The War the Politicians Refuse to End. It's Up to the People. March 19th!

An American soldier pointing to an Iraqi's burned arm and remains hung as a warning to Iraqi insurgents.

On the Question of Susceptibility to Pressure

Some folks on the left have been saying that one candidate or another (usually Obama) is better because he is more likely to respond to "pressure" from progressive forces.

I have a simple question: if you were President of the United States, leader of the only remaining superpower and the biggest and baddest imperialist power in history, what would be more likely to make you respond to pressure -

A) knowing that your predecessor was impeached for his ill deeds or

B) knowing that your predecessor had gotten away with murder (and torture and spying...)?

What the Orange Ribbons Represent

Close to one billion people watched the 2008 Academy Awards telecast and saw the orange ribbons and orange wristbands worn by many in attendance, including Oscar winner Alex Gibney (Best Documentary, “Taxi to the Dark Side”) and Best Actress nominee Julie Christie. As Washington Post writer William Booth, writing about the Oscars, put it: “Suddenly, we noticed -- orange ribbons and bracelets everywhere." Many were surprised to see the orange and wonder what it’s all about.

As Paul Haggis (winner for “Crash” in 2006) put it: “The orange ribbons were worn in protest against state sanctioned torture… the ribbons are the color of the jumpsuits at Guantanamo Bay, and at our secret detention camps, where prisoners are kept indefinitely, in violation of our constitution, and tortured. This is something that our government has long condemned as the heinous behavior of dictators, but something that unbelievably we now condone... Every American of any political party should be loudly condemning this grossly un-American activity, but it is barely even mentioned anymore. The orange wristbands some of us wore said simply ‘Torture + Silence = Complicity.’ I received mine from The World Can't Wait campaign.”

The history behind the orange ribbons is this: in the summer of 2007 I initiated the campaign, calling it “Declare It Now: Wear Orange.” World Can’t Wait: Drive Out the Bush Regime formally adopted the campaign, as did the impeachment movement as a whole, widely distributing orange as the color of resistance to the Bush program. A few months later the ACLU and other groups also took up the color, with their specific focus the demand to shut down GITMO.

Some of the media commentary on the orange ribbons has been to deride it as the latest, superficial fad within Hollywood. Washington Post writer Monica Hesse, for example, called the ribbons “cheap, ugly.”

I wonder what is more ugly, an orange ribbon or suffocating someone to the point of drowning by waterboarding?

An orange wristband or the black hoods put on detainees before they are hooked up for electrical shocks to their genitals?

An orange banner flying from a Church Steeple declaring “We Won’t Live in a Torture State” or a vice-president who declares waterboarding a “no-brainer?”

An orange t-shirt or a president who claims the right, echoing the exact same phrasing used by the Nazis for torture, to use "enhanced interrogation techniques?”

An orange bandana or a Supreme Court justice who says that “so-called torture” would not be “cruel and unusual punishment” because it is not being carried out in the course of a criminal procedure?

An orange headband or an Attorney General who refuses to define waterboarding, a torture technique invented by the Spanish Inquisition, as torture?

An orange flagging tape on your bag or a presidential candidate who failed to filibuster legalized torture and the creation of gulags (GITMO, Abu Ghraib and rendition) where habeas corpus rights can be stripped from you, citizen and no-citizen alike, if the president declares you an “enemy combatant?”

An orange bumpersticker or a government and mass media that lie to their people in order to justify invading another country that did not threaten us, thus committing, according to the UN Charter, the highest war crime of all, causing to date the deaths of more than a million people?

An orange armband or an executive branch and Congress that legalizes warrantless, unjustified surveillance of all of us?

The choice we face collectively in 2008 is whether or not we will allow ourselves to go down in history as infamously standing silent in the face of grave crimes, the way the Germans did in the face of Nazi atrocities.

As I wrote in my book, Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney: “It is up to the rest of us to rouse ourselves and rouse others, to bring forth from the grassroots new social movement leaders to constitute an alternative and powerful counter-force that fundamentally alters the overall political atmosphere, providing a competing legitimate authority to the bankrupt and illegitimate authority now leading this country. The existing establishment has left us no other choice.”

That so many in the Academy have chosen to speak out and take this very public stand is tremendous because people in the cultural arena constitute a critical part of that competing, legitimate moral authority.

We see the importance of artists reflected as well in many of the movies released in the last two years that speak to the monstrous crimes being perpetrated in our names. These are the very films that some have complained have been “doom and gloom.” Films like “Taxi to the Dark Side,” “Rendition,” “The Good Shepherd,” “In the Valley of Ela,” “Persepolis,” “No End in Sight,” “Sicko,” and the allegorical tale of unrestrained evil, “No Country for Old Men.”

Artists have a special capacity - and special responsibility - to express our condition in ways that are larger than life. In a time when mainstream media and the major political parties steadfastly refuse to - air the majority demands for impeachment, end the unjust, immoral, illegal war on Iraq, respond to the emergency of global warming, stop the slide into unfettered, dictatorial rule and hold Bush and Cheney accountable - books, music, and art (including movies, graphic artists, and comedians) have had to shoulder an unusually heavy burden to convey truth and facts to the people. The truth has never been more strangled, restricted and distorted in its dissemination to the American people than today.

It’s a perverse irony that the best-informed young people in the country get much of their news from two satirical news shows, The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. But the king’s court jesters must deliver the bad news when the official information sources are corrupted and merely scribes to power.

What many members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did the other day was the kind of thing that we need to see much, much more of. Millions of people need to quit grumbling to themselves and their friends and family and wear their politics on their sleeves daily. If they do, then the fact that mainstream media and the two major political parties won’t give it a hearing won’t matter because it will be a scene that can be seen by all – orange in the streets, in the malls, in the schools, at the workplace, in the stands, on the bus, the train and the plane: we are taking a public stand against the immorality and depravity that now rules from the highest offices in the land.

We will not go down in history as “good Americans.” We demand a world in which truth and facts are the norm and where justice and fairness prevail.

A Commentary on Andrew Sullivan's Endorsement of Obama

Andrew Sullivan's December 2007 Atlantic Monthly commentary "Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters" provides a peek into the way that politics in fact operate rather than the electoral show that looks more like professional wrestling - with designated parts that each wrestler plays and pseudo-blows delivered to the opponent. If you've ever watched in wonder as I have at the audience at professional wrestling matches - don't they know that this is all fake? - you get a sense of the ploy being played upon the public with the elections game.

What Sullivan reveals - not purposefully in all of what follows - are some of the exigencies of being the sole imperialist superpower and the fact that none of the designated major candidates will do anything other than pursue a very narrow range of actions that fit into the parameters of being an empire. The very reason why he touts Obama as the answer to what ails us is the very reason why this non-Atlantic Monthly commentator believes that Obama is in fact a much greater danger in some respects than Bush. Omigod, I said it!

If you consider the case of former Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode, a black, who presided over the 1985 bombing of the MOVE house (leading to the deaths of all but two of the MOVE people in the house, including women and children, who were also black) and the subsequent fire that Goode let spread to much of the neighborhood, you get a sense of the "logic" that Sullivan employs in his piece about how Obama would make a much better face to pursue the aims of empire and prosecute wars such as in the Middle East and Pakistan than the wholly exposed and transparently rotten, narcissistic, ignorant, spoiled, callous George W. Bush.

In what follows I have excerpted elements of Sullivan's piece in bold face and inserted some commentary in plain text.

"The logic behind the candidacy of Barack Obama is not, in the end, about Barack Obama. It has little to do with his policy proposals, which are very close to his Democratic rivals’ and which, with a few exceptions, exist firmly within the conventions of our politics. ...

"Take the biggest foreign-policy question—the war in Iraq. The rhetoric ranges from John McCain’s “No Surrender” banner to the “End the War Now” absolutism of much of the Democratic base. Yet the substantive issue is almost comically removed from this hyperventilation. Every potential president, Republican or Democrat, would likely inherit more than 100,000 occupying troops in January 2009; every one would be attempting to redeploy them as prudently as possible and to build stronger alliances both in the region and in the world. Every major candidate, moreover, will pledge to use targeted military force against al-Qaeda if necessary; every one is committed to ensuring that Iran will not have a nuclear bomb; every one is committed to an open-ended deployment in Afghanistan and an unbending alliance with Israel. We are fighting over something, to be sure. But it is more a fight over how we define ourselves and over long-term goals than over what is practically to be done on the ground." ...

"On domestic policy, the primary issue is health care. Again, the ferocious rhetoric belies the mundane reality. Between the boogeyman of 'Big Government' and the alleged threat of the drug companies, the practical differences are more matters of nuance than ideology. Yes, there are policy disagreements, but in the wake of the Bush administration, they are underwhelming. Most Republicans support continuing the Medicare drug benefit for seniors, the largest expansion of the entitlement state since Lyndon Johnson, while Democrats are merely favoring more cost controls on drug and insurance companies. ... the difference is more technical than fundamental."

NPR reporters have made similar points when discussing the "debates:" the actual platforms and policy papers of Clinton and Obama are very nearly the same. The differences are in their rhetoric and in how they are presenting themselves and who they are trying to appeal to. This is somewhat like the difference between drinking a Cola and an Uncola. The irony of those cola ads is that the very same company in some cases that is trying to tell you that you don't want that uncool colored cola, you want our clear colored cola, is the company that also owns the colored cola!

Even if, for example, former Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) were to be elected (it speaks volumes about how the field is narrowed by the two major parties' leadership and the mass media that very few people even know that Gravel is in the race), he would be unable to accomplish what he wants absent a completely different political atmosphere in this country. That new situation would have to involve an aroused, engaged, and determined mass movement in the millions - the "larger force" that David Addington has said would be the only thing that could stop him and the Bush White House. Nothing less than this would be able to counter the forces that run things now and that run things ordinarily.

"At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce."

Throughout his article Sullivan ascribes the trouble within America to the divide within the Baby Boomer generation. In the international arena, he describes it as a war between America and Islamic fundamentalist terror. Sullivan's main point: Obama provides the best possible face for ending this cultural war and for carrying forward the "fight" against terror. He is the best face because, most of all, of the way he looks.

Given this quiet, evolving consensus on policy, how do we account for the bitter, brutal tone of American politics? The answer lies mainly with the biggest and most influential generation in America: the Baby Boomers. The divide is still—amazingly—between those who fought in Vietnam and those who didn’t, and between those who fought and dissented and those who fought but never dissented at all. By defining the contours of the Boomer generation, it lasted decades. And with time came a strange intensity.

Perhaps the underlying risk is best illustrated by our asking what the popular response would be to another 9/11–style attack. It is hard to imagine a reprise of the sudden unity and solidarity in the days after 9/11, or an outpouring of support from allies and neighbors. It is far easier to imagine an even more bitter fight over who was responsible (apart from the perpetrators) and a profound suspicion of a government forced to impose more restrictions on travel, communications, and civil liberties. The current president would be unable to command the trust, let alone the support, of half the country in such a time. He could even be blamed for provoking any attack that came.

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

He is not opposed to the use of unilateral force, either—as demonstrated by his willingness to target al-Qaeda in Pakistan over the objections of the Pakistani government. He does not oppose the idea of democratization in the Muslim world as a general principle or the concept of nation building as such. He is not an isolationist, as his support for the campaign in Afghanistan proves. It is worth recalling the key passages of the speech Obama gave in Chicago on October 2, 2002, five months before the war:

"I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war … I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars."

Obama's saying that the illegal, immoral and unjust invasion of Iraq is a "dumb war" is like saying that a serial killer is dumb. "I don't object to his doing the killing. I object that he chose his victims stupidly." Obama also said similarly that he thought the problem with the Military Commissions Act of 2006 was that it was "sloppy." What, pray tell, is "sloppy" about torture? That blood is spilled sloppily onto the floor and that someone's got to clean it up? What, pray tell, is "sloppy" about stripping people of the right to challenge their indefinite detention? Is that what one of the American Revolution's explicit grievances - the absence of habeas corpus - was, sloppy?

But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

Greater danger lies ahead, indeed. But is the constitutional order increasingly vulnerable because of the divisions in society that the 1960s opened up and revealed? Sullivan is turning history inside out. The chasm that the 1960s displayed opened up because blacks were still being treated like second-class citizens, subject to not only legal segregation but also savage violence by white racists and a system that oppresses them, because an imperialist war of conquest in Vietnam was going on in which napalm, for instance, was being routinely used and villages being destroyed "in order to save them," and because American women weren't content to be Harriet to Ozzie Nelson.

Who are these "lethal enemies" that Sullivan speaks of? The very same ones that the lethal leaders of our government have created and fostered. As Michael Scheuer, a senior CIA analyst in charge of tracking down Osama bin Laden, the man who, of all people, ought to know, says in his book Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror: “the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.” That is not a typo. He said ally. Chalmers Johnson calls this "blowback."

We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.

Obama celebrates Reagan as the guy who brought us together and made us feel good about being Americans again. Sullivan hails Obama as the 21st century's first Reagan-redux. Obama was not misspeaking when he lauded Reagan. He meant it and he does intend to try to do something akin to what Reagan did: make Americans feel good about our prejudices (as Rosalynn Carter put it in 1980), except that in Obama's case it will be to feel good about being imperialists waging unjust wars on countries like Pakistan and Iran (both of whom Obama has explicitly threatened). Is that the best we can do? Is that what realism dictates? Is this the world you want to be a part of?

Why Whoever Becomes President Won't Represent a Big Departure

I had intended to post this a few weeks ago, but got pre-occupied by other items. It's an extremely useful and well-researched piece and is usefully read keeping in mind what it says about the institutional forces in play at the highest levels of the US government, at work for a very long time.

Going Bankrupt: Why the Debt Crisis Is Now the Greatest Threat to the American Republic
By Chalmers Johnson
TomDispatch.com

Tuesday 22 January 2008

The military adventurers of the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups of men thought that they were the "smartest guys in the room," the title of Alex Gibney's prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.

As a result, going into 2008, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even attempts to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries. Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for future generations to pay - or repudiate. This utter fiscal irresponsibility has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (such as causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.

There are three broad aspects to our debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on "defense" projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States. Simultaneously, we are keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segments of the American population at strikingly low levels.

Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our manufacturing base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures - so-called "military Keynesianism," which I discuss in detail in my book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. By military Keynesianism, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.

Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of our country. These are what economists call "opportunity costs," things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world's number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs - an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing. Let me discuss each of these.

The Current Fiscal Disaster

It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense's planned expenditures for fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations' military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defense budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The United States has become the largest single salesman of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out of account President Bush's two on-going wars, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since World War II.

Before we try to break down and analyze this gargantuan sum, there is one important caveat. Figures on defense spending are notoriously unreliable. The numbers released by the Congressional Reference Service and the Congressional Budget Office do not agree with each other. Robert Higgs, senior fellow for political economy at the Independent Institute, says: "A well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon's (always well publicized) basic budget total and double it." Even a cursory reading of newspaper articles about the Department of Defense will turn up major differences in statistics about its expenses. Some 30-40% of the defense budget is "black," meaning that these sections contain hidden expenditures for classified projects. There is no possible way to know what they include or whether their total amounts are accurate.

There are many reasons for this budgetary sleight-of-hand - including a desire for secrecy on the part of the president, the secretary of defense, and the military-industrial complex - but the chief one is that members of Congress, who profit enormously from defense jobs and pork-barrel projects in their districts, have a political interest in supporting the Department of Defense. In 1996, in an attempt to bring accounting standards within the executive branch somewhat closer to those of the civilian economy, Congress passed the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act. It required all federal agencies to hire outside auditors to review their books and release the results to the public. Neither the Department of Defense, nor the Department of Homeland Security has ever complied. Congress has complained, but not penalized either department for ignoring the law. The result is that all numbers released by the Pentagon should be regarded as suspect.

In discussing the fiscal 2008 defense budget, as released to the press on February 7, 2007, I have been guided by two experienced and reliable analysts: William D. Hartung of the New America Foundation's Arms and Security Initiative and Fred Kaplan, defense correspondent for Slate.org. They agree that the Department of Defense requested $481.4 billion for salaries, operations (except in Iraq and Afghanistan), and equipment. They also agree on a figure of $141.7 billion for the "supplemental" budget to fight the "global war on terrorism" - that is, the two on-going wars that the general public may think are actually covered by the basic Pentagon budget. The Department of Defense also asked for an extra $93.4 billion to pay for hitherto unmentioned war costs in the remainder of 2007 and, most creatively, an additional "allowance" (a new term in defense budget documents) of $50 billion to be charged to fiscal year 2009. This comes to a total spending request by the Department of Defense of $766.5 billion.

But there is much more. In an attempt to disguise the true size of the American military empire, the government has long hidden major military-related expenditures in departments other than Defense. For example, $23.4 billion for the Department of Energy goes toward developing and maintaining nuclear warheads; and $25.3 billion in the Department of State budget is spent on foreign military assistance (primarily for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Republic, Egypt, and Pakistan). Another $1.03 billion outside the official Department of Defense budget is now needed for recruitment and reenlistment incentives for the overstretched U.S. military itself, up from a mere $174 million in 2003, the year the war in Iraq began. The Department of Veterans Affairs currently gets at least $75.7 billion, 50% of which goes for the long-term care of the grievously injured among the at least 28,870 soldiers so far wounded in Iraq and another 1,708 in Afghanistan. The amount is universally derided as inadequate. Another $46.4 billion goes to the Department of Homeland Security.

Missing as well from this compilation is $1.9 billion to the Department of Justice for the paramilitary activities of the FBI; $38.5 billion to the Department of the Treasury for the Military Retirement Fund; $7.6 billion for the military-related activities of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; and well over $200 billion in interest for past debt-financed defense outlays. This brings U.S. spending for its military establishment during the current fiscal year (2008), conservatively calculated, to at least $1.1 trillion.

Military Keynesianism

Such expenditures are not only morally obscene, they are fiscally unsustainable. Many neoconservatives and poorly informed patriotic Americans believe that, even though our defense budget is huge, we can afford it because we are the richest country on Earth. Unfortunately, that statement is no longer true. The world's richest political entity, according to the CIA's "World Factbook," is the European Union. The EU's 2006 GDP (gross domestic product - all goods and services produced domestically) was estimated to be slightly larger than that of the U.S. However, China's 2006 GDP was only slightly smaller than that of the U.S., and Japan was the world's fourth richest nation.

A more telling comparison that reveals just how much worse we're doing can be found among the "current accounts" of various nations. The current account measures the net trade surplus or deficit of a country plus cross-border payments of interest, royalties, dividends, capital gains, foreign aid, and other income. For example, in order for Japan to manufacture anything, it must import all required raw materials. Even after this incredible expense is met, it still has an $88 billion per year trade surplus with the United States and enjoys the world's second highest current account balance. (China is number one.) The United States, by contrast, is number 163 - dead last on the list, worse than countries like Australia and the United Kingdom that also have large trade deficits. Its 2006 current account deficit was $811.5 billion; second worst was Spain at $106.4 billion. This is what is unsustainable.

It's not just that our tastes for foreign goods, including imported oil, vastly exceed our ability to pay for them. We are financing them through massive borrowing. On November 7, 2007, the U.S. Treasury announced that the national debt had breached $9 trillion for the first time ever. This was just five weeks after Congress raised the so-called debt ceiling to $9.815 trillion. If you begin in 1789, at the moment the Constitution became the supreme law of the land, the debt accumulated by the federal government did not top $1 trillion until 1981. When George Bush became president in January 2001, it stood at approximately $5.7 trillion. Since then, it has increased by 45%. This huge debt can be largely explained by our defense expenditures in comparison with the rest of the world.

The world's top 10 military spenders and the approximate amounts each country currently budgets for its military establishment are:

1. United States (FY08 budget), $623 billion
2. China (2004), $65 billion
3. Russia, $50 billion
4. France (2005), $45 billion
5. Japan (2007), $41.75 billion
6. Germany (2003), $35.1 billion
7. Italy (2003), $28.2 billion
8. South Korea (2003), $21.1 billion
9. India (2005 est.), $19 billion
10. Saudi Arabia (2005 est.), $18 billion
World total military expenditures (2004 est.), $1,100 billion
World total (minus the United States), $500 billion

Our excessive military expenditures did not occur over just a few short years or simply because of the Bush administration's policies. They have been going on for a very long time in accordance with a superficially plausible ideology and have now become entrenched in our democratic political system where they are starting to wreak havoc. This ideology I call "military Keynesianism" - the determination to maintain a permanent war economy and to treat military output as an ordinary economic product, even though it makes no contribution to either production or consumption.

This ideology goes back to the first years of the Cold War. During the late 1940s, the U.S. was haunted by economic anxieties. The Great Depression of the 1930s had been overcome only by the war production boom of World War II. With peace and demobilization, there was a pervasive fear that the Depression would return. During 1949, alarmed by the Soviet Union's detonation of an atomic bomb, the looming communist victory in the Chinese civil war, a domestic recession, and the lowering of the Iron Curtain around the USSR's European satellites, the U.S. sought to draft basic strategy for the emerging cold war. The result was the militaristic National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68) drafted under the supervision of Paul Nitze, then head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department. Dated April 14, 1950 and signed by President Harry S. Truman on September 30, 1950, it laid out the basic public economic policies that the United States pursues to the present day.

In its conclusions, NSC-68 asserted: "One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living."

With this understanding, American strategists began to build up a massive munitions industry, both to counter the military might of the Soviet Union (which they consistently overstated) and also to maintain full employment as well as ward off a possible return of the Depression. The result was that, under Pentagon leadership, entire new industries were created to manufacture large aircraft, nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and surveillance and communications satellites. This led to what President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address of February 6, 1961: "The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience" - that is, the military-industrial complex.

By 1990, the value of the weapons, equipment, and factories devoted to the Department of Defense was 83% of the value of all plants and equipment in American manufacturing. From 1947 to 1990, the combined U.S. military budgets amounted to $8.7 trillion. Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, U.S. reliance on military Keynesianism has, if anything, ratcheted up, thanks to the massive vested interests that have become entrenched around the military establishment. Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable configuration. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses. Devotion to military Keynesianism is, in fact, a form of slow economic suicide.

On May 1, 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research of Washington, D.C., released a study prepared by the global forecasting company Global Insight on the long-term economic impact of increased military spending. Guided by economist Dean Baker, this research showed that, after an initial demand stimulus, by about the sixth year the effect of increased military spending turns negative. Needless to say, the U.S. economy has had to cope with growing defense spending for more than 60 years. He found that, after 10 years of higher defense spending, there would be 464,000 fewer jobs than in a baseline scenario that involved lower defense spending.

Baker concluded:

"It is often believed that wars and military spending increases are good for the economy. In fact, most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment."

These are only some of the many deleterious effects of military Keynesianism.

Hollowing Out the American Economy

It was believed that the U.S. could afford both a massive military establishment and a high standard of living, and that it needed both to maintain full employment. But it did not work out that way. By the 1960s, it was becoming apparent that turning over the nation's largest manufacturing enterprises to the Department of Defense and producing goods without any investment or consumption value was starting to crowd out civilian economic activities. The historian Thomas E. Woods, Jr., observes that, during the 1950s and 1960s, between one-third and two-thirds of all American research talent was siphoned off into the military sector. It is, of course, impossible to know what innovations never appeared as a result of this diversion of resources and brainpower into the service of the military, but it was during the 1960s that we first began to notice Japan was outpacing us in the design and quality of a range of consumer goods, including household electronics and automobiles.

Nuclear weapons furnish a striking illustration of these anomalies. Between the 1940s and 1996, the United States spent at least $5.8 trillion on the development, testing, and construction of nuclear bombs. By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the United States possessed some 32,500 deliverable atomic and hydrogen bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used. They perfectly illustrate the Keynesian principle that the government can provide make-work jobs to keep people employed. Nuclear weapons were not just America's secret weapon, but also its secret economic weapon. As of 2006, we still had 9,960 of them. There is today no sane use for them, while the trillions spent on them could have been used to solve the problems of social security and health care, quality education and access to higher education for all, not to speak of the retention of highly skilled jobs within the American economy.

The pioneer in analyzing what has been lost as a result of military Keynesianism was the late Seymour Melman (1917-2004), a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University. His 1970 book, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War, was a prescient analysis of the unintended consequences of the American preoccupation with its armed forces and their weaponry since the onset of the Cold War. Melman wrote (pp. 2-3):

"From 1946 to 1969, the United States government spent over $1,000 billion on the military, more than half of this under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations - the period during which the [Pentagon-dominated] state management was established as a formal institution. This sum of staggering size (try to visualize a billion of something) does not express the cost of the military establishment to the nation as a whole. The true cost is measured by what has been foregone, by the accumulated deterioration in many facets of life by the inability to alleviate human wretchedness of long duration."

In an important exegesis on Melman's relevance to the current American economic situation, Thomas Woods writes:

"According to the U.S. Department of Defense, during the four decades from 1947 through 1987 it used (in 1982 dollars) $7.62 trillion in capital resources. In 1985, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation's plant and equipment, and infrastructure, at just over $7.29 trillion. In other words, the amount spent over that period could have doubled the American capital stock or modernized and replaced its existing stock."

The fact that we did not modernize or replace our capital assets is one of the main reasons why, by the turn of the twenty-first century, our manufacturing base had all but evaporated. Machine tools - an industry on which Melman was an authority - are a particularly important symptom. In November 1968, a five-year inventory disclosed (p. 186) "that 64 percent of the metalworking machine tools used in U.S. industry were ten years old or older. The age of this industrial equipment (drills, lathes, etc.) marks the United States' machine tool stock as the oldest among all major industrial nations, and it marks the continuation of a deterioration process that began with the end the Second World War. This deterioration at the base of the industrial system certifies to the continuous debilitating and depleting effect that the military use of capital and research and development talent has had on American industry."

Nothing has been done in the period since 1968 to reverse these trends and it shows today in our massive imports of equipment - from medical machines like proton accelerators for radiological therapy (made primarily in Belgium, Germany, and Japan) to cars and trucks.

Our short tenure as the world's "lone superpower" has come to an end. As Harvard economics professor Benjamin Friedman has written:

"Again and again it has always been the world's leading lending country that has been the premier country in terms of political influence, diplomatic influence, and cultural influence. It's no accident that we took over the role from the British at the same time that we took over the job of being the world's leading lending country. Today we are no longer the world's leading lending country. In fact we are now the world's biggest debtor country, and we are continuing to wield influence on the basis of military prowess alone."

Some of the damage done can never be rectified. There are, however, some steps that this country urgently needs to take. These include reversing Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy, beginning to liquidate our global empire of over 800 military bases, cutting from the defense budget all projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States, and ceasing to use the defense budget as a Keynesian jobs program. If we do these things we have a chance of squeaking by. If we don't, we face probable national insolvency and a long depression.

Chalmers Johnson is the author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, just published in paperback. It is the final volume of his Blowback Trilogy, which also includes Blowback (2000) and The Sorrows of Empire (2004).

[Note: For those interested, click here to view a clip from a new film, "Chalmers Johnson on American Hegemony," in Cinema Libre Studios' Speaking Freely series in which he discusses "military Keynesianism" and imperial bankruptcy. For sources on global military spending, please see: (1) Global Security Organization, "World Wide Military Expenditures" as well as Glenn Greenwald, "The bipartisan consensus on U.S. military spending"; (2) Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, "Report: China biggest Asian military spender."]

New Abu Ghraib Photos from Philip Zimbardo

As a witness called in the Abu Ghraib case, Dr. Philip Zimbardo, famous for the Stanford Prison Experiment, released yesterday at the Monterey TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference some photos not previously publicly available.

I am reminded in looking at the above photo of the infamous picture of Southern whites milling around in a picnic atmosphere, laughing and smiling, while above them dangle two lynched black men. I could not find an Internet posting of that photo, but did find this one below:


As Zimbardo, a social psychologist, has indicated, attributing these barbaric actions to a few bad apples constitutes the "fundamental attribution error:" explaining human behavior based on the individual personalities of people involved instead of the social context in which such behavior becomes the norm. This does not excuse the inhumanity of the individuals depicted here, but it does account for why such behavior can occur and why the actions of those who construct such situations are principally to blame.

In the case of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and other sites where U.S. forces and U.S. proxies are routinely torturing and killing innocents (70% of those being held in GITMO are, by the U.S. government's own admission, not guilty of anything) the blame lies with the Defense Department leadership and the White House, beginning with Bush and Cheney and on down to loathsome individuals such as David Addington, Jay Bybee, Alberto Gonzalez, John Yoo, Condoleeza Rice, Michael Mukasey, and Donald Rumsfeld.

Those who buy into the fraudulent claims by these monsters that we must do these things to "protect American lives" will buy anything at all, no matter how horrid and unjustified. Those who are in a position to put a stop to this immediately - U.S. Senators, for example, including those who are now running for the presidency - who have refused to stop it by filibuster if necessary - are complicit.

How can we sit by knowing that for seven years this kind of policy has been in place and is now, as you read these words, going on in our names, and not do everything in our power to stop it NOW? How can anyone who claims the mantle of moral leadership and aspires to be our president, not do everything in their power NOW to end it NOW?

Washington Post writer Monica Hesse, in describing the orange ribbons and wristbands being worn by many of Hollywood at the Academy Awards, called these orange protest symbols "cheap, ugly."

I beg to differ. What is ugly are these daily acts of inhumanity. Protest against torture is beautiful. Those who can permit these monstrosities to go on and who don't protest are the ones who are engaging in what can only euphemistically be described as "ugly."

On Manners, Evidence and Politics

In the course of writing and speaking about various things - for example, the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004 and about impeachment - I've on a very few occasions come up against individuals who contact me to express their disagreements with me. Or I should say, more accurately, most of these few people have hurled invective.

In response to my "No Paper Trail Left Behind: the Theft of the 2004 Presidential Election," which was published online at Project Censored in August 2005, I received scores of supportive emails and about six hostile emailers. Not a bad ratio.

When I respond to these hostile emails, which I almost invariably have done, at least once and in a very civil tone in order to explore whether or not a civil, evidenced-based dialogue can actually ensue, what is striking about this exchange has been the kind of debate style that the hostile ones employ.

(I should point out, however, that even hostile critics can sometimes have a point. Indeed, our critics can at times be our best tests for the strength of our argument. Truth emerges through struggle and it helps, not hurts, to have a debate, even with people who are difficult to take. In my case, two critics DID point out a couple evidentiary issues about which they were right and I accordingly deleted those points from my case.)

Some people write merely to say things on the order of "Bush won! You lost! Ha Ha Ha!" as if this was some kind of argument. But a few have actually at some point or another cited what they present as evidence and in some instances there is actually a fact or two there. The problem, however, is two-fold. One, the evidence they cite is generally - actually I'd have to say, almost invariably - flawed in any number of ways. Evidence is good and when someone puts some forward, I'm actually quite pleased.

The ones who DO offer evidence might, for example, cite a single poll from a specific source that they say contradicts my polls. What they don't do, however, is take the sum total of the evidence, their's and mine, and then weigh them against each other. You also need to weigh the source's credibility. Is this a poll from a reputable pollster with no particularly striking ax to grind (such as John Zogby or Gallup) or is this some conservative think tank's poll? The fact that it's a conservative think tank's poll doesn't necessarily rule it inadmissible, one needs to consider this and then look at other polls taken by others measured against this. (Ad hominem arguments won't do, after all. But I'd have to say that none of my handful of angry critics have any idea what an ad hominem argument is. I even used the term once or twice with a correspondent and he heatedly denied he was one - on principle- while at the same time engaging in it as he was writing! It was if he knew enough to know that saying that something was ad hominem was a bad thing, but he didn't know what it actually meant.)

You also need to take into account trends and motion and a number of other factors when you consider polling data. I had one guy who I engaged in a lengthy exchange with who claimed, for example, that just because polls on the eve of the 2004 election were showing a dramatic shift of momentum away from Bush and in favor of Kerry, and that polls that close to the actual election (in addition to what the exit polls stated before being "adjusted" by the pollsters to conform to the official tallies) have never been wrong, meant nothing because, according to him, "past practice doesn't predict future performance." Now, the phrase is in the abstract true as, in for instance, the warnings given to investors in companies on the stock market. But the phrase is inapplicable in the case of polls on the eve - i.e., e.g., the day before - an election.

You're taught in graduate school in the sciences to weigh evidence and how to develop evidence and so on, and most people haven't learned this practice. They think that if they can cite one fact that fits their viewpoint that they have defeated your argument. So that's on the one hand.

The other thing, which is actually the main point I want to make in this essay, is the strikingly incivil nature of the dialogue from many of these folks. I blame this on the Karl Rove's, the Bill O'Reilly's, the Rush Limbaugh's, the Ann Coulter's, and their imitators who have made their careers by employing insult, invective, exaggeration and sheer fabrication of "facts." O'Reilly, for example, was so upset when GOP Representative Mark Foley got caught in a sex scandal that he made him into a Democrat! The people who have been or are currently (and hopefully not forever) fans of these purveyors of untruth and distortions have, at least the ones who have communicated with me and who I've on occasion read in blogs and so on, adopted the same style of "argument."

There was this one guy who started out our exchanges with insults and continued to use them even after I sent him back a couple or so very civil responses asking him for evidence. I finally got frustrated and sent him a final email asking him if his "Momma ever taught him manners." He wrote back apologizing for his tone and saying that indeed his Momma had taught him manners. Which was nice. I didn't expect it. I thought, that's good and that's that.

But then, right after that, within the next hour, I get another email from him hurling the same insults that he had been engaging in previously. It's as if he knew enough to know that when it was pointed out to him that one should have manners and be civil, that he was supposed to have good manners (and supposed to defend his momma), but when he resumed arguing his case, he couldn't help but fall into a pattern of invective.

I noticed today, in another example, a posting from someone calling himself, right wing nut, or something like that, who was complaining about the orange ribbons at the Oscars. After attacking the ACLU for their role in this, he went on to say that I was an "alleged Associate Professor of Sociology," as if I am claiming a job title that I don't have, and then that I said that the ACLU had "stolen" the orange ribbon idea from me.

I never said anything of the sort.

I am glad that the ACLU has adopted the orange idea and the ribbons. The more the better - although I intended with the orange that it stand for all of the outrages of the Bush regime and not just Guantanamo, which is the much narrower tact the ACLU is taking. (It's in the nature of political movements that people who join a movement do so from varying perspectives and with varying objectives, united behind a general stance. The larger a movement becomes, the more likely this becomes.) I did say that the idea was something I started back in the summer of 2007, which is so. Whether or not the ACLU knew this before or not, I don't know, but that's all I said. But somehow this gets converted in the right wing nut's mind and on his blog into my claiming that the idea was "stolen." Go figure. (It's also revealing of this poster that he automatically translates what I said into a complaint about theft, as if I have a product and someone else is stealing my profits! Tells you something about his ideology.)

The larger point I'm trying to make here, however, is that this coarsening (degradation is probably a better descriptor) of the public and private dialogue is really destructive to people being able to think and consider evidence and reach logical conclusions. If you can heap calumny on those who disagree with you, and you can't use arguments and facts, if you can just shout people down or call them, this is one of their favorites, "America haters," then you have created a situation in which dialogue is virtually impossible. Which, of course, is their objective. As Mark Crispin Miller points out very well in his chapter in my book, "Bush and Cheney's War on the Enlightenment," they are at war with reason itself.