Monday, November 7, the Washington Post editorial board published its take on the extreme rhetoric the country has been hearing on the defense budget since Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta starting talking about the “doomsday mechanism” that would reduce defense spending. Quoting the newer extreme rhetoric of several members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff defending their budget ambitions to the eager-to-listen House Armed services Committee, the Washington Post positioned itself foursquare in favor of hysterics. It was with an editorial titled “Defense on the Rocks: Mandated spending cuts could decimate U.S. military might.” Find it here (although at the web link they toned down the title with the more sympathetic “US Defense on the defensive.”) Continue reading “Winslow Wheeler: Military Spending versus Competence”
The whole game was based on one new innovation: the derivative instruments like CDOs that allowed them to take junk-rated home loans and turn them into AAA-rated instruments. It was not Barney Frank who made it possible for Goldman, Sachs to sell the home loan of an occasionally-employed janitor in Oakland or Detroit as something just as safe as, and more profitable than, a United States Treasury Bill. This was something they cooked up entirely by themselves and developed solely with the aim of making more money.
The 2012 election is now in play, and the Republican wing of the war party is gearing up to blame President Obama for America’s failed wars (who, while not entirely blameless, is hardly the architect of defeat) and the accompanying national humiliation. This email is about an opening shot that just appeared in the Weekly Standard.
One of my closest friends, retired Marine Colonel XXX, forwarded the attached analysis of the US defeat in Iraq. (I use the word ‘analysis’ charitably) It was written by Fred Kagan, his wife, and another person, neocons all. The Kagans are among one of America’s most vocal advocates preventative war, especially the invasion of Iraq, and were “architects” of the so-called “surge” (which is Versailles-speak for a relatively modest, time-consuming escalation, whereas in traditional military parlance, the word ‘surge’ implies a massive increase, like a doubling or tripling, of effort over a very short period of time).
What a stark difference from the Tea Party movement. Patriots holding American flags have orderly events with poignant messages about liberty and freedom and then leave in an orderly fashion. Contrast that with the Occupy Wall Street miscreants! Arrests, rapes, flag burnings, pro-communist chanting, garbage, incessant drumming, filth, profanity and lots and lots of losers who still don’t really know why they’re there!
Phi Beta Iota: We find this upsetting and disgusting. Mindful of the protection of free speech, and mindful of the deep legitimate grievances that most (99%) of US citizens and even global citizens have against what the US Government has done in our name, the flag does not represent the US Government, it represents We the People. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is a mix of four parts: anarchists and undercover provocateurs; local only; alternative direct democracy; and electoral reform act and other tangible change agents seeking a national unity approach. OWS is already facing twin challenges from police departments over-funded by the Department of Homeland Security (using borrowed money), and a massive corporately-funded disinformation campaign seeking to cast them as irresponsible and even dangerous. As a movement, we find OWS to be as responsible as it is possible to get–they have the intelligence and the integrity that the US Government lacks. However, they have not learned the art of counter-intelligence and internal security, and will continue to suffer from this kind of gratuitous and totally uncalled for stomach-turning crap (pun intended).
Below is an excellent interview with Anthony DiMaggio in Counterpunch. DiMaggio author ofThe Rise of the Tea Party, due out in November 2011. He uses the “propaganda model” developed by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their bookManufacturing Consent to document and explain the Tea Party’s organizational dynamics for manufacturing dissent, and he compares these dynamics to those of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Before reading the interview, consider please the following: The forces powering the rage of the Tea Party — the stagnation of incomes and the increasingly unequal distribution of income — were around long before the Tea Party erupted on the national scene.
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That the distribution of income had shifted in a very fundamental way toward the wealthy and especially the super-wealthy at the expense of the bottom 80% of the working population was clearly demonstrated in a classic study by Emanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty (Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2003, updated in 2009), and subsequently confirmed by many other others, including just last week, on 25 October 2011, by the Congressional Budget Office.
It has also clear for years that inflation-adjusted wage growth that underpinned the improved living standards of great American dream machine sputtered out during the 1970s (see chart below).
So, it is simply beyond dispute that a fundamental change in the income distribution has taken place since the late late 1970s. That change is also correlated with the wave of deregulation, tax cutting, defense spending increases (with a slight interregnum following the Soviet Union’s collapse), and deindustrialization/globalization that took off after 1980 during the Reagan Administration and accelerated during the Clinton and Bush II Administrations.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the single best reality rant we have seen, kudos to Brother John for pointing it out. No one is qualified to run for office without reading this first. No on is qualified to vote without reading this first. This is the “reset” button on reality & integrity in the USA and elsewhere.
Yesterday, the Nieman Watchdog journalism group at Harvard asked me to evaluate how well the press is scrutinizing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. Basically, it's not; instead, Panetta seems to be free of informed, skeptical questioning; he must be absolutely delighted with the treatment he is receiving.
The defense secretary likens budget-cutters to Nazis and makes assertions that simply aren't true — but the media don't seem to care, writes Winslow Wheeler.
The silence in the press about the overheated rhetoric and dubious myths from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta makes for a very unhappy comparison of today’s defense journalism compared to previous eras when, for example, SecDef Casper Weinberger was the subject of serious critical analysis.
Phi Beta Iota: Leon Panetta, like Bob Gates before him, is a posturing pimp for the military-industrial complex that pays 5% bribes to get 95% discounts on the taxpayers treasure. He could not stand up to fifteen minutes on the same stage with any one of us–Chuck Spinney, Winslow Wheeler, Ralph Peters, Bob Scales, etcetera.
