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The very best thing that could happen for America is for the Super Committee to fail. To understand why I say that you need a little history.

In my new book, Outlaw Blues;Adventures in the Counter-culture Wars, I write about Walter Lippman helping President Woodrow Wilson “manufacture public consent” for the U.S. to enter World War I, “to make the world safe for democracy.”

Eric Alterman wrote about Lippmann as the precursor of much of our media manipulation of today: “Lippmann likened the average American-or ‘outsider,’ as he tellingly named him-to a ‘deaf spectator in the back row’ at a sporting event: ‘He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen,’ and ‘he lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.’ In a description that may strike a familiar chord with anyone who watches cable news or listens to talk radio today, Lippmann assumed a public that ‘is slow to be aroused and quickly diverted . . . and is interested only when events have been melodramatized as a conflict’.” Thus began the culture war.

We are about to endure a Pentagon inspired propaganda campaign in the next month that will be an echo of Lippmann’s campaign of 1916. It will be triggered by the brilliant position, negotiated by Democrats during the debt ceiling crisis, that if the “Super Committee” was unable to reach a compromise by Thanksgiving, then an automatic “Sequester” would take place, cutting the Defense Budget by $600 Billion in the next ten years. Leon Panetta will be leading the charge against the Sequester for the Military Industrial Complex that views it as Armageddon for the gravy train they have been on since the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb in 1949. Here is Panetta with the first big lie of this campaign.

“After every major conflict — World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union — what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep, across-the-board cuts that impacted on equipment, impacted on training, impacted on capability,” he said. “Whatever we do in confronting the challenges we face now on the fiscal side, we must not make that mistake.”

Here is the reality of defense spending.

The only time defense spending ever declined in real dollars (blue Line) was during the Clinton Administration, after the Soviet Union had dissolved. So as the economy got less “security oriented”in the 1990′s, a huge amount of innovation blossomed, seeded by government spending (the Internet, the microprocessor) from the 1970′s. This meant that as a percentage of GDP (red line) defense spending fell even more as the digital consumer economy boomed. Although the fall of military spending helped Clinton balance the budget for the first time in years, as soon as 9-11 happened, spending went through the roof

So here is the deal I want to make with all my Libertarian friends. Let’s make sure the Sequester goes through. If  the latest polls are right 27% of Americans have a positive view of the Tea Party and 32% have a positive view of Occupy Wall Street. Since I doubt there is much overlap in these two cohorts, that would mean that almost 60% of the people are against the “establishment”–military, financial or political. Here is a place to man the barricades. Let Ron Paul and Barney Frank join forces to defeat any efforts by the Military Industrial puppets in the Congress to weasel out of the Sequester.

A headline in this morning’s New York Times described the last days of Qaddafi’s life as “deluded, defiant and unwilling to quit”. I laughed and thought, “just like like Newt Gingrich and Michelle Bachmann”. The Republican Presidential field does make you wonder about the current state of our democratic process. Here you have at least two candidates that are in the race solely to raise their speaking fees (Cain and Gingrich). Four more candidates who have as much chance of being the Republican nominee as I do (Santorum, Huntsman, Bachmann and Paul). One candidate (Perry) who was riding high in the polls until he opened his mouth and then went into freefall. And then there is Mitt Romney, who has never held a firm opinion on anything for more than about a month and has never been able to attract more than 25% of the vote in any poll.

My guess is that Romney will get the nomination next summer, but not before being bludgeoned with the blunt force instrument of Perry’s Texas sized war chest. In the end, the evangelicals (and much of the Tea Party) will stay home in the November election and Obama will win on the strength of a great ground game, continued foreign policy success and a gradually improving economy. Then hopefully the Tea Party will split off into a third party, forever dooming both themselves and the Country Club Republicans to the wilderness of irrelevancy.

For Obama, getting out of both Iraq and Afghanistan would allow him to make real his promise of last week.

The long war in Iraq will come to an end by the end of this year.  The transition in Afghanistan is moving forward, and our troops are finally coming home.  As they do, fewer deployments and more time training will help keep our military the very best in the world.  And as we welcome home our newest veterans, we’ll never stop working to give them and their families the care, the benefits and the opportunities that they have earned.

This includes enlisting our veterans in the greatest challenge that we now face as a nation — creating opportunity and jobs in this country.  Because after a decade of war, the nation that we need to build — and the nation that we will build — is our own; an America that sees its economic strength restored just as we’ve restored our leadership around the globe.

One year from today we will enter the final two weeks of the Presidential Race. The punditry are making certain predictions they see as “inevitable. But there is a big chance that the radical spirit in the air on both Left and Right as represented by Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, could prove the pundits wrong.

As to the Republicans, the conventional wisdom is that Mitt Romney is now the “inevitable” nominee of the Republican Party. He may in fact prevail next summer, but it is far from inevitable. Two factors will make this a long and brutal race for the nomination.

• 70% of Republicans want a hard line conservative.  At some point the Tea Party Candidate will emerge between Perry and three dwarfs (Bachmann, Gingrich and Cain). They will never back Romney.Just read Rush Limbaugh fulminating last week that “The GOP Elite declares War On the Tea Party”. Limbaugh’s influence in the Tea Party is huge.

• Money-Rick Perry has raised a lot of money and he’s not going to shrink back to Texas without a fight. Reporting Romney’s quarterly total the New York Times noted.

The amount gives Mr. Romney what is expected to be the second largest third-quarter haul in the Republican field, behind Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. Mr. Perry’s aides said last week that he had raised more than $17 million for the period, which covered his first weeks in the campaign.

On the Democratic side, the rise of the Occupy Movement it is making it easier for Obama and the Democrats to fight a Populist Campaign for 2012 which isn’t on Tea Party terms, but on theirs. If Tea Party really does decide to throw their support to the very same Elite Republicans who Limbaugh claims are at war with the Tea Party,it would be a really revealing moment. To decide to throw away the revolutionary attitude and fight in an election—to “Help the One Percent”—(i.e. to have no “Billionaires” surtax). The Tea Party is welcome to fight that war, but it will reveal them to be the Dick Armey Astroturf movement some have suspected as being from the start.

I continue to argue, we are in this wild Interregnum Moment. The very fact that the elite keeps asking that the Occupy Movement create a leadership structure. And they refuse. May be they know what we do to leaders of nascent movements.

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born.  In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.”-Gramsci

The etymology of the word “morbid” is the Latin word morbidus meaning disease. Let us consider the particular disease that grips America right now. Students of Germany in the early part of the Great Depression (1929-1934) might recognize the conditions for a Fascist democratic coup that took place in that period. Here are some of the symptoms:

Paranoia-The Wall Street Journal reports that if you had been savvy enough to invest in an Armageddon portfolio this year you would be sitting pretty.

It is the ultimate bunker portfolio.

Amid the market tumult, a handful of stocks have seen their share prices ratchet up to record highs in recent weeks. And many of them are connected by a curious, if disconcerting, thread: Between them, they provide an investor with essentials for any respectable fallout shelter—makers of bottled water, canned goods, dehydrated broth, gas masks and auxiliary generators.

As with the Goldline Scams, Beck and the end of the world brigade that are pushing the notion, that Spam is the protein source of the future, is part of a completely dystopian fantasy that I think bears little touch with reality but feeds the all important “fear quotient” that is so necessary to fascist politics. A strong man is needed in a time of chaos. Read more…

When I started promulgating this notion of The Interregnum–”The old is dying and the new cannot be born;in this interregnum morbid symptoms abound”(Gramsci)–two years ago, I had no idea how morbid the symptoms would get.

The last week has been as depressing culturally and politically as any in my recent memory. On the political front, the whole Washington edifice seems so terminally broken that I can neither summon the energy to believe that passing this health care legislation which will force every American to pay 15% of their earnings to a private health insurer  is worth the kind of energy I and my friends brought to the 2008 election campaign. Nor can I summon the vitriol to denounce the charlatans like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck–the Private Jet Populists–the new Lonesome Rhodes from A Face in the Crowd–for their cynical manipulation of the paranoid conspiracy theorists that we call Teabaggers. The whole scene seems like some ancient Roman tragedy where King Pyrrhus upon defeating the Romans at such cost to his own followers turns to his general and says, “Another such victory and I am undone.”

And then I venture out in to the culture– the Hollywood Oscar parties–the reality TV–the Facebook posts–the TMZ front page–and I think that so little of it passes the “who cares” test. I met Guy Trebay a couple of years ago when we did a conference called Ready to Share. He writes about fashion with the acid vision of a 21st Century Trollope. This rung true.

And that was when someone else mentioned that fame is so cheap these days, that paparazzi fodder is so interchangeable, that celebrities are so dime-a-dozen, that often one has no idea whom the photographers are making a fuss about.

Perhaps, this person added, someone ought to invent celebrity Shazam, a fame app based on the music identification service available on cellphones.

That way, in a landscape prophesied with cold accuracy by Andy Warhol, one could point a camera phone at a given person and immediately learn which minor Italian soccer player or which trophy wife of which French intellectual or which former actor on a Jerry Bruckheimer crime-scene juggernaut one was gawping at.

It all seems so fucking inconsequential. Here we are stuck in two wars where our boys and girls, as young as the kids I teach at USC, are dying every day and it is as if they aren’t even real. What if the 26 year old coke sniffing Wall Street trader was in danger of being drafted? Would he then pay a bit more attention? A filmmaker like Paul Greengrass in Green Zone, puts evidence of the most treacherous deceptions by your government before you in the most wonderful style and panache and you ignore him. Read more…