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Wednesday, November 16, 2016

A few more posts as I'm sifting through the old online notebook for a few stray record reviews, and finding a world that looks and sounds eerily familiar, marked by six years of corrupt Republican rule (following eight years of corrupt Clinton and twelve years of even more corrupt Reagan-Bush). This shows that ten years ago I was starting to doubt that some of the damage could ever be reversed. Clearly, eight years of Obama has had little effect -- one statistic is that 97% of the gains of the recovery have been captured by the top 1%, which implies that the overwhelming majority of Americans haven't seen anything vaguely resembling a recovery, no matter what the stock markets say -- and now we're poised for another plunge into disaster.

From February 1, 2006, when "the Liar in Chief gave his State of the Disunion speech":

Of course, not everything Bush has tried has worked out exactly according to plan. But it's hard to tell given that the real plans have always been secret, and that the administration and its pliant, co-opted media have consistently been able to put their spin over. Maybe Iraq was intended to be a cakewalk that would deliver us a steady source of cheap oil, but the worst case scenario -- that Iraqi oil falls off the market, constricting supplies and driving prices up -- works just as well for Bush, and better still for Exxon-Mobil. Maybe John ("no carrot") Bolton's non-proliferation diplomacy was intended to pacify Kim Jong Il, but a nuclear-armed North Korea is just the sort of threat that keeps Japan in line and helps sell anti-missile defense systems. Maybe Bush actually wanted to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden, but the latter's taunts are always good for a bump in the polls. Win-win scenarios like those encourage boldness by insulating Bush from the consequences of screwing up. If Herbert Hoover had been able to spin like Bush, America wouldn't have had that New Deal for the Republicans to try to repeal.

The fact is that most Americans are worse off than they were five years ago. Real wages are down. The real cost of living is up, with energy and health care, education and housing leading the way. Fewer people have jobs; those who do work longer hours for less benefits. Productivity is up, but all of the benefits have gone to management. More people live in poverty. Fewer have health insurance, so more skip non-emergency care. Many people have compensated for their declining incomes by borrowing more, so savings is down and debt is up. The federal budget has gone from a surplus to record deficits. Trade deficits have also hit new record levels. This has been temporarily covered by foreign funds, which own more and more of America's capital and debt. The portion of federal spending on such non-productive expenses as defense, security, and prisons has grown considerably, in turn starving social services and infrastructure investments. Where state and local governments have tried to compensate for loss of federal funds, their tax increases have often swallowed up the federal cuts. Meanwhile, safety nets have been reduced, not least under the guise of tort reform and bankruptcy reform. Environmental protections have been slashed, and the Super Fund clean-up system is defunct. Much of the federal government has been turned into a super-police agency, the Dept. of Homeland Security -- the domestic equivalent of the Dept. of Imperial Security (formerly the Dept. of Defense). The right to privacy (i.e., the right to be secure in one's home and person) has been attacked from every angle: through new laws like the USA PATRIOT Act, through blatantly extralegal acts like NSA spying, through Bush's packing of the courts with right-wing extremists. And on all fronts, whatever competency government once had has diminished as the civil service system has been turned into a major new system of political patronage.

The key idea here is not just that the Republicans are crooks (cf. Jack Abramoff) or scoundrels (cf. Scooter Libby) or both (cf. Tom DeLay): it's that they're building a political machine to perpetuate their control, a brutally efficient Tamany Hall that straddles the entire globe. It's a spectacular vision, but it's already -- long before such new space weapons as the Rods from God come on-line -- showing signs of overreach. The Iraq war may be good for Exxon-Mobil, maybe even for Halliburton, but it's been rough on the US Army, stretched now to the breaking point. And the longer a few thousand insurgents in Iraq are able to tie the US down, the more defiant others become. The Muslim world is still mostly tied down in crony dictatorships, but when democratization comes they won't be so easy to push around. For an example of how this works, cf. Latin America, where anti-US politicos have won every election recently. Moreover, Bush's domestic programs weaken the US economy in nearly every way, making any number of economic disasters possible, on top of the long term rot caused by the right's political attacks on science and education, the closing of opportunities, and the increasing tolerance of graft.

That was written a couple years before the predicted economic disaster got out of hand.

From February 15, 2006, when Dick Cheney went hunting:

The sea change in the media coverage of Dick Cheney's little hunting accident just proves that what goes around comes around. Cheney was the guy who insisted on going full bore ahead on the Republicans' agenda after they squeaked through the tainted 2000 presidential election. His cynical exploitation of ill-gotten power was unprecedented in its scope and depravity. (Not only had Bush taken office under a cloud, compare what he said during the campaign to what they did afterwards to get a glimpse of how disengenuous they were before power corrupted them further. And just as secrets and lies got them into office, secrets and lies followed them everywhere.) Although Cheney hasn't exactly gotten a free ride for all he's done, he's gotten a lot of slack -- the media's customary deference to the powerful, who are often (and this is important) the ones who feed them the spin they report as news. I'm tempted to suggest that the real reason they've turned on Cheney so hard is that he denied them the scoop, but at least part of their bite comes from resentment at having been lied to over and over. The media has a bad case of "kiss up, kick down" (to borrow a phrase used to describe John Bolton), so now that Cheney has gotten himself into a pickle, they can finally show their love.

On March 3, 2006, I wrote a comment about a quote from Robert D. Kaplan, an American journalist who served in the IDF and went on to be a major neocon cheerleader in books about Afghanistan, the Balkans, and The Arabists. I read a lot of his work after 9/11, but had largely given up on him by the time I wrote this:

One thing to remember about Kaplan is that he's consistently argued that democracy is not a viable goal for US (or any imperial) foreign policy. His prescription for Iraq was that the US install an authoritarian regime -- possibly another Baathist, another Saddam but on a tighter leash. Allawi would have suited Kaplan fine had it worked, but by the time the US brought Allawi in it was already too late. The US lost the re-use Saddam's systems of control -- the "decapitation" option -- when Bremer dissolved the Iraq army, or you can go further back to the decision to short-staff the invasion force. This meant that the US depended on the Kurds and Shiites to stabilize Iraq after the invasion, and the price of their participation was de-Baathification. Bush also tied his shoelaces together with his liberation/democracy spiel -- while the US actually did very little very slowly to promote democracy (the two-thirds rule is an especially clever poison pill) the idea is still a dangling sword over the head of the occupation.

Kaplan's books are very readable and quite useful, except when he starts "thinking". Even then his "pragmatism" is rigorous and consistent -- to the point that he insists that imperialism needs a "pagan ethos". His big problem is that his ideals and preferred practices are rooted in some other century. That strikes me as a fatal debilitation in a "pragmatist."

On the other hand, recent news does make the rather sobering case that bad as Saddam was, removing him has led to worse. One thing we need to give some serious consideration to is how it might be possible to ameliorate conditions under Saddam-like dictators without plunging entire countries into the hell of war. As far as I can tell, since 1991 all the US ever did viz. Iraq, and for purely domestic political reasons of the basest sort, was try to make conditions there worse.

By the way, has anyone noticed that in Saddam's show trial, he's being charged with ordering fewer executions than Bush signed off on while governor of Texas?

On May 12, 2006, I wrote a post around quotes about Berlusconi and Nixon that seemed to fit the election results so well I went ahead and posted them here.

On June 22, 2006, I wrote a post called "Clintonistas for Armageddon" -- it's one of those things you forget about because it led to nothing, but it was about an op-ed written by two Clinton war guys, William Perry (Clinton's Secretary of Defense) and Ashton Carter (a Clinton under-secretary, who later became Obama's Secretary of Defense). They were upset about North Korea testing one of its missiles, and urged Bush to pre-emptively fire cruise missiles at the site. While North Korea's missiles (and most likely a couple fission bombs) were works-in-progress, this overlooked that North Korea has thousands of pieces of heavy artillery capable of raining destruction on Seoul. That's not a very smart deterrent to test. I spent some time researching North Korea at that point. Today I'm more struck by the Clinton connection. I led off the post with this line:

One reason we're always stuck in a hopeless, hapless mess in foreign policy is that the people the Democrats hire to staff those positions are for all intents and purposes the same pinheaded warrior wannabes as the ones the Republicans hire.

On June 23, 2006, I wrote a post based on an Eagle article reporting that sociologists are finding that Americans have fewer and fewer close friends (the average dropped from 3 in 1985 to 2). I quoted the piece, then added:

This trend has been going on all my life. It's easy to think back to the '50s and '60s when people actually worried about this -- you don't hear much about alienation any more, but it was so much on the mind that existentialism was invented to salve it. The arch trends all date back to the '50s: the move to the suburbs, the envelopment of passive entertainment, the time demands of careerism. More recent is the notion of Quality Time, another time encroachment that has come about as parenting has been shaped by the career ethic. Another factor is fear: the threat of nuclear destruction dates back to the '50s, but everyday fear of your neighbors has built up slowly over time. (The current obsession with tracking "sex offenders" is a good example.) But then fear may also be a consequence of having fewer friends: as you lose the knack of making friends the rest of the world becomes unapproachable.

The consequences of this for politics are almost too obvious to point out. The more isolated and self-contained people's lives are, the less appreciation people have for others not like them. Passive intake of news and information leaves you vulnerable to manipulation -- especially the sort of manipulation that's become the stock and trade of the new right in America. Most of this nonsense would fall apart at the first dissent, but if you avoid anyone who might think differently, you can wind up convincing yourself of any fool thing.

On July 8 I wrote an untitled piece, a bit of autobiography trying to explain why I write this shit. Interesting to read it a decade later, because sometimes I forget.

I've written a lot on Israel ever since 2001 but haven't quoted much in this series. However, in July 2006 Israel opened a brutal assault on Lebanon, an event Condoleezza Rice memorably dubbed "the birthpangs of a new Middle East." On July 25, I wrote:

The irony in all this is that the neocons got snookered worse than anyone in thinking of Israel as the model the American military should aspire to. The fact is that Israel hasn't had anything resembling a clean military victory since 1967. The War of Attrition with Egypt was exactly that. 1973 was a draw perceived as a psychological defeat. Lebanon was a bloody, pointless mess from the very start, dragged out to 18 years only to give Hezbollah training. The counter-intifadas were like trying to fight roaches by pummelling them with garbage.

To be fair, America hasn't done any better, unless you're still excited by Grenada. Korea was a draw. Vietnam was a flat-out loss. The Cuba invasion never got off the beach. Panama was good for one kidnapping then a hasty retreat. Kuwait left Iraq as an open sore, then you know what happened when they opened that one up again. Afghanistan is a slow burn. The War on Terrorism has left its Most Wanteds at large. The War on Drugs hasn't made a dent. The War on Poverty was quietly abandoned, at least until Bush revised the semantics. The last winner we had was WWII, and that was won by manufacturing, logistics and engineering -- as Billmon points out, not by the will to fight, which the Germans and Russians were far more effective at mustering.

The neocons, both American and Israeli, don't understand a lot of things, but at the top of their list is that, while we like everyone else will fight for our homes, we don't really want to go somewhere else and fight to take or crush someone else's homes, especially when they're willing to fight back, and we might get killed or maimed. The only way the US can staff its military is by promising folks that their tours will be virtually riskless -- which thanks to the neocons is getting tougher and tougher, and it shows. Israel still has universal military draft -- well, nearly universal, except for the Arabs they don't trust and the ultra orthodox who get a pass -- but even they are so used to riskless conflict that the real thing is shocking. The fact is, very few people these days want anything to do with war. The destruction is extraordinary and mutual, the chances of gain are negligible. Why do these war mongers even exist?

Finally (for now, anyway), on September 13, 2006 -- two years before "The Great Recession" became official -- I called this post "The Great Decline":

Yesterday I mentioned a long list of problems the Bush administration has at best ignored, more commonly exacerbated, and in some cases flat out caused. I didn't bother with the tiresome task of enumerating, but Billmon has come up with a reasonable summary, occasioned by the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 atrocity:

You can learn a lot about a country in five years.

What I've learned (from 9/11, the corporate scandals, the fiasco in Iraq, Katrina, the Cheney Administration's insane economic and environmental policies and the relentless dumbing down of the corporate media -- plus the repeated electoral triumphs of the Rovian brand of "reality management") is that the United States is moving down the curve of imperial decay at an amazingly rapid clip. If anything, the speed of our descent appears to be accelerating.

The physical symptoms -- a lost war, a derelict city, a Potemkin memorial hastily erected in a vacant lot [the still-empty hole where the WTC used to be] -- aren't nearly as alarming as the moral and intellectual paralysis that seems to have taken hold of the system. The old feedback mechanisms are broken or in deep disrepair, leaving America with an opposition party that doesn't know how (or what) to oppose, a military run by uniformed yes men, intelligence czars who couldn't find their way through a garden gate with a GPS locator, TV networks that don't even pretend to cover the news unless there's a missing white woman or a suspected child rapist involved, and talk radio hosts who think nuking Mecca is the solution to all our problems in the Middle East. We've got think tanks that can't think, security agencies that can't secure and accounting firms that can't count (except when their clients ask them to make 2+2=5). Our churches are either annexes to shopping malls, halfway homes for pederasts, or GOP precinct headquarters in disguise. Our economy is based on asset bubbles, defense contracts and an open-ended line of credit from the People's Bank of China, and we still can't push the poverty rate down or the median wage up.

I could happily go on, but I imagine you get my point. It's hard to think of a major American institution, tradition or cultural value that has not, at some point over the past five years, been shown to be a) totally out of touch, b) criminally negligent, c) hopelessly corrupt, d) insanely hypocritical or e) all of the above.

The next line is: "It's getting hard to see how these trends can be reversed." Then Billmon starts comparing the US to the Soviet Union in the '80s. He recommends a book by David Satter: Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union. I have some other reading planned on the post-fall depression. The thing I find most interesting about Russia isn't the stupidity of the (especially late) Communist years -- it's the absolute collapse of living standards following the fall. We're so used to the idea of progress that we have trouble seeing decline even when the facts are hard to read otherwise. This collapse hit Russia so the hard life expectancy metrics declined. A quarter or more of Russia's GDP vanished. There are other examples scattered around the world, especially war-induced losses like in Iraq, and war-inducing ones in parts of Africa.

In some measures living standards in the US have been declining since roughly 1970. This has been masked by technological progress, by debt accumulation, by scapegoating, and by political delusion. Take medicine, for instance: science and technology have advanced, but insurance and delivery of basic health care has in some cases actually regressed, such that US life expectancy has finally begun to decline, especially compared to other wealthy nations. But the new stuff gets the press and sets the perception. Only when you need it do you find out you can't get it, or it doesn't really work, or something else goes wrong.

Immigration is another source of cover-up. Undocumenteds provide low skill labor that compensates for demotivating our own unskilled labor. There's a lot of scapegoating over that, but more important is legal immigration, which is needed to compensate for our failures to educate and develop knowledge workers -- everyone from school teachers to computer programmers to doctors. Immigration stimulates the economy, but it also levels the world. It's not necessarily a problem per se, but what it covers up is.

Beyond the obvious declines, there's a steady build up of risk and liability, as well as plain old depreciation. I've been reading complaints about not putting enough money into infrastructure for decades now. It's like, if you have a house with termites, it may look fine for years, especially if you don't look very close. Then one day a gust of wind, or just gravity, will bring it down. That's basically what happened to the Alaska pipeline. That's what happened to the New Orleans levees. Katrina wasn't the big storm everyone had so feared, but it was big enough anyway, because we didn't realize how vulnerable we had become.

That sort of rot has been accumulating for a long time -- George Brockway dated a lot of recent economic problems to the Republicans' first attempts to dismantle the New Deal when they took over Congress in the 1946 elections. Laws they passed like Taft-Hartley had little immediate effect, but over time undermined labor unions and working wages and the very principle of equal opportunity. Banking laws, as well as later deregulations, have had similar long-term effects. The long-term dip in growth rates occurred during the Vietnam War, which had many other corrosive effects -- especially as the politicos have dug themselves ever deeper in duplicity and cover-ups.

By now they have to keep denying, they have to keep runing from the truth. Acknowledgment is failure, and as long as they keep from failing they can pretend they're succeeding, which is what keeps the whole scam going. But sometimes failure strikes too suddenly and/or unshakeably to spin. The last five years have shown us some examples like that.

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