represented, there would be 13 of them.
The law is admittedly marginally debatable, but precisely because it is so, the wisest course would be to defer to the jurisdiction sending the legislator to Washington. Once the Senate and the House start making such choices, they become hardly distinguishable from a private club.
Forty years ago, this issue came up in Congress and, ironically, it also involved a black man, Adam Clayton Powell. Whatever Powell's personal failings, he would join another far less then perfect politician, Lyndon Johnson, in getting more good legislation passed in less time than anyone else in American history. But that didn't matter to the goo-goos who preferred the appropriate to the useful.
In a 1967 piece, "Keep the Seat, Baby," I argued:
|||| The punishment proposed for Mr. Powell is the loss of his congressional seat. A strong case can be made against such punishment on constitutional and other legal grounds. Furthermore, there is a good defense based on precedent.
As recently as 1956, a member of the House was convicted of income tax evasion, sentenced to jail and fined $10,000. Not only did the offending gentleman subsequently regain his seat, but his seniority as well. Senator Dodd has not been made to stand aside while more serious charges against him are examined. Nor were Mississippi's GOP congressmen unseated last session despite massive evidence of the disenfranchisement of Negroes in their districts. Congress has repeatedly declined to act in cases involving far more evil than that alleged in the instance of Mr. Powell. Even Senator [Joseph] McCarthy got off with censure.
Should the charges lodged against the former chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee be pressed with equal vigor against all other deserving legislators in the land, it would become difficult to raise a quorum in either house of Congress or for our state legislatures to exist at all. . .
There are too many fingerprints on the apple to justify the current display of public sanctimony in the case of Adam Powell. And if all we are going to get in return for Powell's riddance is more mealy-mouthed, psychologically blanched Negroes who sit respectfully at the back of party caucuses, then by all means let's save Adam. For in the long run, we must judge the man's politics more important than his morals.||||
A couple of years later the Supreme Court agreed with my position if not my arguments, finding, according to the New York Times, that "the House could not bar Mr. Powell, who had been accused of financial impropriety, if he met the constitutionally determined qualifications for age, citizenship and residency.
The Roland Burris case is far simpler. Not only is Blagojevich still the governor of Illinois and thus legally entitled to name a successor, to condemn his choice is an act of hypocritical excess that libels Burris by inference.
It is worth noting, for example, that Burris
- was the first black national bank examiner for the Office of the Comproller of the Currency.
- was National Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer for Operation PUSH
- was elected to the office of Comptroller of Illinois. He was the first African American to be elected to a statewide office in the state of Illinois. Burris was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 1984, losing to Paul Simon who went on to defeat incumbent Senator Charles Percy.
- was the second African American elected to the office of Attorney General in the United States.
- ran for mayor of Chicago, losing to incumbent Richard M. Daley. In 1998 and 2002
- was Vice-Chairman, Democratic National Committee Chairman
- was named by Southern Illinois University one of its Ten Most Distinguished Alumni
Instead of some modicum of decency, he is being dissed by the incompetent and useless Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, joined by the other members of the Senate Democratic caucus, using a weak and narrow legal argument to slap a black politician accused of nothing worse but being appointed by the wrong man. The motivations behind this move - although couched as a moral judgment - are in fact nothing more than sucking up to public outrage over Blagojevich and trying to rig the seat their way. If the Democrats really want a post racial society, showing a little respect of the most ordinary variety would be a good place to start.
December 29, 2008
PROPOSITION NINE, TEN & ELEVEN
Sam Smith
It's probably a sign of me having lived in Washington too long, but I've been thinking of a solution to the gay marriage controversy based on the carbon cap and trade principle. Since we are being asked to support heterosexual domestic partnerships and gay marriages at the same time, and since I can come up with no legal or philosophical argument for this lack of synchronicity other than that, in either case, it's none of my damn business, it occurs to me that a true Washington resolution of the problem would be for heterosexual domestic partners to trade their sacred marriage privileges to gay couples for a fee. I'm not quite sure what to do if the heteros later decide to get married or the gays want a divorce but I've sent emails to several lawyer friends and expect an answer shortly. In any case, it seems a perfect Washington solution: a hopelessly complex response that deftly resolves a moral and spiritual issue by converting it into an aggressively amoral economic one.
Judging from the carbon cap and trade program, however, my plan may not work all that well, in which case I will have to return to my previous proposition on the matter i.e. if you don't like gay marriage, don't marry a gay.
But this thesis also has a problem, which is the large number of people who think that not only do they know whom they should marry but everyone else's proper choice as well. This is the matrimonial equivalent of choosing what the whole neighborhood will have for breakfast.
The purported basis for this intrusion is supposedly the concerns of law, but other than needing children and providing adequate protection for them, the state has little serious concern with this matter. Of course, some like the Reverend Rick Warren have argued that letting gays marry each other could lead to an "older guy marrying a child" or presumably even an animal. The problem with this argument is that it could also be made against allowing a man and woman to get married. You let marriage happen in any form and there's no telling where it will lead.
But since we have no need for additional children in this world and since there is no evidence that gay couples are any harder on their children than straight ones, the law's real interest is minimal at best.
What actually currently drives the definition of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman is not the interests of the state but religion - or, more precisely, some religions.
In other words, what is being presented as a gay vs. straight issue is actually a religion vs. religion issue. Any law against gay marriage is an act establishing religion because it says, for example, that what Mormons or the Reverend Rick Warren believes is more important than the views of Quakers and Unitarians. The Constitution forbids this sort of differentiation as it clearly represents the "an establishment of religion."
Unfortunately, the more enlightened sects have been completely overwhelmed by extremist voices from Jerry Falwell to Rick Warren. With the help of politicians and a media that considers only loud mouthed Baptists to be "faith based," and cowed by the evangelical onslaught, progressive Christians have failed to fight back or even hold their own.
A direct challenge to laws like Prop 8 by these groups - defending the establishment clause of the Constitution - would be one of the healthiest things that could come out of the conflict. We need more progressive Christian soldiers marching as to war and fewer of them, like our president to be, palling around with those perpetrating bigotry in God's name. Civil liberties groups also need to get a better handle on the establishment clause and fight the growing governmental preference of one religious approach over others.
It's probably a sign of me having lived in Washington too long, but I've been thinking of a solution to the gay marriage controversy based on the carbon cap and trade principle. Since we are being asked to support heterosexual domestic partnerships and gay marriages at the same time, and since I can come up with no legal or philosophical argument for this lack of synchronicity other than that, in either case, it's none of my damn business, it occurs to me that a true Washington resolution of the problem would be for heterosexual domestic partners to trade their sacred marriage privileges to gay couples for a fee. I'm not quite sure what to do if the heteros later decide to get married or the gays want a divorce but I've sent emails to several lawyer friends and expect an answer shortly. In any case, it seems a perfect Washington solution: a hopelessly complex response that deftly resolves a moral and spiritual issue by converting it into an aggressively amoral economic one.
Judging from the carbon cap and trade program, however, my plan may not work all that well, in which case I will have to return to my previous proposition on the matter i.e. if you don't like gay marriage, don't marry a gay.
But this thesis also has a problem, which is the large number of people who think that not only do they know whom they should marry but everyone else's proper choice as well. This is the matrimonial equivalent of choosing what the whole neighborhood will have for breakfast.
The purported basis for this intrusion is supposedly the concerns of law, but other than needing children and providing adequate protection for them, the state has little serious concern with this matter. Of course, some like the Reverend Rick Warren have argued that letting gays marry each other could lead to an "older guy marrying a child" or presumably even an animal. The problem with this argument is that it could also be made against allowing a man and woman to get married. You let marriage happen in any form and there's no telling where it will lead.
But since we have no need for additional children in this world and since there is no evidence that gay couples are any harder on their children than straight ones, the law's real interest is minimal at best.
What actually currently drives the definition of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman is not the interests of the state but religion - or, more precisely, some religions.
In other words, what is being presented as a gay vs. straight issue is actually a religion vs. religion issue. Any law against gay marriage is an act establishing religion because it says, for example, that what Mormons or the Reverend Rick Warren believes is more important than the views of Quakers and Unitarians. The Constitution forbids this sort of differentiation as it clearly represents the "an establishment of religion."
Unfortunately, the more enlightened sects have been completely overwhelmed by extremist voices from Jerry Falwell to Rick Warren. With the help of politicians and a media that considers only loud mouthed Baptists to be "faith based," and cowed by the evangelical onslaught, progressive Christians have failed to fight back or even hold their own.
A direct challenge to laws like Prop 8 by these groups - defending the establishment clause of the Constitution - would be one of the healthiest things that could come out of the conflict. We need more progressive Christian soldiers marching as to war and fewer of them, like our president to be, palling around with those perpetrating bigotry in God's name. Civil liberties groups also need to get a better handle on the establishment clause and fight the growing governmental preference of one religious approach over others.
WHERE'S BIN BEEN?
Sam Smith
A conversation with a friend in the dialysis business reminded us that we still haven't caught Osama Bin Laden. Over the past seven years we have ruined our budget, our constitution and our reputation in an effort to suppress the incapacitated warrior and we seem no closer than ever. Since it sounds like the Obama administration plans to continue this escapade, it may help to put it into some perspective. Assuming that AlQaeda exists - and even a British police commissioner has said it was more an idea than a reality - estimates of its force size are in the 5,000 range with an annual budget, according to the 9/11 Commission, of around $30 million (with an unknown proportion laundered through hedge funds and the like). That's what it cost the Pentagon to build a new mortuary at the Dover Air Force Base.
If a country the size of the United States can't handle 5,000 guerrillas operating on one tenth the amount with which Bernie Madoff absconded, we really are in serious trouble. On the other hand, it may occur to the new crowd that the way to reduce the threat ofguerrilla activity is to lessen the cause. After all, Osama bin Laden is a monster created by American foreign policy. You can kill him but unless our foreign policy changes, there are more monsters where he came from.
Sam Smith, 2002 - So here we are a year later, $37 billion out of pocket and still scared as hell someone's going to attack us. We're not the first with the problem. Many years ago some people built castles and walled cities and moats to keep the bad guys away. It worked for a while, but sooner or later spies and assassins figured out how to get across the moats and climb the walls and send balls of fire into protected compounds. The Florentines even catapulted dead donkeys and feces during their siege of Siena.
The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we visit their unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption.
Like the castle-dwellers behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums to put ourselves inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to provide either security for our bodies nor solace for our souls, for we are simply attacking ourselves before others get a chance.
This is not the way to peace and safety. Peace is a state without violence, interrogations, and moats. Peace is a state of reciprocity, of trust, of empirically based confidence that no one is about to do you in. It exists not because of intrinsic goodness or rampant naivete but because of a common, implicit understanding that that it works for everyone..
This discovery is often hard to come by, but it is still cheaper, less deadly, and ultimately far more effective than the alternative we seem to have chosen, which is to imprison ourselves in our castle and hope the moat keeps the others out.
A conversation with a friend in the dialysis business reminded us that we still haven't caught Osama Bin Laden. Over the past seven years we have ruined our budget, our constitution and our reputation in an effort to suppress the incapacitated warrior and we seem no closer than ever. Since it sounds like the Obama administration plans to continue this escapade, it may help to put it into some perspective. Assuming that AlQaeda exists - and even a British police commissioner has said it was more an idea than a reality - estimates of its force size are in the 5,000 range with an annual budget, according to the 9/11 Commission, of around $30 million (with an unknown proportion laundered through hedge funds and the like). That's what it cost the Pentagon to build a new mortuary at the Dover Air Force Base.
If a country the size of the United States can't handle 5,000 guerrillas operating on one tenth the amount with which Bernie Madoff absconded, we really are in serious trouble. On the other hand, it may occur to the new crowd that the way to reduce the threat ofguerrilla activity is to lessen the cause. After all, Osama bin Laden is a monster created by American foreign policy. You can kill him but unless our foreign policy changes, there are more monsters where he came from.
Sam Smith, 2002 - So here we are a year later, $37 billion out of pocket and still scared as hell someone's going to attack us. We're not the first with the problem. Many years ago some people built castles and walled cities and moats to keep the bad guys away. It worked for a while, but sooner or later spies and assassins figured out how to get across the moats and climb the walls and send balls of fire into protected compounds. The Florentines even catapulted dead donkeys and feces during their siege of Siena.
The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we visit their unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption.
Like the castle-dwellers behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums to put ourselves inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to provide either security for our bodies nor solace for our souls, for we are simply attacking ourselves before others get a chance.
This is not the way to peace and safety. Peace is a state without violence, interrogations, and moats. Peace is a state of reciprocity, of trust, of empirically based confidence that no one is about to do you in. It exists not because of intrinsic goodness or rampant naivete but because of a common, implicit understanding that that it works for everyone..
This discovery is often hard to come by, but it is still cheaper, less deadly, and ultimately far more effective than the alternative we seem to have chosen, which is to imprison ourselves in our castle and hope the moat keeps the others out.
December 20, 2008
MISSION CREEP: THE MILITARIZING OF AMERICA
Sam Smith
Disturbing as the McCaffrey appointment may be, however, it is only an unusually visible sign of something that has been going on quietly for a long time -- the military's steady intrusion upon, and interference with, civilian America.
In order to avoid violation of the law, General McCaffrey has retired from the military, but he will not retire from his military contacts, philosophy, loyalty and access. He is, after all, a man some thought in line to become the next chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
General McCaffrey headed the US Southern Command, which provides military backup for American policy in Latin America -- a policy long linked with support of dictatorships, suppression of dissidents, human rights abuses, death squads as well as chronically ineffective and corrupt management of drug smuggling. The price of this policy has been heavy: for example, over 100,000 people have been killed since 1960 in Guatemala, many of them by armed forces and police trained and supported by the US.
One former US ambassador to a Central American country says of Southcom, "I wouldn't even let them in the country" because Southcom would "inexorably militarize political problems." Today, he added, "very few countries outside of Central America welcome visits" from the commander of Southcom.
A Pentagon official describes Southcom's role as "military to military diplomacy." Rather then functioning like an old-fashion colonial army -- "they're not like the Bengal Lancers" -- they go in and work quietly with the local military to make sure the right elements are in charge and show them how to put down dissidents and how to interrogate.
The embassy military attaches are the point men in these operations. McCaffrey came into conflict with the State Department in his attempts to gain authority over the attaches and run his own foreign policy. Further, the Dallas Morning News reports that a year ago McCaffrey circulated a classified plan under which the military would assume direct control of the Latin American drug fight. The idea "drew the wrath of civilian agencies from the Drug Enforcement Administration to the CIA. It was a brash plan to fuse power now spread among dozens of agencies while raising the military from a limited support role. The proposal quietly died."
The Dallas paper noted that "colleagues widely describe [McCaffrey] as outspoken and strongwilled, a man whose self-esteem shone brightly even amid the white light of four-star egos."
One drug enforcement official told US News & World Report that under McCaffrey, Southcom's "idea of coordination was to brief you after their plan was fait accompli."
In its announcement of McCaffrey's drug czar appointment, the White House said:
He has spent his military career engaged in coordinated campaigns that are directed toward solutions and winning. He will not tolerate bureaucratic turf wars or grandstanding on this critical issue.
While his career may have been directed towards solutions, it was a goal McCaffrey never reached at Southcom. Southcom has gone through anti-smuggling strategies likes a Hollywood hooker through designer drugs. As recently as two years ago, for example, the military dumped its touted reliance on AWAC planes. Meanwhile the military virtually gave up on interdiction efforts in the Pacific. One source told the International Defense Review that "the Pacific is just too big to monitor properly."
The IDR also reported a shift towards attempting to stop drugs before they leave the source Latin American country: "The shift is due to a variety of factors, including the relatively low volume of drugs seized in transit; US budgetary restraints and a variety of organizational and force structure changes. . ."
In other words, it didn't work and it cost too much money. But there is no evidence that the source country approach is any better. One study found that such strategies were, in fact, seven times as costly as controlling demand through education and medication.
Furthermore, they do substantial damage to the stability and democracy of the targeted country. Thirty religious, health, and human rights activists wrote Secretary of State Warren Christopher complaining about American trained and encouraged anti-narcotics operations in Bolivia. The letter describes well the sort of drug policy fostered by Southcom and other US agencies:
Since mid-January, the Bolivian anti-narcotics police have undertaken massive sweeps in the Chapre, arbitrarily detaining over three hundred people. Those detained are typically held several days and released without charges; indeed, without even being presented to a judge . . . Neither Bolivian law nor international human rights standards permit these warrantless arrests of individuals against whom there is no evidence of participation in criminal conduct. The government is clearly using police powers to stifle lawful political opposition . . . The Bolivian anti-narcotics efforts also continue to rely on special judicial procedures that violate fundamental due process considerations. Under Bolivia's Law 10008, those who are formally charged with drug offenses -- no matter how minor -- are imprisoned without the possibility of pretrial release and must, even if acquitted, remain in prison until the trial court's decision is reviewed by the Supreme Court, a process that takes years. The US government provided funding for the salaries and expenses of special prosecutors for the anti-narcotics courts.
As the military zig and zags in its Latin American anti-drug tactics, these operations retain one common attribute: failure. Between 1994 and 1995, for example, coca leaf production rose seven percent in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. The drug trade continues so merrily along that the radio stations on the Mexican border are even mocking counter-drug efforts with ballads celebrating famed traffickers.
The model of a modern major general
Rather than pointing out such facts, press reaction to the McCaffrey appointment has been overwhelmingly favorable. This is perhaps not surprising. The media is increasingly composed of journalists who have had no military experience and who see war as just another movie script, even if the battle is on our borders or in our own cities.
These new journalistic romanticists are easy prey for Pentagon flacks and the drug warriors. Their understanding of such matters comes not from experience and history, but from Stalone and Schwarzenegger. So badly was the Iraqi War covered, for example, that Americans still don't know how many of the enemy were killed. Or that the UN Food & Agriculture Organization found that over a half million Iraqi children may have died as a consequence of the economic sanctions we imposed after the conflict.
Meanwhile, in dangerous counterpoint, the American officer corps is increasingly composed of those who have had no democratic experience. With the end of the draft and the professionalization of the services, the leavening effect of reserve and national guard troops has greatly diminished. Further, officers like Colin Powell and Barry McCaffrey earned their spurs and their medals almost entirely in the defense of non-democratic regimes -- from troglodytic sheiks in the Gulf to corrupt generals in Vietnam to drug-pushers in Latin America.
The untold truth is that the post-WW2 American military hasn't that much to be proud of. It fought to a draw in Korea, was humiliated in Vietnam, removed a drug dealer from Panama but left all his peers and all the drugs, slunk off from Somalia and was careful not to hang around too long in Haiti. As for the Gulf -- well, Bush and Thatcher were ousted from office in its wake, but not, unfortunately, the intended target.
The one place where the modern American military has been successful is right here in the US, where it has long occupied much of the budget and captured many of the politicians. The sanctity of defense spending is so taken for granted that cutting it was hardly mentioned in the recent budget debates.
Like any good army, the troops have secured their own base first, moving quietly into key civilian posts at the Pentagon. Says one official, "They want to fill the DOD jobs with industry people but the pay isn't high enough, so they get military. The military is willing to whore for industry." The latter, in turn, gladly hires them upon retirement.
Many of these officers are part of an over-staffed brass brigade that developed in the wake of the Cold War and which helped to gobble up the "peace dividend." With their seepage into civilian billets, an important protection against a military takeover -- direct civilian control of the military -- is quietly and steadily being eroded.
Perhaps all this isn't so surprising when one examines the real metier of a modern major general. It is not, after all, fighting wars -- for there doesn't exist an enemy capable of challenging us. The US defense budget is 120 times the combined strength of the nine next biggest military spenders, and 1,600 times that of six adversarial favorites: Cuba, Syria, Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Libya. In truth, the modern major general's trade consists of occupying, managing and manipulating weak and disorganized small countries, not infrequently primarily for domestic political reasons.
This is the trade for which Powell and McCaffrey were trained and helps explains why each feels comfortable in domestic politics. Where easier to practice the civil and psychological operations they mastered than right here at home? After all, what is the war on drugs but "low intensity" or "non-conventional" warfare? If a Pentagon memo can label Israel a "non-traditional adversary," then why not our own inner cities as well? We're all Northern Ireland now.
The quiet creep
The McCaffrey nomination also follows a dramatic increase in the use of the military and its resources, especially the National Guard, in domestic law enforcement -- from Waco to Ruby Ridge to the inner city. It also follows greater intrusion of the military into high schools, the use of troops on the Mexican border for the first time in modern history and sporadic proposals to involve the Army in everything from inner city works projects to concentration camps for first time drug offenders.
Bill Clinton, who has rarely seen a civil liberty worth standing up for, even submitted legislation last year that would have virtually overturned the Posse Comitatus Act. His bill would have allowed the military to provide "technical assistance" to civilian law enforcement, a term Clinton himself defined as including "conducting searches, taking evidence, and disarming and disabling individuals." So awful was this measure that even Casper Weinberger and Sam Nunn objected. As the director of the Florida ACLU, Robbyn E. Blumner, wrote in the St Petersburg Times:
Throughout history and around the world, involvement by the armed forces in civilian law enforcement is one of the trademarks of a repressive regime. Yet the administration's proposals would chip away at the wall that separates the two and, by that action, greatly enhance the power of the presidency. In the wrong hands, the results could be devastating to freedom.
Much of the military's intrusion has been accomplished without public notice. For example, the Pentagon has greatly expanded JROTC programs. Last year, the American Friends Service Committee found retired military personnel teaching approximately 310,000 students, ages 14 and up, in about 2200 high schools (with another 700 on the docket). As the AFSC pointed out:
Public schooling strives to promote respect for other cultures, critical thinking and basic academic skills in a safe environment. In contrast, JROTC introduces guns into the schools, promotes authoritarian values, uses rote learning methods, and consigns much student time to learning drill, military history and protocol, which have little relevance outside the military.
It pays off, though, for the Pentagon. Although the JROTC denies it is engaged in recruiting, 45% of all cadets completing the program sign up, mostly as enlisted personnel. AFSC also found that JROTC programs are more often found in schools with a high proportion of non-white students -- now providing 54% of all cadets -- and in non-affluent schools.
And what are these cadets being taught? Says the report:
A comparison of the JROTC curriculum and two widely used civilian high school civics and history textbooks demonstrates that the JROTC curriculum falls well below accepted pedagogical standards. Units on citizenship and history are strikingly different from standard civil texts on these subjects.
For example, . . . the JROTC text portrays citizenship as being primarily achieved through military service, provides only a short discussion of civil rights; and downplays the importance of civilian control of the military. . . .
In comparison to the civilian history text, historical events in the JROTC curriculum are distorted . . History is described as a linear series of accomplishments by soldiers, while the progress engendered by regular citizens is marginalized. America's wars are treated as having been inevitable.
While it claims to provide leadership training with broad relevance, in fact the JROTC curriculum defines leadership as respect for constituted authority and the chain of command, rather than as critical thinking and democratic consensus-building . . . Finally, the text encourages the reader to rely uncritically on the military as a source of self-esteem and guidance.
Further, at a time that schools are trying desperately to discourage violence, the JROTC is teaching students how to kill more effectively. It is also teaching them -- in a text that addresses the "Indian menace" that "Fortunately the government policy of pushing the Indians farther West, then wiping them out, was carried out successfully. "
Colin Powell's army
And just where did the idea come from for the expansion of military indoctrination in our high schools? From none other than that very media model of a major modern general: Colin Powell.
Following the LA uprising in 1992, writes Steven Stycos in the Providence Phoenix, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff "proposed a massive expansion of the program. Powell urged the new units be targeted to inner-city youth as an alternative to drug use and gang membership." In New England the number of students involved nearly tripled.
Was Powell seeking citizen officers to balance the academy-trained military? Absolutely not. The JROTC students are grunt-fodder. Besides, while referring to ROTC as "vital to democracy," Powell closed 62 college-based ROTC units during this same period. The inevitable result was that the proportion of academy-trained officers rose and the role of the citizen-officer diminished.
You may recall that Powell was the man whom the media pushed for president, depicting him as in the mold of Dwight Eisenhower. The media forgot to tell us that while Eisenhower warned of a growing military-industrial complex, Powell has been one of its biggest beneficiaries and boosters. While Eisenhower fought to restore democracy, Powell fought to preserve sheikdoms. While the Eisenhower-era military followed the wartime orders of strong civilian leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt, the Powell-era military won't even follow Bill Clinton's orders in peacetime. While Eisenhower was part of a unique military demobilization after the Second World War, Powell was among those who prevented demobilization after the Cold War. On top of which he wants kids to know that the Indians were a menace.
Taking charge of the drug war
One might further ask just when it became the business of the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to set policy on drugs and urban gangs, but in today's Washington the question won't produce more than a shrug. Thus when, upon McCaffrey's appointment, Clinton transferred $250 million from the Pentagon to the drug czar's office, no one took notice. The accounts are already heavily commingled.
Browsing DOD literature makes this clear. For example, there is the Manual for Civil Emergencies that says it applies not only to the various branches of the military services but
serves as a reference for other Federal, State and local agencies on how the Department of Defense supports civil authorities and DOD assets can be used to support civilian leadership priorities in returning their communities to a state of "normalcy."
Those are DOD's quote marks around the last word -- a reminder that what may be normal to a general may not seem normal to an ordinary citizen. You have to watch the language carefully. For example, the manual defines hazards as "natural or man caused events, including, without limitation, civil disturbances, that may result in major disasters or emergencies."
And what are civil disturbances?: "Riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, group acts of violence and disorder prejudicial to public law and order. . ."
In short, words are so broadly defined as to mean almost anything the Pentagon wants them to mean -- right down to a noisy crowd at the street corner. As Mort Sahl once pointed out, a federal conspiracy is now defined as "whenever two or three are gathered together."
Another unnerving manual is the resource guide for the 1994 Counterdrug Managers' Course at the National Interagency Counterdrug Institute at Camp San Luis Obispo CA. In it we learn that among the problems ordinary cops may face is that "the vast DOD bureaucracy will overwhelm the requesting law enforcement agency."
The manual adds reassuringly, "To date such fears have proven to be unfounded. DOD has not become a law enforcement agency . . There is, however, much that DOD can do without usurping a police role."
A few pages on, however, the manual lists what some of these things are:
In appropriate cases, armed forces personnel and equipment will be detailed directly to law enforcement agencies to assist in the fight.
The Department of Defense will be prepared to assist the Department of Justice with its responsibilities for incarceration and rehabilitation of drug criminals, through means such as training federal, state, and local personnel in the conduct of rehabilitation-oriented training camps for first-offense drug abuses and providing overflow facilities for incarceration of those convicted of drug crimes.
[DOD will] arrange for assigning military personal to federal drug law enforcement agencies and the ONDCP [the office of the drug czar] to perform liaison, training, and planning functions as appropriate to assist in implementation of the National Drug Control Strategy and the DOD guidance for implementation of that strategy.
[DOD will] review the potential for DOD to provide temporary overflow facilities, upon the request of appropriate federal, state, or local authorities, for incarceration of individuals convicted of drug crimes.
Verbal shell games are being played here. On the one hand, the Defense Department is declared not to be a law enforcement agency; on the other, its personnel and equipment "will be detailed directly to law enforcement agencies to assist in the fight."
Such postmodern linguistic mush is a key part of the camouflage used to conceal the military's mission creep. For example, the Navy is prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act from engaging in domestic law enforcement, so the Coast Guard gets around this by hoisting a Coast Guard flag on any naval vessel it wants to use. The ship thereupon becomes a Coast Guard vessel -- for the sole purpose of circumventing the law.
Of particular concern to anyone wishing to retain a democracy in the US are the oblique references to concentration camps for drug offenders. To be sure, the manual prefers Maoist phraseology -- "rehabilitation-oriented training camps" -- but it means the same thing. This idea may have been launched some years back by a former high US drug official named Robert Dupont, who proposed in the Washington Post that there be mandatory drugs tests for those attending school or getting a driver's license. Those who failed drug tests repeatedly would be incarcerated in "large temporary health shelters." There would be some invasion of privacy and civil rights, the doctor admitted, but "this is a price we would need to pay for life in a modern, interdependent community."
The concentration camps, the manual notes, could also be used to provide "temporary overflow facilities . . . for incarceration of those convicted of drug crimes" at the request of "appropriate" officials.
Both Dupont and the manual use the word temporary. Does this refer to the quality of the gulags' construction or to the transitory nature of their need? And if the latter, then what precisely are the conditions under which temporary overflow facilities would be required? One thing history teaches us is that drug use rises and falls in a stately fashion; there are no sudden mass LSD binges or waves of ecstasy parties that sweep the nation. On the other hand, what can change rather rapidly is the government's desire and willingness to lock persons up --such as under martial law.
Finally, the manual indicates that not only are military personnel assigned to the drug czar but that the nation's domestic drug strategy is subject to "DOD guidance for implementation of that strategy." In other words, under McCaffrey our drug program will be run by a general, aided by military personnel, funded by military dollars and guided by military policy. In short, it is not unlike the sort of arrangement McCaffrey's Southcom has worked out for places like Bolivia and Colombia. Our cities have become just another third world country to keep under the military's control.
The handwriting has been on the wall for a long time. In speaking before the 1991 National Guard Association Conference, Lt. General John B. Conaway, Chief of the National Guard Bureau, said:
Our commander in chief has declared war on drugs. Our mission as America's National Guard in this war is clear: make America drug-free in as short a time as possible using any means necessary no matter what the cost.
So between January and August of the following year, the National Guard made nearly 20,000 arrests, searched 120,000 cars and searched over 1200 buildings. Said one National Guard official, "The National Guard is America's legally feasible attitude-change agent."
The regular Army, however, was anxious to get in the act as well. Lt. Gen. J. H. Bindford Peay III, the chief of staff for operations and plans, asserted in an Army publication a few years back that military forces are required for such purposes as internal peacekeeping, anti-drug operations and support of civil authorities to maintain stability in a rapidly changing America. Said Peay:
We can look forward to the day when our Congress repeals the Posse Comitatus Act and allows the Army to lend its full strength towards making America drug-free.
And Inside the Pentagon quoted the commander-in-chief of the US Special Operations Command saying in a speech:
[Drugs are] the greatest threat that is out there . . . We've got to get our stuff together. The battle is not going to be won in the source countries or in the transit countries. The battle is going to be won here in the United States and we better start doing something about it.
Major General Barry McCaffrey reporting for duty, Sir.
Such dreams have been partly realized without even bothering to repeal the troublesome Posse Comitatus Act. Thus we now find Army reservists working with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in anti-pot forays. Said one Army official:
We want the public to become more aware of what we're doing. This is an ongoing war on our soil. We want people to see the Army involved in a war right here -- a war against drugs . . . We're fighting a war in our own hometowns -- a war we'll fight every day until, finally, we win.
Over-flights and litterbugs
Considerable benefits accrue to those civilian law enforcement agencies that kowtow to the military. For example, AP has reported that the Pentagon intends to give police departments 2,000 of its helicopters over the next few years. On the other hand, when Arizona Governor Fyfe Symington spoke of using the state national guard to keep the Grand Canyon open during the recent budget crisis, the Pentagon went on alert and prepared to federalized the Arizona militia if necessary to prevent any such residual display of states rights.
Of course, bringing the might of the Pentagon to bear on recalcitrant pot planters is not quite as heroic as defeating the Evil Empire. And it can have some peculiar results. For example, citizens in Monterey County CA have been complaining about a US Marine invasion of the Los Padres National Forest and nearby private lands. These incursions are part of Operation Alliance run by a intergovernmental "coordination center" that handles military-civilian actions in California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. The operation is under the control of Joint Task Force 6 in El Paso, which according to a Forest Service memo, "is now scheduled to handle all military drug raids done thru local law enforcement in the lower 48 states and Puerto Rico. The Forest Service gets military support by going through Operation Alliance." (All military drug raids? Apparently no one has told the Forest Service that the Pentagon is not a law enforcement agency.)
For example, Mission JT-105-96 carried out "approximately October 5 through October 31, 1995" included:
Military over-flights and photography of National Forest Service land
Aerial reconnaissance about 500' from the ground, but allowing aircraft as low as 100' for "confirmation" and as low as 75' for "inserting and extracting military personnel via rappel, fast-rope and spy operation."
"Listening/observation posts on National Forest and National Forest Wilderness areas" and "overnight bivouac."
Landing aircraft in the wilderness area in emergencies.
A situation report from one of the Marine teams described finding a "garden" and then tracing the waterlines to it. Later that afternoon a jogger wandered into their midst. They gave him a drink of water and lied to him about their purpose, claiming that they were training.
On October 15th Team Two was discovered by a woman on horseback who was clearly not pleased to find them. They repeated their lie about training. She said she feared for her daughter's safety and that they had trespassed and broken a water main. She also blew the whistle on the operation when she got back to safety. Soon thereafter both Congressman Sam Farr and the Monterey Herald called and the "mission was compromised."
There were other complaints. An investigative report cited
allegations made by concerned residents that this patrol had established a campfire, littered, defecated and left soiled toilet paper in an exposed condition in the watershed that supplies water to several homes.
The investigator found the allegations were true but happily had not occurred on private property.
The Civil Liberties Monitoring Project, formed by local citizens twelve years ago when the first assaults began, counted 100 complaints of invasions of privacy and illegal searches in 1995. There was also "a surprising amount of damage from helicopters."
According to CLMP:
Helicopters overflights are often conducted at or near tree-top level (say 150' from the ground) despite an agreement by law enforcement to maintain a 500' height except when actually landing or taking off. The noise from these low flights is incredibly loud, causing much disturbance to wildlife, domestic animals and of course, human beings. A sudden loud noise from above triggers fight or flight response in most birds and animals. Much of the injury to animals is impossible to document in a largely forested rural area like the Mateel, but we have documented the deadly injury to a horse, death of a deer and its fawns, stampeding of cattle and destruction of eggs and young birds in the nest at several commercial aviaries. This latest effect is especially disturbing as we have several endangered species of birds in our forests including the spotted owl.
Adults can generally handle the effects of overflights. They get angry, call their congressperson, call the local sheriff, and make complaints. They document their grievances with us. This reduces the long-term effects upon them, if you don't count a deep and abiding distrust of law enforcement and government in general. Two groups cannot handle the psychological effects well, however. They are children and Vietnam vets with flashback problems. We have documented cases of children becoming fearful of going outside, where they had previously enjoyed gardening with their parents; of nightmares about helicopters, and similar effects . . .
Vietnam vets flashbacks are well known, and we are seeing them here. In the worst case the vet was simply advised by his doctor to abandon his home and leave the area until the raids ended.
Military lurkers
One of the ways the military conducts its domestic version of psychological and civil operations is to spy on American citizens. As far back the early 40s, for example, Army intelligence kept tabs on the likes of organizer Saul Alinsky. The practice blossomed with the civil rights and peace movements, possibly even, in the view of some investigators, including direct involvement of Army agents in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Today, the practice continues albeit in modern garb. According to the Computer Fraud and Security Bulletin, the National Security Agency is already spying on the Internet by "sniffing" data at key router and gateways hosts. NSA is also said to have made deals with Microsoft, Lotus and Netscape to prevent anonymous e-mail or encryption systems on the Net.
And last July, Charles Swett, who works for the Pentagon office handling "special operations and low intensity conflict" wrote an internal memo titled: Strategic Assessment: The Internet. The report, uncovered by the Federation of American Scientists, provides an overview of the Internet, particularly its usefulness for spying on both Americans and foreigners and for spreading disinformation during psychological operations.
Of course, Swett didn't use those words, so to be absolutely fair let's quote the man:
The Internet could also be used offensively as an additional medium in psychological operations campaigns and to help achieve unconventional warfare objectives. Used creatively as an integral asset, the Internet can facilitate many DOD operations and activities. . .
The Internet is a potentially lucrative source of intelligence useful to DOD. The intelligence can include . . . information about the plans and operations of politically active groups.
Networks of human sources with access to the Internet could be developed in areas of security concern to the US, and these sources could be oriented to seek specific needed information. If contracted and managed correctly, such a system could be much more responsive and efficient than the current complex, unwieldy, intelligence tasking and collection processes we must use.
If it became widely known that DOD were monitoring Internet traffic for intelligence or counterintelligence purposes, individuals with personal agendas or political purposes in mind, or who enjoy playing pranks, would deliberately enter false or misleading messages. Our analysis function would need to account for this. A great deal of "brain power" exists on the Internet, and if it could be harnessed and channeled for productive purposes, it might be a useful addition to DOD's informational and political assets. Any such use, of course, would have to be protected by appropriate security measures.
It would be possible to employ the Internet as an additional medium for Psychological Operations (Psyops) campaigns. E-mail conveying the US perspective on issues and events could be efficiently and rapidly disseminated to a very wide audience. DOD intelligence agencies should investigate the role of the Internet in helping coordinate the operations of political activists and paramilitary groups in regions of interest.
The Internet should be incorporated in our Psyops planning as an additional medium.
Means of employing the Internet offensively in support of our unconventional warfare objectives should be employed.
While the talents of civ ops and pys ops could be clearly quickly turned from third world lands to our own, Swett specifically declares that his recommendations "should be carried out only in full compliance with the letter and the spirit of the law, and without violating the privacy of American citizens."
Yet Swett himself sets a poor example. After all, he has already been spying on us. And his report gives a strong sense of what the forthcoming dossiers of the Pentagon's Internet strategic assessment office will look like.
For example, he sees as "startling" the use of the Internet to organize against the Contract with America with its charges that it, in effect is encouraging "class war, race war, gender war, and generational war."
He lumps as fringe groups the white supremacist National Alliance, the Michigan Militia, National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, Earth First, and People for Ethical Treatment of Animals.
He quotes from the Wall Street Journal:
Fringe groups are increasingly going on-line, gathering converts and seeking validation on the Internet. The network's far-flung links and low-cost communications are a boon to backwater groups that can't afford to use direct mail to make their pitches . . . The more a group is shut out of the mainstream, the more likely it is to go on-line.
Swett takes particular interest in the Institute for Global Communications and the Association for Progressive Communications, which he describes as "largest and most active international political groups using the Internet." He calls IGC/APC (used by the Review among tens of thousands of others in the US and elsewhere) as "clearly a left-wing political organization." And he informs his Pentagon colleagues that its conferences addresse subjects such as:
Lists of companies and/or products to be considered for a boycott . . . State security activities, surveillance, tapping The Left List Aid in the planning and execution of campaigns to end the nuclear weapons era.
Information relevant to the campaign opposing US military bases in Australia and the Asian-Pacific region. News, announcements and information from War Resisters International, on all aspects of anti-militarist and nonviolent action worldwide. Information and discussion regarding the anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement and non-hierarchical organizing.
Alarmed by all this, Swett shows the spook's unique perspective on matters political, lumping anti-authoritarian movements and non-hierarchical organizing as among the threats the Pentagon should keep its eye on. He also notes that "groups of conspiracy theorists exchange e-mail explaining their often bizarre theories about conspiracies conducted by the US government in general and DOD in particular."
If this all sounds a tad familiar; it is. Only the source material back then was hard copy and it was deposited not on hard disk at the Pentagon but in the files of J. Edgar Hoover.
Roots
The military's extraordinary role in contemporary civilian life can be traced back at least to the Carter administration. In a July 1983 series in the San Francisco Examiner, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Knut Royce reported that a presidential directive had been drafted by a few Carter administration personnel in 1979 to allow the military to take control of the government for 90 days in the event of an emergency. A caveat on page one of the directive said, "Keeping the government functioning after a nuclear war is a secret, costly project that detractors claim jeopardizes US traditions and saves a privileged few." According to Royce there was a heated debate within the Carter administration as to just what constituted an "emergency."
The issue arose again during the Iran-Contra affair, but even in the wake of all the copy on that scandal, the public got little sense of how far some America's soldiers of fortune were willing to go to achieve their ends. When the Iran-Contra hearings came close to the matter, chair Senator Inouye backed swiftly away. Here is an excerpt from those hearings. Oliver North is at the witness table:
REP BROOKS: Colonel North, in your work at the NSC, were you not assigned, at one time, to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?
BRENDAN SULLIVAN: Mr. Chairman?
SEN INOUYE: I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area so may I request that you not touch on that.
REP BROOKS: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers, and several others, that there had been a plan developed by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked. I believe that it was and I wanted to get his confirmation.
SEN INOUYE; May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I'm certain arrangements can be made for an executive session
With few exceptions, the media ignored what well could be the most startling revelation to have come out of the Iran/Contra affair, namely that high officials of the US government were planning a possible military/civilian coup. First among the exceptions was the Miami Herald, which on July 5, 1987, ran the story to which Jack Brooks referred. The article, by Alfonzo Chardy, revealed Oliver North's involvement in plans for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to take over federal, state and local functions during an ill-defined national emergency.
According to Chardy, the plan called for 'suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over to the Federal Management Agency, emergency appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law.' The proposal appears to have forgotten that Congress, legislatures and the judiciary even existed.
In a November 18, 1991 story, the New York Times elaborated:
Acting outside the Constitution in the early 1980s, a secret federal agency established a line of succession to the presidency to assure continued government in the event of a devastating nuclear attack, current and former United States officials said today.
The program was called "Continuity of Government." In the words of a recent report by the Fund for Constitutional Government,1 "succession or succession-by-designation would be implemented by unknown and perhaps unelected persons who would pick three potential successor presidents in advance of an emergency. These potential successors to the Oval Office may not be elected, and they are not confirmed by Congress.
According to CNN, the list eventually grew to 17 names and included Howard Baker, Richard Helms, Jeanne Kirkpatrick James Schlesinger, Richard Thornberg, Edwin Meese, Tip O'Neil, and Richard Cheney.
The plan was not even limited to a nuclear attack but included any "national security emergency" which was defined as:
Any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.
This bizarre scheme was dismissed in many Washington quarters as further evidence of the loony quality of the whole Iran/contra affair. One FEMA official called it a lot of crap while a representative for Attorney General Meese described it as 'bullshit."
The problem is that there is a long history of compatibility between madness and totalitarian takeovers, Adolph Hitler being a prime but far from lone example. Further, there is plenty of evidence in this case that the planning was far more than simply an off-the-wall brainstorm. At least one report found that the US Army had even gone so far as to draft a legal document providing justifications for martial law.
Nor was the planning limited to crises involving the total breakdown of society as in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Among the justifiable uses of martial law were "national opposition to a US military invasion abroad" and widespread internal. dissent.
At least one high government official took the plan seriously enough to vigorously oppose it. In a August 1984 letter to NSC chair Robert McFarlane, Attorney General William French Smith wrote:
I believe that the role assigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the revised Executive Order exceeds its proper function as a coordinating agency for emergency preparedness . . . This department and others have repeatedly raised serious policy and legal objections to the creation of an 'emergency czar' role for FEMA.
FEMA was clearly out of control. Another memo, written in 1982 to then FEMA director Louis Giuffrida and given only tightly restricted circulation even within the agency, made this astonishing assertion:
Over the long term, the peacetime action programs of FEMA and other departments and agencies have the effect of making the conceivable need for military takeover less and less as time goes by. A fully implemented civil defense program may not now be regarded as a substitute for martial law, nor could it be so marketed, but if successful in its execution it could have that effect.
The memo essentially proposed that the American people would rather be taken over by FEMA than by the military. When those are the options on the table, you know you're in trouble.
The head of FEMA until 1985, General Louis Giuffrida, also once wrote a paper on the Legal Aspects of Managing Disorders. Here is some of what he said:
No constitution, no statute or ordinance can authorize Martial Rule. [It commences] upon a determination (not a declaration) by the senior military commander that the civil government must be replaced because it is no longer functioning anyway . . . The significance of Martial Rule in civil disorders is that it shifts control from civilians and to the military completely and without the necessity of a declaration, proclamation or other form of public manifestation . . . As stated above, Martial Rule is limited only by the principle of necessary force.
Those words come from a time when Giuffrida was the head of then-Governor Reagan's California Specialized Training Institute, a National Guard school. It was not, for Giuffrida, a new thought. In 1970 he had written a paper for the Army War College in which he called for martial law in case of a national uprising by black militants. Among his ideas were "assembly centers or relocation camps" for at least 21 million "American Negroes."
During 1968 and 1972, Reagan ran a series of war games in California called Cable Splicer, which involved the Guard, state and local police, and the US Sixth Army. Details of this operation were reported in 1975 in a story by Ron Ridenour of the New Times, an Arizona alternative paper, and later exhumed by Dave Lindorff in the Village Voice.
Cable Splicer, it turned out, was a training exercise for martial law. The man in charge was none other than Edwin Meese, then Reagan's executive secretary. At one point, Meese told the Cable Splicer combatants:
This is an operation, this is an exercise, this is an objective which is going forward because in the long run . . . it is the only way that will be able to prevail [against anti-war protests.]
Addressing the kickoff of Cable Splicer, Governor Reagan told some 500 military and police officers:
You know, there are people in the state who, if they could see this gathering right now and my presence here, would decide their worst fears and convictions had been realized -- I was planning a military takeover.
The Reaganites were not, however, the only ones with such thoughts. Consider this from a NSC directive written by Frank Carlucci in 1981:
Normally a state of martial law will be proclaimed by the President. However, in the absence of such action by the President, a senior military commander may impose martial law in an area of his command where there had been a complete breakdown in the exercise of government functions by local civilian authorities.
The military coup of 2012
To those who would dismiss all the foregoing as the fantasies of a paranoid conspiracy theorist, I fully understand. Such are our times, such is the propaganda in which our minds swim, that the real can frequently, almost inevitably, seem but a mirage.
But how about this? In the winter 1992 issue of Parameters, the quarterly of the US Army College, there appeared an article by Lt. Col. Charles J. Dunlap Jr. USAF Dunlap was a graduate of St. Joseph's University, Villanova School of Law, the Armed Forces Staff College, and a distinguished graduate of the National War College. In 1992 he was named by the Judge Advocates Association as the USAF's outstanding career armed services attorney. In short, not your average paranoid conspiracy theorist.
Dunlap's article was called The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012. In it, he pretends to be writing to a fellow military colleague in 2012, explaining how the coup had occurred. With eerie precision he described America's current state:
America became exasperated with democracy. We were disillusioned with the apparent inability of elected government to solve the nation's dilemmas. We were looking for someone or something that could produce workable answers. The one institution of government in which the people retained faith was the military.2 Buoyed by the military's obvious competence in the First Gulf War, the public increasingly turned to it for solutions to the country's problems. Americans called for an acceleration of trends begun in the 1980s: tasking the military with a variety of new, non-traditional missions, and vastly escalating its commitment to formerly ancillary duties.
Though not obvious at the time, the cumulative effect of these new responsibilities was to incorporate the military into the political process to an unprecedented degree.
Dunlap quoted one of Washington's journalistic cherubs, James Fallows, in a 1991 article:
I am beginning to think that the only way the national government can do anything worthwhile is to invent a security threat and turn the job over to the military . . . The military, strangely, is the one government institution that has been assigned legitimacy to act on its notion of the collective good.
Dunlap recounted the slow attrition of civilian independence from the military:
In 1981 Congress passed a bill, the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act "specifically intended to force reluctant military commanders to actively collaborate in police work. By 1992, combating drugs had been declared a "high national security mission."
By this same time, the military had become deeply involved in environmental cleanup, and would regularly show up in uniform in high crime areas.
The balance of power between the various services was being undermined by an emphasis on "jointness," thus weakening an internal check on the military.
Dunlap then imagined what might happen next:
Other problems were transformed into "national security" issues. As more commercial airlines went bankrupt and unprofitable air routes were dropped, the military was called upon to provide "essential" air transport to the affected regions. In the name of national defense, the military next found itself in the sealift business. . . .The nations' crumbling infrastructure was also declared a "national security threat." As was proposed back in 1991, troops rehabilitated pubic housing, rebuilt bridges and roads, and constructed new government buildings . . . . Voices in both Congress and the military had reached a crescendo calling for military involvement across a broad spectrum of heretofore civilian activities. Soon, it became common in practically every community to see crews of soldiers working on local projects. Military attire drew no stares.
Not so long ago, Stephen Rosenfeld of the Washington Post wrote a bizarre and scary column praising one of the Army's advocates of Dunlap's bad dream. Rosenfeld described US Army Major Ralph Peters this way:
At home, use of the military appears inevitable to him -- though not yet to an American consensus -- "at least on our borders and in some urban environments" . . . He deplores our military's reluctance to join the war on drugs, which he attributes to a fear of failure. He would dutifully prepare for the traditionally 'military' missions, plus the new one of missile defense. But he would be ready to engage with drugs and crime, terrorism, peacekeeping, illegal immigration, disease control, resource protection, evacuation of endangered citizens . . .
What Dunlap was described and Peters advocated was not a bold military stroke against the civilian government, but simply a coup by attrition. Wrote Dunlap:
By the year 2000 the armed forces had penetrated many vital aspects of American society. More and more military officers sought the kind of autonomy in these civilian affairs that they would expect from their military superiors in the execution of traditional combat operations . . . They convinced themselves that they could more productively serve the nation in carrying out their new assignments if they accrued to themselves unfettered power to implement their programs.
By 2012, it was all over.
Col. Dunlap's calculations are that we have about 16 years to come up with an alternative approach.
And he may be a bit optimistic.
1 The author is on the board of the Fund for Constitutional Government but did not work on this report.
2 This remains true. A recent poll showed that 47% of Americans have a great deal of confidence in the military. The Supreme Court, colleges and medicine were lumped at about 30% and every other majori institution lagged far behind. Only 15% have high condidence in the white House and only 10% in Congress.
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