The standard history of the Great Depression holds that Herbert Hoover deepened the Depression by not doing enough, that Franklin Roosevelt’s spending improved the situation but that his attempt to balance the budget in 1937 sent unemployment back up to nearly the level of 1932. Then came World War II when all restraints were off and with the end of the war came untrammeled economic progress, with management and labor walking hand in hand under the rainbow of a benign government. Then, depending on how old your history professor is, along came Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, who ruined everything. All that is necessary for the triumph of the Little Man is unrestrained Keynesianism with all dissenters locked away somewhere.
But there is a different way of looking at the story. That it is more realistic than the standard Keynesian myth is irrelevant for the millions of people – bureaucrats, lawyers and the rest of society’s snake oil salesmen – whose livelihood depends on this myth.
Even with the large deficits the Federal government was running, the net debt in the economy – individual, corporate, local, state and federal government – dropped steadily throughout the thirties, freeing up private and local government balance sheets to allow them to borrow more and reinvest. The importance of “deleveraging” is nothing new. Hoover’s first Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, famously argued that the solution to the Great Depression was to “liquidate capital, liquidate industry, liquidate the farmers.”
The result, of course, was that Mellon himself was liquidated and policies were put in place to prop up failure. Deleveraging is still considered as a possible solution in every credit crisis, but while it is always proposed it is always ignored. One of the pre-TARP proposals was for the government to buy up bad debt and to liquidate it over time, allowing banks to create new debt without having to deal with the baggage of old debt. The argument for rejecting that idea was that there was no way to price bad debt, but that is downright silly. You just buy at a high enough price not to bankrupt the banks and a low enough price to keep Uncle Sam from losing his shirt. Then you provide a mechanism for the bank to share in recoveries above that amount. The real reason the idea was rejected is that it would have forced those in the executive suites to show just how bad the stewardship of their institutions had been. Heads would have rolled. TARP, like the President’s stimulus bill, was designed to save jobs, not create any.
The recession of 1937 had more to do with the social legislation of the New Deal – high taxes, social security (which was being taxed but not yet paid out), the Wagner Act which empowered labor unions – stifling the private economy. FDR accused capital of “going on strike” but he had induced the strike. Capital doesn’t go on strike unless it is facing an uncertain future. Today we have the same thing: Obamacare and the raft of regulations being churned out of Washington are big scary unquantified liabilities looming over the economy. Why pour your money into a hole in the ground when you have no idea how deep the hole is?
When World War II broke out, there was a sudden demand for goods of all types. But here was the kicker: people were earning money, but rationing prevented them for spending any of it. The post-war boom resulted from four years of pent-up demand, factories with enough resources to move into products which were in demand and the undeniable fact that the industrial capacity of the rest of the world was bombed flat, creating a foreign demand for American goods (and equally important, a lack of competition domestically).
The effect of these three elements wore off by the early 1970’s leaving Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush to try to muddle through within the paradigm created by FDR. As America lost its supremacy and then its industry, it fell into a position where the old paradigm no longer works. This week, Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard called the Obama Administration “reactionary,” but the President is pushing the policies of the academic, political and media establishments. Reactionary they may be, but they think of themselves as progressive.
These reactionaries are encouraged to think of themselves as progressive since there is not yet a coherent body of ideas coalescing around the opposition. The Tea Party knows that something is very wrong, but they are a mass movement of middle class and working class Americans, the same people who in 1860 and 1930 knew something was terribly wrong with the framework of society, but had no intelligible body of ideas to deal with it. Tax cuts are not a complete public policy.
This is nothing new. When a paradigm has become obsolete, there is no full blown platform of ideas to replace it. Abe Lincoln was lucky to have the platform of the Whig Party which had been held up by the Democrats for twenty years, but even he flailed around with many issues. He was, after all, against emancipation before he was for it. FDR was a famous experimenter, borrowing concepts from Herbert Hoover, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Francis Everett Townsend, Huey Long and any other crank, tyrant or crackpot who had a vaguely attractive idea to flog.
So where are the new ideas going to come from? Despite the lack of a coherent policy, FDR kept the Government Printing Office busy grinding out new laws and regulations. Abe Lincoln had a legislative program which in its ambition and effect was even greater and more important than that of the New Deal.
But both of those Presidents had advantages we don’t have today. Abraham Lincoln and FDR both had advisors who were practical men of affairs. America had not yet strapped itself into the strait jacket of an academic elite coming from academic ivory towers and a business elite which has more in common with postal workers than entrepreneurs. The media was not yet a morass of unthinking scriveners who all say the same thing, but was a vibrant market of competing opinions.
If we are to climb out of the current dead end we find ourselves in, we have to rethink a great many things. New ideas won’t come from the left. All humans have a tendency to confuse self-interest with public interest, but the elites – those who have reached the top of the ladder of the current economic system – have the power to influence the future, which makes their confusion more dangerous than that of the average person. Since the left constitutes the bulk of the current elite, radical ideas will not be coming from them. This is made worse because the current elite, unlike the agricultural interests which dominated before 1860 and the industrial interests which dominated before 1930, have no vested interest in anything but keeping themselves on top. The cotton grower had to protect the environment in order to keep his fields productive, the industrialist had to build a useful product in order to find a market for his goods. The academic, the media and the day trader don’t have anything riding on the long term.
The left controls most of academia and the media and as both of those august institutions strive to prop up the current economic regime, they inevitably betray the neutrality and quest for the truth which is the reason they exist. These istitutions either have to be reformed or replaced.
It’s time to explore whether there are alternate ways to frame society which will keep the best of what we have, but leave behind those elements which benefit some of us to the detriment of everyone else.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
Showing posts with label other. Show all posts
Showing posts with label other. Show all posts
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Friday, September 2, 2011
Straws in the Wind By Thomas F. Berner
Item: I spent last weekend with friends. He is a retired police officer and she has just retired as an environmental scientist for a Midwestern city. She told me that she was glad to have retired because there has suddenly been a mass of regulations issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, none of which will do much for the environment, compliance with which will be very expensive and most of which have a mechanism allowing one to pay a fee and get an exemption.
Comment: It is that last “pay to not play” feature which should raise an eyebrow or two in the media, but doesn’t.
Item: The EPA has been wasting a lot of energy this year trying to get CO2 regulated as a pollutant. The operations of some municipalities and companies apparently cause an excess of it. Now CO2 is the equivalent of oxygen to all plants, so it is hardly a pollutant as we currently think of them. Animals breathe oxygen and breath out CO2 while plants breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen, a classic symbiotic relationship.
Comment: Assuming that the CO2 levels are high enough to worry about, shouldn’t the EPA just mandate the planting of trees to convert the CO2 to oxygen? Of course not. You’re thinking too rationally. The EPA wants all sorts of fees, fines and fiats which will clean nothing up but create a lot of jobs for lawyers.
Item: Meanwhile, in order to argue that climate warming is anthropogenic (i.e., caused by humans instead of occurring naturally), global warming alarmists have to confront paleoclimatology, the study of prior weather patterns. There is abundant evidence that the climate was a lot warmer than it is now. Deep under thick sheets of ice in central Greenland are a number of Norse farming villages. It’s a pretty good bet that humans weren’t responsible for THAT global warming. There weren’t that many of us and we certainly hadn’t invented the internal combustion engine then.
The response of the scientists has been less than honorable. First came the infamous “hockey stick graph” made famous by “An Inconvenient Truth,” the discredited “documentary” produced by Al Gore. In one paper, the global warming enthusiasts relied on the tree ring data of a single tree in Siberia, ignoring contrary data from all the other trees in the surrounding forest, a literal failure to see the forest for the tree. More important, there was a leak of 1000 emails and 3000 other documents – a total of 160 MB of data in computerspeak - from the Climatic Research Unit (the “CRU”) at the University of East Anglia, which The Daily Mail tells us plays “a leading role in compiling UN reports” and has many of the most prominent paleoclimatologists in the world. The University of East Anglia, as well as some of the authors, have acknowledged the accuracy of the leaks.
These documents show a disturbing willingness of leading scientists to destroy the lives of anyone who dissented from their ideology (their methods are too political to give them the dignity of calling their work “science”). They would threaten to withhold data from journals which published dissenting views, they would ruin the reputation of any scientist who published papers which didn’t tow their party line. Even The New York Times, always sycophantic towards leftist thinking, quoted Patrick J. Michaels, a prominent climatologist who was a victim of the CRU hit squad as saying “this shows these are people willing to bend rules and go after other people’s reputations in very serious ways.”
Comment: Perhaps worse than the crime itself was the reaction. Even though global warming researchers, including many implicated in the fraud perpetrated by the CRU have received billions of dollars of government research money, no government entity has even bothered to investigate. Those academic entities who bothered to look into the issue seemed more intent to whitewash the issue than to deal with it seriously. And, of course, The New York Times spent most of the small space it devoted to the story tut-tutting that gentlemen don’t read other peoples’ mail. Berthold Brecht’s great play “Galileo” portrays an establishment so protective of the status quo that it is willing to block all dissenting opinions. That provides a perfect analogy to the state of the intellect in modern establishment America.
Item: Of course, there was something always a bit suspicious about a movement which pushes the Kyoto Treaty which imposed economically crippling restrictions on developed countries while exempting the world’s worst polluters in their entirety; a movement which tells us that the sky is falling even as it books annual conferences, on the taxpayers bill, to carbon footprint intensive destinations like Bali and Rio de Janeiro. It is common to find even moderate and normally sensible commentators who argue that since the scientists believe one thing, we are forbidden to disagree and must also ignore scientists with equal credentials who disagree. This is a movement that doesn’t search for the truth, but claims to have found it as a Revealed Truth and damns anyone who asks to look behind the curtain.
Comment: This is not, of course, a conspiracy. We are, rather, in one of those intellectual air pockets the world finds itself every once in a while in which discovery and innovation are a threat to the established order and any failure of policy results from our not believing hard enough – we all must clap loud enough to bring Tinkerbell back to life. There are four toxic intellectual flaws which have created the mess we’re in, not just environmentally, but in all forms of intellectual endeavor:
Stupidity – as Abe Lincoln said “it’s better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you’re dumb than to open it and prove it to them.” Although most believers of global warming have no knowledge of its source, they know that if they blame America, no one will fault them, whereas alternates will put you on the hot seat. There is, therefore, an incentive to tow the party line. Original thinking always involves some flaws in the argument, rightfully exposing one to criticism. Hiding in the pack with other believers of a flawed theory lets you escape responsibility for your own beliefs.
Arrogance – if you believe what everyone else believes, you can hide behind others even while you take credit for their ideas. This breeds arrogance and arrogance shuts down the innovative part of the intellect: you already know the truth, so there is nothing more to learn. Al Gore believes that he is so important to the environmental fate of the world that he is entitled to fly around the world on private jets despite the much higher carbon footprint than commercial air travel. This creates a lack of empathy for others that is startling. I met a former Secret Service Agent who was assigned to protect Mr. Gore when he was Vice President. One day, Mr. Gore was criticizing his son’s poor grades in front of the Agent and, pointing to the Agent, said “if you don’t get your grades up, you’ll end up just like this guy!”
Self-interest – not coincidently, Al Gore is the first environmental billionaire and those scientists who silence dissent do so because they count on billions of dollars in grants from governments, charities and people with more dollars than sense. There is a conflict which cripples rational thinking.
Self-hatred – you can never overlook the power of self-hatred, which usually takes the form of hatred for your culture and your heritage. The other day, I met a nice, conservative lady in church who told me very matter-of-factly that “before the white man came to America” (she was white herself, of English descent), rattlesnakes didn’t bite, that they would drop by Native American village and sort of hang out and the Native Americans would talk to them. Look around you and you’ll find this self-hatred to take many forms and to be found among all classes and races in the world (there were even a few Jews in the Nazi Party, which has to be the ultimate example of self-hatred). It is certainly evident in the environmental movement.
Comment: does this mean that global warming is a fraud? No, it does not. Although the data has an annoying habit of moving around a lot – it is constantly rising! no, says the same institution later, it has stayed at current levels since the late 90s; it has risen to a certain level, says someone, whoops! they say later, the data was off by 40% - and even though I am not a scientist, I am willing to attest that the weather SEEMS to be behaving differently than when I was a child. However, what is clear is that the toxic intellectual flaws I mention above have rendered much of the raw data and all of the hype dubious. The answer is not to write off the concept, but to find some honorable scientists to study the issue, real scientists, not just with degrees behind their name, but with the integrity to lead them where their research takes them.
Item: And it looks like this has already been done. The Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark has long argued that changes in the sun, such as sunspots, have caused the bulk of climate change in the world. In a project only recently finished, working under the auspices of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Dr. Svensmark and 63 scientists from 17 European and American institutes built a chamber which modeled the effect of the sun on the earth’s atmosphere and proved that cosmic rays control the atmosphere and that the suns magnetic fields control the amount of cosmic rays hitting the earth. This is a major turning point in the science of global warming, although we can expect powerful forces suffering from the four toxic intellectual flaws to be arrayed against it.
Sadly, you might include cowardice as a fifth intellectual flaw, a flaw which the Director General of CERN shares. It was the Director General who ordered Dr. Svensmark not to interpret the results or speak publicly about the project, not because there is anything wrong with the results, but because the results “would go immediately into the highly political arena of climate change debate.” As if that is a reason to suppress an important scientific breakthrough: we might further the progress of a debate and - apocalypse now! – actually change the premises on which our faulty knowledge is based!
When moral courage is lacking, the truth takes a longer time to break through.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
Comment: It is that last “pay to not play” feature which should raise an eyebrow or two in the media, but doesn’t.
Item: The EPA has been wasting a lot of energy this year trying to get CO2 regulated as a pollutant. The operations of some municipalities and companies apparently cause an excess of it. Now CO2 is the equivalent of oxygen to all plants, so it is hardly a pollutant as we currently think of them. Animals breathe oxygen and breath out CO2 while plants breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen, a classic symbiotic relationship.
Comment: Assuming that the CO2 levels are high enough to worry about, shouldn’t the EPA just mandate the planting of trees to convert the CO2 to oxygen? Of course not. You’re thinking too rationally. The EPA wants all sorts of fees, fines and fiats which will clean nothing up but create a lot of jobs for lawyers.
Item: Meanwhile, in order to argue that climate warming is anthropogenic (i.e., caused by humans instead of occurring naturally), global warming alarmists have to confront paleoclimatology, the study of prior weather patterns. There is abundant evidence that the climate was a lot warmer than it is now. Deep under thick sheets of ice in central Greenland are a number of Norse farming villages. It’s a pretty good bet that humans weren’t responsible for THAT global warming. There weren’t that many of us and we certainly hadn’t invented the internal combustion engine then.
The response of the scientists has been less than honorable. First came the infamous “hockey stick graph” made famous by “An Inconvenient Truth,” the discredited “documentary” produced by Al Gore. In one paper, the global warming enthusiasts relied on the tree ring data of a single tree in Siberia, ignoring contrary data from all the other trees in the surrounding forest, a literal failure to see the forest for the tree. More important, there was a leak of 1000 emails and 3000 other documents – a total of 160 MB of data in computerspeak - from the Climatic Research Unit (the “CRU”) at the University of East Anglia, which The Daily Mail tells us plays “a leading role in compiling UN reports” and has many of the most prominent paleoclimatologists in the world. The University of East Anglia, as well as some of the authors, have acknowledged the accuracy of the leaks.
These documents show a disturbing willingness of leading scientists to destroy the lives of anyone who dissented from their ideology (their methods are too political to give them the dignity of calling their work “science”). They would threaten to withhold data from journals which published dissenting views, they would ruin the reputation of any scientist who published papers which didn’t tow their party line. Even The New York Times, always sycophantic towards leftist thinking, quoted Patrick J. Michaels, a prominent climatologist who was a victim of the CRU hit squad as saying “this shows these are people willing to bend rules and go after other people’s reputations in very serious ways.”
Comment: Perhaps worse than the crime itself was the reaction. Even though global warming researchers, including many implicated in the fraud perpetrated by the CRU have received billions of dollars of government research money, no government entity has even bothered to investigate. Those academic entities who bothered to look into the issue seemed more intent to whitewash the issue than to deal with it seriously. And, of course, The New York Times spent most of the small space it devoted to the story tut-tutting that gentlemen don’t read other peoples’ mail. Berthold Brecht’s great play “Galileo” portrays an establishment so protective of the status quo that it is willing to block all dissenting opinions. That provides a perfect analogy to the state of the intellect in modern establishment America.
Item: Of course, there was something always a bit suspicious about a movement which pushes the Kyoto Treaty which imposed economically crippling restrictions on developed countries while exempting the world’s worst polluters in their entirety; a movement which tells us that the sky is falling even as it books annual conferences, on the taxpayers bill, to carbon footprint intensive destinations like Bali and Rio de Janeiro. It is common to find even moderate and normally sensible commentators who argue that since the scientists believe one thing, we are forbidden to disagree and must also ignore scientists with equal credentials who disagree. This is a movement that doesn’t search for the truth, but claims to have found it as a Revealed Truth and damns anyone who asks to look behind the curtain.
Comment: This is not, of course, a conspiracy. We are, rather, in one of those intellectual air pockets the world finds itself every once in a while in which discovery and innovation are a threat to the established order and any failure of policy results from our not believing hard enough – we all must clap loud enough to bring Tinkerbell back to life. There are four toxic intellectual flaws which have created the mess we’re in, not just environmentally, but in all forms of intellectual endeavor:
Stupidity – as Abe Lincoln said “it’s better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you’re dumb than to open it and prove it to them.” Although most believers of global warming have no knowledge of its source, they know that if they blame America, no one will fault them, whereas alternates will put you on the hot seat. There is, therefore, an incentive to tow the party line. Original thinking always involves some flaws in the argument, rightfully exposing one to criticism. Hiding in the pack with other believers of a flawed theory lets you escape responsibility for your own beliefs.
Arrogance – if you believe what everyone else believes, you can hide behind others even while you take credit for their ideas. This breeds arrogance and arrogance shuts down the innovative part of the intellect: you already know the truth, so there is nothing more to learn. Al Gore believes that he is so important to the environmental fate of the world that he is entitled to fly around the world on private jets despite the much higher carbon footprint than commercial air travel. This creates a lack of empathy for others that is startling. I met a former Secret Service Agent who was assigned to protect Mr. Gore when he was Vice President. One day, Mr. Gore was criticizing his son’s poor grades in front of the Agent and, pointing to the Agent, said “if you don’t get your grades up, you’ll end up just like this guy!”
Self-interest – not coincidently, Al Gore is the first environmental billionaire and those scientists who silence dissent do so because they count on billions of dollars in grants from governments, charities and people with more dollars than sense. There is a conflict which cripples rational thinking.
Self-hatred – you can never overlook the power of self-hatred, which usually takes the form of hatred for your culture and your heritage. The other day, I met a nice, conservative lady in church who told me very matter-of-factly that “before the white man came to America” (she was white herself, of English descent), rattlesnakes didn’t bite, that they would drop by Native American village and sort of hang out and the Native Americans would talk to them. Look around you and you’ll find this self-hatred to take many forms and to be found among all classes and races in the world (there were even a few Jews in the Nazi Party, which has to be the ultimate example of self-hatred). It is certainly evident in the environmental movement.
Comment: does this mean that global warming is a fraud? No, it does not. Although the data has an annoying habit of moving around a lot – it is constantly rising! no, says the same institution later, it has stayed at current levels since the late 90s; it has risen to a certain level, says someone, whoops! they say later, the data was off by 40% - and even though I am not a scientist, I am willing to attest that the weather SEEMS to be behaving differently than when I was a child. However, what is clear is that the toxic intellectual flaws I mention above have rendered much of the raw data and all of the hype dubious. The answer is not to write off the concept, but to find some honorable scientists to study the issue, real scientists, not just with degrees behind their name, but with the integrity to lead them where their research takes them.
Item: And it looks like this has already been done. The Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark has long argued that changes in the sun, such as sunspots, have caused the bulk of climate change in the world. In a project only recently finished, working under the auspices of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Dr. Svensmark and 63 scientists from 17 European and American institutes built a chamber which modeled the effect of the sun on the earth’s atmosphere and proved that cosmic rays control the atmosphere and that the suns magnetic fields control the amount of cosmic rays hitting the earth. This is a major turning point in the science of global warming, although we can expect powerful forces suffering from the four toxic intellectual flaws to be arrayed against it.
Sadly, you might include cowardice as a fifth intellectual flaw, a flaw which the Director General of CERN shares. It was the Director General who ordered Dr. Svensmark not to interpret the results or speak publicly about the project, not because there is anything wrong with the results, but because the results “would go immediately into the highly political arena of climate change debate.” As if that is a reason to suppress an important scientific breakthrough: we might further the progress of a debate and - apocalypse now! – actually change the premises on which our faulty knowledge is based!
When moral courage is lacking, the truth takes a longer time to break through.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
Friday, August 12, 2011
Who Defends Society? By Thomas F. Berner
The pictures out of London this week were startling. The cityscapes with a dozen fires raging in the background reminded one of the famous pictures of the Blitz, only this time, the villains weren’t from a foreign enemy, but from people within a society which had turned against itself. The photos from World War II were inspiring, calling to mind the defiance of evil which led the British peoples to victory over a powerful foe. The pictures this week are demoralizing, symbolizing as they do a society that has collapsed in on itself.
Worse yet were the remarks of elite commentators sitting in their lush broadcasting studios or their lavish offices in academic settings. This was all caused, they said, because the wealth of London wasn’t being equally parceled out. But the wealth of society has never been equally parceled out and the implication of their remarks was to excuse such behavior, because in modern Western parlance, a moral free “explanation” amounts to a justification.
On the radio, I heard a Labor MP attack the riots with heartfelt passion. The rioters, he said, were not just burning down chain stores; they were burning down small shops owned by their neighbors. But if a public official believes it to be a greater crime to burn down a local store than it is to burn down a chain store, then society has already lost. Criminal destruction is criminal destruction and if you discriminate against the victims, you have condoned the destruction.
On the internet, you can find a clip from a British television show where the Deputy Labor Party leader is debating the Conservative Education Minister, fatuously accusing him of creating the riot because budget restraints required him to cut back on tuition assistance. Although the Education Minister handled himself well, what can you say to a public official who seriously thinks that arsonists should be placated with subsidized college education or that someone so debased as to burn his own neighborhood belongs in college in the first place?
Who defends society these days? Who puts the interest of the nation at large over the desires of the special interests? The answer is damn few.
Everyone talks about the rights of citizenship, but no one talks about the duties and responsibilities. Republicans and Democrats don’t talk duties. They dangle competing carrots: do you want to keep more of your money by paying less taxes or do you want more goodies paid for by the “millionaires and billionaires” making more than $200,000 a year.
Both of these positions are a crock. For the Republicans, tax cuts are a declining issue. You can only reduce taxes so much and since only 50% of the tax paying public pays any taxes at all, that issue has been pretty much run into the ground. And that was before the monstrously wasteful boondoggle of a “stimulus package” made all future tax cuts impossible. Not that higher taxes will make the “rich” pay more, it will only increase their use of tax dodges and loopholes.
And the sort of tax increases the Democratic Party will tolerate anyway are modest: two and three percentage increases with plenty of new tax loopholes to exploit, as the tax hikes were under Bill Clinton. Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts just made it safe for the rich to be Democrats, who now rail against the “rich” even while they dominate that demographic. Obama outspent John McCain by an enormous amount in the 2008 elections and will probably outspend the GOP in 2012 as well. He carried 19 of the 20 richest Congressional Districts in the country. And why not? Not many of the “rich” these days have payrolls to meet or regulations to comply with. Today’s rich are the trial lawyers, the quick buck artists on Wall Street, the Hollywood types. Why not be a Democrat? There are always favors the government will grant you and regulations just reduce the amount of competition you will have to cope with. “Taxes are for little people,” to quote that late, great Democrat, Leona Helmsley.
But if the Republicans are fighting the other sides’ battle for them, the Democrats are just cynical. If they were really concerned with society at large, they would want to get the maximum bang for the tax buck. If that were the case, they wouldn’t have blocked Republican attempts to combat Medicare fraud in the recent debt ceiling Kabuki dance. They would be as outraged as Republicans are that 50% of all foreign aid money never leaves Washington, D.C., getting skimmed off by a handful of corporations run by retired government officials who get rich by taking the money from starving third world children. There is not enough money in all of the portfolios of all of the “millionaires and billionaires” in the country that would get us out of the jam they have put us in.
Like those “scientists” so concerned about global warming that they’re willing to run up an enormous carbon footprint spending the taxpayers’ money to fly to Bali for a conference cum vacation, the special interests have corrupted national discourse to such a degree that they confuse their own interests with the country’s. They hide behind the image of a unified society, even as they divide it in order to gain wealth.
We have fractured as a society because no one in authority wants to stand up for society at large. There are no Americans any more, we are all hyphenated Americans because that is how politicians, academics and the media choose to define us. Society is just some monolith which we are supposed to oppose.
But many of us don’t oppose it, because, whatever its flaws, the alternative – no unity at all – is far worse. This is the reason, not some sort of homophobia, why there is so much opposition to gay marriage or to gays openly serving in the military. Gayness has little to do with it. The military and the institution of marriage were two of the last remnants of a unified society, where the concept means the same thing to everyone in society and where everyone is subject to the same rules.
If you were married, you were subject to the same rules as everyone else, rich or poor, black or white. Not anymore. And gays have always served in the military, but they have always submitted to the concept embodied in “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Now you aren’t going to be a Marine, you’ll be a “gay Marine.” What is the damage with that? Maybe not much, maybe a lot, as a large majority of front line Marines thought in the same poll President Obama used to eliminate the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. We won’t know for quite some time. But with both gay marriage and gays openly in the military, there are two more element of unity which will disappear in the country, one more area in which an adjective will have to be added to the description of who you are.
And at some point, we will begin to look like the Austrian - Hungarian Empire, where your ethnic identity or your aristocratic heritage or some other form of distinguishing characteristic took precedence over your country.
That’s when the fracturing begins in earnest.
That’s when mobs take to the streets.
That’s when overeducated fools look for explanations and excuses.
And that’s when society is fully and finally dead.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
Worse yet were the remarks of elite commentators sitting in their lush broadcasting studios or their lavish offices in academic settings. This was all caused, they said, because the wealth of London wasn’t being equally parceled out. But the wealth of society has never been equally parceled out and the implication of their remarks was to excuse such behavior, because in modern Western parlance, a moral free “explanation” amounts to a justification.
On the radio, I heard a Labor MP attack the riots with heartfelt passion. The rioters, he said, were not just burning down chain stores; they were burning down small shops owned by their neighbors. But if a public official believes it to be a greater crime to burn down a local store than it is to burn down a chain store, then society has already lost. Criminal destruction is criminal destruction and if you discriminate against the victims, you have condoned the destruction.
On the internet, you can find a clip from a British television show where the Deputy Labor Party leader is debating the Conservative Education Minister, fatuously accusing him of creating the riot because budget restraints required him to cut back on tuition assistance. Although the Education Minister handled himself well, what can you say to a public official who seriously thinks that arsonists should be placated with subsidized college education or that someone so debased as to burn his own neighborhood belongs in college in the first place?
Who defends society these days? Who puts the interest of the nation at large over the desires of the special interests? The answer is damn few.
Everyone talks about the rights of citizenship, but no one talks about the duties and responsibilities. Republicans and Democrats don’t talk duties. They dangle competing carrots: do you want to keep more of your money by paying less taxes or do you want more goodies paid for by the “millionaires and billionaires” making more than $200,000 a year.
Both of these positions are a crock. For the Republicans, tax cuts are a declining issue. You can only reduce taxes so much and since only 50% of the tax paying public pays any taxes at all, that issue has been pretty much run into the ground. And that was before the monstrously wasteful boondoggle of a “stimulus package” made all future tax cuts impossible. Not that higher taxes will make the “rich” pay more, it will only increase their use of tax dodges and loopholes.
And the sort of tax increases the Democratic Party will tolerate anyway are modest: two and three percentage increases with plenty of new tax loopholes to exploit, as the tax hikes were under Bill Clinton. Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts just made it safe for the rich to be Democrats, who now rail against the “rich” even while they dominate that demographic. Obama outspent John McCain by an enormous amount in the 2008 elections and will probably outspend the GOP in 2012 as well. He carried 19 of the 20 richest Congressional Districts in the country. And why not? Not many of the “rich” these days have payrolls to meet or regulations to comply with. Today’s rich are the trial lawyers, the quick buck artists on Wall Street, the Hollywood types. Why not be a Democrat? There are always favors the government will grant you and regulations just reduce the amount of competition you will have to cope with. “Taxes are for little people,” to quote that late, great Democrat, Leona Helmsley.
But if the Republicans are fighting the other sides’ battle for them, the Democrats are just cynical. If they were really concerned with society at large, they would want to get the maximum bang for the tax buck. If that were the case, they wouldn’t have blocked Republican attempts to combat Medicare fraud in the recent debt ceiling Kabuki dance. They would be as outraged as Republicans are that 50% of all foreign aid money never leaves Washington, D.C., getting skimmed off by a handful of corporations run by retired government officials who get rich by taking the money from starving third world children. There is not enough money in all of the portfolios of all of the “millionaires and billionaires” in the country that would get us out of the jam they have put us in.
Like those “scientists” so concerned about global warming that they’re willing to run up an enormous carbon footprint spending the taxpayers’ money to fly to Bali for a conference cum vacation, the special interests have corrupted national discourse to such a degree that they confuse their own interests with the country’s. They hide behind the image of a unified society, even as they divide it in order to gain wealth.
We have fractured as a society because no one in authority wants to stand up for society at large. There are no Americans any more, we are all hyphenated Americans because that is how politicians, academics and the media choose to define us. Society is just some monolith which we are supposed to oppose.
But many of us don’t oppose it, because, whatever its flaws, the alternative – no unity at all – is far worse. This is the reason, not some sort of homophobia, why there is so much opposition to gay marriage or to gays openly serving in the military. Gayness has little to do with it. The military and the institution of marriage were two of the last remnants of a unified society, where the concept means the same thing to everyone in society and where everyone is subject to the same rules.
If you were married, you were subject to the same rules as everyone else, rich or poor, black or white. Not anymore. And gays have always served in the military, but they have always submitted to the concept embodied in “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Now you aren’t going to be a Marine, you’ll be a “gay Marine.” What is the damage with that? Maybe not much, maybe a lot, as a large majority of front line Marines thought in the same poll President Obama used to eliminate the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. We won’t know for quite some time. But with both gay marriage and gays openly in the military, there are two more element of unity which will disappear in the country, one more area in which an adjective will have to be added to the description of who you are.
And at some point, we will begin to look like the Austrian - Hungarian Empire, where your ethnic identity or your aristocratic heritage or some other form of distinguishing characteristic took precedence over your country.
That’s when the fracturing begins in earnest.
That’s when mobs take to the streets.
That’s when overeducated fools look for explanations and excuses.
And that’s when society is fully and finally dead.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
Friday, August 5, 2011
Reputations Lost and Found: Richard Nixon by Thomas F. Berner
History has a habit of changing its opinion of people, not very quickly – it turns more slowly than a battleship in a narrow strait – but all the more interesting for that. Settled wisdom on historical characters is often wrong, because they are seen through the filter of propaganda, false memories and irrelevant prejudice. These vanish only as distance replaces memories. Then reputations change.
For instance, there have only been five US Presidents since President Lincoln who have been seriously concerned with civil rights: Grant, Harding, Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Nixon. All of them left office with low ratings among academicians and for many years afterwards, historians have dutifully kept them in the gutter when it was time to draw up their annual ratings of the good, the bad and the ugly Presidents.
Yet, strangely, one by one, these five Presidents have begun to rise through the ranks years after they have left office. Truman was first, rising in polls of historians from a low rating to “Near Great” status beginning in the early 1970s. Since the mid-1990’s, President Grant has risen in polls from the very bottom to the midranks of Presidents and in a recent book of essays ( Profiles in Leadership, edited by Walter Isaacson), the leftwing (but scrupulously honest and always valuable) Sean Wilentz makes a very strong case that Grant belongs near the top of the list of great Presidents.
I believe that Richard Nixon’s turn will be next. When Nixon took office, his two predecessors had bequeathed to him the weakest hand of any President since Abraham Lincoln. The country was riven by riots, a divisive war and an economy already heading for the cellar. The USSR was out to exploit the weaknesses it saw and the media began to believe for the first time in American history that being patriotic was a crime against the trade of journalism.
Somehow, in the course of his six years in office, Richard Nixon stabilized events. He ended the war and if it hadn’t been for the act of Congress denying it ammunition, South Vietnam would have had a good chance of surviving. Nixon improved relations with the Communist world in a manner that set the stage for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of China. America’s cities were no longer in an uproar.
Neither were the campuses. Nixon instinctively knew something about the Baby Boomers that very few people in power did: they weren’t against the war by and large, they were just too self involved to fight in it. I entered the University of Wisconsin – Madison in the fall of 1972. That spring, I visited the campus the day after a demonstration of close to 10,000 students. I met a friend, an apolitical sort who was gushing about how much fun anti-war demonstrations are. You meet all sorts of chicks, he told me, and the cops are cool: they ask if you want some tear gas so that you can say you were gassed. That summer, I turned 18 and got my draft card, which became obsolete almost immediately as President Nixon ended the draft. When I returned to Madison in the fall, the war was still being fought, but without the draft, the Boomers didn’t care. The only anti-war demonstration I saw consisted of about 25 hippies dragging their banners behind them.
But President Nixon’s successes also go way beyond those he is credited with. For some reason, his most significant successes have been downplayed by both allies and enemies alike. While liberals like Joan Hoff and Tom Wicker have grudgingly conceded that in the realm of civil rights, he was “One of Us” (to borrow Wicker’s phrase), in some respects, Richard Nixon’s achievements in the area of civil rights exceeded those of any other President. President Johnson obtained the enabling legislation and judicial orders to force the integration of schools in the South, but true to form, he left the implementation to his successor, expecting the sort of warfare that plagued South Boston a few years later. Instead, Nixon, exploiting the South’s concern about the ravaged cities of the North and the collapse of law and order, quietly went about integrating Southern schools with a minimum of fuss, combining racial equality with rhetoric of conservative values (“watch what we do, not what we say” he told insiders), thus not only peacefully integrating the schools, but delivering the South to the Republican Party for good.
Today, race relations are better in the South than in the North, where liberals pretend to care, but don’t. A prominent liberal law firm was sued for race discrimination awhile back and its office manager’s defense was that they didn’t discriminate because they had plenty of blacks in the mailroom. Meanwhile, the brightest lights on the Republican right are a black Congressman and an Hispanic Senator, both from the State of Florida. Nixon, who was always sympathetic to civil rights can be credited with that.
Another major achievement of President Nixon (usually handled in a footnote even by those historians who treat him fairly, such as Mark Feeney in his insightful Nixon at the Movies) is his actions during the Yom Kippur War where he single-handedly saved Israel from defeat by ordering a massive airlift of munitions. President Nixon was under fire over Watergate in the fall of 1973 and could have used that as an excuse to abandon Israel. Nixon was aware that the Arab states would throw the country into recession with an oil embargo if he acted. But act he did, stripping the U.S.Army of regiments of armor and equipment to ship it to Israel. He fought against the military who understandably didn’t want to see their own forces denuded. He fought against the State Department and other government bureaucracies who favored Islamic states. He fought the Democrats who accused him of staging a coup d’état. He even fought his own Administration (“Get off your fat ass and get those planes in the air, Henry,” Feeney quotes Nixon as telling Henry Kissinger.) It is fair to say that if it weren’t for Nixon, there would have been no Camp David Accords; there may not even have been an Israel.
Even on his economic policy, which admittedly failed, he managed to discredit Keynesian economics for thirty years. He did this by following the leading liberal advice of the day. Abandoning the gold standard, imposing wage and price controls, he gave the left what it wanted and when what it wanted proved to be a bust, they preferred to blame him instead of their theories. But Nixon won the long war: today only the robber barons and their enablers on the left – politicians, public unions, professors and the press – push for Keynesian solutions, antagonizing the rest of us (for good reason, given the appalling track record of those solutions).
Ah, but there was Watergate, historians will tell you. Shortly after Watergate, when William Safire documented Democratic crimes in his It Didn’t Start with Watergate, the standard response became “Ah, but Nixon got caught.” Well, of course, it is always easy to get caught when the media is gunning for you and easy to escape when they aren’t. But in the curious amnesia that strikes liberal historians, the break-ins, buggings and harassments ordered by Herbert Hoover, FDR, JFK and LBJ are forgotten, all of which are arguably worse than Watergate since they used government officials to commit the crimes (the Office of Naval Intelligence in the case of Hoover and the FBI and the IRS in the case of the others). Today historians would want you to believe that Nixon alone committed these sort of acts.
When Nixon told David Frost “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal,” he was being sincere. He was simply stating what had become the de facto Constitutional powers of the Presidency. Every President in his adult life had engaged in nefarious activities without damaging their reputations (Truman and Ike didn’t spy on their fellow citizens – not the innocent ones anyway – but they engaged in overseas activities of a questionable nature). In 1971, we were in the midst of a war and the burgling and the bugging were not designed to provide bedroom reading for him, the way JFK’s did. Rather they were designed to find out who was leaking secrets that were killing American soldiers.
Nor has anything changed on the left wing of American politics since 1974. Since Watergate, President Clinton’s sale of military secrets to China in exchange for campaign contributions (let alone his own bugging of Newt Gingrich) were treated with a “boys will be boys” attitude on the left and President Obama’s distribution of healthcare waivers to supporters don’t even raise an eyebrow on the collective face of the media. We know now that “Deep Throat,” who brought Nixon down, was Mark Felt, the senior career officer at the FBI who was angry that he wasn’t named Director because Nixon, worried that the Agency had become the “rouge elephant” that the Democrats claimed it to be, wanted to create civilian oversight over its activities. If Nixon had been a Democrat, all else (China, the end of the war, etc.) being equal: The New York Times would have argued that he had been toppled by a coup d’état.
Somehow, Nixon stands alone among historians as the able politician with a dark side, as the tragic figure with a “paranoid” nature. But something is wrong with that idea. Although he won the most votes (and even more of the legitimate ones) in 1960, he never challenged the outcome of the election, ordering his aides to cease all opposition to the fraudulent election results. The clear theft of the electoral votes of Illinois, Missouri and Texas, which would have given him the election, could have been challenged, but he said “You don’t steal the Presidency of the United States,” giving JFK the honeymoon with the country which he promptly squandered with the Bay of Pigs, the Vienna Summit and the Berlin Wall. And in 1974, instead of fighting his impeachment, he resigned rather than put the country through another protracted battle.
But what really proves his mettle was that, at the height of the anti-war demonstrations in 1970, he slipped out of the White House, alone except for a single (unarmed) aide and mingled with the demonstrators who were pledging to kill him. He had a long conversation with students near the Washington Monument while the Secret Service frantically ran around the White House trying to locate him. There was no precedent for this. When Martin Luther King held a far friendlier rally in Washington, JFK hid in the Oval Office and pretended not to be home. When President Obama has his Town Hall Meetings, all the riff-raff (i.e. anyone who doesn’t agree with him) are screened out. The only precedent for Nixon’s act that comes to mind is Abraham Lincoln’s carriage ride through Richmond in 1865, and even there, Honest Abe was accompanied by a troop of U.S. Cavalry.
Nixon wasn’t a paranoid, he was a populist, together with Harry Truman the only legitimate populist President in the Twentieth Century. That rankled the left which drew its own paranoid conclusions about him, launching an increasingly irrational element into liberal politics which have chased an increasing percentage of the population to the right. “I gave them a sword,” Nixon told Frost, but it was really a matter of the Democrats giving it to the right wing of the Republican Party. Nixon was a liberal, with a raft of environmental acts to add to his other achievements, and by taking him down, the Democrats allowed the Republican right to abandon him, paving the way for Ronald Reagan. Liberal Republicanism ceased to exist because of Watergate. By contrast, when Clinton’s crimes became too much to ignore and the Republicans launched an impeachment, the Democrats carefully steered the controversy away from his real high crimes and misdemeanors to the more manageable Lewinsky affair. It is because of the sheep-like behavior of Democrats in Congress that President Obama is floundering today.
The reason Nixon fell has nothing to do with any act of his, but with the blunders of his predecessors which pulled us into Vietnam. The coup against the Ngo Dinh Diem sponsored by JFK in 1963 made our involvement in the Vietnam War inevitable and probably made our defeat there inevitable as well. By the time Nixon took office, we had become such a polarized country that, by comparison, today’s contretemps seem like a picnic. The country was more divided in 1968 than at any time since the Civil War, maybe more so, since no one clarified the battlelines by seceding in 1968. Nixon’s theme was Bring Us Together, based on a little girl’s placard he spotted while campaigning, and that was his goal.
He ended the war but the bitterness and the irrational hatred of the left was too strong. In James Frazier’s The Golden Bough, an anthropological survey of myths and legends around the world, the author mentions a legend found in many parts of the world of a threatened people who turn to a king to save them. After he does so, he is murdered by the tribe he saved, as a sort of sacrifice. Something like that happened to Richard Milhous Nixon. Forcing his resignation is the way we put Vietnam behind us and allowed us to turn our backs while our enemy butchered millions of innocent people It all happened in a country far away and the left didn’t care, so the bitterness was redirected to poor Dick Nixon, the only guy left in America who gave a damn.
Such an outcome was almost predictable on Election Day 1968, no matter who won. Richard Nixon’s fate, then, is not a tragedy but the unjust penalty for saving the country. The real tragedy is not 1974, but 1960. If he had taken office eight years earlier, there would have been no Vietnam, because he was far too intelligent and far too contemptuous of the Establishment to allow The New York Times to bully him into murdering an ally, destabilizing all of Southeast Asia and forcing US troops to prevent a collapse. He wouldn’t have gummed up the Bay of Pigs by trying to “keep the noise level down” as JFK did. He would have pressed civil rights legislation far more vigorously than JFK and with Nixon’s lifelong encouragement of minority businesses, civil rights would be more than just the sad story of black elites leaving the black community to join white businesses serving the white community.
In 1932, there were six black owned, black operated banks in Richmond, Virginia alone. Today, there is only one. That is not the sort of “progress” Richard Nixon would have tolerated.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
For instance, there have only been five US Presidents since President Lincoln who have been seriously concerned with civil rights: Grant, Harding, Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Nixon. All of them left office with low ratings among academicians and for many years afterwards, historians have dutifully kept them in the gutter when it was time to draw up their annual ratings of the good, the bad and the ugly Presidents.
Yet, strangely, one by one, these five Presidents have begun to rise through the ranks years after they have left office. Truman was first, rising in polls of historians from a low rating to “Near Great” status beginning in the early 1970s. Since the mid-1990’s, President Grant has risen in polls from the very bottom to the midranks of Presidents and in a recent book of essays ( Profiles in Leadership, edited by Walter Isaacson), the leftwing (but scrupulously honest and always valuable) Sean Wilentz makes a very strong case that Grant belongs near the top of the list of great Presidents.
I believe that Richard Nixon’s turn will be next. When Nixon took office, his two predecessors had bequeathed to him the weakest hand of any President since Abraham Lincoln. The country was riven by riots, a divisive war and an economy already heading for the cellar. The USSR was out to exploit the weaknesses it saw and the media began to believe for the first time in American history that being patriotic was a crime against the trade of journalism.
Somehow, in the course of his six years in office, Richard Nixon stabilized events. He ended the war and if it hadn’t been for the act of Congress denying it ammunition, South Vietnam would have had a good chance of surviving. Nixon improved relations with the Communist world in a manner that set the stage for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of China. America’s cities were no longer in an uproar.
Neither were the campuses. Nixon instinctively knew something about the Baby Boomers that very few people in power did: they weren’t against the war by and large, they were just too self involved to fight in it. I entered the University of Wisconsin – Madison in the fall of 1972. That spring, I visited the campus the day after a demonstration of close to 10,000 students. I met a friend, an apolitical sort who was gushing about how much fun anti-war demonstrations are. You meet all sorts of chicks, he told me, and the cops are cool: they ask if you want some tear gas so that you can say you were gassed. That summer, I turned 18 and got my draft card, which became obsolete almost immediately as President Nixon ended the draft. When I returned to Madison in the fall, the war was still being fought, but without the draft, the Boomers didn’t care. The only anti-war demonstration I saw consisted of about 25 hippies dragging their banners behind them.
But President Nixon’s successes also go way beyond those he is credited with. For some reason, his most significant successes have been downplayed by both allies and enemies alike. While liberals like Joan Hoff and Tom Wicker have grudgingly conceded that in the realm of civil rights, he was “One of Us” (to borrow Wicker’s phrase), in some respects, Richard Nixon’s achievements in the area of civil rights exceeded those of any other President. President Johnson obtained the enabling legislation and judicial orders to force the integration of schools in the South, but true to form, he left the implementation to his successor, expecting the sort of warfare that plagued South Boston a few years later. Instead, Nixon, exploiting the South’s concern about the ravaged cities of the North and the collapse of law and order, quietly went about integrating Southern schools with a minimum of fuss, combining racial equality with rhetoric of conservative values (“watch what we do, not what we say” he told insiders), thus not only peacefully integrating the schools, but delivering the South to the Republican Party for good.
Today, race relations are better in the South than in the North, where liberals pretend to care, but don’t. A prominent liberal law firm was sued for race discrimination awhile back and its office manager’s defense was that they didn’t discriminate because they had plenty of blacks in the mailroom. Meanwhile, the brightest lights on the Republican right are a black Congressman and an Hispanic Senator, both from the State of Florida. Nixon, who was always sympathetic to civil rights can be credited with that.
Another major achievement of President Nixon (usually handled in a footnote even by those historians who treat him fairly, such as Mark Feeney in his insightful Nixon at the Movies) is his actions during the Yom Kippur War where he single-handedly saved Israel from defeat by ordering a massive airlift of munitions. President Nixon was under fire over Watergate in the fall of 1973 and could have used that as an excuse to abandon Israel. Nixon was aware that the Arab states would throw the country into recession with an oil embargo if he acted. But act he did, stripping the U.S.Army of regiments of armor and equipment to ship it to Israel. He fought against the military who understandably didn’t want to see their own forces denuded. He fought against the State Department and other government bureaucracies who favored Islamic states. He fought the Democrats who accused him of staging a coup d’état. He even fought his own Administration (“Get off your fat ass and get those planes in the air, Henry,” Feeney quotes Nixon as telling Henry Kissinger.) It is fair to say that if it weren’t for Nixon, there would have been no Camp David Accords; there may not even have been an Israel.
Even on his economic policy, which admittedly failed, he managed to discredit Keynesian economics for thirty years. He did this by following the leading liberal advice of the day. Abandoning the gold standard, imposing wage and price controls, he gave the left what it wanted and when what it wanted proved to be a bust, they preferred to blame him instead of their theories. But Nixon won the long war: today only the robber barons and their enablers on the left – politicians, public unions, professors and the press – push for Keynesian solutions, antagonizing the rest of us (for good reason, given the appalling track record of those solutions).
Ah, but there was Watergate, historians will tell you. Shortly after Watergate, when William Safire documented Democratic crimes in his It Didn’t Start with Watergate, the standard response became “Ah, but Nixon got caught.” Well, of course, it is always easy to get caught when the media is gunning for you and easy to escape when they aren’t. But in the curious amnesia that strikes liberal historians, the break-ins, buggings and harassments ordered by Herbert Hoover, FDR, JFK and LBJ are forgotten, all of which are arguably worse than Watergate since they used government officials to commit the crimes (the Office of Naval Intelligence in the case of Hoover and the FBI and the IRS in the case of the others). Today historians would want you to believe that Nixon alone committed these sort of acts.
When Nixon told David Frost “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal,” he was being sincere. He was simply stating what had become the de facto Constitutional powers of the Presidency. Every President in his adult life had engaged in nefarious activities without damaging their reputations (Truman and Ike didn’t spy on their fellow citizens – not the innocent ones anyway – but they engaged in overseas activities of a questionable nature). In 1971, we were in the midst of a war and the burgling and the bugging were not designed to provide bedroom reading for him, the way JFK’s did. Rather they were designed to find out who was leaking secrets that were killing American soldiers.
Nor has anything changed on the left wing of American politics since 1974. Since Watergate, President Clinton’s sale of military secrets to China in exchange for campaign contributions (let alone his own bugging of Newt Gingrich) were treated with a “boys will be boys” attitude on the left and President Obama’s distribution of healthcare waivers to supporters don’t even raise an eyebrow on the collective face of the media. We know now that “Deep Throat,” who brought Nixon down, was Mark Felt, the senior career officer at the FBI who was angry that he wasn’t named Director because Nixon, worried that the Agency had become the “rouge elephant” that the Democrats claimed it to be, wanted to create civilian oversight over its activities. If Nixon had been a Democrat, all else (China, the end of the war, etc.) being equal: The New York Times would have argued that he had been toppled by a coup d’état.
Somehow, Nixon stands alone among historians as the able politician with a dark side, as the tragic figure with a “paranoid” nature. But something is wrong with that idea. Although he won the most votes (and even more of the legitimate ones) in 1960, he never challenged the outcome of the election, ordering his aides to cease all opposition to the fraudulent election results. The clear theft of the electoral votes of Illinois, Missouri and Texas, which would have given him the election, could have been challenged, but he said “You don’t steal the Presidency of the United States,” giving JFK the honeymoon with the country which he promptly squandered with the Bay of Pigs, the Vienna Summit and the Berlin Wall. And in 1974, instead of fighting his impeachment, he resigned rather than put the country through another protracted battle.
But what really proves his mettle was that, at the height of the anti-war demonstrations in 1970, he slipped out of the White House, alone except for a single (unarmed) aide and mingled with the demonstrators who were pledging to kill him. He had a long conversation with students near the Washington Monument while the Secret Service frantically ran around the White House trying to locate him. There was no precedent for this. When Martin Luther King held a far friendlier rally in Washington, JFK hid in the Oval Office and pretended not to be home. When President Obama has his Town Hall Meetings, all the riff-raff (i.e. anyone who doesn’t agree with him) are screened out. The only precedent for Nixon’s act that comes to mind is Abraham Lincoln’s carriage ride through Richmond in 1865, and even there, Honest Abe was accompanied by a troop of U.S. Cavalry.
Nixon wasn’t a paranoid, he was a populist, together with Harry Truman the only legitimate populist President in the Twentieth Century. That rankled the left which drew its own paranoid conclusions about him, launching an increasingly irrational element into liberal politics which have chased an increasing percentage of the population to the right. “I gave them a sword,” Nixon told Frost, but it was really a matter of the Democrats giving it to the right wing of the Republican Party. Nixon was a liberal, with a raft of environmental acts to add to his other achievements, and by taking him down, the Democrats allowed the Republican right to abandon him, paving the way for Ronald Reagan. Liberal Republicanism ceased to exist because of Watergate. By contrast, when Clinton’s crimes became too much to ignore and the Republicans launched an impeachment, the Democrats carefully steered the controversy away from his real high crimes and misdemeanors to the more manageable Lewinsky affair. It is because of the sheep-like behavior of Democrats in Congress that President Obama is floundering today.
The reason Nixon fell has nothing to do with any act of his, but with the blunders of his predecessors which pulled us into Vietnam. The coup against the Ngo Dinh Diem sponsored by JFK in 1963 made our involvement in the Vietnam War inevitable and probably made our defeat there inevitable as well. By the time Nixon took office, we had become such a polarized country that, by comparison, today’s contretemps seem like a picnic. The country was more divided in 1968 than at any time since the Civil War, maybe more so, since no one clarified the battlelines by seceding in 1968. Nixon’s theme was Bring Us Together, based on a little girl’s placard he spotted while campaigning, and that was his goal.
He ended the war but the bitterness and the irrational hatred of the left was too strong. In James Frazier’s The Golden Bough, an anthropological survey of myths and legends around the world, the author mentions a legend found in many parts of the world of a threatened people who turn to a king to save them. After he does so, he is murdered by the tribe he saved, as a sort of sacrifice. Something like that happened to Richard Milhous Nixon. Forcing his resignation is the way we put Vietnam behind us and allowed us to turn our backs while our enemy butchered millions of innocent people It all happened in a country far away and the left didn’t care, so the bitterness was redirected to poor Dick Nixon, the only guy left in America who gave a damn.
Such an outcome was almost predictable on Election Day 1968, no matter who won. Richard Nixon’s fate, then, is not a tragedy but the unjust penalty for saving the country. The real tragedy is not 1974, but 1960. If he had taken office eight years earlier, there would have been no Vietnam, because he was far too intelligent and far too contemptuous of the Establishment to allow The New York Times to bully him into murdering an ally, destabilizing all of Southeast Asia and forcing US troops to prevent a collapse. He wouldn’t have gummed up the Bay of Pigs by trying to “keep the noise level down” as JFK did. He would have pressed civil rights legislation far more vigorously than JFK and with Nixon’s lifelong encouragement of minority businesses, civil rights would be more than just the sad story of black elites leaving the black community to join white businesses serving the white community.
In 1932, there were six black owned, black operated banks in Richmond, Virginia alone. Today, there is only one. That is not the sort of “progress” Richard Nixon would have tolerated.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
Friday, July 29, 2011
Don't Blame Obama by Thomas F. Berner
You know that the President is losing his support when even the most slavish of his lapdogs, those at The New York Times and the Washington Post, start suggesting that he is really a right winger in disguise. When the ideologues start to run for the exits and blame the actor and not the script, you know that the show is over.
President Obama would be doomed to mediocrity even if he were more of a leader, more intelligent, more independent, if he had more of that je ne sais quoi that his erstwhile supporters have suddenly discovered that he never had. It isn’t Obama who has failed, it is the current mindset of the nation, the assumptions and policies that have converted the idea of “progress” since the 1930s from a welfare state with industry to a welfare state without industry to a nanny state to a crumbling nanny
state. President Obama is a prisoner of the assumptions that brought him to power.
We have reached an end of an era and it just a question as to how long it will be before we recognize that fact and begin a search for a replacement. Before then, prosperity will return, but it will be based on a concept even more tenuous than its predecessors: real estate, dot-com commerce, subprime mortgages and the prosperity will last even shorter, and the recovery from its collapse will take even longer, than the previous collapse. Regulations will be passed and won’t protect us, politicians and their friends will get richer and the rest of us will get poorer.
At some point, someone in power will recognize what a lot of people already know: that you can’t build prosperity on politics, that redistributing wealth is different than creating wealth, even if done on a grand scale, that you need decentralized decision making, that you need real industries, not fake ones created by legislation, that political power only creates corruption, not a better world.
That someone, if he or she ever comes along, will be in position to determine the course of the American commonwealth for the next 70 years, until that course no longer serves the nation. Until then, we are stuck in the same stagnant intellectual air that existed in the 1850s and the 1920s. Does the President seem an empty suit? So did James Buchanan. Does he seem detached from reality? So did Herbert Hoover. President Obama can’t change this state of affairs nor will his successors be able to do so unless one of them wakes up to the new reality and tries to change the system, instead of trying to improve the old rotten system.
To some extent, this day of reckoning was built into the very basis of the New Deal. All of those crusty old Vermont farmers and those plutocrats with diamond stickpins in their cravats were correct in their predictions, just off a little in their timing. You can’t discourage wealth creation forever before you have to live off your capital and you can’t foster wealth redistribution forever before you start turning the country against itself.
And the winners of this era are certainly to blame for not knowing when enough is enough:
1. Public Sector Labor Unions – as the private sector labor unions have shut down our industrial base, aided by foreign competition and weak corporate management, public sector labor unions have been getting increasingly powerful since President Kennedy authorized their creation in 1961 and they have been irresponsible in the use of their power. Without the understanding of economic restraints that traditional labor leaders had, public labor leaders just think of wealth creators as individuals to be milked.
2. Lawyers – who have managed to increase their portion of the national paycheck without creating jobs or progress of any kind and who have managed to make litigation no longer a means to redress society’s victims, but a growth industry in itself.
3. Wall Street – which no longer sees its main task as fueling the growth of the economy, but as devising instruments which no one understands, developing a rationale for selling them to people and bailing out quickly enough so that someone else is left holding the bag during the inevitable collapse.
But all of these winners are only taking advantage of the structure of society. Eras can change by adapting to new realities and reducing the pain of social adjustments for the average citizen, but that isn’t happening today. All of the “reforms” proposed by Washington will only strengthen these groups and will not address the underlying problems. Why not? And, more importantly, who or what in a free society is to blame for an unresponsive approach to changes in circumstance? It is not wise to blame politicians, who only have to answer to the voters who elected them.
The primary problem is a matter of intelligence, of how society analyzes its problems and how this analysis gets disseminated. Phrasing the problem this way, you get the two obvious candidates:
1. Academia – academia has abandoned its traditional task of seeking the truth. As far as it is concerned, it has FOUND the truth and its only task is to broadcast it. This becomes more of a propaganda effort than the sort of careful analysis one used to expect from academia.
The recent release by hackers of thousands of emails from the world’s leading climate center is illustrative. It is hard to blame mankind for global warming as long as we have the precedent of the global warming of 1,000 years ago, when it became so warm that Vikings established farming communities so far north in Greenland that today such communities are buried under sheets of ice. So the “scientists” at this center not only engaged in selective data compilation to fake their results, but launched a blacklisting campaign against any scientist or publication which threatened to deviate from the party line. To call this McCarthyism is to slander Joe McCarthy. Tailgunner Joe, for all his faults, never destroyed a body of science by ruining the lives of people merely for following the best practices of scientific inquiry.
If academia has replaced self interest with what was once its primary purpose of studying the world, one should expect that its answers are not going to be helpful in deciding how the world is changing, nor can it be expected to craft the solutions that will address those changes. This isn’t the first time this happened. Academia didn’t think much of Abe Lincoln150 years ago and the abolitionist movement was treated something like the Tea Party is today. Similarly, in the 1920s, academia was lined up with the status quo, not the revolutionaries of the New Deal. Academia, for all of its advocacy of “progress,” tends to rely on a set of assumptions which make it the most conservative of institutions.
2. The media – similarly, the media thinks of itself as progressive, but tends to promote the status quo. This tendency is exacerbated these days by the fact that most newspapers are local monopolies and the broadcast media tends to be just fluff, relying on the newsprint media for any real reporting. The result is an absence of the sort of marketplace of ideas that makes intellectual output more reliable.
This failing is magnified by the self defeating bias of the press. When a Republican is in the White House, the media assumes the role of the accusing class, finding fault with everything, but they suddenly become the excusing class when a Democrat takes office. While this magnifies the errors of Republicans and conceals the faults of Democrats, it has the effect of giving Republicans the chance to fix things while letting Democratic initiatives spin out of control. Where would we be in Iraq if press criticism hadn’t forced President Bush to overrule his advisors and institute the surge? And wouldn’t Obamacare be less hated if the media had shamed the Administration into not issuing all of those waivers to its contributors? The ultimate irony of press bias is that it benefits those it opposes and undermines those it supports. Too bad no one at The New York Times is bright enough to recognize this.
But perhaps the era would be drawing to a close anyway. You can dole out an economy’s rewards to the politically useful instead of to the economically useful for only so long before society as a whole pays the price. We still don’t have the leadership to do anything about it yet and the ideas to create a new paradigm are still in the nascent stage. All we have is the Tea Party Movement and certain members of the radical left who know something is wrong and needs to be fixed and who are grappling for answers. For the next twenty years or so, that will be the intellectually exciting place to be.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
President Obama would be doomed to mediocrity even if he were more of a leader, more intelligent, more independent, if he had more of that je ne sais quoi that his erstwhile supporters have suddenly discovered that he never had. It isn’t Obama who has failed, it is the current mindset of the nation, the assumptions and policies that have converted the idea of “progress” since the 1930s from a welfare state with industry to a welfare state without industry to a nanny state to a crumbling nanny
state. President Obama is a prisoner of the assumptions that brought him to power.
We have reached an end of an era and it just a question as to how long it will be before we recognize that fact and begin a search for a replacement. Before then, prosperity will return, but it will be based on a concept even more tenuous than its predecessors: real estate, dot-com commerce, subprime mortgages and the prosperity will last even shorter, and the recovery from its collapse will take even longer, than the previous collapse. Regulations will be passed and won’t protect us, politicians and their friends will get richer and the rest of us will get poorer.
At some point, someone in power will recognize what a lot of people already know: that you can’t build prosperity on politics, that redistributing wealth is different than creating wealth, even if done on a grand scale, that you need decentralized decision making, that you need real industries, not fake ones created by legislation, that political power only creates corruption, not a better world.
That someone, if he or she ever comes along, will be in position to determine the course of the American commonwealth for the next 70 years, until that course no longer serves the nation. Until then, we are stuck in the same stagnant intellectual air that existed in the 1850s and the 1920s. Does the President seem an empty suit? So did James Buchanan. Does he seem detached from reality? So did Herbert Hoover. President Obama can’t change this state of affairs nor will his successors be able to do so unless one of them wakes up to the new reality and tries to change the system, instead of trying to improve the old rotten system.
To some extent, this day of reckoning was built into the very basis of the New Deal. All of those crusty old Vermont farmers and those plutocrats with diamond stickpins in their cravats were correct in their predictions, just off a little in their timing. You can’t discourage wealth creation forever before you have to live off your capital and you can’t foster wealth redistribution forever before you start turning the country against itself.
And the winners of this era are certainly to blame for not knowing when enough is enough:
1. Public Sector Labor Unions – as the private sector labor unions have shut down our industrial base, aided by foreign competition and weak corporate management, public sector labor unions have been getting increasingly powerful since President Kennedy authorized their creation in 1961 and they have been irresponsible in the use of their power. Without the understanding of economic restraints that traditional labor leaders had, public labor leaders just think of wealth creators as individuals to be milked.
2. Lawyers – who have managed to increase their portion of the national paycheck without creating jobs or progress of any kind and who have managed to make litigation no longer a means to redress society’s victims, but a growth industry in itself.
3. Wall Street – which no longer sees its main task as fueling the growth of the economy, but as devising instruments which no one understands, developing a rationale for selling them to people and bailing out quickly enough so that someone else is left holding the bag during the inevitable collapse.
But all of these winners are only taking advantage of the structure of society. Eras can change by adapting to new realities and reducing the pain of social adjustments for the average citizen, but that isn’t happening today. All of the “reforms” proposed by Washington will only strengthen these groups and will not address the underlying problems. Why not? And, more importantly, who or what in a free society is to blame for an unresponsive approach to changes in circumstance? It is not wise to blame politicians, who only have to answer to the voters who elected them.
The primary problem is a matter of intelligence, of how society analyzes its problems and how this analysis gets disseminated. Phrasing the problem this way, you get the two obvious candidates:
1. Academia – academia has abandoned its traditional task of seeking the truth. As far as it is concerned, it has FOUND the truth and its only task is to broadcast it. This becomes more of a propaganda effort than the sort of careful analysis one used to expect from academia.
The recent release by hackers of thousands of emails from the world’s leading climate center is illustrative. It is hard to blame mankind for global warming as long as we have the precedent of the global warming of 1,000 years ago, when it became so warm that Vikings established farming communities so far north in Greenland that today such communities are buried under sheets of ice. So the “scientists” at this center not only engaged in selective data compilation to fake their results, but launched a blacklisting campaign against any scientist or publication which threatened to deviate from the party line. To call this McCarthyism is to slander Joe McCarthy. Tailgunner Joe, for all his faults, never destroyed a body of science by ruining the lives of people merely for following the best practices of scientific inquiry.
If academia has replaced self interest with what was once its primary purpose of studying the world, one should expect that its answers are not going to be helpful in deciding how the world is changing, nor can it be expected to craft the solutions that will address those changes. This isn’t the first time this happened. Academia didn’t think much of Abe Lincoln150 years ago and the abolitionist movement was treated something like the Tea Party is today. Similarly, in the 1920s, academia was lined up with the status quo, not the revolutionaries of the New Deal. Academia, for all of its advocacy of “progress,” tends to rely on a set of assumptions which make it the most conservative of institutions.
2. The media – similarly, the media thinks of itself as progressive, but tends to promote the status quo. This tendency is exacerbated these days by the fact that most newspapers are local monopolies and the broadcast media tends to be just fluff, relying on the newsprint media for any real reporting. The result is an absence of the sort of marketplace of ideas that makes intellectual output more reliable.
This failing is magnified by the self defeating bias of the press. When a Republican is in the White House, the media assumes the role of the accusing class, finding fault with everything, but they suddenly become the excusing class when a Democrat takes office. While this magnifies the errors of Republicans and conceals the faults of Democrats, it has the effect of giving Republicans the chance to fix things while letting Democratic initiatives spin out of control. Where would we be in Iraq if press criticism hadn’t forced President Bush to overrule his advisors and institute the surge? And wouldn’t Obamacare be less hated if the media had shamed the Administration into not issuing all of those waivers to its contributors? The ultimate irony of press bias is that it benefits those it opposes and undermines those it supports. Too bad no one at The New York Times is bright enough to recognize this.
But perhaps the era would be drawing to a close anyway. You can dole out an economy’s rewards to the politically useful instead of to the economically useful for only so long before society as a whole pays the price. We still don’t have the leadership to do anything about it yet and the ideas to create a new paradigm are still in the nascent stage. All we have is the Tea Party Movement and certain members of the radical left who know something is wrong and needs to be fixed and who are grappling for answers. For the next twenty years or so, that will be the intellectually exciting place to be.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
Friday, July 22, 2011
We Don't Need Another Reagan By Thomas F. Berner
Looking over the 2012 candidates for President, many of my Republican friends express the wish for “another Reagan.” That’s the last thing we need.
Forget the categorties of “great” vs. the “failed” Presidents or the “good vs. the “bad.” Those categories tend to be drafted by historians flogging their own prejudices. Forget their rhetoric, their parties or their platforms. There are only three kinds of Presidents, the “transformational Presidents,” who change the fundamental thrust or underlying myths of the nation (often in ways they never imagined), the “constructive Presidents,” who tinker with the mechanics of the system while accepting the underlying myths and the “administrative Presidents,” who accept the nation as it is and only stir themselves to react to world events.
We have had only three transformational Presidents: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Their primary achievement was to alter the course of the nation: Washington by freeing us from our colonial past, Lincoln by instituting a national infrastructure for transforming an agricultural economy to an industrial powerhouse and FDR by shifting the country to what we have today: a “post-industrial” society where few people actually produce anything and lawyers and bureaucrats make all the rules and guys pushing buttons on Wall Street make all the money.
Washington faced a blank slate; he was forced by circumstance to create the initial myths of the nation. He created the infrastructure on which we all rely today, but accepted the existing power elite, the Southern planters and their Northern enablers, who were the richest and most powerful people in the country.
Lincoln became President in the midst of a crisis and took advantage of it to enact Whig reforms that had been trapped in a government dominated by Democrats since the days of Alexander Hamilton. Lincoln did not just free the slaves and crush ante-bellum society, he created a new system in a series of legislative moves which rivaled the New Deal in its creation of a new society: transcontinental railroads, land grant colleges, banking reform, currency reform, the list is long and impressive and when the smoke cleared at Appomattox, a new elite of industrialists launched the most impressive economic growth in the country’s history.
Franklin Roosevelt also became President in the midst of a crisis. One of the greatest misconceptions among historians is the notion that he was a “traitor to his class.” Nothing could be farther from the truth. FDR’s class was the Northern banker/enablers who assisted the Southern slaveocracy. He was threatened by the new industrial robber barons that came from nowhere to become much richer and more powerful than his family ever was. FDR was a reactionary, trying to stem the free market and its ability to create wealth and replace the idle rich with more productive people.
In some ways, he was successful: his “alphabet soup” of government agencies and regulations has prevented the creation of new heavy industry. There have been no new automobile manufacturers since the New Deal, although many talented people –Henry Kaiser, Preston Tucker, John Delorean, among others – have tried to do so. World War II was the last gasp of industrial power. We could never fight that war again. Ironically, however, he also tried to set up a permanent elite primarily of WASP upper class and in this he failed but it is also the reason he is the hero to so many progressives. When his cousins, Stewart and Joseph Alsop, astute political commentators in their own right, were asked in the 1970s what FDR’s greatest achievement was, they said that it was something he had had no intention of doing and would have been horrified if he knew what he had done: ending the dominance of white Anglo Saxon Protestants in society.
Each of these transformational Presidents created the era which existed until a new transformational President took office. These eras have their own structure and are as different from one another as one nation is from another. This is why the United States rose to the top so quickly and stayed at the top until now. It had the ability to adapt itself to meet new challenges.
Constructive Presidents take the world as it is and try to improve the way it functions. They are strongest after a transformational President, so Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses Grant and Harry Truman all cemented the transformation created by their predecessors.
Other Presidents may come later in each transformational era, changing it without affecting the thrust of the nation’s sense of progress. Thus, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Some of these Presidents could have been transformative Presidents if the times were right. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were both elitists whose families had lost their stature in the laissez faire economy and were horrified at the unschooled multimillionaires who had replaced them at the top of the social ladder. Both of them led the way for FDR. Other constructive Presidents may very well have been administrative Presidents but were forced by events to adopt a more active role. If Richard Nixon had been elected in 1960, would he have recognized China, taken the US off the gold standard, introduced affirmative action and created the Environmental Protection Agency? That is a question history, even psychobiographical history, cannot answer.
Administrative Presidents are those who take the world as it is and any progress is simply tinkering. John Quincy Adams, William McKinley, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy are examples of this sort of President. They are all for “progress” – every President touts progress and thinks of himself as a progressive of some sort or the other – but they are perfectly content to live with the world as it is.
Towards the end of each of the three eras – let’s call them the Agricultural Era for the one ushered in by Washington, the Industrial Era for the one ushered in by Lincoln and the Bureaucratic Era for FDR’s – the Administrative Presidents, tend to be corrupt or incompetent, thus Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, Harding and Hoover, Clinton and Obama. This is because the eras themselves have gotten old and tired, their fundamental myths have been taken over by conmen out for the main chance who use the prevailing rhetoric of progress in order to reward their richest friends with government largesse at the expense of the rest of us.
After a generation or two, an era becomes dominated by politicians espousing a doctrine which sounds progressive but has been twisted to reward the insiders. Thus the emphasis on states’ rights became a code to protect slave ownership, laissez faire was used to pull up the ladder of enterprise and prevent competition and, in the current era, concern for the underprivileged has become an excuse for both: forcing everyone to submit to an increasingly paternalistic state benefitting a handful of insiders while pulling up the ladder for anyone without the connections to join the ranks of the elite. This era is at an end and as long as it dictates the guiding principles of the country, the worst things will get. Economists look at a 9% unemployment rate, flippantly suggest that this rate has become structurally permanent and prescribe more of the same policies that got us here. We need a new era, with new rules for getting ahead, new myths to provide the guiding principles for the future, new leaders who will get us there.
What we don’t need is a new Reagan. Reagan was a “constructive President.” He didn’t transform anything, he just made the existing system less dysfunctional for a time. But times are different now. When economists are suggesting that we need to get used to 9 and 10% unemployment as the new normal, when plenty of laws get passed, but none of them accomplish what they set out to do, when society contains too few wealth creators and too many rich wealth redistributors, we can no longer tinker on the edges and expect things to get better.
In short, we need a transformational President. We need the anti-FDR. We need another Abe Lincoln.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
Forget the categorties of “great” vs. the “failed” Presidents or the “good vs. the “bad.” Those categories tend to be drafted by historians flogging their own prejudices. Forget their rhetoric, their parties or their platforms. There are only three kinds of Presidents, the “transformational Presidents,” who change the fundamental thrust or underlying myths of the nation (often in ways they never imagined), the “constructive Presidents,” who tinker with the mechanics of the system while accepting the underlying myths and the “administrative Presidents,” who accept the nation as it is and only stir themselves to react to world events.
We have had only three transformational Presidents: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Their primary achievement was to alter the course of the nation: Washington by freeing us from our colonial past, Lincoln by instituting a national infrastructure for transforming an agricultural economy to an industrial powerhouse and FDR by shifting the country to what we have today: a “post-industrial” society where few people actually produce anything and lawyers and bureaucrats make all the rules and guys pushing buttons on Wall Street make all the money.
Washington faced a blank slate; he was forced by circumstance to create the initial myths of the nation. He created the infrastructure on which we all rely today, but accepted the existing power elite, the Southern planters and their Northern enablers, who were the richest and most powerful people in the country.
Lincoln became President in the midst of a crisis and took advantage of it to enact Whig reforms that had been trapped in a government dominated by Democrats since the days of Alexander Hamilton. Lincoln did not just free the slaves and crush ante-bellum society, he created a new system in a series of legislative moves which rivaled the New Deal in its creation of a new society: transcontinental railroads, land grant colleges, banking reform, currency reform, the list is long and impressive and when the smoke cleared at Appomattox, a new elite of industrialists launched the most impressive economic growth in the country’s history.
Franklin Roosevelt also became President in the midst of a crisis. One of the greatest misconceptions among historians is the notion that he was a “traitor to his class.” Nothing could be farther from the truth. FDR’s class was the Northern banker/enablers who assisted the Southern slaveocracy. He was threatened by the new industrial robber barons that came from nowhere to become much richer and more powerful than his family ever was. FDR was a reactionary, trying to stem the free market and its ability to create wealth and replace the idle rich with more productive people.
In some ways, he was successful: his “alphabet soup” of government agencies and regulations has prevented the creation of new heavy industry. There have been no new automobile manufacturers since the New Deal, although many talented people –Henry Kaiser, Preston Tucker, John Delorean, among others – have tried to do so. World War II was the last gasp of industrial power. We could never fight that war again. Ironically, however, he also tried to set up a permanent elite primarily of WASP upper class and in this he failed but it is also the reason he is the hero to so many progressives. When his cousins, Stewart and Joseph Alsop, astute political commentators in their own right, were asked in the 1970s what FDR’s greatest achievement was, they said that it was something he had had no intention of doing and would have been horrified if he knew what he had done: ending the dominance of white Anglo Saxon Protestants in society.
Each of these transformational Presidents created the era which existed until a new transformational President took office. These eras have their own structure and are as different from one another as one nation is from another. This is why the United States rose to the top so quickly and stayed at the top until now. It had the ability to adapt itself to meet new challenges.
Constructive Presidents take the world as it is and try to improve the way it functions. They are strongest after a transformational President, so Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses Grant and Harry Truman all cemented the transformation created by their predecessors.
Other Presidents may come later in each transformational era, changing it without affecting the thrust of the nation’s sense of progress. Thus, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Some of these Presidents could have been transformative Presidents if the times were right. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were both elitists whose families had lost their stature in the laissez faire economy and were horrified at the unschooled multimillionaires who had replaced them at the top of the social ladder. Both of them led the way for FDR. Other constructive Presidents may very well have been administrative Presidents but were forced by events to adopt a more active role. If Richard Nixon had been elected in 1960, would he have recognized China, taken the US off the gold standard, introduced affirmative action and created the Environmental Protection Agency? That is a question history, even psychobiographical history, cannot answer.
Administrative Presidents are those who take the world as it is and any progress is simply tinkering. John Quincy Adams, William McKinley, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy are examples of this sort of President. They are all for “progress” – every President touts progress and thinks of himself as a progressive of some sort or the other – but they are perfectly content to live with the world as it is.
Towards the end of each of the three eras – let’s call them the Agricultural Era for the one ushered in by Washington, the Industrial Era for the one ushered in by Lincoln and the Bureaucratic Era for FDR’s – the Administrative Presidents, tend to be corrupt or incompetent, thus Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, Harding and Hoover, Clinton and Obama. This is because the eras themselves have gotten old and tired, their fundamental myths have been taken over by conmen out for the main chance who use the prevailing rhetoric of progress in order to reward their richest friends with government largesse at the expense of the rest of us.
After a generation or two, an era becomes dominated by politicians espousing a doctrine which sounds progressive but has been twisted to reward the insiders. Thus the emphasis on states’ rights became a code to protect slave ownership, laissez faire was used to pull up the ladder of enterprise and prevent competition and, in the current era, concern for the underprivileged has become an excuse for both: forcing everyone to submit to an increasingly paternalistic state benefitting a handful of insiders while pulling up the ladder for anyone without the connections to join the ranks of the elite. This era is at an end and as long as it dictates the guiding principles of the country, the worst things will get. Economists look at a 9% unemployment rate, flippantly suggest that this rate has become structurally permanent and prescribe more of the same policies that got us here. We need a new era, with new rules for getting ahead, new myths to provide the guiding principles for the future, new leaders who will get us there.
What we don’t need is a new Reagan. Reagan was a “constructive President.” He didn’t transform anything, he just made the existing system less dysfunctional for a time. But times are different now. When economists are suggesting that we need to get used to 9 and 10% unemployment as the new normal, when plenty of laws get passed, but none of them accomplish what they set out to do, when society contains too few wealth creators and too many rich wealth redistributors, we can no longer tinker on the edges and expect things to get better.
In short, we need a transformational President. We need the anti-FDR. We need another Abe Lincoln.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
Friday, July 15, 2011
Lost Boys by Thomas F. Berner
Perhaps it is the nature of democracies that they ignore pending disasters until they become too big and too dangerous to ignore.
So, for all his supposed prescience about the Nazis, Franklin Roosevelt was a Johnny Come Lately to the threat. In the early 1930’s he supported the isolationist impulse of the progressives in Congress who blamed big corporations for launching World War I. The so-called “merchants of death” Congressional hearings were a convenient way to beat up industrial corporations and led to American disenchantment with our involvement in the Great War, fanning the flames of isolationism. Then in the mid-1930’s, FDR encouraged the passage of the infamous Neutrality Acts so that he wouldn’t have to alienate either his leftwing supporters or his Catholic, conservative ethnic supporters who supported opposing sides in the Spanish Civil War. It wasn’t until the summer of 1940, when, having sown the wind and watching Europe reap the whirlwind, FDR took measures to undo the harm he had caused.
Some may argue that it is best that governments wait until it is too late to take milder measures, because when they do take action, they tend to make a hash of it, as we’ve seen lately with a stimulus package which didn’t stimulate and a health care bill which will provide nothing of the sort. The problem with ignoring issues, however, is that, when existing policies exacerbate a situation, delay in taking action may result in much more damage than can be repaired.
Such is the case with America’s young men. I know many upper middle class couples who have marvelously successful daughters and sons whom the parents themselves will tell you don’t measure up. These couples are all fine parents, as witnessed by their daughters’ success, so something more than family dynamics is going on.
Although this seems to affect white males more than African American or Hispanic males, this phenomenon is evident across the rainbow. Statistics tell the story. Divorce is down, but that is because marriage is down even further. For the first time in history, married couples constitute a minority of households in America. A full 60% of all freshmen in college are women these days. In the last ten years, the number of babies born to whites has fallen 10% and the number born to African-Americans has fallen by 2%, while the number of Hispanic births has risen by 40%. Larger percentages than ever before live with their parents into their thirties. More women over the age of forty remain unmarried than any time in the past.
The candidates for causing this collapse of manhood all date from the postwar era, but primarily the 60’s. My personal candidates are, in order of their appearance in American society, popular culture, feminism, economics and pacifism.
POPULAR CULTURE
The first candidate, by right of seniority, is pop culture. The concept of what it took to be a man began to change shortly after World War II. Slowly the popular conception was altered by movies, novels and television. The ideal man moved from boys who became men early – whether it be Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath or Private Peter Conway in The Sands of Iwo Jima – to boys who raced their cars off cliffs and their fathers who hadn’t a clue how to deal with them as with Jim Stark and Frank Stark in Rebel Without a Cause. By the 60’s, the depiction of the mature establishment male had degenerated into Gomer Pyle and Gilligan. Meanwhile, the transgressive male – whether he be Dirty Harry and General Patton on the right or Hawkeye Pierce and Billy Jack on the left, fighting an incompetent or corrupt establishment – were the new model man. From both ends of the political spectrum, then, it became admirable for a man not to be integrated into society.
There are many reasons for this shift, one being that the authors of American postwar culture tended to be males who served as enlisted men or junior officers in World War II and chaffed under the thumb of authority. Their postwar product was another version of the same griping they did as young soldiers and sailors and by the 60s, this attitude took on a life of its own.
FEMINISM AND THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION
Another candidate is feminism, and, more broadly, the sexual revolution. Since this gets the most attention, it doesn’t need much time here, except for a few interesting nuggets:
• The rote excuse these days is that biology has programed men to flit from female to female, so that the current standards are more “normal” than the classic monogamous male. But this is a case of crafting the theory to fit the desire. Whatever biology has to say about polygamy, it also programs males to defend females, a feature of maleness that is sharply missing in the brave new world. Some women appreciate not having men open doors for them, but the damage it does to men is something to take into account.
• In his novel Whatever, Michel Houellebecq, the French novelist and philosopher, said that it only takes about six months of playing the singles scene before a person is rendered incapable of developing a deep and permanent relationship. If he is right, then the brave new world of sexual liberation has permanently infantilized many young men.
• Many commentators, such as Kay Hymowitz in her book Manning Up, have attributed the extended male adolescence to feminism. Recently Myriam Miedzam, in an article for Dissent magazine, praised Ms. Hymowitz’ book, but argued that, if it is indeed feminism which has affected male behavior, females have not benefitted either. That, I think, is exactly the point.
ECONOMICS
The next possible candidate is economic. There are two possible culprits here: affirmative action and a shift away from wealth creation in the economy.
The affirmative action argument is an obvious one. In the current recession, nearly 80% of all people laid off were males, because if a company fires a female, it invites a lawsuit, whereas, a male, particularly a young white heterosexual male, is an unprotected class who has no recourse to the courts. It is certainly possible that anyone facing that sort of societal attitude would just stop trying very hard and live life to enjoy himself.
As for wealth creation, I’ve argued before that there are only three types of jobs - wealth creation (manufacturing and farming), wealth protection (the military and medicine) and wealth redistribution (Wall Street, lawyering and most of the rest of us) – and that many current government policies serve to encourage wealth redistribution at the expense of wealth creation. It is possible that men are more comfortable in wealth creating jobs than they are in other forms of employment. The fact that females are close to half of the legal profession these days and less than 10% of entrepreneurs lends credence to that argument.
PACIFISM
The final candidate is that our knee jerk national impulse these days is to be anti-war. Nothing wrong with that per se, but to make it a primary emotion is to sacrifice much. Since Vietnam, there has been genocide and tyranny around the world and to be true to our perceived morality of opposing war requires us to turn a blind eye to it. The New York Times did not even bother to cover the hundreds of thousands of bodies, murdered by Saddam Hussein, which the Allies dug up after the Iraqi invasion.
There is only one option: you can be anti-war or you can be anti-slavery, anti-genocide and anti-tyranny. You cannot be opposed to all of these evils and if you consider war the worst evil, you have to accept all the rest. Since the dawn of civilization, it was the essence of manhood to defend right from wrong, to be willing to sacrifice yourself for the greater good. By altering that equation, society has redefined men out of a job.
That’s not to say that men and war was always a positive force, just that when good men believe it is wrong to defend themselves or defend the weak by force of arms, they surrender the field to the worst forms of humanity. I was in a bookstore recently and read on a dust jacket of some pacifist’s thick tome the author’s goal of stopping all “good men” from being willing to go to war. He was realistic enough not to suppose that anyone could prevent all war, so he was content just to have “good men” refuse to participate. Here, I realized, was the most evil man in the world.
So, who is to blame for the decline of the American male? All of the above, I’d wager. On the bright side, anyone who has worked with the military will recognize that the damage is reversible at any time. The military is full of intelligent, enthusiastic, mature young men who make their civilian counterparts look as if they’re from a different planet. But these men grew up in the same country as the driftless adolescents. Obviously, it is not something in the water.
Unfortunately, the military is only a fraction of society and there are not enough of them to deal with a real national emergency. If we don’t do something to turn things around, it may be too late to realize why the old male authority figure was handy to have around.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
So, for all his supposed prescience about the Nazis, Franklin Roosevelt was a Johnny Come Lately to the threat. In the early 1930’s he supported the isolationist impulse of the progressives in Congress who blamed big corporations for launching World War I. The so-called “merchants of death” Congressional hearings were a convenient way to beat up industrial corporations and led to American disenchantment with our involvement in the Great War, fanning the flames of isolationism. Then in the mid-1930’s, FDR encouraged the passage of the infamous Neutrality Acts so that he wouldn’t have to alienate either his leftwing supporters or his Catholic, conservative ethnic supporters who supported opposing sides in the Spanish Civil War. It wasn’t until the summer of 1940, when, having sown the wind and watching Europe reap the whirlwind, FDR took measures to undo the harm he had caused.
Some may argue that it is best that governments wait until it is too late to take milder measures, because when they do take action, they tend to make a hash of it, as we’ve seen lately with a stimulus package which didn’t stimulate and a health care bill which will provide nothing of the sort. The problem with ignoring issues, however, is that, when existing policies exacerbate a situation, delay in taking action may result in much more damage than can be repaired.
Such is the case with America’s young men. I know many upper middle class couples who have marvelously successful daughters and sons whom the parents themselves will tell you don’t measure up. These couples are all fine parents, as witnessed by their daughters’ success, so something more than family dynamics is going on.
Although this seems to affect white males more than African American or Hispanic males, this phenomenon is evident across the rainbow. Statistics tell the story. Divorce is down, but that is because marriage is down even further. For the first time in history, married couples constitute a minority of households in America. A full 60% of all freshmen in college are women these days. In the last ten years, the number of babies born to whites has fallen 10% and the number born to African-Americans has fallen by 2%, while the number of Hispanic births has risen by 40%. Larger percentages than ever before live with their parents into their thirties. More women over the age of forty remain unmarried than any time in the past.
The candidates for causing this collapse of manhood all date from the postwar era, but primarily the 60’s. My personal candidates are, in order of their appearance in American society, popular culture, feminism, economics and pacifism.
POPULAR CULTURE
The first candidate, by right of seniority, is pop culture. The concept of what it took to be a man began to change shortly after World War II. Slowly the popular conception was altered by movies, novels and television. The ideal man moved from boys who became men early – whether it be Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath or Private Peter Conway in The Sands of Iwo Jima – to boys who raced their cars off cliffs and their fathers who hadn’t a clue how to deal with them as with Jim Stark and Frank Stark in Rebel Without a Cause. By the 60’s, the depiction of the mature establishment male had degenerated into Gomer Pyle and Gilligan. Meanwhile, the transgressive male – whether he be Dirty Harry and General Patton on the right or Hawkeye Pierce and Billy Jack on the left, fighting an incompetent or corrupt establishment – were the new model man. From both ends of the political spectrum, then, it became admirable for a man not to be integrated into society.
There are many reasons for this shift, one being that the authors of American postwar culture tended to be males who served as enlisted men or junior officers in World War II and chaffed under the thumb of authority. Their postwar product was another version of the same griping they did as young soldiers and sailors and by the 60s, this attitude took on a life of its own.
FEMINISM AND THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION
Another candidate is feminism, and, more broadly, the sexual revolution. Since this gets the most attention, it doesn’t need much time here, except for a few interesting nuggets:
• The rote excuse these days is that biology has programed men to flit from female to female, so that the current standards are more “normal” than the classic monogamous male. But this is a case of crafting the theory to fit the desire. Whatever biology has to say about polygamy, it also programs males to defend females, a feature of maleness that is sharply missing in the brave new world. Some women appreciate not having men open doors for them, but the damage it does to men is something to take into account.
• In his novel Whatever, Michel Houellebecq, the French novelist and philosopher, said that it only takes about six months of playing the singles scene before a person is rendered incapable of developing a deep and permanent relationship. If he is right, then the brave new world of sexual liberation has permanently infantilized many young men.
• Many commentators, such as Kay Hymowitz in her book Manning Up, have attributed the extended male adolescence to feminism. Recently Myriam Miedzam, in an article for Dissent magazine, praised Ms. Hymowitz’ book, but argued that, if it is indeed feminism which has affected male behavior, females have not benefitted either. That, I think, is exactly the point.
ECONOMICS
The next possible candidate is economic. There are two possible culprits here: affirmative action and a shift away from wealth creation in the economy.
The affirmative action argument is an obvious one. In the current recession, nearly 80% of all people laid off were males, because if a company fires a female, it invites a lawsuit, whereas, a male, particularly a young white heterosexual male, is an unprotected class who has no recourse to the courts. It is certainly possible that anyone facing that sort of societal attitude would just stop trying very hard and live life to enjoy himself.
As for wealth creation, I’ve argued before that there are only three types of jobs - wealth creation (manufacturing and farming), wealth protection (the military and medicine) and wealth redistribution (Wall Street, lawyering and most of the rest of us) – and that many current government policies serve to encourage wealth redistribution at the expense of wealth creation. It is possible that men are more comfortable in wealth creating jobs than they are in other forms of employment. The fact that females are close to half of the legal profession these days and less than 10% of entrepreneurs lends credence to that argument.
PACIFISM
The final candidate is that our knee jerk national impulse these days is to be anti-war. Nothing wrong with that per se, but to make it a primary emotion is to sacrifice much. Since Vietnam, there has been genocide and tyranny around the world and to be true to our perceived morality of opposing war requires us to turn a blind eye to it. The New York Times did not even bother to cover the hundreds of thousands of bodies, murdered by Saddam Hussein, which the Allies dug up after the Iraqi invasion.
There is only one option: you can be anti-war or you can be anti-slavery, anti-genocide and anti-tyranny. You cannot be opposed to all of these evils and if you consider war the worst evil, you have to accept all the rest. Since the dawn of civilization, it was the essence of manhood to defend right from wrong, to be willing to sacrifice yourself for the greater good. By altering that equation, society has redefined men out of a job.
That’s not to say that men and war was always a positive force, just that when good men believe it is wrong to defend themselves or defend the weak by force of arms, they surrender the field to the worst forms of humanity. I was in a bookstore recently and read on a dust jacket of some pacifist’s thick tome the author’s goal of stopping all “good men” from being willing to go to war. He was realistic enough not to suppose that anyone could prevent all war, so he was content just to have “good men” refuse to participate. Here, I realized, was the most evil man in the world.
So, who is to blame for the decline of the American male? All of the above, I’d wager. On the bright side, anyone who has worked with the military will recognize that the damage is reversible at any time. The military is full of intelligent, enthusiastic, mature young men who make their civilian counterparts look as if they’re from a different planet. But these men grew up in the same country as the driftless adolescents. Obviously, it is not something in the water.
Unfortunately, the military is only a fraction of society and there are not enough of them to deal with a real national emergency. If we don’t do something to turn things around, it may be too late to realize why the old male authority figure was handy to have around.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts By John Russell Deane
In this case, the Greeks are bearing an invaluable gift: a view of the future. The future they present is what happens when a government engages in unsustainable monetary and fiscal policies. Everyone knows that Greece, as a result of unsustainable practices, faced certain default on its obligations. In order to maintain the viability of the Euro, the European Community came to the rescue with a $159 Billion rescue package. The package did not come without strings. The first condition was inherent: Greece was no longer a sovereign nation. The second condition was that Greece engage in a severe program of government cuts and tax increases.
Two things became obvious almost immediately. First, the nature of the austerity programs caused violent rioting in the streets. Second, the austerity program was not enough. While the riots continued, all of the cuts did not provide any confidence in the success of Greece’s efforts. The Greek budget deficit is larger than originally thought and the spending cuts and increase in revenues are significantly deficient in meeting the obligations that have been imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the other members of the Euro Zone. There is little doubt that Greek default is a certainty unless there is another bailout. There is a problem with a bailout. The European Community is concerned about the inevitable need to provide support for Greece long into the future. Some of the Finance Ministers of the European countries are insisting that in addition to serious increases in the austerity programs, the Greek bond holders participate in the pain by bearing part of the cost of the bailout program. This means that bond holders will not receive the return on their investments or, in fact, the return of their initial investments. This debate has already caused the cost of bonds to the Greek government to soar to 30% for two-year bonds. Of course, the cost to the Greek government is now and will continue to be unsustainable. Greece will not be able to rely on borrowing to fund governmental expenditures. Further, having Greek bondholders take a haircut will send a negative message to all of the other countries currently being bailed out and those who are about to be bailed out.
What has happened in Greece has spread to Ireland and Portugal and has Spain and Italy in its sites. As is the case in Greece, the others receiving bail-out funds are not likely to meet the austerity goals imposed on them. This will create even greater pressure on Europe. Even those not anticipating default are facing significant challenges. Country-wide public sector strikes are promised in England.
What is very important about what is happening in Europe is that it could happen here. In fact, the crisis is here already. Further, the instability in Europe is contributing to the weakness in our economy. What is also important about what is happening in Europe is that we are not just spectators. We are involved. Our Fed has transferred $60 Billion to the European Central Bank which is being used to bail out European countries. Further, we are the largest contributor to the International Monetary Fund which is the major player in the bail out of these countries.
Those who look at what is happening in Europe and believe that these extreme events could not happen here should try to explain to themselves why not. Is there something inherently different between Greece and California? If both have pursued unsustainable governmental spending program and cannot meet their obligations, why should the result be different for one than the other. Actually, there is a major difference. The European Union has felt, to date, that they could not let Greece default. They bailed Greece out. California does not have anyone prepared to bail-out them out. We already see marches and somewhat violent demonstrations in the streets of many of our States. We are seeing state governments cut programs and employees. When will the response of the demonstrators be indistinguishable from what we see in Greece? If there are those who do not see this result as inevitable, they should be prepared to explain why, if only to themselves.
Is it different at the Federal level? The unsustainable programs and spending will necessarily lead to a default. Like the states, the Federal government cannot not look elsewhere to be bailed out. They can help themselves by printing more money. In fact, that is what they are doing now. The problem is that this effort will substantially devalue the dollar and not solve our problem. The federal government can also borrow money to meet its needs. Unfortunately, as everyone knows, our borrowing has resulted in a $14.3 Trillion debt and growing. Over 40 cents of every dollar we spend is borrowed. Is this sustainable? Of course not. Is it getting better? No! We are borrowing $1.6 Trillion each year.
Greece is our “mine canary.” What is happening in Greece in inevitable here unless we make significant changes in our spending programs. Time is running out. What are our leaders doing? Nothing. They are seeking to take political advantage of the position of their opponents. They are trying to find new ways of kicking the can down the road.
The Greeks have sent us a valuable gift. If only we could make good use of it.
Two things became obvious almost immediately. First, the nature of the austerity programs caused violent rioting in the streets. Second, the austerity program was not enough. While the riots continued, all of the cuts did not provide any confidence in the success of Greece’s efforts. The Greek budget deficit is larger than originally thought and the spending cuts and increase in revenues are significantly deficient in meeting the obligations that have been imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the other members of the Euro Zone. There is little doubt that Greek default is a certainty unless there is another bailout. There is a problem with a bailout. The European Community is concerned about the inevitable need to provide support for Greece long into the future. Some of the Finance Ministers of the European countries are insisting that in addition to serious increases in the austerity programs, the Greek bond holders participate in the pain by bearing part of the cost of the bailout program. This means that bond holders will not receive the return on their investments or, in fact, the return of their initial investments. This debate has already caused the cost of bonds to the Greek government to soar to 30% for two-year bonds. Of course, the cost to the Greek government is now and will continue to be unsustainable. Greece will not be able to rely on borrowing to fund governmental expenditures. Further, having Greek bondholders take a haircut will send a negative message to all of the other countries currently being bailed out and those who are about to be bailed out.
What has happened in Greece has spread to Ireland and Portugal and has Spain and Italy in its sites. As is the case in Greece, the others receiving bail-out funds are not likely to meet the austerity goals imposed on them. This will create even greater pressure on Europe. Even those not anticipating default are facing significant challenges. Country-wide public sector strikes are promised in England.
What is very important about what is happening in Europe is that it could happen here. In fact, the crisis is here already. Further, the instability in Europe is contributing to the weakness in our economy. What is also important about what is happening in Europe is that we are not just spectators. We are involved. Our Fed has transferred $60 Billion to the European Central Bank which is being used to bail out European countries. Further, we are the largest contributor to the International Monetary Fund which is the major player in the bail out of these countries.
Those who look at what is happening in Europe and believe that these extreme events could not happen here should try to explain to themselves why not. Is there something inherently different between Greece and California? If both have pursued unsustainable governmental spending program and cannot meet their obligations, why should the result be different for one than the other. Actually, there is a major difference. The European Union has felt, to date, that they could not let Greece default. They bailed Greece out. California does not have anyone prepared to bail-out them out. We already see marches and somewhat violent demonstrations in the streets of many of our States. We are seeing state governments cut programs and employees. When will the response of the demonstrators be indistinguishable from what we see in Greece? If there are those who do not see this result as inevitable, they should be prepared to explain why, if only to themselves.
Is it different at the Federal level? The unsustainable programs and spending will necessarily lead to a default. Like the states, the Federal government cannot not look elsewhere to be bailed out. They can help themselves by printing more money. In fact, that is what they are doing now. The problem is that this effort will substantially devalue the dollar and not solve our problem. The federal government can also borrow money to meet its needs. Unfortunately, as everyone knows, our borrowing has resulted in a $14.3 Trillion debt and growing. Over 40 cents of every dollar we spend is borrowed. Is this sustainable? Of course not. Is it getting better? No! We are borrowing $1.6 Trillion each year.
Greece is our “mine canary.” What is happening in Greece in inevitable here unless we make significant changes in our spending programs. Time is running out. What are our leaders doing? Nothing. They are seeking to take political advantage of the position of their opponents. They are trying to find new ways of kicking the can down the road.
The Greeks have sent us a valuable gift. If only we could make good use of it.
Friday, June 3, 2011
NEW FORMS OF WAR, AND OLD ……..By Dick Shriver
“So they’ve killed our Osama”, said the Mullah from the Waziristan region in north Pakistan to the al Qaeda chieftain, as the two of them contemplated candidates for new leadership to continue forging ahead toward the 12th Caliphate, bin Laden having made such great progress toward that ultimate goal.
This hypothetical conversation is adapted from Jaroslav Haschek’s satirical classic, “The Good Soldier Schvejk” in which he refers to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by the Serb, Gavrilo Princip, an event that triggered WWI. Could the assassination of Osama bin Laden trigger WWIII?
I think not.....for two reasons. One is the power of our superior military, and the second is the power of our founding principles.
Haschek’s "Schvejk” epitomized those who were dragooned into service by the Austro-Hungarians to be front-line infantry forced into battle against overwhelming odds with little chance of survival…..in other words, “cannon fodder”. Use of soldiers conscripted by force to die en masse has been one of the traditional ways of fighting wars for centuries. WWI was the last such war in its entirety, however, though the Soviet Union conscripted troops from throughout the vast USSR and often compelled them to be cannon fodder in much of WWII. One might argue that the Vietnamese often used their troops as cannon fodder during the Vietnam war, and certainly the child soldiers in African civil wars in the past few decades have been used as cannon fodder.
As weaponry and tactics advanced, and especially where democratic governments were engaged in battle, forcing people into battles as cannon fodder has all but disappeared. The major new form of war that has emerged involves battles in which one side, the ultimate loser, has an apparent lopsided advantage over the other by using superior intelligence, weapons and tactics to destroy large numbers of enemy forces and resources; the other side, by comparison, has very few combatants, total secrecy, and expends little by way of resources. Bin Laden’s pre-emptive attack on 9/11 was the most successful and dramatic example in history of what is now referred to as “asymmetric warfare”. President Jimmy Carter’s failed attempt to rescue US hostages in Iran in 1980 was one of the worst.
Bin Laden’s “costs” to bring about this horrific attack on an unwitting “enemy” cost half a million dollars plus 19 jihadists willing to commit kamikaze by flying planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The immediate and long term costs to the United States were more than three thousand innocent civilians dead, with costs, over time, approaching a trillion dollars. The ratio of damage inflicted divided by the costs to the terrorists is nearly infinite. Scenes of Palestinians dancing in the streets for joy in celebration of the attack have left unforgettable images of an enemy of which the vast majority of Americans were completely unaware.
Russ Deane has written an important article for this blog on the topic of our own new form of war which he calls “Hunters and Killers”. Putting bin Laden away was the result of the best American intelligence (hunters) and special operations forces (killers). Emphasis to enhance and modernize both capabilities has evolved because of excellent national security leadership over the past decade.
There was a fourth plane hijacked by suicidal Islamic extremists on 9/11, United Airlines Flight 93. This plane was headed for either the US Capitol or the White House, but instead it crashed into an empty field in Pennsylvania. It crashed because a group of courageous, but otherwise ordinary, untrained civilian Americans stormed the front of the plane in the face of certain death no matter what happened. For intelligence, they had only their cell phones whereby they learned of the World Trade Center and Pentagon crashes. They analyzed this data quickly and made a plan. Their code was, “Let’s Roll”. With only their bodies as weapons, they stormed the cockpit and crashed the plane into an empty field. 37 passengers, a crew of 7 and 4 hijackers died in this Boeing 757-222 instead of the planned slaughter of many in our Congress or our President and many of his staff. This time, the form of warfare, the counter-punch, was in the form of citizen patriots willing to die for their country.
Our modern technology is critical to our long term survival as a nation. The last Caliphate was terminated in 1924 by Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk and the idea remained effectively dormant until Osama bin Laden came along. His quest to establish the 12th caliphate will not be taken up by others because of two American forms of counter-terrorism: the first, quite new and always being modernized, is the “Hunter – Killer” ability of the best trained and best led military force on the planet; the second form of counter-terrorism, requiring no funding or pre-planning or uniforms or leaders, and as old as the country itself, is plain old Americans who, when presented with the necessity, will die for Liberty.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Hunters and Killers By John Russell Deane
Hunters and Killers
The recent, successful effort by Seal 6 to eliminate bin Laden began a discussion of “hunters and killers.” For some of us who have addressed this form of combat, news of the successful mission was not a surprise. For others, it might be of interest to consider one means by which we are going to war. This new approach to deal with our enemies should make us all proud.
Under the traditional concept of war, two or more opposing armies face off in battle. They maintain enemy and friendly “lines.” The armies are immediately recognizable by their uniforms. There is a constant battle to take land or other prizes of war and hold them. There is a constant attempt to reduce the capabilities of one’s opponents. This requires taking out supply lines, weapon systems, strategic positions and enemy soldiers. All of this is undertaken, to the extent possible, without incurring collateral damage including loss of civilian life and loss of non-military targets. That was then, this is now.
We began to see differences in traditional warfare in Vietnam. We see it again in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, New York City, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia. In fact, it is everywhere. Instead of combatants wearing uniforms, they wear non-descript clothing and seek to blend into their surrounding, most often areas of civilian population. They are not as interested in gaining territory and holding it. There are no restrictions on their targets, including civilian population centers. In fact, using civilians as human shields is commonplace. They do not seek victory in the form of a surrender from their enemies. They seek to wear down their enemies through tactics centering on terror. They continue to fight for the mantra of Islam that all infidels must be eliminated on the way to the Islamic caliphate.
It seems clear that fighting terror tactics cannot be done with conventional tactics and weapons. A different course of action is needed. Hence: hunters and killers. As discussed in an earlier paper, the intelligence capability of our government has been in steady decline since the days of Senator Frank Church in the 1970s. Until recently, our intelligence came from photographs taken from the satellites and reports from people at NSA who spend their days reading newspapers. Human intelligence has been all but eliminated. Fortunately, under the Bush Administration, this began to change. They adopted the concept of hunters and killers. This is a simple concept. First, a major effort is undertaken to gather human intelligence by a variety of methods, identifying the location of potential targets, such as bin Laden. Once the hunters have identified a target, the killers take it out. Killers use a variety of means of taking targets out including the drones which have been so successful, bombs from aircraft, strikes such as Seal 6 and snipers.
To their credit, the Obama Administration has significantly expanded their hunter/killer capacity. Further, they have increased the use of drones to inflict damage. Further still, they have expanded their incursions into Pakistan. Further still, they have consolidated this capability at the CIA. These are all important moves to assist in securing our safety. This approach should be the model of counterterrorism. This technique requires intelligence teams on the ground in the areas where attacks will be undertaken. This will require some cooperation with the governments in the area. Will that be available to us?
That we have this capability and have used it to take out bin Laden should bring a great deal of pride to Americans. It is even more encouraging to assume that the hunters have developed a long list of targets and the killers are preparing to take them out. A finger in the eye of the liberal do-gooders is the fact that the intelligence gathered to find bin Laden included that from “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Clearly, the lead to the couriers began with the “waterboarding” of Kalid Sheikh Mohammed. Similar interrogation techniques even led to the capture of Mohammed. These and other examples prove that enhanced interrogation techniques work and keep us safe. The former Director of the CIA has made clear that a substantial amount of knowledge about the terrorists came from such techniques. Common sense supports the conclusion that treating terrorist as criminals and providing Miranda Warnings and trying them in criminal courts does not work.
Perhaps, we have reached the point where heroes who keep us safe are considered for medals, not investigations and prosecution. Perhaps, our intelligence operatives will be encouraged to do their tough jobs, not avoid activities that will subject them to criticism. A good first step might be the cessation of the investigation of CIA personnel. First, the Attorney General needs to come around. This may be tough as he spends most of his time protecting the bad guys. Second, we must have the courage to ignore those who are offended by these programs which lead to targeted killings.
Many of these steps have raised the ire or apparent ire of Pakistan. They have suggested they will not play nicely with us in the future. They are likely suggesting that the United States violated the Charter of the United Nations prohibitions on one country carrying out military operations in another country without consent. This seems to be just one more of the hundreds of reasons justifying the conclusion that there is no reason for the United Nations. Well, there are many who wonder why we have considered the relationship with Pakistan important, especially to the tune of $3 Billion annually in foreign aid as well as “reimbursement” for expenses incurred in assisting us in the war against terror. There can be no question that Pakistan has played a minor role in assisting us with the Taliban and Al-Qaida. However, they have had access, through their intelligence agencies, to information about the location of bin Laden as well as other enemies for a number of years. They have not provided us with this information and, in fact, have provided us with mis-information. They have provided financial and other resources to the Taliban and al Qaeda to support their terrorist activities. Further, they have not provided information which could have been significant in saving the lives of many of our soldiers who were subject to ambush. After the raid on bin Laden, Pakistan refused, initially, to return the tail section of the downed helicopter and refused, initially, access to bin Laden’s wives. Importantly, Pakistan identified (outed) the CIA representative in Pakistan. Great allies.
So why do we care about Pakistan? First, much of the supplies for the NATO troops are sent through Pakistan. I do not know whether there is an acceptable substitute. Second, they are a nuclear power and if the current government were destabilized, these weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists and those who support terrorists. I do not know whether these weapons are centralized and could be taken out with air strikes. The Pakistanis will fight to maintain these armaments due to their continuing conflict with India. Third, there continues to be a concern about an alliance between Pakistan and China. These are significant issues. On the other hand, I am not sure there is anything we can do to assure the nuclear weapons do not end in the wrong hands. Maybe it is to our interest, and the interest of India, to take out the weapons. It may be logistically more sophisticated than the same mission in Iran but it may be necessary. Further, I am not sure there is any way to prevent the alliance between Pakistan and China. After all, the two countries jointly approached Afghanistan and strongly suggested that they end their relationship with the United States. They suggested that Afghanistan, Pakistan and China would be able to bring the Taliban into the fold through peaceful efforts. Clearly, this will not be a pro-Western alliance.
In the end, we are improving our ability to deal with terror and those who would subject us to terror. On the other hand, we know we cannot rely on Pakistan for assistance in the war with the terrorists. Unless we can find new supply routes to Afghanistan and neutralize the Pakistani nuclear capability, we may need to continue to bribe them. In the end, however, we know we have the means to deal with certain terrorists and that is a good thing.
The recent, successful effort by Seal 6 to eliminate bin Laden began a discussion of “hunters and killers.” For some of us who have addressed this form of combat, news of the successful mission was not a surprise. For others, it might be of interest to consider one means by which we are going to war. This new approach to deal with our enemies should make us all proud.
Under the traditional concept of war, two or more opposing armies face off in battle. They maintain enemy and friendly “lines.” The armies are immediately recognizable by their uniforms. There is a constant battle to take land or other prizes of war and hold them. There is a constant attempt to reduce the capabilities of one’s opponents. This requires taking out supply lines, weapon systems, strategic positions and enemy soldiers. All of this is undertaken, to the extent possible, without incurring collateral damage including loss of civilian life and loss of non-military targets. That was then, this is now.
We began to see differences in traditional warfare in Vietnam. We see it again in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, New York City, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia. In fact, it is everywhere. Instead of combatants wearing uniforms, they wear non-descript clothing and seek to blend into their surrounding, most often areas of civilian population. They are not as interested in gaining territory and holding it. There are no restrictions on their targets, including civilian population centers. In fact, using civilians as human shields is commonplace. They do not seek victory in the form of a surrender from their enemies. They seek to wear down their enemies through tactics centering on terror. They continue to fight for the mantra of Islam that all infidels must be eliminated on the way to the Islamic caliphate.
It seems clear that fighting terror tactics cannot be done with conventional tactics and weapons. A different course of action is needed. Hence: hunters and killers. As discussed in an earlier paper, the intelligence capability of our government has been in steady decline since the days of Senator Frank Church in the 1970s. Until recently, our intelligence came from photographs taken from the satellites and reports from people at NSA who spend their days reading newspapers. Human intelligence has been all but eliminated. Fortunately, under the Bush Administration, this began to change. They adopted the concept of hunters and killers. This is a simple concept. First, a major effort is undertaken to gather human intelligence by a variety of methods, identifying the location of potential targets, such as bin Laden. Once the hunters have identified a target, the killers take it out. Killers use a variety of means of taking targets out including the drones which have been so successful, bombs from aircraft, strikes such as Seal 6 and snipers.
To their credit, the Obama Administration has significantly expanded their hunter/killer capacity. Further, they have increased the use of drones to inflict damage. Further still, they have expanded their incursions into Pakistan. Further still, they have consolidated this capability at the CIA. These are all important moves to assist in securing our safety. This approach should be the model of counterterrorism. This technique requires intelligence teams on the ground in the areas where attacks will be undertaken. This will require some cooperation with the governments in the area. Will that be available to us?
That we have this capability and have used it to take out bin Laden should bring a great deal of pride to Americans. It is even more encouraging to assume that the hunters have developed a long list of targets and the killers are preparing to take them out. A finger in the eye of the liberal do-gooders is the fact that the intelligence gathered to find bin Laden included that from “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Clearly, the lead to the couriers began with the “waterboarding” of Kalid Sheikh Mohammed. Similar interrogation techniques even led to the capture of Mohammed. These and other examples prove that enhanced interrogation techniques work and keep us safe. The former Director of the CIA has made clear that a substantial amount of knowledge about the terrorists came from such techniques. Common sense supports the conclusion that treating terrorist as criminals and providing Miranda Warnings and trying them in criminal courts does not work.
Perhaps, we have reached the point where heroes who keep us safe are considered for medals, not investigations and prosecution. Perhaps, our intelligence operatives will be encouraged to do their tough jobs, not avoid activities that will subject them to criticism. A good first step might be the cessation of the investigation of CIA personnel. First, the Attorney General needs to come around. This may be tough as he spends most of his time protecting the bad guys. Second, we must have the courage to ignore those who are offended by these programs which lead to targeted killings.
Many of these steps have raised the ire or apparent ire of Pakistan. They have suggested they will not play nicely with us in the future. They are likely suggesting that the United States violated the Charter of the United Nations prohibitions on one country carrying out military operations in another country without consent. This seems to be just one more of the hundreds of reasons justifying the conclusion that there is no reason for the United Nations. Well, there are many who wonder why we have considered the relationship with Pakistan important, especially to the tune of $3 Billion annually in foreign aid as well as “reimbursement” for expenses incurred in assisting us in the war against terror. There can be no question that Pakistan has played a minor role in assisting us with the Taliban and Al-Qaida. However, they have had access, through their intelligence agencies, to information about the location of bin Laden as well as other enemies for a number of years. They have not provided us with this information and, in fact, have provided us with mis-information. They have provided financial and other resources to the Taliban and al Qaeda to support their terrorist activities. Further, they have not provided information which could have been significant in saving the lives of many of our soldiers who were subject to ambush. After the raid on bin Laden, Pakistan refused, initially, to return the tail section of the downed helicopter and refused, initially, access to bin Laden’s wives. Importantly, Pakistan identified (outed) the CIA representative in Pakistan. Great allies.
So why do we care about Pakistan? First, much of the supplies for the NATO troops are sent through Pakistan. I do not know whether there is an acceptable substitute. Second, they are a nuclear power and if the current government were destabilized, these weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists and those who support terrorists. I do not know whether these weapons are centralized and could be taken out with air strikes. The Pakistanis will fight to maintain these armaments due to their continuing conflict with India. Third, there continues to be a concern about an alliance between Pakistan and China. These are significant issues. On the other hand, I am not sure there is anything we can do to assure the nuclear weapons do not end in the wrong hands. Maybe it is to our interest, and the interest of India, to take out the weapons. It may be logistically more sophisticated than the same mission in Iran but it may be necessary. Further, I am not sure there is any way to prevent the alliance between Pakistan and China. After all, the two countries jointly approached Afghanistan and strongly suggested that they end their relationship with the United States. They suggested that Afghanistan, Pakistan and China would be able to bring the Taliban into the fold through peaceful efforts. Clearly, this will not be a pro-Western alliance.
In the end, we are improving our ability to deal with terror and those who would subject us to terror. On the other hand, we know we cannot rely on Pakistan for assistance in the war with the terrorists. Unless we can find new supply routes to Afghanistan and neutralize the Pakistani nuclear capability, we may need to continue to bribe them. In the end, however, we know we have the means to deal with certain terrorists and that is a good thing.
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