December 2nd, 2008 by Jon Taplin
The Obama Transition team, many of them Clinton veterans is finding that things have changed drastically in 8 years since they were last in the West Wing.
But few can contain their amazement, chiefly at the sheer increase in the size of the defense and national-security apparatus.
“For a bunch of small-government Republicans,” one former denizen of the White House who has now stepped back inside for the first time in eight years, “these guys built a hell of an empire.”
Eight years ago, there were two deputy national security advisers; today there are a half-dozen, each with staff. In the downstairs suites of the West Wing and across the street in the Old Executive Office Building, the returnees tripped into the Homeland Security Council, created to keep order in the new, vast, often dysfunctional Homeland Security Department. In the Pentagon’s deepest crevices, the Joint Special Operations Commandhas mushroomed in size and influence because of the demands of operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The list goes on.
We have been speaking here recently of the great eight year transfer of U.S. wealth towards the the assembled operations and corporate partners of the National Security State (NSS). This must now be, to some extent, disassembled. I’m afraid we are going to be outliers on this subject, as so much of the “conventional wisdom” supports the whole notion of the NSS. But a financial crisis will cause this government to chose its priorities. The advantage of Obama keeping his social network together since the election is that he can use the grassroots to be the people’s lobby on issues like more Military spending vs more local school spending (Guns vs. Butter).
Because I promise you, it will come down to that choice.
December 2nd, 2008 by Jon Taplin
The Obama Transition team, many of them Clinton veterans is finding that things have changed drastically in 8 years since they were last in the West Wing.
But few can contain their amazement, chiefly at the sheer increase in the size of the defense and national-security apparatus.
“For a bunch of small-government Republicans,” one former denizen of the White House who has now stepped back inside for the first time in eight years, “these guys built a hell of an empire.”
Eight years ago, there were two deputy national security advisers; today there are a half-dozen, each with staff. In the downstairs suites of the West Wing and across the street in the Old Executive Office Building, the returnees tripped into the Homeland Security Council, created to keep order in the new, vast, often dysfunctional Homeland Security Department. In the Pentagon’s deepest crevices, the Joint Special Operations Commandhas mushroomed in size and influence because of the demands of operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The list goes on.
We have been speaking here recently of the great eight year transfer of U.S. wealth towards the the assembled operations and corporate partners of the National Security State (NSS). This must now be, to some extent, disassembled. I’m afraid we are going to be outliers on this subject, as so much of the “conventional wisdom” supports the whole notion of the NSS. But a financial crisis will cause this government to chose its priorities. The advantage of Obama keeping his social network together since the election is that he can use the grassroots to be the people’s lobby on issues like more Military spending vs more local school spending (Guns vs. Butter).
Because I promise you, it will come down to that choice.
A good start would be to dismantle Homeland Security out from under our good friend Joe Lieberman.
I’m scared to know how many Oliver North’s have flourished over the past eight years.
The real question is – will Robert Gates be willing to clean house on Jan 21?
Bill Clinton hated the pentagon and tried like hell to cut their budget. Now with this Orwellian war with no end, chances are they’ll have over 50% of the budget soon.
Incidentally – I’ll take bloated, Pentagon quagmire over creepy outsourced Blackwater any day.
Noel, I hope you’d take neither — between SOCOM’s inveterate corruption, and sneaky-petes and regime-destabilizers in the various black branches of DoD, and the black-budget Wag-the-Dog tales we’ll never hear, and the inevitable constant of “procurement” fraud, and the back-and-forth between commissioned-purchasing-officer careerists into weapons-peddling companies, Blackwater is small-time evil on its way up, hopefully to be choked off this cycle if the company managers haven’t already so indispensably institutionalized their services that “we” have to keep eating more of the same rotten fruit.
One thing that always bugs the heck out of THIS curmudeonly cynic, at least, is that until 1949 1/2 “we” had a War Department. And then, in the PR coup of the millenium, that resource- and soul-eating monster suddenly became, presto-chango, the DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, because after all what sane citizen-taxpayer could question or “be against” DEFENSE? And so began the whole scam of billion- and trillion-dollar “superiority” pursuit of Really Cool Stuff that looks so good rampaging across the covers of Mechanix Illustrated and Popular Mechanics, spitting fire and launching missiles from every orifice as they tear across the blasted landscape.
Want a giggle (or a sob)? Try this quickie:
http://www.gahanwilson.com/
And then there were my youthful decades of duck-and-cover-under-your-school-desk, talking about how “IF I grow up, I wanna be a history teacher,” while “adults” came up with a World System that required nukular-armed leaders to actually demonstrably be insane, a doctrine known as MAD, interestingly enough, that preached the holiness of Armageddon — “We” have to be ready to destroy all of humanity, in the event that “You” launch your nukular weapons at “Us” because “Our” notoriously ineffective sensors and WOPR computers detect the first possible signs that “The Enemy” has launched their MIRVs first, even if they haven’t. See, if “Your” leaders did not believe “Our” leaders were insane enough to Push The Button, and vice versa, the whole deterrence thing doesn’t work.
And how many nukes on how many ICBMs and SLBMs and ALCMs and STS missiles, and how many dumb-bomb nukes in how many Bombays (sorry) are still on hair-trigger line? Makes the apocalyptic Rapturists happy every day to know they are no more than half an hour from The Big One.
But hey, that’s just me.
Right Jt….we watched a neighbor build one of those underground shellout falters in ’57 while the rest of us did the duck and cover….but we always had MAD to read.
Well, duck and cover did leave a permanent mark on a large number of people who, because of that youthful imprinting with images of imaginary horrors (the evil annihilation machine that was the pack of slavering 20 foot tall, Communist Siberian WOLVES waiting to eat us little American babies hiding so bravely under those protective desks) we were much more willing as adults to buy the need for all that protective Defense.
Not saying that the defense industry (the MIC) designed duck and cover; I actually think that the people who did were very convinced of the possibility of a nuclear war, and were doing what they could….
but, the images on impressionable minds.
Probably why Existentialism was so appealing to me in my 20s. It really did not make sense in any God run world to have that kind of threat hanging out there.
Point? There is a myth that the whole thing is run by a coordinated cabal of rich indifferent capitalist. But that’s a lot like saying your personality is determined by your genes, or your birth order, or your parents, or your (pick and insert the blamable option de jour). Stuff and nonsense. Personality is a complex mix of all that and more and even the portions vary from one individual to another.
Same with political memes. The Military Industrial complex exists in part due to the greed of some soulless bastards, and because of good intended patriots like the Dick Chaneys (who really believe all those threats they imagine), and the Pentagon’s spin machine, and the K street/ congress critters getting money for constituents, and …. US.
US. We tolerate it. Support it, even. Because of the power of those child like fears. And all the morphings of those duck and cover days: Berlin airlift, commies in Hollywood, Atomic Spies, yellow hoards pouring over the Yalu River, Sputnik, ICBMs, Cuba, Cuba missile bases for Christ sake, yellow hoards lined up to invade Santa Monica (ask your local John Birch chapter, they have maps), dominos, and (fast forward) Islamo-Fascist terrorists which brought our kids the threat color of the day to keep us duckin and covering.
It gets into the national psyche. Part of the reason London has so damn many CCTV cams is the Irish bombings. Made people twitchy enough to give up a little.. scratch that, A LOT of privacy.
While many of us can see through the total misallocation of national resources these night terrors bring, it’s probably not the critical mass needed to move the beast of childhood nightmares out of the political equation.
Somehow, we need to design a counter campaign as fresh as the Obama political one, to move the meme of TERROR. Instead of trying to identify the parties responsible and pinching their heads off, we need to be focusing on how to move from being a culture of fear that makes us pay for all those dark warriors that try to protect our sleepless nights.
Ken, a suggestion: Watch, in order, “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and “The Kite Runner.” Then read “First In,” by Cia “dark warrior” Gary Schroen. These guys are not trying to protect us while we sleep.
I agree that “we” need to do something about the various memes, “War on Terror” and “War on Drugs” and all the other phony wars, in the minds of the citizenry.