INVISIBLE HANDS DESTROYING THE NATION
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMEbX3K4fK4&feature=channel
Kim Phillips-Fein in Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (2009) exposes that by its very nature the AEI is a fifth column organization intent on wiping out the middle class. It grew out of the post WWII Communist Witch Hunts. Individual corporations such as Lockheed Martin, following in the footsteps of the John Birch Society, started “educational” programs to combat communism in the ranks of their employees. “Whatever communists have gained power there [has] followed bloody purges, slave labor, concentration camps, and ruthless control over every phase of human life,” read a circular distributed to all Lockheed’s employees. (The National Association of Manufacturers commended the program and suggested that other employers followed Lockheed’s example.)
The Free-Market conservatives took the nightmarish fears inspired by anticommunism and turned them against the entire liberal state, making it seem as though the minimum wage and labor unions were about to usher in a new era of political enslavement. No spies were needed, no conscious treachery—the logic of liberalism itself was the threat. They used the shadow of the Communist danger to bolster their case that dismantling the welfare state was a crusade for freedom. Years after McCarthy had been repudiated; they continued to fight for the market using the tropes they had developed when anticommunism was at its zenith.
The American Enterprise Association (AEA), later changed to the American Enterprise Institute in 1962, wanted to appear objective, respectable, and neutral, to issue insightful formal reports by people with impeccable academic credentials, and to get its analyses and studies into the hands of the political elite—politicians, journalist, and editors. It sought to advance a critique of modern Republicanism and the contemporary political scene of the 1950s without being accused of being a mere pawn of business. And it wanted to do this all the while raising money from the business world and building a board of trustees filled with executives from companies such as Coca-Cola, Socony Mobile Oil Company, U.S. Steel, and Eli Lilly. Companies like U.S. Steel bargained with their labor unions; these major industrial companies might not be willing to break openly with the Eisenhower administration or the principles of postwar liberalism. But they also sought to finance the intellectual opposition where they could.
In the late 1950s, the ADA embarked on an ambitious interdisciplinary project on the American labor movement. The underlying assumption was that unions were abridging the freedoms of the nation. The reports sought to encourage the American public to identify labor unions with monopolies, knowing that “the anti-monopoly tradition is one of the most powerful influences in American life.” One 1957 report found that unions did not really raise wages. Another argued that unions received legal privileges comparable only to those exercised by kings. A third insisted that “autocracy” was rising within labor unions. Other AEA-commissioned studies condemned the Tennessee Valley Authority as “neo-feudalism,” rejected federal aid to education, and argued in favor of giving Congress veto power over foreign treaties (this last was a favorite preoccupation of the right during the 1950s, limiting the power of the executive branch to determine foreign policy).
The think tanks, radio stations, magazines, and intellectual organizations that were funded by business contributions during the 1950ss helped to form the infrastructure for the rise of the conservative movement. From the Mont Pelerin Society to the National Review, from Spiritual Mobilization to the American Enterprise Association, from the Foundation for Economic Education to the Minion Forum, they produced the ideas, popularized the language, and built the support for conservative economic politics at the very height of postwar liberalism. Some did better than others. However, all of these organizations relied on the contributions of businessmen, and all of them sought to encourage businessmen to do what they could to fight the power of the welfare state—and, more immediately, the threat of unions. It was only a matter of time before the cultural and intellectual push began to spill over into a world far removed from its abstractions: that of the factory floor. (60+, 86)
NEOCONSERVATIVE DE JAVU~REFIGHTING THE NEW DEAL BATTLES
Michael Kazin in The Populist Persuasion: An American History (1995) quotes Charles J. Tull when he writes, “During the Depression, opponents of the New Deal had argued that the interventionist state—directed by liberal planners and allied with industrial unions—was a giant step toward socialist dictatorship. In 1941, Father Coughlin wrote: “Too many of us do not realize that the Marxists’ greatest victory to date has been won not in Europe nor in Asia but in the City of Washington, D.C.” Although FDR’s wartime leadership enabled his followers to discount them, such accusations surfaced again in the 1944 election. (166)
Newt Gingrich’s denunciations and criticisms of President Obama are basically those of Father Coughlin, i.e. “Obama is the worst president in history etc. Delusion is a wonderful thing in the body politic, but not in its would-be leaders. Moreover, Martin Jacques in When China Rules the World: The End of the Western world and the Birth of a New Global Order (2009) states that “Being an imperial power, however, is a hugely expensive business and, peering into the future, as its relative economic power declines, the United States will not longer be able to sustain the military commitments and military superiority that it presently enjoys..” (8)
HUBRIS AND WAR IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Martin Jacques posits that it was not the banks that precipitated the financial crisis of 2008, but the hubris of the Neocons. Following 9/11, the United States not only saw itself as the sole superpower but attempted to establish a new global role which reflected that pre-eminence. The neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century, established in 1997 by, among others, [Bill Kristol], Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, adopted a statement of principles which articulated the new doctrine and helped prepare the ground for the Bush administration:
As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world’s pre-eminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?
The neoconservatives chose to interpret the world through the prism of the defeat of the Soviet Union and the overwhelming military superiority enjoyed by the United States, rather than in terms of the underlying trend towards economic multiplicity, which was downplayed.
In the post-Cold War era, US military expenditure was almost as great as that of the other nations of the world combined: never in the history of the human race has the military inequality between one nation and all others been so great. The Bush presidency’s foreign policy marked an important shift compared with that of previous administrations: the war on terror became the new imperative, America’s relations with Western Europe were accorded reduced significance, the principle of national sovereignty was denigrated and that of regime-change affirmed, culminating in the invasion of Iraq.
Far from the United States presiding over a reshaping of global affairs, however, it rapidly found itself beleaguered in Iraq and enjoying less global support than at any time since 1945. The exercise of overwhelming military power proved of little effect in Iraq but served to squander the reserves of soft power—in Joseph S. Nye’s words, ‘the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals and polices’—that the United States had accumulated since 1945. Failing to comprehend the significance of deeper economic trends, as well as misreading the situation in Iraq, the Bush administration overestimated American power and thereby overplayed its hand, with the consequence that its policies hand exactly the opposite effect that which had been intended: instead of enhancing the US’s position in the world, Bush’s foreign policy seriously weakened it. The neo-conservative position represented a catastrophic misreading of history.
Military and political power rest on economic strength. As Paul Kennedy argued in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, the ability of nations to exercise and sustain global hegemony has ultimately depended on their productive capacity. The precondition for being a hegemonic power, including the ability or otherwise to preside over a formal or informal empire is economic strength. In the long run at least, it is a merciless measure. Notwithstanding this, imperial powers in decline are almost invariably in denial of the fact. That was the case with Britain from 1918 onwards and, to judge by the behavior of the Bush administration (though perhaps not Obama’s)—which failed to read the runes, preferring to believe that the US was about to rule the world in a new American century when the country was actually in decline and on the eve of a world in which it would find its authority considerable diminished—the Us may well make the same mistake, perhaps on a much grander scale.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129293191
The estimated cost of the Iraq war will turn out to be around $3 trillion. The armed forces have come under high strains as a result of the war [of choice]. Deployments have got steadily longer and redeployments move frequent, retention rate and recruitment standards have fallen, while the army has lost many of its brightest and best, with a remorseless rise in the number of officers choosing to leave at the earliest opportunity. As a result, the United States is, thus already beginning to face the classic problems of imperial overreach.
The United States has ceased to be a major manufacturer or a large-scale exporter of manufactured goods, having steadily ceded that position to East Asia. In recent times it has persistently been living beyond its means: the government has been spending more than it saves, households have been doing likewise, and since 1982, apart from one year, the country has been buying more from foreigners than it sells to them, with a consequent high current account deficit and a growing volume of IOUs. Growing concern on the part of foreign institutions about these deficits led to a steady fall in the value of the dollar until 2008, and this could well be resumed at some point, further threatening the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency and American financial power.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129293195
Moody’s warned in 2008 that the US faced the prospect within a
decade of losing its top-notch triple-A credit rating , first granted
to US government debt when it was assessed in 1917, unless it
took radical action to curb government expenditure. And this was
before the financial meltdown in 2008, which, with the huge
taxpayer-funded government bail-out of the financial sector, will
greatly increase the size of the US national debt. This is not to
suggest that in the short run, the US will be required to reduce its
military expenditure for reasons of financial restraint: indeed,
given the position that the US military occupies in the national
psyche, and the primary emphasis that US foreign policy has
traditionally placed on military power, this seems most unlikely.
Being an imperial power, however, is a hugely expensive business
and, peering into the future, as its relative economic power
declines, the United States will no longer be able to sustain the
military commitments and military superiority that it presently
enjoys. (4-5, 6, 7-8)
WHAT THE BODY POLITICS UNERSTANDS: ON POINT 1930S REDUX ON POINT
Our weekly news roundtable goes behind the headlines.
A television screen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange shows the Federal Reserve interest rate decision, Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2010. (AP)
Fire and flood from Moscow to Iowa to Pakistan this week. And big jitters on Wall Street as economic recovery shudders, globally. What comes next – not clear.
In primary votes around the country, Republicans continued to favor hard-right candidates. Will they sell in the midterms? In Washington, Congress passess$26 billion in aid to gasping states. And White House press secretary Robert Gibbs goes after the “professional left” and its expectations of the President.
All that, plus a new JetBlue exit strategy, in our weekly news roundtable.
Guests:
Michael Crowley, senior correspondent for Time.
Byron York, chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner.
Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst.
You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, or on Facebook.
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
David Biddle
jmac1949
Snowden
libbyliberalnyc
skypixie0
Jimmy Zuma
Salon.com
Comments