Archive for the 'Military Spending' Category
February 26th, 2010 by Jon Taplin
The Pew Research Center has just come out with a comprehensive report on the Millennial Generation that should put a smile on the face of progressives everywhere.
Generations, like people, have personalities, and Millennials — the American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium — have begun to forge theirs: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.
They are more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults. They’re less religious, less likely to have served in the military, and are on track to become the most educated generation in American history.
It may be that my vision of Life After Empire may take a generation to be realized, but if the chart at the top is any indication of the ideology of this huge generation (as big as the boomers), we will get there eventually.
February 23rd, 2010 by Jon Taplin
Mullah Omar must be wondering if anyone will show up for the next scheduled meeting of the Quetta Shura–the ruling council of the Taliban. Yesterday the Pakistani army captured yet another of his chief military aides, Mullah Abdul Kabir.
Coming right on the heels of the arrest of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the top military commander last week, the half blind sheik must be seeing shadows on the wall of his cave.
Many of us have always felt that the Pakistani intelligence (ISI) knew where all of these guys were hiding and during the 7 years of George Bush’s unquestioning embrace of General Musharraf, the ISI was protected from American pressure to round up the Taliban in their country. President Obama is not so patient and the combined push of one on ones with key Pakistani generals from Biden, Holbrooke, General Jones and Admiral Mullen seems to have paid off.
“This indicates Baradar was not a one off or an accident but a turning point in Pakistan’s policy toward the Taliban,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow of Brookings Institution and a former C.I.A. official. “We still need to see how far it goes, but for Obama and NATO this is the best possible news. If the safe haven is closing then the Taliban are in trouble.”
I have made it very clear that I want our troops out of Afghanistan ASAP. If Obama is to keep his word to us that he will be withdrawing by the summer of 2011, the elimination of the Pakistani sanctuaries will be a major element of that plan. Then perhaps President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign can be framed as “Nation Building in America”, not the Mid-East.
Life After Empire.
February 21st, 2010 by Jon Taplin
I have been arguing for a while that there is a strange bedfellows coalition forming between progressives and libertarians around ending America’s Imperial adventures and beginning Life After Empire. Yesterday Ron Paul gave an extraordinary speech calling for the end of empire in front of the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual convention. When the speech was over the 10,000 delegates voted in a straw poll for their 2012 Presidential candidate. Ron Paul won easily beating Mitt Romney by 9 points. Paul’s platform is built on two points: end our military adventures and close down the Federal Reserve. The first is built on a different idea of conservatism, citing Eisenhower as a model and the notions about the Fed are based around the idea that Private interests (the New York Banks) should not be in charge of how much money we print. Neither of these seem like very controversial stances to me, but the announcement of Paul’s straw poll victory brought a chorus of boos from the Republican establishment at CPAC. I don’t agree with a lot of what Paul says, but if you watch this section of Paul’s speech you can see an opening for a progressive candidate who was anti-Imperialist and anti-Wall Street and willing to revert to the Democratic principles of Jeffersonian Democratic Federalism.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahQM0tITG4U&feature=player_embedded]
February 20th, 2010 by Jon Taplin
I only met Alexander Haig once, but it was pretty memorable. A year after he had been dismissed by Reagan as Secretary of State, he came to a screening at the MPAA headquarters in Washington DC of a film I produced called Under Fire
. Jack Valenti, who ran the MPAA in those days was always inviting Washington Bigwigs to his screenings, but I knew when we greeted the guests that Haig was a mismatch for Under Fire. Haig had been instrumental in funding the Contras in fighting Reagan’s covert war in Central America and my film was centered on three war correspondents (Nick Nolte, Gene Hackman and Joanna Cassidy) who feel a certain sympathy for the Sandinista rebels fighting the Samoza dictatorship in Nicaragua.
I was seated behind Haig at the screening and thirty minutes in I could see he was getting agitated, whispering in his wife’s ear. Eventually he couldn’t take the counter narrative and very publicly got up and walked out of the screening. Valenti, who knew that Haig was out of power, just shrugged.
As he predicted long ago, his obituary led with the classic moment he overstepped right after the attempted assassination of Reagan, when Haig stepped to the microphone in the White House Press room to announce, “I am in control here, in the White House.” From there his life and influence ran downhill, undone he claimed by the cabal of James Baker, Edwin Meese and Michael Deaver.
“Reagan was a cipher,” Mr. Haig said with evident bitterness. “These men were running the government.”
He reflected: “Having been a White House chief of staff, and having lived in the White House under great tension, you know that the White House attracts extremely ambitious people. Those who get to the top are usually prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to get there.”
He tried to run for President, but couldn’t raise any money. Having been used to Colonel’s saluting his every order, he couldn’t adjust to the give and take of politics.
February 18th, 2010 by Jon Taplin
When ever I raise the issue of the Cost of Empire, our conservative correspondents always respond that the real economic crisis facing America comes not from Imperial Overstretch, but from our profligate system of social insurance–Social Security and Medicare. But last week Bill Gross, our country’s leading bond manager, published a chart he called The Ring of Fire, looking at the relative economic security of the developed nations.
So how come the nations that define Social Democracy–Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands are all considered safe bets, while the U.S. is about the join the club of the economic disabled, with its public debt nearing 90% of its GDP? The Finnish government provides cradle to grave health care and universal free education as well as old age pensions. What would keep us, after we have shed the burdens of empire, from providing similar services to our citizens?
February 16th, 2010 by Jon Taplin
There is a supreme irony buried in the heart of the comprehensive investigation of the Tea Party Movement in this morning’s New York Times. The governing principle of the movement is described as a,
Patriot ideology, which holds that governments and economies are controlled by networks of elites who wield power through exclusive entities like the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Many of us who grew up in the Sixties have heard this rhetoric before, ironically from the left. Here is a paragraph from the Port Huron Statement, the founding manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society.
It is not possible to believe that true democracy can exist where a minority utterly controls enormous wealth and power. The influence of corporate elites on foreign policy is neither reliable nor democratic; a way must be found to be subordinate private American foreign investment to a democratically-constructed foreign policy. The influence of the same giants on domestic life is intolerable as well; a way must be found to direct our economic resources to genuine human needs, not the private needs of corporations nor the rigged needs of maneuvered citizenry. Continue reading ‘American Rebellion’
February 9th, 2010 by Jon Taplin
As I’ve said before the right wing of American Politics is a pretty fractious bunch. It now appears that the Pro-business wing is getting pretty worried about the anti-business rhetoric of the Tea Party Populists. Conventional wisdom is that Republican gridlock is good for big business but in the Wall Street Journal it was noted that the stock market’s recent fall started the morning after Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts.
So why did stocks collapse the moment the vote was tallied in Massachusetts?
It’s because the immediate reaction to the Brown election—in both parties—has been a dangerous lurch toward antibusiness populism. The Obama administration’s strategy has been to latch onto something that both parties can agree on: lynching Wall Street.
Republicans have to be careful what they wish for. John McCain under attack from the right, is no longer the maverick. Continue reading ‘Riding the Tea Party Tiger’
February 6th, 2010 by Jon Taplin
This chart shows that the number of working males has dropped back to 1996 levels when there were 30 million less citizens in the U.S. A lot of angry unemployed men in an interregnum is a recipe for social unrest and fascism. Any student of the rise of Hitler to power in 1933 understands that the depression unleashed a huge number of unemployed young and middle-aged German men onto the streets only to be organized by the Nazis. Here’s Eric Hobsbawm from The Age of Extremes
“Fascism was triumphantly anti-liberal. It also provided the proof that man can, without difficulty, combine crack-brained beliefs about the world with a confident mastery of contemporary high technology…. Nevertheless, the combination of conservative values, the techniques of mass democracy, and an innovative ideology of irrationalist savagery, essentially centered in nationalism, must be explained…. Continue reading ‘Men At Work’
February 2nd, 2010 by Jon Taplin
In 1922, the British Empire held sway over a population of about 458 million people, one-quarter of the world’s population,and covered more than 13,000,000 square miles: approximately a quarter of the Earth’s total land area. By 1956, after the disastrous attempt to hold on to the Suez Canal, the British finally abandoned the last of their imperial pretensions and settled into rebuilding their own country, culture and spirit. By 1964 the world was sharing in the joy of life after empire.
To read the analysis of David Sanger in the New York Times this morning, life in America for our children will be a pinched, pale shadow of itself.
For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country’s influence around the world eroded. Continue reading ‘Life After Empire’
January 27th, 2010 by Jon Taplin
In this time of constant bickering between the right and the left, the movie Avatar has become the highest grossing film in history. To achieve these astonishing grosses of $1.86 Billion (besting Cameron’s own Titanic in record time), the movie has appealed across all demographics and all political profiles. This is not to say that right wing critics didn’t try to discourage their partisans as Jonah Goldberg points out.
The film has been subjected to a sustained assault from many on the right, most notably by Ross Douthat in the New York Times, as an “apologia for pantheism.”
It would be a cop-out on my part to say the huge success was due only to the gee whiz special effects and the immersive 3D environment. Continue reading ‘Avatar and the Spiritual Deficit’
