My favorite analogy for US security policy during the past two decades is a huge allergic reaction. It seems quite likely that allergies are caused by the immune system lacking antagonists and instead latching onto factors that are not real threats [1]. Similarly, the early '90s saw serious reductions in objective threats that US security was organized to deal with, internal (a sustained decline in crime [2]) and external (the disappearance of a second superpower). The resulting reaction is... what else if not allergic? Police is more militarized than ever and drives tanks into the living rooms of nonviolent offenders. The military's budget is unprecedentedly large and it hunts down shepherds in the Afghan hills at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per kill. Any claim that such threats are comparable with those that were adequately met in the '80s (crack epidemic, nuclear-tipped ICBMs etc.) is nothing short of risible. Yet the response is, if anything, even more aggressive than it was back then.
While I agree largely in sentiment, you're incorrect about some things. For example, military spending during WW2 absolutely dwarfs spending on the current two wars.
Well those wars actually had armies fighting back.
The current "wars" ended a decade ago. What you have now is extremely dangerous police work, not war. You have thousands of tanks, armoured vehicles, and aircraft against disorganized groups of criminals on bicycles wielding decade-old guns and DIY bombs.
This will never happen. Nothing outside of purely symbolic rhetoric can posit China as an actual adversary of the United States. A war between the US and China would destroy the world; not with weapons and violence, but with the catastrophic collapse of global trade and finance that would immediately accompany it.
The economic viability of the United States and the economic viability of China are so closely intertwined today that any idea of open hostility between the two is quite absurd.
Regardless of rhetoric, the US will only continue harassing sclerotic third-world countries with negligible relevance to the American economy.
Militaries develop strategic plans for wars that will never occur all the time. It's an effective form of contingency planning, and an effective way to practice strategic planning.
I believe there have been plans developed by the Pentagon for a war with Canada, too.
The first sentence in the linked article is: "The Pentagon has concluded that the time has come to prepare for war with China, and in a manner well beyond crafting the sort of contingency plans that are expected for wide a range of possible confrontations."
I didn't bother reading all of it (it's not something that interests me), but that beginning seems to kind of undermine your point.
The issue is complex, hence why the article is so long:
> To judge by several published reports which will be discussed in greater detail below, including those by government “insiders,” there is no indication—not a passing hint— that the White House has ever considered earnestly preparing the nation for a war with China. Nor is there any evidence that the White House has compared such a strategy to alternatives, and—having concluded that the hegemonic intervention implied by ASB is the course the United States should follow—then instructed the Pentagon to prepare for such a military showdown
How do you want to fight a war against China? Not that I think it is impossible, in fact I think the world looks increasingly like 1913. ( Shifting power centers, convenient located powder kegs and large scale military alliances to ensure that everyone gets pulled into a war.) But there is simply not a staging area, so that it would be rather complicated to have a large war.
It we accept this analogy, the question that arises is - if nature hasn't figured out how to eliminate allergies over millions of years of evolution, what magic do we expect a government to perform?
Not everyone is susceptible to allergic reactions. Without modern medicine, the people who are susceptible tend to die relatively quickly. Seems like the analogy leads to the decline of the united states and the rise of some other country that doesn't suffer from this particular affliction. They will probably have other problems though.
The hygiene hypothesis "is used to explain the increase in allergic diseases that has been seen since industrialization, and the higher incidence of allergic diseases in more developed countries."
This is to say that it's a relatively recent problem; one that has not applied selective pressure over the millions of years of evolution you're talking about, but rather the past ~200 years or so. My non-biologist understanding is that you can expect evolution to a relatively good job of adapting to slowly changing conditions over a long period by selecting for the vanishingly small number of mutations that happen to be beneficial.
My citizen understanding of government is that we should expect more of it than that, or it will continue to suck.
You don't need magic, you only need to be able to think; nature cannot think. Otherwise you would see nature making spacecraft or using binary search everywhere.
It's not a reaction. It's a well-planned mission to make hundreds of billions of dollars by scaring the population with relatively trivial terrorists acts into spending said billions without much resistance on the weapons and programs nobody really needs.
People who are not truly paying attention are under the impression this is all a mistaken over-reaction and we have had "some bad apples" that have more-or-less accidentally brought us into this situation.
Anyone who, in the past 40 years, has pointed out the concerted and deliberate efforts of the MIC to ring us here have been dismissed as "wild conspiracy theorists" -- now though, its just to difficult to keep people from the truth.
This is why the distractions have been larger and larger -- but they are coming to a head. The problem is that the MIC is so extraordinarily well funded and well positioned - that now they are looking for the excuse to use their totalitarian machine against all Humanity. They want the next war.
I am generally reluctant to buy into theories about giant conspiracies, not because I think people in power aren't capable of desiring such things, but because I don't think they're capable of pulling it off. However, it doesn't have to be a conspiracy. All you need is a group of actors in a similar position/industry, each motivated by their own self-interest and following what is to them, the path of least resistance to their goal. From the outside then, it can look more or less like a big conspiracy and indeed I’d be willing to accept that there may be many minor conspiracies playing out (of the ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ kind).
I don't think anyone is wanting the next war, IMO more likely what has happened is around about the wrap up of Gulf War 2, people in relevant industries started to realise that there won't be that many more fortuitously sized 'sandboxable' (if I may coin a term) hot wars that profit can consistently be extracted from. So what do you do instead? Get on the surveillance gravy train. It certainly seems like a pretty good gig doesn't it? Huge amounts of government spending up for grabs, very little informed oversight or ability for anyone to argue that too much is being spent. It's a government contractor's (or a government offical taking the revolving door's) dream.
I wouldn't credit them with enough foresight to be thinking about depopulation. It's all just about next quarter's profits.
I often say similar things on this topic. It doesn't have to be an explicit conspiracy (though there is certainly likely to be a number of conspiracies along the way).
As a physicist by training I think of these things as the stable attractors we see in complex systems, where out of chaos certain configurations act to pull everything towards them.
A totalitarian world of surveillance and conflict which feed off each other leading to us liquidating more and more of our economy to feed the beast, creating insecurity at home and a knee jerk support of those carrying this stuff out, in the name of attacking some faceless enemy is an attractor with many individuals acting in self interest generating motion in that direction.
Complacency prevents people breaking the cycle. A belief that it's a pendulum swinging back and forth rather than a drift towards a stable attractor from which it's hard to move back again.
The US is directing significant resources towards war with China and China is responding in kind. It kind of makes sense given the amount of money the US owes China and given the "threat" of China's economic ascendence.
I fail to see anything new. China has an outstanding claim of sovereignty over Taiwan and the US has entered into treaty obligations to defend Taiwan. China regularly holds military exercises in which it fires shells and missiles into the sea just off Taiwan. This situation has been in place for many decades. Over the last few decades China has greatly increased it's GDP and it's military spending, escalating the level of threat to Taiwan e.g. by buying or building submarines and an aircraft carrier, experimenting with stealth aircraft technology, etc, so the US has responded to that in step. Bear in mind it's the PRC's territorial claim and standing claim of a right to violently enforce it that's the driving force here.
China's posturing isn't limited to military exercises, they're also courting Taiwan for reintegration through economic incentives. It stands to reason that Taiwan's proximity to China could also be construed as a threat, due to her Western allegiance.
If Taiwan integrates with China as a special economic zone then that would be a key Western ally lost, however Taiwanese reintegration has been a hot-button issue for a few decades (in both Chinese and Taiwanese politics) that has quietly remained dormant.
I probably should have qualified that a little better: I don't think anyone sane is wanting the next war - which I agree would most likely be US + allies vs. China + allies and would likely spell Armageddon.
My earlier post was really concerned more with those actors within relevant industries whose motive is to maximise profit, not with those actors whose motive is to win a dick measuring competition between their country/empire and someone else’s. If the latter guys win out then yeah, all bets are off I'd say.
Perhaps I'm overestimating their adherence to logic and reason, but I don't think those actors motivated primarily by greed want such a big, uncontrollable war, the outcome of which is not foregone. They want little controllable ones like Gulf War 1 and 2 (or failing this, the surveillance state).
A good reason to not pay it off is like the fact that US is borrowing money right now below the inflation rate - people are paying US to keep their money.
Also government debt is rarely paid off - it is usually grown out of and revolved. What US lack is economic growth thanks the "serious" people that push for austerity.
Also rule of thumb - anyone that uses a country budget is like the family budget analogy is - liar, dumb or ignorant. That is very quick filter by which you could judge politicians.
Sometimes you do not need a conspiracy which is articulated at the intellectual level. Sometimes a conspiracy can be implicit; emergent; driven by the biology and the natural drives of the authoritarian, power-seeking mind, driven to reinforce their own authority; to proclaim and strut their status, and to demean and chasten their "inferiors". Power is sex, and the domination of an elite over a subjugated population is rape. No intellectual conspiracy here; just an accumulation of drives; an institutional lust for power and control; and a human sexual power dynamic playing itself out on a grand stage.
Yup. The notion of full spectrum warfare goes beyond the paradigm of traditional war, or even non-traditional death-by-drone. The effort to dominate globally will employ finance (manufactured crises to bankrupt countries, speculation to drive up food prices, etc.), industry (embedded surveillance tech in consumer electronics), agriculture (making global crops dependent on pesticides controlled by allied corporations), the pharmaceutical industry (control what countries can get drugs, weaken populations with unneeded, addictive drugs), media (obvious) etc. This kind of skullduggery has been going on, conceptually, for a long time but technology now means it can scale.
More realistically: the next business opportunity, the next contract, the next sale, all of these things are very much on the agenda. Lots of short-term decisions leading to long term catastrophe.
The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world ... and in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare. The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour.
You are very naive if you think journalists decide which stories get published/aired.
Politicians are PERFECT for this kind of game. Think about it, fewer than a thousand people (congress + high-ranking judges) decide on EVERYTHING. It's trivial to bribe / blackmail them when you have billions and access to their emails and billions of dollars. Think of which major politicians were killed in the last 50 years.
Oh, you're just a conspiracy theorist. The commies, the arabs and the jews hate us for our freedom, thank God we have heroes like Dick Cheney, George W Bush and Barack Obama to protect us.
"Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated."
The AUMF needs to be sunsetted. Heck, if necessary, pass a resolution/law that congratulates everybody on a job well-done and declares victory. Whatever it takes.
A state of war is a temporary thing in a democracy. It has to be. Otherwise the natural tendency of the executive to overreach will be completely unchecked.
I suggest that the job we're doing now is much more like "global policeman", including using lethal SWAT forces, than being in a war. I think such a role is necessary, and I also think that there's no way in hell all the nations of the world are going to overtly agree to this. (Although I suspect a majority are very happy having the yanks clean up the nuts using Predators as long as the PR isn't too bad. Even better, they can support various strikes and options with their intelligence services while publicly railing against the Evil Empire. A lot of foreign political leaders have been playing this game long before 9-11.)
That's a fine and dandy pickle for the world, and I have sympathy for the problem of crazy people wanting to come and hurt civilians in order to affect political change. The problem is, democracies can't be in a state of war for decades. Even assuming that all of the threats are clear and present.
We need a way out of this, and pronto. This is a structural problem for the U.S. that is much worse than slavery ever was. Here's hoping the light will come on for the voting public and they'll start pressuring their elected representatives to do their damned jobs and stop spending so much time politically posturing and positioning their party for the next election.
You can get votes by promising free chickens in every pot. You can get votes by bringing a big defense contract into an area. Politicians get elected by votes, and the political system runs on votes.
Yes, money is used to fight the battle. But focusing on the money is idiotic. Money is a completely secondary factor. It's main modern use (I speak of direct contributions, not the sweetheart deals to relatives that really is at the heart of corruption) is to attack the opponent's base and prevent them from turning out to vote.
Also, political power is much more important than money. Being able to launch a Predator strike trumps any amount of campaign contributions.
This focus on money has to stop. It's like saying businesses are all about making money. It's not that it's a false statement -- it's that it misses the point entirely of what's going on. Business provide value by giving folks stuff they want. Money is a secondary way to keep score. Political power is accumulated by votes. If you can gain a thousand votes by simply making a speech, much better than throwing money at folks. It's an easy win. Focusing on money ignores the entirety of what's really going on.
You want a really corrupt system, start overengineering the money side.
But, as an example, I'd just like to mention the obscene amounts of money being wasted during presidential elections. Why should candidates be allowed to be able to get more votes because they spend more money because they literally got paid/owned by some private interests/ultra-rich people? It's just plain stupidity. How can we allow that?
We're technically not exactly there yet, b/c not every household has an Internet connection yet, but why shouldn't the goal be this:
Set up just 1 website where all political parties can express their positions. And let that be the only allowed form of communication with the voter.
It's a sane pull versus an insane push approach.
And it would take a lot of money out of politics, which can then be spent for intelligent things like research, for example.
Just to be clear: northwest is for the repeal of the 1st amendment.
OK, so candidates can only use one site. Then "Friends of Candidate" will set up a site, or some random blogger with a million followers will set up a website. There is no stopping the message, or the money. The voting system needs to change, among other things. the government should also do less, so there is less power to be had at the top.
> Just to be clear: northwest is for the repeal of the 1st amendment.
I am certainly not against any part of the constitution!
> OK, so candidates can only use one site. Then "Friends of Candidate" will set up a site, or some random blogger with a million followers will set up a website.
Of course that is and should be possible, because it is free speech!
The thing is: it should be made illegal to advertise such a blog with money. Of course there will still the possibility of abuse, but that is the case with any other law.
Doing what I propose would make a huge difference in the money-based corruption of the entire system.
Because of the constitution. Suppose you are running for President, I support you, and I am rich. I rent a billboard and hang paper on it saying 'northwest for President!!' Well, the other candidate (southeast) is not happy about that, but under the first amendment there is no question that I have the right to publish my opinion that everyone should vote for you. So southeast reasonably argues that it is unfair for her to be prevented from renting a billboard, which is true. And so it goes.
This is a simplistic example, but that's basically what the famous Citizens United case was about - did a wealthy third party have the right to publish something designed to influence an election (in that case, by saying negative things about Hilary Clinton)? The first amendment says pretty clearly that Congress cannot make any law that limits the freedom of the press, and so people who want to use their money to publish election messages have to be allowed to do it.
As a European I agree that it's far from ideal, but that's something you have to accept if you want the freedoms of the first amendment as it is written.
Why shouldn't money have meaning in the political realm? If you take away the ability of wealth to actually influence the world, then all you can do when you're rich is buy increasingly banal toys.
Being a representative democracy simply means that everyone who can vote gets an equal vote.
It doesn't mean that one person cannot be more influential than the other due to charisma, logical reasoning, or by using money to simply have their message heard by more people.
For instance, no matter how rich you are and how many TV spots you buy out, you're unlikely to convince the population to do something that they inherently dislike. In a true plutocracy, the rich don't need to convince anyone of their feelings, their power is written into the system.
> America is, in theory, a representative democracy ...
America was once a republic, precisely to avoid the madness we are talking about in this thread. One by one the protections against mob rule have been dismantled.
A country with a Supreme Court that believes threshing wheat is interstate commerce is not a republic. Ditto for a country with federal bunny rabbit inspectors.
> A country with a Supreme Court that believes threshing wheat is interstate commerce is not a republic. Ditto for a country with federal bunny rabbit inspectors.
I know of no reasonable definition of "republic" under which either of these statements is defensible. "Republic" doesn't mean a system of government that produces exclusively outcomes that meet with Daniel_Newby's approval.
that's a non-sequitur. "Republic" isn't the average of oligarchy and mob rule, or anywhere in between those. It's orthogonal to them. You certainly can have a system with strong elements of both that is a republic (as demonstrated by the essentially prototypical republic, that of Rome.)
You seem, again, to be conflating what you like with what a Republic is.
I fear that perhaps the money problem is at the other end of the process. The money required to "get the votes" isn't the only monetary consideration.
Once you get voted in, all of a sudden you've got control over a – for all intents and purposes – unlimited money tap.
This encourages the sort of people who think "skimming a little bit off the top" of the government provided money flow (aka "stealing from the taxpayer") is OK, to enter the political arena for self-serving reasons.
I don't know how much this is a real problem – there's a good argument that "enlightened self interest" is perhaps the best motivator for politicians, but I know where I live (Sydney, Australia) our local state government is currently involved in many many scandals where politicians have been caught using their positions to create great wealth for themselves and their family/friends under extremely suspicious circumstances (mysterious real estate deals in areas which subsequently get significant changes in legal status, planning permission given to industries with no public consultation followed by executive level jobs or board positions when responsible politicians leave office).
In an "ideal world", people seeking political power for personal self-interest would be excluded in favour of people with purely altruistic intentions. Unfortunately that's about as practical as appointing me as Emperor of the Universe.
-> More war needed to kill them (feed military budget)
-> Creates new enemies
-> More war needed to kill them (feed military budget)
-> You get the idea...
To keep the cash cow going, keep it all secret (or at least very nontransparent).
0. Where is the money going?
1. Are foreign and domestic policies using tactics that a civil society should use?
Often, in positions of power where secrecy is used to hoard information as a form of job security, what happens is that any challenging argument becomes the secret-keeper protrarys themselves as having more intelligence than any critic, so the challenger always appears misinformed.
Well this comes to mind, the US economical dependence on military and war:
"This is a very significant power group. And it is a power group that is not just at the top of the White House. It is not just a few generals. Rather it is all the people connected to and profiting from that system. And that's about a third of the US population. So all the way from Chelsea Clinton down to the someone in the gutters of San Antonio whose brother is deployed in Iraq."
"the U.S. is at war with “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.”
So who exactly are those associated forces? It’s a secret. "
It's not a secret at all. They've demonstrated it in the past. Based on observation, "associated forces" can be defined as "anybody who has some connection to". There is no definitive answer because it changes constantly and there is no need to provide justification anyway. War is being fought by the government, for the government. Your civilian inquiries are not welcome.
In Russia we used to call them "the enemies of the people" and, of course, they were among us and everyone could be marked as such just by a gossip or finger-pointing by a neighbor.)
very impressive how prescient george orwell was; impressive but of little consolation. I'm a big fan of technology; but i hope that technology wasn't the missing something that previous governments lacked to be able to enforce their authoritarianism.
This is Huxley's future not Orwell's. It's not that "the people" can't change society, they just don't want to think about it and would rather watch television, whether that be sports, sitcoms, or infotainment.
That was true of Orwell's future as well - the Proles, which composed 80%+ of the population, weren't spied upon at nearly the same level as the Party members, they were just too poorly educated and content with the status quo as long as they were fed meaningless entertainment created by Party machines.
Huxley does not exclude Orwell. What we have is a Huxley layer over an Orwell core. People don't care enough to change, but, when they do, governments know and can act swiftly and forcefully.
We have neither Huxley's world nor Orwell's. In Huxley's version we would exile free thinkers; the US government never exiles people (with so much invested in the prison industry, how could we?). In Orwell's version, free thinkers would be tortured until they either die or learn to love the system. The US government just marginalizes free thinkers, allowing them to continue to live and work in our society (with the exception of whistleblowers) but ensuring that they never find themselves in a position to change anything.
The common theme in dystopia is that free thinkers are ignored by the rest of society, which is either apathetic or too brainwashed. We are certainly at that point, but neither Brave New World nor 1984 accurately describe what America is becoming.
He has not been exiled by the US government, he is in a self-imposed exile. In fact the US government has been doing everything in their power to get him back to this country, so that he can be thrown in prison as punishment for being a whistleblower.
Guys come one. Have a little patience! Building up the China thing is going to take a few more years. Until then we need to keep the military complex busy with some extended theater of war games.
The problem with the US Government is that they try so hard to garner support from everybody, which leads to situations where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. With all the wheeling and dealing going on, allies turn to opponents where convenient (and vice versa).
Today we're helping a certain group of people, tomorrow we're bombing the shit out of them. Why?
> it would be difficult for the Congress to get involved in trying to track the designation of which are the affiliate forces
Translation: when their usefulness ends then we stop supporting them, at which point they turn against us. This happens so frequently that monthly briefings would be a pointless formality.
In their effort to control everybody, more spitefully slip through their fingers.
The list of the usual suspects in 'Round up the usual suspects'. This is not something that they would not like to specify further.
It might have something to do with 'Continuity of governance' plans; those plans may have detailed lists of 'internal enemies'; those are supposed to be round up in times of emergencies (like supposed leaders of 'occupy' or something)
Interviewer: Is the government winning the battle against terrorists?
Helpmann: Ah, yes. We're fielding all their strokes, running all of them out. We're consistently knocking them for six. I'd say they're nearly out of the game.
Interviewer: But, Mr. Helpmann, the bombing campaign is now in its 13 th year.
I think their reasoning for withholding a list of names of Al Qaeda affiliates is a bit weak, but I can still see how it might make sense. After all, we're fighting for transparency because we know information can be powerful, but that power is not always a positive force. Information can aid in organization, and we do have an interest in keeping our enemies disorganized.
The real question is, do other comprehensive lists of Al Qaeda affiliates exist? If so, then releasing this list would probably not substantially increase the information currently out there.
Yeah, but as the good professor stated in the article, we are already dropping bombs on their heads, so they are pretty much aware that we know who they are (paraphrasing).
I don't know that it matters. When you think about it, it's actually kind of a silly notion that we don't name them because we don't want to give them free advertising.
Like there are a bunch of guys itching to participate in jihad and strap themselves up as suicide bombers, but just can't figure out where to sign up?
I think that's unlikely. And, I would agree with the professor's other point that the bigger risk is these secret wars and the fact that Americans don't know what's being done in our names. That's extraordinarily detrimental to a democracy, to say the least.
Congressmen on select committees have clearance, but cannot tell you what they know.
Basically, the Congress had ceded it's ability to approve/disapprove warlike action to the executive. They retain the power of the purse, but it is difficult to be in a position politically where you are "cutting off support" for "the troops".
That's also a key reason why we had the "support the troops" propaganda. Even if you were against the war, how can you be against your neighbor's sons and daughters?
>Congressmen on select committees have clearance, but cannot tell you what they know.
This isn't exactly true. Congressmen have an explicit Constitutional protection for anything they say in the House. This was most famauslly used by Senator Mike Gravel to leak the Pentagon Papers, and set the precedent of Gravel v. United States that doing so is legal.
In reality, attempting to do so would cost significant political capitol, and will likely make it difficult for the Congressmen to get onto such committees in the future.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Crim...