The great Avedon Carol and the legendary Sam Seder discuss developments of the week, highlighting issues neglected or misrepresented on the Sunday morning broadcasts, drawing from their work of the prior week and the wickedly funnyBobblespeak Translations Informative, thoughtful, passionate. Follow them @avedon_says @samseder @bobblespeak
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Last week I wrote a post about the likelihood that Newt Gingrich is heavily involved in the actual war planning for the Iraq invasion. I had no proof other than some gossipy items in newspaper columns. However, I have since been informed that Newt has had almost unequalled influence in long term strategic military planning for many, many years.
And, when he introduced the Generals to his intellectual mentors in the early 1980’s he began a revolution in military affairs that is playing itself out in the Iraqi desert at this very minute.
Last November, Newt spoke to the U.S. Joint Forces Command about the future of the military in the 21st century. He spoke of fast paced deployments, joint services, men on horseback with cell phones commanding B52’s, “The Bridges at Toko Ri” and “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean” and a whole lot of other stuff. It’s quite a speech and he’s given many just like it for the last 20 years.
… in 1979 as a freshman congressman … My dad retired as a lieutenant colonel, and here is a brigadier general [Donald Starry] in the United States Army asking me to advise on the core pattern of how you fight a battle. I promptly said to my staff, “Hold the phone calls, postpone my next appointment…He said, “We have a real problem.” I whipped out a legal pad and said, “Now to understand what we’re doing, let me share with you a framework so you can advise them.” I was thrilled. Back then, this was pretty powerful, and he pulled out a little flip chart from his attaché case, and for 45 minutes he walked me through every battle doctrine.
[…] Now, the thing that actually sold me was when he left he had taken notes that would begin a dialogue which continued until 1987. I advised the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command from the spring of 1979 through the fall of ’87 on Army battle doctrine. Oh, and I guess in that sense the only elected member of Congress to have ever done anything quite like that.
He says in the same speech:
…my stepfather who was an infantryman who was stationed in Orleans, France, and he took me to the battle field for the Verdun, and we spent a weekend with a friend of his who had been drafted in 1941, sent to the Philippines, served in the Bataan Death March and spent 3 1/2 years in a Japanese prison camp. And at the end of the weekend of Japanese prison camp stories at night and Verdun battle fields during the daytime, I had this sense that this stuff’s all real. People die, and not just in Tel Aviv malls, but, as we discovered on September 11th, in our biggest cities.
So I come down here with a passion which is the equivalent to the passion some of you may have felt in combat…
One supposes that those who have actually been in battle might feel differently, but there you have it. In any case, Newt has been advising the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) for many years, (where he also spent a lot of time talking politics apparently.)
He remains very active in military matters since he left office in 1998:
(June 18,2002)Command leaders briefed Gingrich, who was accompanied by the Commander in Chief of U.S. Joint Forces Command and Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic, U.S. Army Gen. William Kernan and Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic, British Admiral Ian Forbes, at the JFCOM Joint Warfighting Center.
During those early years in congress he was also heavily involved with some other big thinkers, the authors of the popular bestseller, “Future Shock,” Alvin and Heidi Toffler. He introduced his good friends to the above mentioned General Starry in 1982 and they soon came to have an almost unimaginable influence on a certain group of military planners in creating a new military doctrine called alternatively “third wave” and “information warfare.”
This doctrine relies on the Tofflers’ thesis that the United States is in the midst of a transition between the 2nd wave industrial society and the 3rd wave information society. This concept is the single biggest influence on Newt Gingrich’s “vision” and the military is the one place where Gingrich seems to have been taken very seriously as a planner and long term strategist from very early in his career. (At one time he had 5 active military officers serving on his congressional staff, a fact which raised eyebrows but since he was the Speaker nobody said much about the obvious conflict of active duty personnel directly involved in the political process.)
After the Gulf War the Tofflers wrote “War and Anti-War: Summit at the Dawn of the 21st Century,” in which they claimed that the first Gulf War was the first war to occur between the 2nd wave and 3rd wave of civilization and was the greatest military victory in history. There were
dissenters but many in the military began to plan along the lines that the Tofflers suggested developing a theory called Information Warfare.In its most benign form it is merely a doctrine for attacking and defending the ever more important information systems (i.e command and control.) But the concept became merged with another doctrine called the Revolution in Military Affairs or RMA that includes the ideas of small, fast “niche” special forces, “information driven” airpower, psy-ops and propaganda and as Don Rumsfeld called it “Exquisite Intelligence.” And these ideas are the basis for Rumsfeld’s military transformation, including his personal favorite “effects based warfare.”
To 3rd wave military enthusiasts, Information Warfare is the thrilling notion that:
“Information dominance is superior situational awareness applied to seize and maintain the initiative, influence the enemy’s actions, and induce operational paralysis while denying your adversary the ability to do the same.”
In other words, war as mind fuck. “Shock and Awe,” falls into the Information Warfare doctrine with its psy-ops goal made possible by information driven precision weapons. IW relies upon the assurance that, in the face of proper information (i.e. the massive superiority of the offensive force) that logically the enemy will not fight. Well…
The target of information warfare, then, is the human mind, especially those minds that make the key decisions of war or peace and, from the military perspective, those minds that make the key decisions on if, when, and how to employ the assets and capabilities embedded in their strategic structures.
Newt put it more prosaically in a speech at the Hoover Institute last July:
…their [old] answer has been to design campaign plans that are so massive – I mean the standard plan in Afghanistan was either Tomahawks or 5 divisions, and that’s why Rumsfeld was so important. Cause Rumsfeld sat down and said, “Well what if we do this other thing? You know, 3 guys on horseback, a B-2 overhead.” And it was a huge shock to the army. I mean, because it worked. Now I’ll tell you one guy who does agree and that’s Chuck Horner who ran the air campaign.
You can still find people out there who are warriors who came up during the Reagan years, all of whom will say flatly to the Secretary of Defense, “The right model is simultaneous, massive, immediate combined air and land forces, period.”
Now, many people see much of the Afghan campaign as a failed strategy, particularly the battle of Tora Bora, which was roundly condemned for its misjudgment of the Afghan “allies” and a failure to put adequate troops on the ground. (Sound familiar?) This was the battle from which Osama bin Laden was believed to have escaped. The guys on horseback with cell phones didn’t quite get the job done.
After Operation Anaconda was proclaimed a victory, (why, we do not know) Junior turned to Condi and said “what’s next?” Immediately, the planning began in earnest for the invasion of Iraq. News reports said that Rumsfeld and crew initially believed that the operation would only require 50-60,000 troops, in keeping with the rapid deployment of “niche” special forces theory. And although they were ultimately persuaded that a much larger force was needed, events of recent days suggest that the adjustment was badly planned and then micromanaged.
Perhaps most importantly, their exquisite intelligence was very selective:
Intelligence officials say Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and other Pentagon civilians ignored much of the advice of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency in favor of reports from the Iraqi opposition and from Israeli sources that predicted an immediate uprising against Saddam once the Americans attacked.
I do not know how much Gingrich has been involved with the war planning since 9/11. There have been numerous reports that he has been advising Rumsfeld and we know that he is a member of the Defense Policy Board. But, even if he isn’t, in his own way, he has been as influential on the thinking in military affairs as any of the neocons (which he isn’t, really) and his influence is being felt today and will continue to be felt for many, many years to come. He’s the man who brought pop futurism into the American military and got a lot of people to believe that we can run the world militarily without having to commit human beings in great numbers to face the enemies that result from such adventures.
I have no great quarrel with the Tofflers. They are pop futurists and they have had an enormous influence on the way we think about change and the information age. But, it is truly amazing to me that their thesis has become a serious basis for military planning. While these concepts are intriguing and give one plenty of food for thought about how the future will play out, they are also extremely limited. Their prescriptions for how to deal with new challenges in a non-military sense are almost entirely utopian nonsense and have no practical application. There is no reason to believe that their thinking about military strategy is any more realistic.
In “Creating a New Civilization, The Politics of the Third Wave,” the Tofflers define their ideas as this:
“The way we make war reflects the way we make wealth and the way we make anti-war must reflect the way we make war.”
I know that I will always be grateful to Newt Gingrich for introducing that kind of clear thinking into our military back in 1983. We can only be more secure as a result.
This is the new would-be Anti-Mitt. Thank God his personality is so toxic that he’s unelectable.
Sunday Fun
by David Atkins
Hope everyone is enjoying their Sunday. I’m stuck with 12 hours of work today myself, but not too busy to get a kick out of this:
Sure, a lot of people will contend that this is all a sideshow of a two-party good cop-bad cop system designed to screw the middle class. But then, a lot of people took a good long look at George Bush and Al Gore and said to themselves, “hey, not too much difference there. How bad could it get?”
The answer: bad. Really, really bad. And the jokers on the GOP stage are far worse than Bush, if such a thing is even possible.
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Your moment of zen
Leave it to Third Way to characterize screwing the middle class and the poor for decades to come as “moderate.” But that’s what they call their proposed plan for the Supercommittee. And I’d guess that if the Supercommittee manages to come up with a deal, it will look something like this:
“A grand bargain is ideal but a distraction. … With that falling apart, the whole supercommittee could fall apart,” says Jim Kessler, Third Way’s vice president for policy. The group’s “break-glass” plan contains $426 billion in new revenue — compared with the $1 trillion that Democrats are currently demanding — without raising marginal tax rates, in hopes of appeasing Republicans. It also contains $556 billion in cuts to mandatory spending, but with relatively minimal reductions to entitlement benefits, in hopes of satisfying Democrats. It also has about $420 billion in defense cuts — a substantial figure, but less than the $600 billion in cuts that would be triggered if the supercommittee fails. Finally, it leaves some of the most contentious issues — like the future of the Bush tax cuts and major changes to Medicare and Medicaid — for later. “This is not our ideal plan … but there are a limited amount of moving pieces that can be used,” Kessler explains. He casts the plan as an alternative between “go big” and “don’t do anything at all,” saying that it’s a false dichotomy that excludes a more moderate compromise.
There are some parts of the Third Way plan that supercommittee Democrats and Republicans have already put on the table: It lowers the mortgage-interest deduction, which Republicans have floated. It uses chained-CPI for calculating Social Security benefits and raises Medicare premiums for wealthier beneficiaries, which both parties have considered. A full outline of the entire plan is available here.
But there are potential dealbreakers throughout, particularly in light of the GOP’s aversion to tax increases. The proposal eliminates an estate-tax exemption that builds on the Bush tax cuts, for instance. And it raises some $50 billion in revenue through eliminating subsidies to ethanol, coal, oil and other energy industries. Although the Third Way lifted many of those energy revenues from Coburn’s own plan, the Oklahoma Republican is still something of a fiscal outlier within his own party. When Coburn tried to eliminate ethanol subsidies this year, it sparked a fierce backlash from other Republicans.
When you look at the actual plan you see that the big ticket item is the chained CPI change, which raises money by “changing” the tax brackets on everyone, but mostly by cutting Social Security. The largest single line item is that one. But they also raise a lot of money by cutting Medicare and Medicaid (I don’t know why that article says they aren’t included) and lowering the mortgage interest deduction, which seems an odd choice at a time when the dead housing market is still a huge drag on the economy. They also do a major hit on federal workers by forcing them to pay in much more for their pensions (also known as a pay cut.)
That automatic trigger seems likelier by the day because at this point the odds of an agreement are roughly zero.
Here’s the truly insane thing: The triggered cuts start in 2013, a little over a year from now.
Yet no one in their right mind believes unemployment will be lower than 8 percent by then.
The cuts will come on top of the expiration of extended unemployment benefits, the end of a payroll tax cut, and continuing reductions in state and local budgets — all when American consumers (whose spending is 70 percent of the economy) will still be reeling from declining jobs and wages and plunging home prices. Even if Europe’s debt crisis doesn’t by then threaten a global financial meltdown, this rush toward austerity couldn’t come at a worse time.
In other words, what will really be triggered is a deeper recession and higher unemployment.
Michele Bachmann: … The Great Society has not worked, and it’s put us into the modern welfare state. If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps. If you look at China, they’re in a very different situ– they save for their own retirement security. They don’t have to pay FDC. They don’t have the modern welfare state. And China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with The Great Society, and they’d be gone.
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In case you were wondering whether Americans have decided that the whole torture thing was misguided and wrong, think again:
This is Your Modern GOP
by David Atkins
Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Michele Bachmann:
Let’s reiterate what we just witnessed: a contender and one-time frontrunner for the nomination of the Republican Party declared that America should eliminate food stamps, Medicare and the expansion of Social Security, before stating that America should emulate China’s social safety net. And the Republican audience cheered her.
At some point the pearl clutchers and bipartisan fetishists are going to acknowledge that there is a political civil war in this country, that the right wing is going off the rails at an accelerated pace, and that these people represent a grave threat to democracy should they ever take power again.
It’s not just the Bachmanns of the world are living in a dystopic fantasyland. The GOP base is living there, too.
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was that, sandwiched somewhere between the bong hits and assorted scatological references was an undercurrent of sharp socio-political commentary about racial stereotyping in America (for the uninitiated, Harold and Kumar are played by a Korean-American and Indian-American actor, respectively). The film’s co-creators, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, officially turned their baked heroes into a sort of Cheech and Chong franchise for Gen Y with the 2008 sequel, Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay 
. Like its predecessor, it was outrageously crass and vulgar, yet oddly endearing (in a South Park kind of way). So, is the magic recaptured in this third outing?
. Go ahead…ask (“Are you high?!”). Maybe.
. In other words, don’t expect a slick film (although…the press screener I viewed online was subtitled “rough cut” so it’s possible the version in theatres will be polished up). That being said, seen purely as a historical document, it’s a doozey.
. There are shared themes of loyalty, selflessness and that kind of collective idealism that seems relegated to a bygone era. Stylistically, however, Kaurismaki and Melville could not be any different. To say that Kaurismaki likes to populate his films with quirky characters is an understatement. For instance, I’d love to know where he dug up Roberto Piazza, who plays “Little Bob”, a “legendary” musician who Marcel recruits to perform a makeshift “benefit concert”. To look at this odd little gentleman, you’d never dream that he could rock out the way he does once he’s onstage (it’s like the first time you saw Andy Kaufman “become” Elvis). Little Bob also gets the best line in the film (“She’s like the road manager for my soul.”).
). Jim Jarmusch absolutely worships Kaurismaki; they definitely share the same sense of humor, as well as the same sense of, er, pacing…if that helps. You’re not going to see a lot of car chases, okay? And if you can settle in with this tale’s unhurried rhythms, you might just catch the compassion and humanity at its core. Think of it as a shoeshine…for your soul.QOTD
Well the consensus seems to be we need to just install bankers as the leaders of all the countries, and the only way any of us can survive is if all the richest countries of the world are turned into 3rd world hellholes after the middle class gives all of their money to rich people.
That’s about it.
This phenomenon is also known as disaster capitalism:
After each new disaster, it’s tempting to imagine that the loss of life and productivity will finally serve as a wake-up call, provoking the political class to launch some kind of “new New Deal.” In fact, the opposite is taking place: disasters have become the preferred moments for advancing a vision of a ruthlessly divided world, one in which the very idea of a public sphere has no place at all. Call it disaster capitalism. Every time a new crisis hits—even when the crisis itself is the direct by-product of free-market ideology—the fear and disorientation that follow are harnessed for radical social and economic re-engineering. Each new shock is midwife to a new course of economic shock therapy
Update: QOTD Part Deux: from Greg Sargent:
The ultra wealthy will spend a whole lot of undisclosed money on a whole lot of ads filled with a whole lot of lies designed to dupe a whole lot of struggling Americans into believing that their number one problem in life is a rag-tag band of nose-ringed hippies who somehow managed to compel our media to tentatively begin a discussion about this, and the very modest actions we should take to begin to change it.
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Embracing the Slow Path to Undefined Success
by David Atkins
Matt Taibbi has a great piece on Occupy Wall Street. It closely parallels the evolution of my own thinking on the Occupy movement–and I figure that if I’m not too far off Taibbi’s perspective, I must be doing something right.
So consider this my own apology to the Occupy movement for my own lack of patience, by way of Taibbi:
I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.
The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he’s not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off.
That’s what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I’m beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It’s about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one’s own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it’s flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.
After rounding out the usual right-wing critiques, Taibbi takes on the critiques from the Left–critiques that he and I have both leveled at the movement:
Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, there were scads of progressive pundits like me who wrung our hands with worry that OWS was playing right into the hands of assholes like Krauthammer. Don’t give them any ammunition! we counseled. Stay on message! Be specific! We were all playing the Rorschach-test game with OWS, trying to squint at it and see what we wanted to see in the movement. Viewed through the prism of our desire to make near-term, within-the-system changes, it was hard to see how skirmishing with cops in New York would help foreclosed-upon middle-class families in Jacksonville and San Diego.
What both sides missed is that OWS is tired of all of this. They don’t care what we think they’re about, or should be about. They just want something different.
We’re all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob’s Ladder nightmare with no end; we’re entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.
If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There’s no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it’s 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.
That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don’t know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.
There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.
But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it’s at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned “democracy,” tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.
Very, very true.
Ultimately, the movement will have to decide how best to affect public policy: Aquarian fantasies of culture shift that simply withers and washes away current institutions toward a new progressive modality are just that.
But for now, it’s only necessary that the movement continue to grow, and Taibbi is right that people like me have been too impatient to try to push the movement toward some sort of immediate strategy.
People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It’s about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a “beloved community” free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn’t need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.
Indeed. We’ll see where this grows, but what is most important is to simply get involved. If you have an Occupy location in your neck of the woods, go there and show solidarity. If you don’t have one, start one.
