China: Update. The 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China concluded on 14 November after the Congress elected a new Central Committee and a new Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.
Comment:NightWatch will report at greater length as details warrant. The two most impressive themes that emerged from the early speeches were that corruption is a threat to the survival of the party and possibly the communist state itself and that the new leadership will have no latitude to compromise the communist political leadership. Political reform means measures to ease social tension and increase participation within the communist system. Put another way, free market economics with greater individual entrepreneurship will not lead to Western-style democracy or a multiparty system.
There's a flash of hope here: A remarkable U.S. transpartisan group called Represent.Us is promoting a brilliantly designed Anti-Corruption Act. Check it out!
The proposed law pulls together a number of anti-corruption and money-out-of-politics approaches into one piece of national legislation. It exposes and regulates bribery and restricts the “revolving door” of public officials getting high paying corporate jobs soon after leaving their government jobs. It tightens regulations on lobbying and exposes secret donations to public view. It strengthens the Federal Election Commission and even provides a tax rebate for small political donations.
The introduction on its website http://anticorruptionact.org explains: “The Act was crafted by former Federal Election Commission chairman Trevor Potter in consultation with dozens of strategists, democracy reform leaders and constitutional attorneys from across the political spectrum. Mr. Potter was one of the chief architects of the McCain-Feingold law. The Act would transform how elections are financed, how lobbyists influence politics, and how political money is disclosed. It is a bold, sweeping proposal that would reshape the rules of American politics, and restore ordinary Americans as the most important stakeholders instead of major donors. The Anti-Corruption Act’s provisions enjoy support from progressives and conservatives alike. Constitutional attorneys confirm that the provisions are constitutional.”
Open Season indeed. A seismic shift appears to be occurring, and CIA is the new “best target.” Below is s summary that represents the “worst-case” view of post Viet-Nam CIA.
The Petraeus Affair has demonstrated yet again how a sex scandal story can be fed into the U.S. media to serve both as a “political assassination” and as the tree hiding the forest. Even though what lies behind the salacious smoke screen is still the object of speculation, most of those speculations are more credible than a simple extramarital affair.
One of the possible explanations of Petraeus’ departure is his stance on Israel which he saw as a liability to US interests in the Middle East:
The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR [Area of Operations]. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas. (Ali Abunimah, When Former CIA Chief David Petraeus Enraged the Israel Lobby, Electronic Intifada, November 12, 2012.)
As Stephen Lendman observes, sex scandals don’t necessarily lead to resignations unless state secrets are at stake:
Phi Beta Iota: Here is the executive summary — none of this has been validated from other sources, but what keeps coming back to us, in relation to both who the US Government does business with and who major commanders socialize with, is ZERO counter-intelligence. We have no clue. Amateur hour continues.
01 The Lebanese sisters are part of the Khawam family that fronted for Saadaam Hussein in assigning contracts where 50% came back to him. The family name is allegedly feared still in Iraq.
02 The twin married Washington insider Grayson Wolfe, founding partner of Akkadian Private Ventures LLC and affiliate companies.
03 They work in all the CENTCOM hotspots and many of their contracts can be traced to Petraeus / Allen command periods.
04 Grayson himself was Iraqi Reconstruction and Special Assistant to the Chief Operating Officer of the Export-Import Bank of the USA, appointed by President Bush. He also served in 2004 as Manager of the Private Sector Development Office of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.
Note to readers: this blaster contains two clearly marked inserts that were not in my Time essay. Also, in introducing Seymour Melman's important work below, I should have mentioned that it was Melman's considered belief in the possibility of putting together a political coalition to facilitate the conversion of the defense industry to civilian production. Conversion is a exceedingly complex and highly controversial subject; and to date, conversion has not been accomplished in any meaningful way, but that does not mean conversion is impossible. Here, that possibility or impossibility is not at issue in this essay; my focus is on the very short term: namely how in the next few months the defense dependency may induce politicians who have been captured by the defense industry to react to the looming budget sequester by flinging the middle class off the fiscal cliff.
This recent essay – America the Third World Nation in Just 4 Easy Steps – describes how our political addiction to the free-trade ideology of neoliberal economics has helped to de-industrialize America and thereby impoverish much of the American middle class.
My essay describing the decline of manufacturing employment will give you a sense of the mind-boggling magnitude of what has happened. While “4 Easy Steps” makes passing references to the increasing dependence of the manufacturing sector on military spending, as well as the financialization of economy (but not the latter’s Siamese-twin ‘managerialism’), the authors do not develop these points. Without implying any criticism of this excellent essay, my aim today is to tweak your interest in these omissions, particularly America’s defense dependency.
The late Professor Seymour Melman of Columbia University wrote a prescient book, Profits Without Production (Knopf, 1983) that explained how the militarization and managerialization of our economy were becoming the central causes of the decline in America’s manufacturing competitiveness. This decline started in the 1970s, but Melman showed how it grew out of seeds planted by the permanent military mobilization of a huge defense industry in the 1950s.
The birth date for the permanent war economy was 30 September 1950.
On that day, President Harry Truman officially signed NSC-68, a document that became a blueprint for the containment strategy for waging the Cold War. Central to this strategy was the establishment of a large, permanently-mobilized defense manufacturing sector.
They justified the permanent mobilization, in part, with an economic rationalization reflecting their contention that the World War II production miracle proved the multiplier effects of Military Keynesianism, or in their words: “the economic effects of the [NSC-68] program might be to increase the gross national product by more than the amount being absorbed for additional military and foreign assistance purposes.”
The post-WWII economic boom in the U.S. (with our competitive performance aided in part by the lingering effects of the WWII damage to the world’s other major industrial economies) hid the adverse economic effects of the economic diversion attending to the permanent war economy unleashed by NSC-68. Nevertheless, by early 1961, the accumulating damage caused by the diversion was apparent to some insiders: President Eisenhower famously warned the nation about the rise of misplaced power posed by the rise of a large permanent standing arms industry, which he said, pointedly, was new in our national experience.
The accumulating damage wrought by the permanent war economy started to accelerate in the 1970s, and by 1980, the cancer metastasized: militarization and managerialization began to openly thrive at the expense of the traditional high-wage manufacturing sector, in effect, siphoning off money flows via a combination of government handouts and favorable tax treatment that in effect rewarded both the looting of the tax base and the draining of competitiveness and ingenuity from the civilian manufacturing sector (via the increased defense subsidy, leveraged buyouts, offshoring of jobs, emphasizing short-term focus to pump stock prices, etc.)
When David Petraeus got the job of CIA chief, he knew what job #1 was: find out everything he could about al-Qaida and its allies — and then assist in their removal from the land of living. Fourteen months and more than 110 drone strikes later, the breaking of al-Qaida’s core that began under Petraeus’ predecessors is almost complete. Yet a major chunk of the nation’s intelligence community remains singularly focused on terrorism.
It’s time to give that a rest, a former leader of the Central Intelligence Agency says — especially with Petraeus gone. There’s a whole world out there that needs to be snooped on.
Phi Beta Iota: Sorcha Fall is a discredited source still read in Europe that has a gift for connecting dots in strange ways that often make real sense. We do not believe that a coup was planned or that there was a serious plan to assassinate Romney and slip Petraeus in at the last minute. We do believe that across the senior ranks, both uniformed and civilian, there are such strong senses of entitlement, hubris, and immunity from accountability, such that the legitimacy and authority of the President and his designated senior civilian defense leader, have been called into question publicly and in a manner clearly prejudicial to good order and discipline. The US lacks a strong counterintelligence capability, but the one thing that could explain both the many officers being relieved, retired, or otherwise placed out of service, and the FBI's rather wide-ranging inspection of the emails of many flag officers, would be a legitimate concern on the part of the President that his military commanders could not be trusted. We also have the earlier case of US Navy Admirals, first Admiral Cosgriff and then Admiral Charles Gaouette, the first reported to be planning a false flag attack on Iran, the second relieved of command before he got past Guam enroute to Straits of Hormuz. Something is going on. It is not about bimbos but it will in passing flush the flags with personal indiscretions, as well as those who may be considered out of control or disloyal to a degree that mandates their relief or retirement.
