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Is A New Political System Emerging In This Country?

Tyler Durden's picture




 

Submitted by Tom Engelhardt,

Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that, and let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name.

And here’s what I find strange: the evidence of this, however inchoate, is all around us and yet it’s as if we can’t bear to take it in or make sense of it or even say that it might be so.

Let me make my case, however minimally, based on five areas in which at least the faint outlines of that new system seem to be emerging: political campaigns and elections; the privatization of Washington through the marriage of the corporation and the state; the de-legitimization of our traditional system of governance; the empowerment of the national security state as an untouchable fourth branch of government; and the demobilization of "we the people."

Whatever this may add up to, it seems to be based, at least in part, on the increasing concentration of wealth and power in a new plutocratic class and in that ever-expanding national security state. Certainly, something out of the ordinary is underway, and yet its birth pangs, while widely reported, are generally categorized as aspects of an exceedingly familiar American system somewhat in disarray.

1. 1% Elections

Check out the news about the 2016 presidential election and you’ll quickly feel a sense of been-there, done-that. As a start, the two names most associated with it, Bush and Clinton, couldn’t be more familiar, highlighting as they do the curiously dynastic quality of recent presidential contests.  (If a Bush or Clinton should win in 2016 and again in 2020, a member of one of those families will have controlled the presidency for 28 of the last 36 years.)

Take, for instance, “Why 2016 Is Likely to Become a Close Race,” a recent piece Nate Cohn wrote for my hometown paper.  A noted election statistician, Cohn points out that, despite Hillary Clinton’s historically staggering lead in Democratic primary polls (and lack of serious challengers), she could lose the general election.  He bases this on what we know about her polling popularity from the Monica Lewinsky moment of the 1990s to the present.  Cohn assures readers that Hillary will not “be a Democratic Eisenhower, a popular, senior statesperson who cruises to an easy victory.”  It’s the sort of comparison that offers a certain implicit reassurance about the near future.  (No, Virginia, we haven’t left the world of politics in which former general and president Dwight D. Eisenhower can still be a touchstone.)

Cohn may be right when it comes to Hillary’s electability, but this is not Dwight D. Eisenhower’s or even Al Gore’s America. If you want a measure of that, consider this year’s primaries. I mean, of course, the 2015 ones. Once upon a time, the campaign season started with candidates flocking to Iowa and New Hampshire early in the election year to establish their bona fides among party voters. These days, however, those are already late primaries.

The early primaries, the ones that count, take place among a small group of millionaires and billionaires, a new caste flush with cash who will personally, or through complex networks of funders, pour multi-millions of dollars into the campaigns of candidates of their choice.  So the early primaries -- this year mainly a Republican affair -- are taking place in resort spots like Las Vegas, Rancho Mirage, California, and Sea Island, Georgia, as has been widely reported. These “contests” involve groveling politicians appearing at the beck and call of the rich and powerful, and so reflect our new 1% electoral system. (The main pro-Hillary super PAC, for instance, is aiming for a kitty of $500 million heading into 2016, while the Koch brothers network has already promised to drop almost $1 billion into the coming campaign season, doubling their efforts in the last presidential election year.)

Ever since the Supreme Court opened up the ultimate floodgates with its 2010 Citizens United decision, each subsequent election has seen record-breaking amounts of money donated and spent. The 2012 presidential campaign was the first $2 billion election; campaign 2016 is expected to hit the $5 billion mark without breaking a sweat.  By comparison, according to Burton Abrams and Russell Settle in their study, “The Effect of Broadcasting on Political Campaign Spending,” Republicans and Democrats spent just under $13 million combined in 1956 when Eisenhower won his second term.

In the meantime, it’s still true that the 2016 primaries will involve actual voters, as will the election that follows. The previous election season, the midterms of 2014, cost almost $4 billion, a record despite the number of small donors continuing to drop. It also represented the lowest midterm voter turnout since World War II. (See: demobilization of the public, below -- and add in the demobilization of the Democrats as a real party, the breaking of organized labor, the fragmenting of the Republican Party, and the return of voter suppression laws visibly meant to limit the franchise.) It hardly matters just what the flood of new money does in such elections, when you can feel the weight of inequality bearing down on the whole process in a way that is pushing us somewhere new.

2. The Privatization of the State (or the U.S. as a Prospective Third-World Nation)

In the recent coverage of the Hillary Clinton email flap, you can find endless references to the Clintons of yore in wink-wink, you-know-how-they-are-style reporting; and yes, she did delete a lot of emails; and yes, it’s an election year coming and, as everyone points out, the Republicans are going to do their best to keep the email issue alive until hell freezes over, etc., etc.  Again, the coverage, while eyeball gluing, is in a you’ve-seen-it-all-before, you’ll-see-it-all-again-mode.

However, you haven’t seen it all before. The most striking aspect of this little brouhaha lies in what’s most obvious but least highlighted.  An American secretary of state chose to set up her own private, safeguarded email system for doing government work; that is, she chose to privatize her communications.  If this were Cairo, it might not warrant a second thought.  But it didn’t happen in some third-world state.  It was the act of a key official of the planet’s reigning (or thrashing) superpower, which -- even if it wasn’t the first time such a thing had ever occurred -- should be taken as a tiny symptom of something that couldn’t be larger or, in the long stretch of history, newer: the ongoing privatization of the American state, or at least the national security part of it. 

Though the marriage of the state and the corporation has a pre-history, the full-scale arrival of the warrior corporation only occurred after 9/11.  Someday, that will undoubtedly be seen as a seminal moment in the formation of whatever may be coming in this country.  Only 13 years later, there is no part of the war state that has not experienced major forms of privatization.  The U.S. military could no longer go to war without its crony corporationsdoing KP and guard duty, delivering the mail, building the bases, and being involved in just about all of its activities, including training the militaries of foreign allies and even fighting.  Such warrior corporations are now involved in every aspect of the national security state, including torturedrone strikes, and -- to the tune of hundreds of thousands of contract employees like Edward Snowden -- intelligence gathering and spying.  You name it and, in these years, it’s been at least partly privatized.

All you have to do is read reporter James Risen’s recent book,Pay Any Price, on how the global war on terror was fought in Washington, and you know that privatization has brought something else with it: corruption, scams, and the gaming of the system for profits of a sort that might normally be associated with a typical third-world kleptocracy.  And all of this, a new world being born, was reflected in a tiny way in Hillary Clinton’s very personal decision about her emails.

Though it’s a subject I know so much less about, this kind of privatization (and the corruption that goes with it) is undoubtedly underway in the non-war-making, non-security-projecting part of the American state as well.

3. The De-legitimization of Congress and the Presidency

On a third front, American “confidence” in the three classic check-and-balance branches of government, as measured by polling outfits, continues to fall.  In 2014, Americans expressing a “great deal of confidence” in the Supreme Court hit a new low of 23%; in the presidency, it was 11%, and in Congress a bottom-scraping 5%.  (The military, on the other hand, registers at 50%.)  The figures for “hardly any confidence at all” are respectively 20%, 44%, and more than 50%.  All are in or near record-breaking territory for the last four decades.

It seems fair to say that in recent years Congress has been engaged in a process of delegitimizing itself.  Where that body once had the genuine power to declare war, for example, it is now “debating” in a desultory fashion an “authorization” for a war against the Islamic State in Syria, Iraq, and possibly elsewhere that has already been underway for eight months and whose course, it seems, will be essentially unaltered, whether Congress authorizes it or not.

What would President Harry Truman, who once famously ran a presidential campaign against a “do-nothing” Congress, have to say about a body that truly can do just about nothing?  Or rather, to give the Republican war hawks in that new Congress their due, not quite nothing.  They are proving capable of acting effectively to delegitimize the presidency as well.  House Majority Leader John Boehner’s invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to undercut the president's Iranian nuclear negotiations and the lettersigned by 47 Republican senators and directed to the Iranian ayatollahs are striking examples of this.  They are visibly meant to tear down an “imperial presidency” that Republicans gloried in not so long ago.

The radical nature of that letter, not as an act of state but of its de-legitimization, was noted even in Iran, where fundamentalist Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei proclaimed it “a sign of a decline in political ethics and the destruction of the American establishment from within.” Here, however, the letter is either being covered as a singularly extreme one-off act (“treason!”) or, as Jon Stewart did on “The Daily Show,” as part of a repetitive tit-for-tat between Democrats and Republicans over who controls foreign policy.  It is, in fact, neither.  It represents part of a growing pattern in which Congress becomes an ever less effective body, except in its willingness to take on and potentially take out the presidency.

In the twenty-first century, all that “small government” Republicans and “big government” Democrats can agree on is offering essentially unconditional support to the military and the national security state.  The Republican Party -- its various factions increasingly at each other’s throats almost as often as at those of the Democrats -- seems reasonably united solely on issues of war-making and security.  As for the Democrats, an unpopular administration, facing constant attack by those who loath President Obama, has kept its footing in part by allying with and fusing with the national security state.  A president who came into office rejecting torture and promoting sunshine and transparency in government has, in the course of six-plus years, come to identify himself almost totally with the U.S. military, the CIA, the NSA, and the like.  While it has launched an unprecedented campaign against whistleblowers and leakers (as well as sunshine and transparency), the Obama White House has proved a powerful enabler of, but also remarkably dependent upon, that state-within-a-state, a strange fate for “the imperial presidency.” 

4. The Rise of the National Security State as the Fourth Branch of Government

One “branch” of government is, however, visibly on the rise and rapidly gaining independence from just about any kind of oversight.  Its ability to enact its wishes with almost no opposition in Washington is a striking feature of our moment.  But while the symptoms of this process are regularly reported, the overall phenomenon -- the creation of ade facto fourth branch of government -- gets remarkably little attention.  In the war on terror era, the national security state has come into its own.  Its growth has been phenomenal.  Though it’s seldom pointed out, it should be considered remarkable that in this period we gained a second full-scale “defense department,” the Department of Homeland Security, and that it and the Pentagon have become even more entrenched, each surrounded by its own growing “complex” of private corporations, lobbyists, and allied politicians.  The militarization of the country has, in these years, proceeded apace. 

Meanwhile, the duplication to be found in the U.S. Intelligence Community with its 17 major agencies and outfits is staggering.  Its growing ability to surveil and spy on a global scale, including on its own citizens, puts the totalitarian states of the twentieth century to shame.  That the various parts of the national security state can act in just about any fashion without fear of accountability in a court of law is by now too obvious to belabor.  As wealth has traveled upwards in American society in ways not seen since the first Gilded Age, so taxpayer dollars have migrated into the national security state in an almost plutocratic fashion.

New reports regularly surface about the further activities of parts of that state.  In recent weeks, for instance, we learned from Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley of the Intercept that the CIA has spent years trying to break the encryption on Apple iPhones and iPads; it has, that is, been aggressively seeking to attack an all-American corporation (even if significant parts of its production process are actually in China).  Meanwhile, Devlin Barrett of the Wall Street Journal reported that the CIA, an agency barred from domestic spying operations of any sort, has been helping the U.S. Marshals Service (part of the Justice Department) create an airborne digital dragnet on American cell phones.  Planes flying out of five U.S. cities carry a form of technology that "mimics a cellphone tower." This technology, developed and tested in distant American war zones and now brought to "the homeland," is just part of the ongoing militarization of the country from its borders to its police forces.  And there’s hardly been a week since Edward Snowden first released crucial NSA documents in June 2013 when such “advances” haven’t been in the news.

News also regularly bubbles up about the further expansion, reorganization, and upgrading of parts of the intelligence world, the sorts of reports that have become the barely noticed background hum of our lives.  Recently, for instance, Director John Brennan announced a major reorganization of the CIA meant to break down the classic separation between spies and analysts at the Agency, while creating a new Directorate of Digital Innovation responsible for, among other things, cyberwarfare and cyberespionage.  At about the same time, according to the New York Times, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, an obscure State Department agency, was given a new and expansive role in coordinating “all the existing attempts at countermessaging [against online propaganda by terror outfits like the Islamic State] by much larger federal departments, including the Pentagon, Homeland Security and intelligence agencies.”

This sort of thing is par for the course in an era in which the national security state has only grown stronger, endlessly elaborating, duplicating, and overlapping the various parts of its increasingly labyrinthine structure.  And keep in mind that, in a structure that has fought hardto keep what it's doing cloaked in secrecy, there is so much more that we don’t know.  Still, we should know enough to realize that this ongoing process reflects something new in our American world (even if no one cares to notice).

5. The Demobilization of the American People

In The Age of Acquiescence, a new book about America’s two Gilded Ages, Steve Fraser asks why it was that, in the nineteenth century, another period of plutocratic excesses, concentration of wealth and inequality, buying of politicians, and attempts to demobilize the public, Americans took to the streets with such determination and in remarkable numbers over long periods of time to protest their treatment, and stayed there even when the brute power of the state was called out against them.  In our own moment, Fraser wonders, why has the silence of the public in the face of similar developments been so striking?

After all, a grim new American system is arising before our eyes.  Everything we once learned in the civics textbooks of our childhoods about how our government works now seems askew, while the growth of poverty, the flatlining of wages, the rise of the .01%, the collapse of labor, and the militarization of society are all evident.

The process of demobilizing the public certainly began with the military.  It was initially a response to the disruptive and rebellious draftees of the Vietnam-era.  In 1973, at the stroke of a presidential pen, the citizen’s army was declared no more, the raising of new recruits was turned over to advertising agencies (a preview of the privatization of the state to come), and the public was sent home, never again to meddle in military affairs.  Since 2001, that form of demobilization has been etched in stone and transformed into a way of life in the name of the “safety” and “security” of the public.

Since then, “we the people” have made ourselves felt in only three disparate ways: from the left in the Occupy movement, which, with its slogans about the 1% and the 99%, put the issue of growing economic inequality on the map of American consciousness; from the right, in the Tea Party movement, a complex expression of discontent backed and at least partially funded by right-wing operatives and billionaires, and aimed at the de-legitimization of the “nanny state”; and the recent round of post-Ferguson protests spurred at least in part by the militarization of the police in black and brown communities around the country.

The Birth of a New System

Otherwise, a moment of increasing extremity has also been a moment of -- to use Fraser’s word -- “acquiescence.”  Someday, we’ll assumedly understand far better how this all came to be.  In the meantime, let me be as clear as I can be about something that seems murky indeed: this period doesn’t represent a version, no matter how perverse or extreme, of politics as usual; nor is the 2016 campaign an election as usual; nor are we experiencing Washington as usual.  Put together our 1% elections, the privatization of our government, the de-legitimization of Congress and the presidency, as well as the empowerment of the national security state and the U.S. military, and add in the demobilization of the American public (in the name of protecting us from terrorism), and you have something like a new ballgame.

While significant planning has been involved in all of this, there may be no ruling pattern or design.  Much of it may be happening in a purely seat-of-the-pants fashion.  In response, there has been no urge to officially declare that something new is afoot, let alone convene a new constitutional convention.  Still, don’t for a second think that the American political system isn’t being rewritten on the run by interested parties in Congress, our present crop of billionaires, corporate interests, lobbyists, the Pentagon, and the officials of the national security state.

Out of the chaos of this prolonged moment and inside the shell of the old system, a new culture, a new kind of politics, a new kind of governance is being born right before our eyes. Call it what you want. But call it something. Stop pretending it’s not happening.

 

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Sun, 03/22/2015 - 15:14 | 5915848 Cycle
Cycle's picture

Breadboards and Circuits?

Sun, 03/22/2015 - 16:55 | 5916087 Chuck Knoblauch
Chuck Knoblauch's picture

Voice and image fingerprinted for later uses.

Mon, 03/23/2015 - 13:24 | 5918462 libertysghost
libertysghost's picture

Why would they waste their time pretending there's a way to "vote" our way out of this?  If there was...you wouldn't be able to vote.

Sun, 03/22/2015 - 14:23 | 5915719 SilverCoinLover
SilverCoinLover's picture

Is a new political system emerging in this country?

Yes, and George Soros & Sheldon Adelson are its Founders.

Sun, 03/22/2015 - 14:54 | 5915772 Chuck Knoblauch
Chuck Knoblauch's picture

Why isn't there more violence in the country?

Is it just not being reported?

If there is so much anger and unrest, where is it?

It all looks so controlled out there.

Sun, 03/22/2015 - 15:11 | 5915841 tumblemore
tumblemore's picture

Rome 2.0: transition from Republic to Empire

Sun, 03/22/2015 - 15:28 | 5915875 Terminus C
Terminus C's picture

It happened in 1860.

The mass expansion of Empire happened after that date.  Now the decline.  The similarities are eerie... 

History rhyming and all that.

Sun, 03/22/2015 - 16:01 | 5915954 Luc X. Ifer
Luc X. Ifer's picture

Well, all that was called long before already *FASCISM*

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”
? Benito Mussolini

Mon, 03/23/2015 - 13:20 | 5918444 libertysghost
libertysghost's picture

Thank you...I like when people reinforce the notion that words have meanings.  That was the first thing I thought of when I started this article...

 

IT HAS A NAME ALREADY...CORPORATISM!!!!!  (But the progressives don't want to accept the fact that they are promoting corporatism now...so theey flail around saying everything is new and nothing they wanted happened WHILE THEY RAN THINGS FOR THE LAST CENTURY!)

Sun, 03/22/2015 - 16:14 | 5915988 MASTER OF UNIVERSE
MASTER OF UNIVERSE's picture

Totalitarianism is as old as the hills and twice as dusty, Z/H. Stalin created the first wave and the USA is ushering in the last wave. People will not live under tyranny if it can be avoided. When the American Establishment figures out that they have a modern revolution on their hands it will be too late for the establishment, frankly. That moment in history has already passed and cannot be brought back by thieves, magicians, grifters, and fraud-artists. GAME OVER came when the FCC allowed Bear Stearns and the BIG five investment banks to throw out Glass-Steagall. Everything boils down to Glass-Steagall in the end, America. Without Glass-Steagall we stand no chance at survival given the obvious risk. In brief, The long term trend is for CB to act irrationally until the whole system crashes yet again. CB will take over the planning when they crash the system and we will see rinse & repeat on the currency scam Ponzi when the Americans indiscriminately start threatening EM to comply with the Hegemony2.0 imparted via the IMF/WB. Wall Street, and the White House, along with Congress, have no compunction about pulling the wool over the eyes of American citizens if that meets with their objectives via political expediency and power retention. For all EM the Hegemony2.0 will prove to be simply more of the same post Glass-Steagall pre-08 crash dynamics until the whole system crashes yet again. This is a real zero-sum game in Game Theory.

Sun, 03/22/2015 - 17:35 | 5916190 q99x2
q99x2's picture

Any person or entity that has more than 10,000,000 gets taken to the pyramids. It works if you work it. We did this where I come from and it fixed everything except we quickly followed through by eliminating individuals (as much as any q99x2s are individual capable) from government and implementating  The Constitution of Q99X2, which is not that different from the Constitution of the United States of America. Our government is based on referendum, run by the public, and developed with open source software--pedophile free!

Sun, 03/22/2015 - 17:39 | 5916203 Klemens
Sun, 03/22/2015 - 17:44 | 5916215 g speed
g speed's picture

"the truth the truth----you can't handle the truth"

https://whitehouse.gov1.info/continuity-plan/

Sun, 03/22/2015 - 18:06 | 5916272 Gumbum
Gumbum's picture

This is not new. To quote Franklin D. Roosevelt:

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”

 

Yes USA, you guys ARE the new nazis. Gratz.

Sun, 03/22/2015 - 20:04 | 5916589 Hope Copy
Hope Copy's picture

History tends to repeat.  The Republic of Romes lasted about 200 years..  and the Empire comeith.

Sun, 03/22/2015 - 20:50 | 5916690 dark_matter
dark_matter's picture

Victory, Safety.

Mon, 03/23/2015 - 13:16 | 5918422 libertysghost
libertysghost's picture

But no...the essence of fascism is really the merger of the centralized state and centralized private power.  FDR conveniently tried to take the definition in a different direction.  I can't imagine why....  

Sun, 03/22/2015 - 18:54 | 5916429 John Wilmot
John Wilmot's picture

“1% Elections “

Do the rich get more votes than the poor? No. So how do the rich control the outcome of elections? O, that's right, they pay for really mind-numbingly stupid TV advertizing to change popular opinion. So, is the problem the rich or that the people are so god damned stupid and gullible? Is the problem here the “hijacking of democracy by the 1%” or is this just how democracy works because of the inherent stupidity of the masses? Maybe the solution to the problem isn't “more democracy.”

“the breaking of organized labor”

Ah, a communist. Go fuck yourself.

“the return of voter suppression laws visibly meant to limit the franchise “

If only that were true. We desperately need to limit the franchise.

“The Privatization of the State”

Here is the product of a confused leftist mind which cannot bring itself to blame the state for its own behavior (it must be, like, the corporations or something...). And no doubt the solution to this problem, of the state using its power corruptly, is to....you guessed it...give the state more power! /derp

“In the twenty-first century, all that “small government” Republicans and “big government” Democrats can agree on is offering essentially unconditional support to the military and the national security state.”

The author focuses on the warfare-state, but of course the vast majority of federal spending and activity is devoted to his precious welfare-state and regulatory system. And the two parties? Yea, they (with a very few notable exceptions) agree on all of that. They are all socialists at home and warmongers abroad.

“The Rise of the National Security State as the Fourth Branch of Government “

The problem you're complaining about is a result of the growth of the state. The more functions a state takes on, the more it has to rely on the unelected bureaucracy as a practical matter. It is physically impossible for any one senator/congressman/president to direct the gigantic organization called the US government, with its millions of employees, hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations, etc. Big government necessarily means rule by bureaucrat.

“he nineteenth century, another period of plutocratic excesses, concentration of wealth and inequality, “

(facepalm)...says the economic illiterate.

“Americans took to the streets with such determination and in remarkable numbers over long periods of time to protest their treatment, and stayed there even when the brute power of the state was called out against them.”

Uh no, they were calling for the brute power of the state to be used on their behalf. The entire system that this dumb fuck is complaining about is the result of the “progressive era” and its offspring through the New Deal, the Great Society, and up to the present. People like the author (democratic socialists) have had unchallenged political dominance since approximately 1900. Don;t like what you see in America today you fuckers? Look in the mirror.

“After all, a grim new American system is arising before our eyes.  Everything we once learned in the civics textbooks of our childhoods about how our government works now seems askew”

You mean that the government schools serve to glorify the government rather than actually educate children? Well, gee whiz, I grues you better give the schools more money so they can correct this “mistake,” right?

Mon, 03/23/2015 - 13:14 | 5918411 libertysghost
libertysghost's picture

Yep, yeppity YEP!!!  I think your first point on the elections may be a tad too simple, but the overall gist is right...mor democracy isn't going to fix this problem with democracy...as de Toqueville noted so long ago.  But I too get sooo annoyed by the constant prograssive claptrap complaining about the outcomes of their century of dominance.  I love how they like to pretend they have been and still are "marginalized"...most of them are so nacissistic and ignorant they actually believe it though.  They are the product of their intellectual circle jerk after all.  GRRRRRRRR

Sun, 03/22/2015 - 23:10 | 5917069 Youri Carma
Youri Carma's picture

Biden sees $2 billion-per-candidate cost for 2016
12 February 2015, by Robert Schroeder - Washington (MarketWatch)
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/biden-sees-2-billion-per-candidate-cost...

Mon, 03/23/2015 - 00:08 | 5917165 BGO
BGO's picture

All the changes are the direct result of America's transformation into a fascist state. Everyone who supports the current system by default supports fascism. Fascist is a title that should more readily be attached to our (current stock of) elected leaders. The willfully ignorant part of the US population aka +90% of all citizens needs to learn what the word fascism means, and then they need to be taught why it is dangerous.

Mon, 03/23/2015 - 01:50 | 5917288 TeethVillage88s
TeethVillage88s's picture

"The process of demobilizing the public certainly began with the military. It was initially a response to the disruptive and rebellious draftees of the Vietnam-era."

This maybe partly where the military gets the Idea that the USA is a Military Republic. Rebellious Draftees have to be shown power...

I'm liking this article. The writer's voice is very good.

"All you have to do is read reporter James Risen’s recent book,Pay Any Price, on how the global war on terror was fought in Washington, and you know that privatization has brought something else with it: corruption, scams, and the gaming of the system for profits of a sort that might normally be associated with a typical third-world kleptocracy."

I'd like to point out the Treason of anyone American or Israeli that says the USA needs a new regional War or a World War. This is Treason. It is clear the USA can't afford an other Iraqi War or World War. Treason OR Racketeering involving Lobbying of the US Congress.

- Teeth's National Security Assessment of Preparedness for a World War (A work in Progress)

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- Teeth's National Security Assessment -
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1. Augustine's Laws prove Weapons are becoming too expensive and at times too Complicated for any force of a million or more men and women to use
2) War the size of Iraqi War has far higher costs then authorities will admit, being much smaller than a world war, $3 Trillion USD is the Entry level for a Regional War over 700 Miles from CONUS
3) A National Draft would be needed for the USA, since it really can only field 400K-500K, however the shock to the US Economy and People would be Great
4) US would have to Nationalize Defense Corporations and maybe Private US Military/Armies to protect the USD, and prevent Catastrophic Economic Collapse & Federal Government Collapse by War's End
5) World War Sized Conflict would require US Field Forces who could Seize Assets or Pirate Assets from other Countries or Corporations, and perhaps would rely on Slave Labor for some Tasks or Functions of War or for Food and other materials required by a nation at war
6) Commodities have far Too Low Availability & are Too Subject to Price Increases for the USA to Wage a World War
7) National Stock Piles are too Low to sustain a World War
8) US Would have to Nationalize an Ability to Produce Food, Grain, Electricity, Transportation like Trucking, and Oil, Gasoline, Diesel, and Chemicals... This could mean Nationalizing Whole Industries to keep costs and prices within a Reasonable Range and not bankrupt or break the Federal Government
9) Privateers and Federal Contractors would still become wealthy much like the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Warburgs, Rothschilds
10) Cost of US Defense Contractors and US Military has been known to be Excessive since the Vietnam War, the War Profiteers have done a great job of Mind Control in Covering this up, agitating Washington DC, and using the Cold War to get Wealthy, this is the biggest national security threat to the USA

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- Teeth's National Security Assessment -
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Wed, 03/25/2015 - 14:28 | 5926229 thecrud
thecrud's picture

Whatever it is everyone is in like they have a royal flush in their hand. Those cards are unlimited cash by the way.

And the rules are the same on both sides as Bush too has a private stand alone mail server.

The reason is people in the government cant be trusted.

 

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