Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Bringin' It All Back Home A MUST READ

JR: AS AN ANALYST AND ONE WHICH DON'T TRUST NOR ALIGN WITH EITHER PARTY, I HAVE TO SAY THAT THE FOLLOWING, IN MY OPINION, IS MOSTLY ACCURATE.

http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/for-the-record-747-bringin-it-all-back-home/


Spitfire List.com - Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record #747 Bringin’ It All Back Home

By Dave Emory - July 4, 2011 @ 3:05 pm in For The Record
[1]

Richard Nixon
[2]

Cit­i­zen Rove

Lis­ten:
MP3 [3]

Intro­duc­tion: As the coun­try approaches yet another anniver­sary of Amer­i­can inde­pen­dence, this pro­gram looks at the GOP’s polit­i­cal and eco­nomic hege­mony over Amer­i­can life. With a loom­ing show­down over rais­ing the debt ceil­ing and the pos­si­bil­ity of a U.S. credit default (with cat­a­strophic con­se­quences for this and other coun­tries), we exam­ine a very impor­tant arti­cle [4] by Robert Parry [5].

Not­ing that the GOP is using the same play­book in its desta­bi­liza­tion of Barack Obama that the CIA has used in the sub­ver­sion of for­eign gov­ern­ments con­sid­ered insuf­fi­ciently coop­er­a­tive, Parry sets forth the unfold­ing of this unsa­vory drama.

Cen­tral to Parry’s analy­sis is com­par­i­son of the desta­bi­liza­tion of the Allende regime with the sub­ver­sion of Obama. In addi­tion to delib­er­ately sab­o­tag­ing the econ­omy, the CIA in Chile and the GOP in the U.S. have uti­lized a vig­or­ous media cam­paign to dis­sem­i­nate and pop­u­lar­ize the mes­sage that the fail­ing econ­omy is due to the failed poli­cies of the seated government.

[6]The desired result is the polit­i­cal elim­i­na­tion of that government.

Parry prop­erly cites the gin­ning up of phony “pop­ulist” phe­nom­ena, styled to appear as gen­uine dis­sat­is­fac­tion with gov­ern­men­tal pol­icy. In Chile, house­wives and truck­ers were turned out to high­light the “failed” poli­cies of Allende. In the U.S., the Tea Party fas­cists have shown up pack­ing guns in Wash­ing­ton D.C. and elsewhere.

The foun­da­tion to the suc­cess of the desta­bi­liza­tion strat­egy is the eco­nomic sub­ver­sion engin­nered in both coun­tries. The failed econ­omy is then blamed on the gov­ern­ment and used to bring to power the very sub­ver­sives who bear respon­si­bil­ity for eco­nomic disaster.

Much of the rest of the pro­gram recaps key arti­cles pre­sented in FTR #412 [7]. Nobel Prize win­ning econ­o­mist Paul Krug­man notes [8] that the GOP delib­er­ately ran up enor­mous deficits under George W. Bush, with the intent of using the result­ing fis­cal cri­sis as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the elmi­na­tion of social pro­grams dear to the public.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The Bush administration’s sup­pres­sion of a Trea­sury Depart­ment report detail­ing the spec­tac­u­lar debt that would result from the Bush administration’s poli­cies; colum­nist Bob Herbert’s [9] account­ing of the grotesque inequal­ity of wealth and income dis­tri­b­u­tion stem­ming from the pro­grams detailed by Krug­man and the Trea­sury report; James Stew­art Martin’s warn­ing about the dan­gers of eco­nomic con­cen­tra­tion and the pos­si­bity that “a calm judge­ment of busi­ness neces­sity” might lead the U.S. power elite to insti­tute fas­cism in the United States.

1. Much of the pro­gram con­sists of the read­ing of impor­tant analy­sis pre­sented by Robert Parry. Not­ing that the GOP is using the same play­book in its desta­bi­liza­tion of Barack Obama that the CIA has used in the sub­ver­sion of for­eign gov­ern­ments con­sid­ered insuf­fi­ciently coop­er­a­tive, Parry sets forth the unfold­ing of this unsa­vory drama.

Note that miss­ing from Parry’s analy­sis is the fact that the national secu­rity estab­lish­ment long ago under­took the domes­tic appli­ca­tion of the same deadly force used to elim­i­nate Chile’s Sal­vador Allende. The deaths of Pres­i­dent Kennedy, his brother Robert, Mar­tin Luther King and many oth­ers stand in mute wit­ness to this fact.

Cen­tral to Parry’s analy­sis is com­par­i­son of the desta­bi­liza­tion of the Allende regime with the sub­ver­sion of Obama. In addi­tion to delib­er­ately sab­o­tag­ing the econ­omy, the CIA in Chile and the GOP in the U.S. have uti­lized a vig­or­ous media cam­paign to dis­sem­i­nate and pop­u­lar­ize the mes­sage that the fail­ing econ­omy is due to the failed poli­cies of the seated government.

The desired result is the polit­i­cal elmi­na­tion of that government.

Parry prop­erly cites the gin­ning up of phony “pop­ulist” phe­nom­ena, styled to appear as gen­uine dis­sat­is­fac­tion with gov­ern­men­tal pol­icy. In Chile, house­wives and truck­ers were turned out to high­light the “failed” poli­cies of Allende. In the U.S., the Tea Party fas­cists have shown up pack­ing guns in Wash­ing­ton D.C. and elsewhere.

Cen­tral to the suc­cess of the desta­bi­liza­tion strat­egy is the eco­nomic sub­ver­sion engin­nered in both coun­tries. The failed econ­omy is then blamed on the gov­ern­ment and used to bring to power the very sub­ver­sives who bear respon­si­bil­ity for eco­nomic disaster.

Mod­ern Repub­li­cans have a sim­ple approach to pol­i­tics when they are not in the White House: Make Amer­ica as ungovern­able as pos­si­ble by using almost any means avail­able, from chal­leng­ing the legit­i­macy of oppo­nents to spread­ing lies and dis­in­for­ma­tion to sab­o­tag­ing the economy.

Over the past four decades or so, the Repub­li­cans have sim­ply not played by the old give-and-take rules of pol­i­tics. Indeed, if one were to step back and assess this Repub­li­can approach, what you would see is some­thing akin to how the CIA has desta­bi­lized tar­get coun­tries, espe­cially those that seek to orga­nize them­selves in defi­ance of cap­i­tal­ist orthodoxy.

To stop this spread of “social­ism,” nearly any­thing goes. Take, for exam­ple, Chile in the early 1970s when social­ist Pres­i­dent Sal­vador Allende won an elec­tion and took steps aimed at improv­ing the con­di­tions of the country’s poor.

Under the direc­tion of Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon and Sec­re­tary of State Henry Kissinger, the CIA was dis­patched to engage in psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare against Allende’s gov­ern­ment and to make the Chilean econ­omy “scream.”

U.S. intel­li­gence agen­cies secretly spon­sored Chilean news out­lets, like the influ­en­tial news­pa­per El Mer­cu­rio, and sup­ported “pop­ulist” upris­ings of truck­ers and house­wives. On the eco­nomic front, the CIA coor­di­nated efforts to starve the Chilean gov­ern­ment of funds and to drive unem­ploy­ment higher.

Wors­en­ing job­less­ness could then be spun by the CIA-financed news out­lets as proof that Allende’s poli­cies didn’t work and that the only choice for Chile was to scrap its social pro­grams. When Allende com­pro­mised with the Right, that had the addi­tional ben­e­fit of caus­ing fric­tion between him and some of his sup­port­ers who wanted even more rad­i­cal change.

As Chile became increas­ingly ungovern­able, the stage was set for the vio­lent over­throw of Allende, the instal­la­tion of a right­ist dictatorship, and the impo­si­tion of “free-market” eco­nom­ics that directed more wealth and power to Chile’s rich and their Amer­i­can cor­po­rate backers.

Though the Allende case in Chile is per­haps the best known exam­ple of this intel­li­gence strat­egy (because it was inves­ti­gated by a Sen­ate com­mit­tee in the mid-1970s), the CIA has employed this approach fre­quently around the world. Some­times the tar­get gov­ern­ment is removed with­out vio­lence, although other times a bloody coup d’etat has been part of the mix.

Home to Roost

So, it is per­haps fit­ting that a com­pa­ra­ble approach to pol­i­tics would even­tu­ally come home to roost in the United States, even to the point that some of the pro­pa­ganda fund­ing comes from out­side sources (think of Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Wash­ing­ton Times and Aus­tralian media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.)

Obvi­ously, given the wealth of the Amer­i­can elites, the rel­a­tive pro­por­tion of the pro­pa­ganda fund­ing is derived more domes­ti­cally in the United States than it would be in a place like Chile (or some other unfor­tu­nate Third World coun­try that has got­ten on Washington’s bad side).

But the con­cept remains the same: Con­trol as much as pos­si­ble what the pop­u­la­tion gets to see and hear; cre­ate chaos for your opponent’s gov­ern­ment, eco­nom­i­cally and polit­i­cally; blame if for the mess; and estab­lish in the minds of the vot­ers that their only way out is to sub­mit, that the pain will stop once your side is back in power.

Today’s Repub­li­cans have fully embraced this con­cept of polit­i­cal war­fare, whereas the Democ­rats gen­er­ally have tried to play by the old rules, acqui­esc­ing when Repub­li­cans are in office with the goal of “mak­ing gov­ern­ment work,” even if the Repub­li­cans are set­ting the agenda.

Unlike the Democ­rats and the Left, the Repub­li­cans and the Right have pre­pared them­selves for this bat­tle, almost as if they are fol­low­ing a CIA train­ing man­ual. They have invested tens of bil­lions of dol­lars in a pro­pa­ganda infra­struc­ture that oper­ates 24/7, year-round, to spot and exploit mis­steps by polit­i­cal enemies.

This ver­ti­cally inte­grated media machine allows use­ful infor­ma­tion to move quickly from a right-wing blog to talk radio to Fox News to the Wall Street Jour­nal to con­ser­v­a­tive mag­a­zines and book pub­lish­ing. Right-wing pro­pa­gan­dists are well-trained and well-funded so they can be deployed to all man­ner of pub­lic out­lets to ham­mer home the talk­ing points.

When a Demo­c­rat some­how does man­age to get into the White House, Repub­li­cans in Con­gress (and even in the Courts) are ready to do their part in the desta­bi­liza­tion cam­paign. Rather than grant tra­di­tional “hon­ey­moon” peri­ods of coop­er­a­tion with the president’s early poli­cies, the bat­tle lines are drawn immediately.

In late 1992, for instance, Bill Clin­ton com­plained that his “hon­ey­moon” didn’t even last through the tran­si­tion, the two-plus months before a new pres­i­dent takes office. He found him­self fac­ing espe­cially harsh haz­ing from the Wash­ing­ton press corps, as the main­stream media – seek­ing to shed its “lib­eral” label and goaded by the right-wing media – tried to demon­strate that it would be tougher on a Demo­c­rat than any Republican.

The main­stream press hyped minor “scan­dals” about Clinton’s White­wa­ter real estate invest­ment and Travel-gate, a flap about some rou­tine fir­ings at the White House travel office. Meanwhile, the Right’s rapidly grow­ing media was spread­ing false sto­ries impli­cat­ing Clin­ton in the death of White House aide Vince Fos­ter and other “mys­te­ri­ous deaths.”

Repub­li­cans in Con­gress did all they could to feed the press hys­te­ria, hold­ing hear­ings and demand­ing that spe­cial pros­e­cu­tors be appointed. When the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion relented, the choice of pros­e­cu­tors was handed over to right-wing Repub­li­can Appeals Court Judge David Sen­telle, who con­sciously picked polit­i­cal ene­mies of Clin­ton to over­see zeal­ous investigations.

Finally Win­ning

The use of scandal-mongering to desta­bi­lize the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion finally peaked in late 1998 and early 1999 when the Republican-controlled House voted impeach­ment and Clin­ton had to endure (but sur­vive) a humil­i­at­ing trial in the Senate.

The Repub­li­can strat­egy, how­ever, con­tin­ued into Cam­paign 2000 with Vice Pres­i­dent Al Gore fac­ing attacks on his char­ac­ter and integrity. Gore was falsely painted as a delu­sional brag­gart, as both right-wing and main­stream media out­lets freely mis­quoted him and sub­jected him to ridicule (while simul­ta­ne­ously bow­ing and scrap­ing before Repub­li­can can­di­date George W. Bush).

When Gore man­aged to win the national pop­u­lar vote any­way – and would have car­ried the key state of Florida if all legally cast bal­lots were counted – the Repub­li­cans and the Right rose up in fury demand­ing that the Florida count be stopped before Bush’s tiny lead com­pletely dis­ap­peared. Start­ing a minor riot in Miami, the Repub­li­cans showed how far they would go to claim the White House again.

Five Repub­li­can par­ti­sans on the U.S. Supreme Court – want­ing to ensure that the new pres­i­dent would keep their side in con­trol of the courts and rec­og­niz­ing that their party was pre­pared to spread dis­or­der if Gore pre­vailed – stopped the count­ing of votes and made Bush the “win­ner.” [For details, see the book, Neck Deep [10].]

Despite this par­ti­san rul­ing, Gore and the Democ­rats stepped back from the polit­i­cal con­fronta­tion. The right-wing press cheered and gloated, while the main­stream news media urged the peo­ple to accept Bush as “legit­i­mate” for the good of the country.

For most of Bush’s dis­as­trous pres­i­dency, this dynamic remained the same. Though barely able to com­plete a coher­ent sen­tence, Bush was treated with great def­er­ence, even when he failed to pro­tect the coun­try from the 9/11 attacks and led the nation into an unpro­voked war with Iraq. There were no com­bat­ive inves­ti­ga­tions of Bush like those that sur­rounded Clinton.

Even at the end of Bush’s pres­i­dency – when his poli­cies of dereg­u­la­tion, tax cuts for the rich and mas­sive bud­get deficits com­bined to cre­ate the biggest finan­cial cri­sis since the Great Depres­sion – the pre­vail­ing mes­sage from the Estab­lish­ment was that it was unfair to lay too much blame on Bush.

Shortly after Barack Obama took office in 2009, a Republican/right-wing talk­ing point was to com­plain when any­one took note of the mess that Bush had left behind: “There you go again, blam­ing Bush.”

Get­ting Obama

Imme­di­ately, too, the Repub­li­cans and the Right set to work demo­niz­ing and destroy­ing Obama’s pres­i­dency. Instead of allow­ing the Democ­rats to enact leg­is­la­tion aimed at address­ing the finan­cial and eco­nomic cri­sis, the Sen­ate Repub­li­cans launched fil­i­buster after filibuster.

When Obama and the Democ­rats did push through emer­gency leg­is­la­tion, such as the $787 bil­lion stim­u­lus pack­age, they had to water it down to reach the 60-vote super-majority. The Repub­li­cans and the Right then quickly laid the blame for high unem­ploy­ment on the “failed” stimulus.

There also were waves of pro­pa­ganda pound­ing Obama’s legit­i­macy. The Right’s news media pressed bogus accu­sa­tions that Obama had been born in Kenya and thus was not con­sti­tu­tion­ally eli­gi­ble to be pres­i­dent. He was denounced as a social­ist, a Mus­lim, a fas­cist, an enemy of Israel, and pretty much any other charge that might hit some Amer­i­can hot button.

When Obama wel­comed Amer­i­can stu­dents back to school in 2009, the Right orga­nized against his sim­ple mes­sage – urg­ing young peo­ple to work hard – as if it were some form of total­i­tar­ian mind con­trol. His attempt to address the grow­ing cri­sis in Amer­i­can health care was denounced as tak­ing away free­doms and impos­ing “death panels.”

Soon, bil­lion­aires like oil man David Koch and media mogul Mur­doch were pro­mot­ing a “grass­roots” rebel­lion against Obama called the Tea Party. Activists were show­ing up at pres­i­den­tial speeches with guns and bran­dish­ing weapons at ral­lies near Washington.

The high-decibel dis­rup­tions and the “scream­ing” econ­omy cre­ated the impres­sion of polit­i­cal chaos. Largely ignor­ing the role of the Repub­li­cans, the press faulted Obama for fail­ing to live up to his cam­paign promise to bring greater bipar­ti­san­ship to Washington.

Hear­ing the dis­cord framed that way, many aver­age Amer­i­cans also blamed Obama; many of the President’s sup­port­ers grew demor­al­ized; and, as hap­pened with Allende in Chile, some on the Left turned against Obama for not doing more, faster.

By Novem­ber 2010, the stage was set for a big Repub­li­can come­back. The party swept to vic­tory in the House and fell just short in the Sen­ate. But Con­gress was not the Repub­li­cans’ true goal. What they really want is the White House with all its exec­u­tive powers.

How­ever, fol­low­ing Obama’s suc­cess in killing Osama bin Laden on May 2 and with what is widely regarded as a weak Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial field, the Right’s best hope for regain­ing com­plete con­trol of the U.S. gov­ern­ment in 2012 is to sink the U.S. economy.

Already, the Repub­li­can suc­cess in lim­it­ing the scope of the stim­u­lus pack­age and then label­ing it a fail­ure – com­bined with deep cuts in local, state and fed­eral gov­ern­ment spend­ing – have helped push the econ­omy back to the brink where a double-dip reces­sion is now a seri­ous concern.

Despite these wor­ries – and a warn­ing from Moody’s about a pos­si­ble down­grade on U.S. debt if Con­gress delays action on rais­ing the debt limit – the Repub­li­cans are vow­ing more brinks­man­ship over the debt-limit vote. Before act­ing, they are demand­ing major reduc­tions in gov­ern­ment spend­ing (while refus­ing to raise taxes on the rich).

A Conun­drum

So, Obama and the Democ­rats face another conun­drum. If they slash spend­ing too much, they will fur­ther stall the recov­ery. How­ever, if they refuse to sub­mit to this lat­est round of Repub­li­can black­mail, they risk a debt cri­sis that could have dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quences for the U.S. econ­omy for years – even decades – to come.

Either way, the right-wing media and much of the main­stream press will put the blame on Obama and the Democ­rats. They will be held account­able for fail­ing to govern.

The Repub­li­can pro­pa­ganda machine will tell the Amer­i­can peo­ple that they must throw Obama and the Democ­rats out of office for sta­bil­ity to return. There will be assur­ances about how the “magic of the mar­ket” will bring back the bright days of prosperity.

Of course, the real­ity of a new Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion, espe­cially with a GOP Con­gress, would be the return of the old right-wing nos­trums: more tax cuts for the rich, less reg­u­la­tion of cor­po­ra­tions, more mil­i­tary spend­ing, and more pri­va­ti­za­tion of social programs.

Any bud­get bal­anc­ing will come at the expense of labor rights for union employ­ees and shift­ing the costs for health care onto the backs of the elderly. Yet, all this will be sur­rounded by intense pro­pa­ganda explain­ing the pub­lic pain as a hang­over from mis­guided gov­ern­ment “social engineering.”

There is, of course, the pos­si­bil­ity that the Amer­i­can peo­ple will see through today’s Repub­li­can CIA-style strat­egy of “mak­ing the econ­omy scream.” Amer­i­cans might come to rec­og­nize the role of the pseudo-populist pro­pa­gan­dists on Fox News and talk radio.

Or Repub­li­cans might have sec­ond thoughts about play­ing chicken on the debt limit and run­ning the risk of a global depres­sion. Such a gam­ble could redound against them. And, it’s hard to believe that even their most ardent billionaire-backers would find destruc­tion of their stock port­fo­lios that appealing.

But there can be a momen­tum to mad­ness. We have seen through­out his­tory that events can get out of hand, that thor­oughly pro­pa­gan­dized true believ­ers can truly believe. Some­times, they don’t under­stand they are sim­ply being manip­u­lated for a lesser goal. Once the chaos starts, it is hard to restore order.

That has been another bloody les­son from the CIA’s oper­a­tions in coun­tries around the world. These covert actions can have exces­sive or unin­tended consequences.

Oust­ing Allende turned Chile into a fas­cist dic­ta­tor­ship that sent assas­sins far and wide, includ­ing Wash­ing­ton, D.C. Oust­ing Mossadegh in Iran led to the tyranny of the Shah and ulti­mately to an extreme Islamist back­lash. Oust­ing Arbenz in Guatemala led to the butch­ery of some 200,000 peo­ple and the rise of a narco-state. Such exam­ples can go on and on.

How­ever, these CIA-type tech­niques can be very seduc­tive, both to U.S. pres­i­dents look­ing for a quick fix to some inter­na­tional prob­lem and to a polit­i­cal party try­ing to gain a deci­sive edge for win­ning. These meth­ods can be espe­cially dan­ger­ous when the other side doesn’t orga­nize effec­tively to counter them.

The hard real­ity in the United States today is that the Repub­li­cans and the Right are now fully orga­nized, armed with a potent pro­pa­ganda machine and pos­sess­ing an extra­or­di­nary polit­i­cal will. They are well-positioned to roll the U.S. econ­omy off the cliff and blame the cat­a­stro­phe on Obama.

Indeed, that may be their best hope for win­ning Elec­tion 2012.

“The GOP’s CIA Play­book: Desta­bi­lize Coun­try to Sweep Back into Power” by Robert Parry [Con­sor­tium News]; AlterNet.org; 6/9/2011. [4]

2. Much of the rest of the pro­gram recaps key arti­cles pre­sented in FTR #412 [11]. Nobel Prize win­ning econ­o­mist Paul Krug­man notes that the GOP delib­er­ately ran up enor­mous deficits under George W. Bush, with the intent of using the result­ing fis­cal cri­sis as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the elmi­na­tion of social pro­grams dear to the public.

‘The lunatics are now in charge of the asy­lum.’ So wrote the nor­mally staid Finan­cial Times, tra­di­tion­ally the voice of solid British busi­ness opin­ion, when sur­vey­ing last week’s bill. Indeed, the leg­is­la­tion is dou­bly absurd: the gim­micks used to make an $800-billion-plus tax cut carry an offi­cial price tag of only $320 bil­lion are a joke, yet the cost with­out the gim­micks is so large that the nation can’t pos­si­bly afford it while keep­ing its other promises.

“Stat­ing the Obvi­ous” by Paul Krug­man; The New York Times; 5/27/2003. [8]

3. Mr. Krug­man sug­gests that “a fis­cal train wreck” is indeed intended.

But then maybe that’s the point. The Finan­cial Times sug­gests that ‘more extreme Repub­li­cans’ actu­ally want a fis­cal train wreck: ‘propos­ing to slash fed­eral spend­ing, par­tic­u­larly on social pro­grams, is a tricky elec­toral propo­si­tion, but a fis­cal cri­sis offers the tan­ta­liz­ing prospect of forc­ing such cuts through the back door.’ Good for The Finan­cial Times. It seems that stat­ing the obvi­ous has now, finally, become respectable.

It’s no secret that right-wing ide­o­logues want to abol­ish pro­grams Amer­i­cans take for granted. But not long ago, to sug­gest that the Bush administration’s poli­cies might actu­ally be dri­ven by those ideologues—that the admin­is­tra­tion was delib­er­ately set­ting the coun­try up for a fis­cal cri­sis in which pop­u­lar social pro­grams could be sharply cut—was to be accused of spout­ing con­spir­acy the­o­ries. [Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’s] Yet by push­ing through another huge tax cut in the face of record deficits, the admin­is­tra­tion clearly demon­strates either that it is com­pletely feck­less, or that it actu­ally wants a fis­cal cri­sis. (Or maybe both.)

Here’s one way to look at the sit­u­a­tion: Although you wouldn’t know it from the rhetoric, fed­eral taxes are already his­tor­i­cally low as a share of G.D.P. Once the new round of cuts takes effect, fed­eral taxes will be lower than their aver­age dur­ing the Eisen­hower admin­is­tra­tion. How, then, can the gov­ern­ment pay for Medicare and Medicaid—which didn’t exist in the 1950’s—and Social Secu­rity, which will become far more expen­sive as the pop­u­la­tion ages? (Defense spend­ing has fallen com­pared with the econ­omy, but not that much, and it’s on the rise again.)

The answer is that it can’t. The gov­ern­ment can bor­row to make up the dif­fer­ence as long as investors remain in denial, unable to believe that the world’s only super­power is turn­ing into a banana repub­lic. But at some point bond mar­kets will balk—they won’t lend money to a gov­ern­ment, even that of the United States, if that government’s debt is grow­ing faster than its rev­enues and there is no plau­si­ble story about how the bud­get will even­tu­ally come under control.

At that point, either taxes will go up again, or pro­grams that have become fun­da­men­tal to the Amer­i­can way of life will be gut­ted. We can be sure that the right will do what­ever it takes to pre­serve the Bush tax cuts—right now the admin­is­tra­tion is even skimp­ing on home­land secu­rity to save a few dol­lars here and there. But bal­anc­ing the books with­out tax increases will require deep cuts where the money is: that is, in Med­ic­aid, Medicare and Social Security.

The pain of these ben­e­fit cuts will fall on the mid­dle class and the poor, while the tax cuts over­whelm­ingly favor the rich. For exam­ple, the tax cut passed last week will raise the after-tax income of most peo­ple by less than1 percent—not nearly enough to com­pen­sate them for the loss of ben­e­fits. But peo­ple with incomes over $1 mil­lion per year will, on aver­age, see their after-tax income rise 4.4 per­cent. The Finan­cial Times sug­gests this is delib­er­ate (and I agree): ‘For them,’ it says of those extreme Repub­li­cans, ‘under­min­ing the mul­ti­lat­eral inter­na­tional order is not enough; long-held views on income dis­tri­b­u­tion also require rad­i­cal revision.’

How can this be hap­pen­ing? Most peo­ple, even most lib­er­als, are com­pla­cent. They don’t real­ize how dire the fis­cal out­look really is, and they don’t read what the ide­o­logues write. They imag­ine that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, like the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion, will mod­ify our sys­tem only at the edges, that it won’t destroy the social safety net built up over the past 70 years. But the peo­ple now run­ning Amer­ica aren’t con­ser­v­a­tives: they’re rad­i­cals who want to do away with the social and eco­nomic sys­tem we have, and the fis­cal cri­sis they are con­coct­ing may give them the excuse they need. The Finan­cial Times, it seems, now under­stands what’s going on, but when will the pub­lic wake up?

Idem. [8]

4. High­light­ing the cat­a­clysmic dimen­sions of what the Bush admin­is­tra­tion did, The Finan­cial Times set forth the deadly dimen­sions of the fis­cal impact of the Bush tax cuts. One should not over­look the fact that this infor­ma­tion is from a report com­mis­sioned by the Trea­sury Depart­ment, sup­pressed by the admin­is­tra­tion, and ignored by the US media.

The Bush admin­is­tra­tion has shelved a report com­mis­sioned by the Trea­sury that shows the US cur­rently faces a future of chronic fed­eral bud­get deficits total­ing at least $44,200bn in cur­rent US dol­lars. [Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’s.] The study, the most com­pre­hen­sive assess­ment of how the US gov­ern­ment is at risk of being over­whelmed by the ‘baby boom’ generation’s future health­care and retire­ment costs, was com­mis­sioned by then trea­sury sec­re­tary Paul O’Neill. But the Bush admin­is­tra­tion chose to keep the find­ings out of the annual bud­get report for fis­cal year 2004, pub­lished in Feb­ru­ary, as the White House cam­paigned for a tax-cut pack­age that crit­ics claim will expand future deficits.

The study asserts that sharp tax increases, mas­sive spend­ing cuts or a painful mix of both are unavoid­able if the US is to meet ben­e­fit promises to future gen­er­a­tions. It esti­mates that clos­ing the gap would require the equiv­a­lent of an imme­di­ate and per­ma­nent 66 per cent across-the-board income tax increase. . .

Mr. O’Neill, who was fired last Decem­ber, refused to com­ment. The study’s analy­sis of future deficits dwarfs pre­vi­ous esti­mates of the finan­cial chal­lenge fac­ing Wash­ing­ton It is roughly equiv­a­lent to 10 times the pub­licly held national debt, four years of US eco­nomic out­put or more than 94 per cent of all US house­hold assets. [Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’s.] Alan Greenspan, Fed­eral Reserve chair­man, last week bemoaned what he called Washington’s ‘deaf­en­ing silence about the future crunch.’

The esti­mates reflect the extent to which the annual deficit, the national debt and other widely reported, backward-looking data are becom­ing archaic and mis­lead­ing as mea­sures of the government’s sol­vency. Mr. [Kent] Smet­ters, now a Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia finance pro­fes­sor, said tax cuts were only a frac­tion of the imbal­ance, and that the big­ger prob­lem ‘is the whole [bud­get] lan­guage we’re using.’ Lau­rence Kot­likoff, an expert on long-term bud­get account­ing alleged in a recent Boston Globe edi­to­r­ial that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion sup­pressed the research to ease pas­sage of the tax-cut plan.

“Report Warns of Chronic US Deficits” by Per­onet Despeignes; The Finan­cial Times; 5/29/2003; p. 1.

5. In his last col­umn for The New York Times, Bob Her­bert chron­i­cled the depth of the fail­ure of GOP eco­nomic poli­cies exe­cuted under George W. Bush.

. . . . Income and wealth inequal­ity in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Eco­nomic Pol­icy Insti­tute has reported, the rich­est 10 per­cent of Amer­i­cans received an uncon­scionable 100 per­cent of the aver­age income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of eco­nomic expansion.

Amer­i­cans behave as if this is some­how nor­mal or accept­able. It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income dis­tri­b­u­tion was far more equi­table, with the top 10 per­cent of fam­i­lies account­ing for just a third of aver­age income growth, and the bot­tom 90 per­cent receiv­ing two-thirds. That seems like ancient his­tory now.

The cur­rent mald­is­tri­b­u­tion of wealth is also scan­dalous. In 2009, the rich­est 5 per­cent claimed 63.5 per­cent of the nation’s wealth. The over­whelm­ing major­ity, the bot­tom 80 per­cent, col­lec­tively held just 12.8 per­cent. [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.]

This inequal­ity, in which an enor­mous seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion strug­gles while the for­tu­nate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Down­ward mobil­ity is an ever-shortening fuse lead­ing to pro­found consequences.

A stark exam­ple of the fun­da­men­tal unfair­ness that is now so wide­spread was in The New York Times on Fri­day under the head­line: “G.E.’s Strate­gies Let It Avoid Taxes Alto­gether.” Despite prof­its of $14.2 bil­lion — $5.1 bil­lion from its oper­a­tions in the United States — Gen­eral Elec­tric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year. . . .

“Los­ing Our Way” byb Bob Her­bert; The New York Times; 3/25/2011. [9]

6. The broad­cast presents dis­cus­sion indi­cat­ing that the white work­ing class vot­ing bloc may well hold the key to Obama’s reelection.

. . . .Each elec­tion cycle there occurs a tired rit­ual, in which pun­dits and reporters redis­cover that yes, indeed, there are still a lot of white work­ing class vot­ers in Amer­ica, and they rep­re­sent a seri­ous vul­ner­a­bil­ity for the Democ­rats. But just this once, let’s skip the period where every­one ini­tially ignores this group and cut straight to the chase: There will be a lot of white work­ing class vot­ers show­ing up at the polls next Novem­ber, and the degree to which they sup­port (or aban­don) Pres­i­dent Obama could very well make or break his reelection.

In 2008, dur­ing his otherwise-solid elec­tion vic­tory, Obama lost the white work­ing class vote by 18 points. In 2010, how­ever, things got much worse: Con­gres­sional Democ­rats’ expe­ri­enced a cat­a­strophic 30 point deficit among the same group. While the first num­ber is a fig­ure Obama could live with repeat­ing, the sec­ond could very well prove fatal.

Indeed, if Repub­li­cans can repli­cate that 30 point deficit in 2012—a mar­gin which seems increas­ingly pos­si­ble given the recent bad news about the economy—Obama will have lit­tle to no room for error among his other con­stituen­cies. For exam­ple, even if, as expected, the share of minor­ity vot­ers increases from 26 to around 28 per­cent in the next elec­tion and Obama receives the typ­i­cal 75 per­cent of that vote, while the share of white work­ing class vot­ers declines by another 3 per­cent­age points, a 30 point hole in Obama’s white work­ing class sup­port would mean that the over­all sup­port he needs to win the elec­tion was tee­ter­ing right on the knife’s edge. In such a sce­nario, Obama would have to hold essen­tially all of his white col­lege grad­u­ate sup­port from 2008 (47 per­cent, a his­toric high for Democ­rats) to be assured of victory.

And make no mis­take about it, GOP strat­egy for 2012 will start with the white work­ing class and attempt to drive up sup­port among this group as high as possible. . . .

“The White Work­ing Class: The Group that Will Likely Decide Obama’s Fate” by Ruy Tex­eira; The New Repub­lic; 6/20/2011. [12]

7. Cor­po­rate Amer­ica has turned its back on the U.S. mid­dle class, with results that may well rebound on Obama’s elec­toral chances and play into the Repub­li­can strategy.

The big mys­tery in the United States today s why the job cri­sis is not at the cen­ter of the polit­i­cal and eco­nomic debate. After all, the numbers–and the human tragedies they reflect–could not be bleaker. . . .

. . . Politi­cians and pun­dits on the left have begun warn­ing that this rel­a­tive indif­fer­ence to job­less­ness is worse than a crime, it is a mis­take. In a blog post­ing, for­mer labour sec­re­tary Robert Reich said “the eco­nomic bur­dens of America’s vast mid­dle class may be catch­ing up with the street.” Unless more jobs are cre­ated soon , he warned ‘Amer­i­can con­sumers will not hae enough pur­chas­ing power to buy what the pri­vate sec­tor can produce.’

The real­ity may be even more chill­ing: Per­haps U.S. busi­ness is learn­ing to get by just fine, thanks you, with­out middle-class con­sumers. While that may be good news for chief exec­u­tives and share­hold­ers, it could be the begin­ning of a new and socially wrench­ing polit­i­cal logifc that leaves the great Amer­i­can mid­dle class behind.

Wall Street, which is paid for smarts, not sen­ti­ment, has this fig­ured out. In a news­pa­per inter­view ear­lier this month, Robert Doll, chief equity strate­gist at Black­Rock, the largest money man­ager in the world, pointed out that the for­tunes of U.S. com­pa­nies and the for­tunes of the coun­try as a whole are diverg­ing: ‘The U.S. stock mar­ket and the U.S. econ­omy are increas­ingly dif­fer­ent animals.” . . .

“U.S. Mid­dle Class Becomes a Big Busi­ness After­thought” by Chris­tia Free­land; Toronto Globe and Mail; 6/0/2011.

8. The broad­cast con­cludes by revis­it­ing the work of James Stew­art Mar­tin, the Jus­tice Depart­ment offi­cial charged with help­ing the dis­so­lu­tion of the transna­tional cor­po­rate links that enabled the rise of Hitler and the Nazi war of aggres­sion. One of the most impor­tant aspects of Martin’s elo­quent book is his warn­ing for the future. Hav­ing wit­nessed first­hand how eas­ily the Amer­i­can busi­ness inter­ests were able to sub­vert the eco­nomic restruc­tur­ing of Ger­many, Mar­tin feared for the future of the United States. Not­ing that eco­nomic con­cen­tra­tion in Ger­many had made it pos­si­ble for a small num­ber of pow­er­ful inter­ests to put Hitler in power, Mar­tin noted the same pat­tern of eco­nomic con­cen­tra­tion becom­ing evi­dent in the United States as of the late 1940’s. He offered a stark warn­ing for future gen­er­a­tions of Americans.

. . . .The ecopo­lit­i­cal mas­ters of Ger­many boosted Hitler and his pro­gram into the driver’s seat at a time when the tide in the polit­i­cal fight between the Nazis and the sup­port­ers of the Weimar Repub­lic was swing­ing against the Nazis. All of the men who mat­tered in bank­ing and indus­trial cir­cles could quickly agree on one pro­gram and throw their finan­cial weight behind it. Their sup­port won the elec­tion for the Nazis. We must assume that the same thing is not yet true in the United States. We do have eco­nomic power so con­cen­trated that it would lie in the power of not more than a hun­dred men—if they could agree among themselves—to throw the same kind of com­bined eco­nomic weight behind a sin­gle pro­gram. They have not agreed yet. . . . If the United States should run into seri­ous eco­nomic dif­fi­cul­ties, how­ever, most of the con­di­tions for a re-enactment of the Ger­man drama would already exist on the Amer­i­can stage. The slight dif­fer­ences within the camp of the fra­ter­nity then may be the only real bar­rier to the kind of inte­gra­tion of the finan­cial and indus­trial com­mu­nity behind a sin­gle repres­sive pro­gram, like that which the financiers and indus­tri­al­ists of Ger­many exe­cuted through Hitler. Are we safe in assum­ing that it would take a grave eco­nomic cri­sis to pre­cip­i­tate the dan­gers inher­ent in eco­nomic con­cen­tra­tion? The basic inte­gra­tion of the finan­cial and indus­trial groups in the United States is evi­dent when we look at the increase of con­cen­tra­tion in the past few years. . . .

(All Hon­or­able Men; James Stew­art Mar­tin; Copy­right 1950 [HC]; Lit­tle, Brown & Co.; p. 295.) [13]

9. The last para­graph of Martin’s book, pub­lished in 1950, may well fore­cast what the GOP has in mind for the U.S. As Robert Parry notes above, if the GOP can desta­bi­lize Obama, their “alter­na­tive” pro­gram will sim­ply be more of the same, tax cuts for the rich and spend­ing cuts for every­one and every­thing else. In that this will no more cre­ate jobs than it did dur­ing the Bush years (see the Bob Her­bert col­umn above), the for­mal impo­si­tion of fas­cism to “deal” with the pop­u­lar dis­sat­is­fac­tion stem­ming from the inevitable fail­ure is a pos­si­bil­ity to contemplate.

That impo­si­tion of fas­cism may well stem from some mon­ster ter­ror­ist inci­dent, or per­haps a nat­ural or civic dis­as­ter (Cal­i­for­nia earth­quake or a nuclear power plant meltdown).

. . . The moral of this is not that Ger­many is an inevitable men­ace, but that there are forces in our own coun­try which can make Ger­many a men­ace. And, more impor­tantly, they could cre­ate a men­ace of their own here at home, not through a delib­er­ate plot to bring about a polit­i­cal cat­a­stro­phe but as a calm judg­ment of ‘busi­ness neces­sity.’ The men who would do this are not Nazis, but busi­ness­men; not crim­i­nals, but hon­or­able men.

(Ibid.; p. 300.) [13]

Article printed from Spitfire List: http://spitfirelist.com

URL to article: http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/for-the-record-747-bringin-it-all-back-home/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://spitfirelist.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Richard-Nixon.jpg

[2] Image: http://spitfirelist.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/rove.gif

[3] MP3: http://wfmu.org/listen.m3u?show=40979&archive=70305

[4] very impor­tant arti­cle: http://www.alternet.org/story/151209/the_gop%27s_cia_playbook%3A_destabilize_country_to_sweep_back_into_power/

[5] Robert Parry: http://consortiumnews.com/

[6] Image: http://spitfirelist.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/All-Honorable-Men.jpg

[7] FTR #412: http://spitfirelist.com../for-the-record/ftr-412-the-engineer-intends-to-wreck-the-train/

[8] Paul Krug­man notes: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/27/opinion/stating-the-obvious.html

[9] colum­nist Bob Herbert’s: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/opinion/26herbert.html?_r=1

[10] Neck Deep: http://www.neckdeepbook.com/

[11] FTR #412: http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-412-the-engineer-intends-to-wreck-the-train/

[12] “The White Work­ing Class: The Group that Will Likely Decide Obama’s Fate” by Ruy Tex­eira; The New Repub­lic; 6/20/2011.: http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/90241/obama-election-2012-working-class-kerry

[13] (All Hon­or­able Men; James Stew­art Mar­tin; Copy­right 1950 [HC]; Lit­tle, Brown & Co.; p. 295.): http://spitfirelist.com/books/all-honorable-men/

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