What Obama is Up Against

by Russ Baker

March 10, 2010

The first anniversary of Barack Obama’s historic election finds many of his supporters already grousing. Fair enough: Obama has been more vigorous in some areas than others. But one essential question goes unasked: How much can any president accomplish against the wishes of recalcitrant power centers within his own government?

We Americans harbor a quaint belief that a new president takes charge of a government that eagerly awaits his next command. Like an orchestra conductor or perhaps a football coach, he can inspire or bludgeon and get what he wants. But that’s not how things work at the top, especially where “national security” is concerned. The Pentagon and CIA are powerful and independent fiefdoms characterized by entrenched agendas and constant intrigue. They are full of lifers, who see an elected president largely as an annoyance, and have ways of dealing with those who won’t come to heel.

Compound that with the Bush-Cheney administration’s aggressive seeding of its staunch loyalists throughout the bureaucracy, and you have a pretty tough situation. Obama, then, has to contend not only with the big donors and corporate lobbies. His biggest problem resides right inside his “team.”

The internal battles between American presidents and their national security establishments are not much reported. But if it is an invisible game, it is also a devious and even deadly one. Our civilian leaders end up mirroring the chronically nervous chiefs of state of the fragile democracies to our south.

Those who do not kowtow to the spies and generals have had a bumpy ride. FDR and Truman both faced insubordination. Dwight Eisenhower, who had served as chief of staff of the US Army, left the White House warning darkly about the “military industrial complex.” (He of all presidents had reasons to know.) John Kennedy was repeatedly countermanded and double-crossed by his own supposed subordinates. The Joint Chiefs baited him; Allen Dulles despised him (more so after JFK fired him over the Bay of Pigs fiasco), and Henry Cabot Lodge, his ambassador to South Vietnam, deliberately undermined Kennedy’s agenda. Kennedy called the trigger-happy generals “mad” and spoke angrily to aides of “scattering the CIA to the wind.” The evidence is growing that he suffered the consequences.

In the 1950s, the late Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, a high-ranking Pentagon official, was assigned by CIA Director Allen Dulles to help place Dulles’s officers under military cover throughout the federal government. As a result, Dulles not only knew what was happening before the president did, but had essentially infiltrated every corner of the president’s domain. One Nixon-era Republican Party official told me that in the early 1970s, there were intelligence officers everywhere, including the White House. Nixon was unaware of the true background of many of his trusted aides, particularly those who helped drive him from office. Remember Alexander Butterfield, the so-called “military liaison,” who told Congress about the White House taping system? Years later, Butterfield admitted to CIA connections.

In December 1971, Nixon learned of a military spy ring, the so-called Moorer-Radford operation, that was piping White House documents back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Chiefs were wary of secret negotiations the president and Henry Kissinger were conducting with America’s enemies, including North Vietnam, China and the USSR, and decided to keep tabs on this intrusion upon their domain. Jimmy Carter came into office as revelations of CIA abuses made headlines. He tried to dismantle the agency’s dirty tricks office, but wound up instead a victim of it—and a one-term president.

Those who avoided problems—Johnson, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Jr.—were chief executives that made no problems for the Pentagon and intelligence chiefs. All embraced military and covert operations, expanded wars or launched their own. The agile Bill Clinton was a special case—no babe in the woods, he focused on domestic gains and pretty much steered clear of the hornets’ nest.

As for the Bushes, their ascension represented a seizure of power by the national security state itself. Their family had profited from arms manufacturing for decades. The patriarch, Prescott Bush, monitored US assassination plots against foreign leaders as a senator; and records indicate that the elder George Bush had been a secret agency operative for decades before he became CIA director—and then, 12 years later, president.

Obama seems to understand his narrow range of movement, and to be carefully picking his fights. He retained many of Bush’s top military brass, and even Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who himself had served as a CIA director for Bush’s father. He has trod very carefully with the spy agency and has declined to aggressively investigate Bush administration wrongdoing on torture and wiretapping. Obama’s campaign rhetoric about disengaging from Iraq seems a long time ago, and the war in Afghanistan is taking on the hues of permanency.

The old boys’ network is very much in place, and it is hard at work to force Obama’s hand, a la Vietnam. Witness the leaking of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s supposedly “confidential report” calling for escalation in Afghanistan. The leak was, not surprisingly, to the reliable Bob Woodward. The reporter was himself in Naval Intelligence shortly before he went to work at the Washington Post, where he soon built a career around leaks from the military and spy establishment. The White House was furious at the McChrystal release. But what could it do? Presidents come and go, and the security folks have ways to hasten the latter.

Covert alliances and payments to corrupt foreign allies continue, making creative diplomacy more difficult. In late October came a front-page story that the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, suspected of being a major figure in that country’s opium trade, has been on the CIA’s payroll for eight years. Anyone who finds this shocking should go back and read about the CIA and the drug trade in Southeast Asia.

Throughout its six-decade history, the CIA has resisted accountability, with even some of its own nonspook directors kept in the dark about the agency’s most troubling activities. As for the public’s elected representatives, Nancy Pelosi is the most recent in a long line of legislators to accuse the CIA of deliberately misleading Congressional overseers.

None of this is likely to change soon, and not without a huge fight. Half a century after Ike’s famous admonition, conflict and intrigue remain the engine of our economy, and everyone from private equity firms to missile makers to car and truck manufacturers count on that to continue. The homeland security industry, the most recent head to grow on this hydra, is now seeking permanency.

So Barack Obama is boxed in. But so are the American people, and so, really, is democracy itself. Bringing this inconvenient truth out in the open is the essential first step toward taking back control of our government—and our future. For all the reasons laid out here, Obama will need help. He may, in the rote formulation, hold “the most powerful office in the world.” However, the extent to which he controls the government he heads, is another matter.

An Empire Decomposed: American Foreign Relations
In the Early 21st Century

Remarks to the Foreign Affairs Retirees of Northern Virginia

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr., USFS (Ret.)

Arlington, Virginia, 24 March 2010

Americans are accustomed to foreigners following us. After all, for forty years, we led the industrial democracies against the former USSR and its captive entourage. After the Soviet collapse, we bestrode the world as its sole colossus. For a while, we imagined we could do pretty much anything we wanted to do on our own. This, in the opinion of some, made followers irrelevant and leadership unnecessary.

Still, on reflection, we thought things might go better with a garland of allies and a garnish of friends. So we accepted some help from NATO members and some other foreign auxiliaries in Afghanistan. And, when we marched into the ambush of Iraq, we recruited a few other nations eager to ingratiate themselves with us to tag along in what became known as “the coalition of the billing.” In the end, however, in Iraq, it came down to us and our faithful British collaborators. Then, without even a “yo! Bush,” the Brits too were gone. And when we looked for other allies to follow us back into Afghanistan, they weren’t there.

All this should remind us that power, no matter how immense, is not by itself enough to ordain leadership. Power must be informed by vision, guided by wisdom, and embodied in strategy if it is to inspire companions and followers. We’re a bit short of believers in our leadership these days, not just on the battlefields of West Asia but at global financial gatherings, the United Nations, meetings of the G-20, among human rights and environmental activists, in the world’s regions, including our own hemisphere, and so forth. There are few places where we Americans still enjoy the credibility and command the deference we once did. A year or so ago, we decided that military means were not always the best way to solve problems and that having diplomatic allies could really help do so. But it isn’t happening.

The excesses that brought about the wide-ranging devaluation of our global standing originate, I think, in our politically self-serving reinterpretation of the Cold War soon after it ended. As George Kennan predicted, the Soviet Union was eventually brought down by the infirmities of its system. The USSR thus lost its Cold War with America and our allies. We were still standing when it fell. They lost. We won, if only by default. Yet Americans rapidly developed the conviction that military prowess and Ronald Reagan’s ideological bravado — not the patient application of diplomatic and military “containment” to a gangrenous Soviet system — had brought us victory. Ours was a triumph of grand strategy in which a strong American military backed political and economic measures short of war to enable us to prevail without fighting. Ironically, however, our politicians came to portray this as a military victory. The diplomacy and alliance management that went into it were forgotten. It was publicly transmuted into a triumph based on the formidable capabilities of our military-industrial complex, supplemented by our righteous denunciation of evil.

Many things followed from this neo-conservative-influenced myth. One conclusion was the notion that diplomacy is for losers. If military superiority was the key to “victory” in the Cold War, it followed for many that we should bear any burden and pay any price to sustain that superiority in every region of the world, no matter what people in these regions felt about this. This was a conclusion that our military-industrial complex heard with approval. It had fattened on the Cold War but was beginning to suffer from enemy deprivation syndrome — that is, the disorientation and queasy apprehension about future revenue one gets when one’s enemy has irresponsibly dropped dead. With no credible enemy clearly in view, how was the defense industrial base to be kept in business? The answer was to make the preservation of global military hegemony our objective. With no real discussion and little fanfare, we did so. This led to increases in defense spending despite the demise of the multifaceted threat posed by the USSR. In other words, it worked.

Only a bit over sixty percent of our military spending is in the Department of Defense budget, with the rest hidden like Easter eggs in the nooks and crannies of other federal departments and agencies’ budgets. If you put it all together, however, defense-related spending comes to about $1.2 trillion, or about eight percent of our GDP. That is quite a bit more than the figure usually cited, which is the mere $685 billion (or 4.6 percent of GDP) of our official defense budget. Altogether, we spend more on military power than the rest of the world — friend or foe — combined. (This way we can be sure we can defeat everyone in the world if they all gang up on us. Don’t laugh! If we are sufficiently obnoxious, we might just drive them to it.) No one questions this level of spending or asks what it is for. Politicians just tell us it is short of what we require. We have embraced the cult of the warrior. The defense budget is its totem.

Of course, our virtue as Americans is self-evident, at least to us. Our military power is famously irresistible. Those with the power to do good have the duty to do it. The collapse of the Soviet Union gave us a virtual monopoly on global military power. It followed that we must use our power to impose our values on others abroad unfortunate enough to have different mores. Or so the neocons argued, in a sort of parody of the beliefs of America’s long-vanished, Christian Wahhabis — my Puritan ancestors. Hence, Operation Iraqi Freedom. Liberal interventionists often join the neocons in their eagerness to remake the world in our image. Hence, the war to secure Afghanistan for feminism and other undeniably worthy causes not normally associated with that country. Americans are learning the hard way that armed evangelism and the diplomacy-free foreign policy associated with it give birth to more enemies than they kill. But what’s done is done. We’re addicted to military surges and the substitution of campaign plans for strategies. We just can’t seem to quit.

The many trillions we spent on perfecting our capability to use force against our Soviet enemies included paying billions of dollars to universities and research institutes to develop doctrine for influencing foreigners by coercive means. To date, there has been no comparable effort to research how to persuade others to do things our way without whacking them. Problems without military components get lower priority. That is why we strain to relate issues like climate change to future military tasks. Two generations of decision-makers have been taught that only the threat or the use of force can really change foreign minds or produce decisive results. Of course, to change minds at home we draw on bonds of friendship, seduce, inveigle, coax, wheedle, beguile, or make it worth their financial while for them to do things our way. Few of us would consider it appropriate or effective to seek our compatriots’ cooperation by pulling a gun or pistol-whipping them. Foreigners are a different matter. In American politics, common sense now stops at the water’s edge.

Amazingly, as an example, we retain a touching faith in sanctions as an instrument of coercive influence. Our diplomacy follows a predictable pattern. It begins with bluster, experiments with covert action, then proceeds to demands that others join us in sanctions, which become a diplomatic end in themselves. When sanctions fail – as they always do, we put the bombers in the air and the tanks on the dirt. Somehow, the thought that foreigners could, like Americans, be induced rather than bombarded into seeing it as in their interest to do things our way is seldom, if ever, considered. After all, they’re not like us. The only language they understand is that uttered by firepower. Only wimps attempt to reason with such people.

Given our idiosyncratic and often counterproductive preference for military solutions, it’s hardly surprising that we have lost our political hegemony. Equally clearly, the neo-liberal dogma of deregulation and the “bankster” capitalism it fostered on Wall Street have been discredited. The wingnut notion that fiscal deficits don’t matter has been disproved. All these developments, and the military adventurism that catalyzed our fall from global grace, have indeed brought disrepute on our country. Other nations are indeed strengthening. Yet, America remains the only military power with worldwide reach, the safe haven of rattled foreign investors, the possessor of the single most important reserve currency, and by far the largest economy and market in the world. Much to the distress of proponents of higher culture everywhere, our entertainment industry and universities retain preeminent appeal to the world’s youth. In short, the United States continues to possess unmatched fundamentals. Our decline — if that is the word — is self-inflicted. So is the collapse of our self-confidence.

It is hard to believe what we have done to ourselves. It is harder still to know where to start to diagnose it and to begin to prescribe appropriate solutions. I have no experience in domestic politics. I cannot explain how the Congress became so venal and corrupt — a forum dedicated almost completely to the sale and trading of favors on behalf of special interests — or why we have allowed our political, economic, and social systems to decay to the extent they have. I do not know how we decided we were OK with foreign nations excelling us in an ever-growing range of social and economic indicators. I will stick to what I know, which is foreign affairs.

The bottom line in that arena? Without really understanding what we’ve done, we have thoroughly militarized our approach to foreign policy. It has come to the point that the Secretary of Defense (of all people) feels obliged to complain about the atrophy of civilian instruments of influence and the incapacity of non-military elements of our national security apparatus to manage programs abroad. He’s right to do so. Civilian incapacities leave soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to do a mediocre job of diplomacy and development instead of the superb job they can do as war fighters.

But it’s not just that military forces, funding, and capabilities dwarf those of the Department of State, related agencies, and the Foreign Service. (So, of course, do those of the intelligence community.) Budgets can be plussed up, and to some extent this is happening. More than a quantitative problem, however, our statecraft deficit and crisis of civilian capacity are qualitative problems. They have to do with decades of underfunding, malorganization, deprofessionalization, inattention to training and professional development, and — let’s face it — sometimes truly catastrophic leadership by elected officials and political appointees. And they have to do with civic illiteracy amongst Americans.

As the Chinese saying has it: “three feet of ice didn’t freeze in a one day of cold.” These problems took time to reach their current severity. They can be fixed. But this will take time as well as money. And fixing them will be politically demanding to say the least.

Among other things, it will require stripping the congressionally mandated barnacles from the ship of state. The foreign affairs agencies must be reorganized to deal with the world beyond our borders rather than to appease special interest groups at home. To placate particular blocs of voters, Congress has created a bewildering Rube Goldberg-type array of wheel-spinning bureaucratic entities — bureaus, ambassadors-at-large, special coordinators, czars, and the like. These establishments make it look as if we’re taking special interests seriously. So what if their work eats resources but doesn’t connect to much in the real world beyond our borders? We have knocked together a Department of State that even gifted managers find unmanageable and a policy process that produces more platitudes than strategy.

Regaining diplomatic effectiveness will require an unprecedented emphasis on training and professionalization. The concept of the foreign service as a refuge for dilettantes went out of style a while back. Replacing dilettantes with campaign gerbils, as we did in Iraq, was not an improvement. But our foreign service is not only amateurish, untrained, and unreflective in comparison with our military, it is far less trained and professional than the foreign services of other great and middle-ranking powers. It should not surprise anyone that retired flag officers, rather than foreign service officers, are now being appointed to some of our most difficult ambassadorial assignments. What can one say of a so-called profession that cannot present the best qualified candidates for its own most senior and demanding positions? What’s happening confirms the militarization of our diplomacy. It also reflects a judgment about the professional incapacities of our career diplomats.

Meanwhile, new employees and a whole lot of contractors are being rushed to the diplomatic front with next to no training beyond brief familiarization with government operations. Well, why not? After all that’s how we train the third of our ambassadors whose principal qualification for diplomacy is wealth and political connections. In other countries, civilian control of the military is paralleled by political control of diplomacy, that is, a foreign policy whose goals are set by elected and appointed national leaders but whose implementation is carried out by experienced professionals. We are now alone among nations in imagining that political appointments should be made directly to the diplomatic battlefields on which policy must be implemented. We let our ambassadors learn their trade through trial and error on the job. We expect their career subordinates to cover for them. As a nation, we have less margin for error than we used to have. We can ill afford diplomatic operations that are so much less competent and professional than the related operations of our armed services.

Given the circumstances in which we now find ourselves, we need to leverage our huge natural advantages as a nation into restored international leadership. Rather than allowing others to rearrange the world to their gain and our loss, we need to shape the global trends and regional events that bear on our interests and values. To be able to do this, we must, no less than other nations with which we compete and cooperate, develop and insist upon professional standards from the bottom to the top of our diplomatic services.

The last election seemed to herald the demilitarization of our foreign policy and a return to diplomacy. So far it hasn’t worked out that way. The reason is the political culture bequeathed to us by the four decades of the Cold War and the decade and a half of national hubris that followed it. The notion that military phenomena are the only significant element of national security policy would be regarded elsewhere as simple-minded. It is, however, the politically correct view among our elite. This accounts in part for the strange pattern of American military activism and diplomatic default in regions like the Middle East.

Since very few Americans have any idea what diplomats do or what diplomacy is, it is hardly surprising that they imagine it as appeasement and the avoidance of strife rather than a means of cultivating support for US positions and sizing up adversaries while setting them straight about US interests. Nothing in their educational experience, on their television screens, in popular fiction, or in movie theaters gives Americans any basis for understanding where diplomacy begins or ends or what it can or can’t do. Of course, a public that is so ignorant of geography that it cannot distinguish Australia from Iraq on a world map and so parochial that it is aware of no connection between Judaism and Islam might not know what to do with diplomacy even if it understood it. Yet the international alternative to diplomacy is violence — either violence from us or violence against us. Our schools and colleges don’t just fail to prepare Americans to deal with the challenging world we live in. They reinforce dysfunctional approaches to the world and dumb us down about it while reassuring us that we are the best and most virtuous.

Erroneous assumptions and assertive ignorance about foreign societies are self-reinforcing. Polls show that Americans do not want more foreign news in part because they feel they lack the background to understand it or to see how it links to the fate of our country or themselves. For this and many other reasons (including often obvious ideological biases), our news oligopolies filter what they report about the world beyond our borders. The net effect is to reinforce blind spots and prejudice rather than to challenge stereotypes or provoke thought about why U.S. policies often seem to produce backlash rather than progress toward their declared objectives.

Perhaps this sort of contempt for the intelligence of the American people explains our leaders’ evident fear of candid discourse on an expanding range of international issues. Take, for example, our pathetic national inability to do demand management. Without the insatiable demand of North American addicts, neither drug lords nor the current bloodletting in northern Mexico would exist. Americans sell Mexican cartels the guns they use to kill anyone who gets in the way of supplying other Americans with drugs. Yet our politicians, to the extent they take account of the issue at all, talk about supporting the Mexican authorities, not about ending the American drug culture that is the source of the problem or curbing the gun sales that make it so lethal. Or think about the last presidential election, in which candidates promised the American people both cheap gas at the pump and lessened dependence on oil imports. Or consider our efforts to deal with Muslim terrorists with global reach while denying that our subsidies for Israel and our own invasions and occupations of Muslim lands have anything to do with motivating their attacks on us. Dumb-downs, demagoguery, and denial do not provide a basis for resumed global agenda-setting by the United States.

The absence of American leadership is conspicuous in a widening range of international problem areas — the precarious transnational role of the dollar, the missing peace process in the Middle East, the all-but-abandoned effort at trade liberalization, Russia’s still undefined relationship to Europe, the eroding rule of international law, the wobbling US-Japan alliance, accelerating climate change, contriving a satisfactory Chinese role in global governance, and many other arguably less momentous matters come to mind. Then there are perplexing issues we can neither defer nor evade, like how to cope with spreading hostility in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and how to extricate ourselves from Iraq without throwing it either to Iran or into turmoil — or both. I have not exhausted the list. Doing nothing about so many international issues — or letting them drift to all-too-plausible ruin — should not be an acceptable option for our country.

What, then, are the prospects for a renewal of effective American international leadership? And, if it is not forthcoming, what — other than vacuum — will replace it?

I have discussed a few prerequisites for a revival of American diplomacy. These include a more sophisticated understanding of foreign affairs by citizens and their representatives; the reorganization of our foreign affairs agencies to focus on U.S. national interests abroad rather than to posture for special interests at home; the development of a more professional civilian presence abroad; and the appointment of better qualified officials at policy-making levels in Washington. Until these pieces are in place, it is hard to see how the United States can conceive or implement strategies for foreign affairs that require robust contributions of a political, economic, cultural, or informational nature to complement those of our military.

There are two ways to reform our educational system, government structure, career development programs for diplomats and development specialists, and inappropriate use of political appointees. One is effortless. We can wait for disaster to impose recognition of the need for change. This is a time-honored American tradition. Think of our failure to prepare for Pearl Harbor; think of Sputnik or Hurricane Katrina. The other way is arduous. We can try tackling our deficiencies before they do more damage to us and the world. I see heads shaking in disbelief that we might actually attempt any such thing. The collapse in our national confidence is a problem too. European friends who have not been here for a while tell me they are struck by the extent to which the vaunted optimism and can-do spirit of American society are now in eclipse. The dominant motif in our politics is pessimism and partisan rancor, coupled with a deep cynicism about Washington’s capacity to acknowledge, let alone mount rational responses, to the challenges we face as a nation and people.

If pessimism proves justified — if we cannot do what is required to pull our diplomatic act together — we must expect a further decline in our power to shape the world order and what happens within it. For the past decade or more, in the absence of American leadership and engagement, the focus of problem solving has been devolving to the sub-global and regional levels. It has been moving beyond our control. This trend is accelerating.

China and others are experimenting with new policies and monetary groupings to hedge the dollar. Events in the Middle East are taking their own perilous course, not only undirected but often uninfluenced by us. Trade deals at the bilateral and regional level fill the vacuum left by the disintegration of the Doha Round. Russia and Europe are working out a separate peace without regard to stated American interests. Since the United States no longer polices its own behavior, other nations have begun to do so, issuing arrest warrants for U.S. officials engaged in actions, like extraordinary rendition and torture, that violate international law. American-sponsored practices on matters like the law of the sea are being set aside in favor of interpretations that disadvantage us. Japan is charting a course to an unknown destination, without apparent benefit of American counsel. U.S. relations with Turkey are in free fall. In the absence of a global regime for climate change, major polluters are each doing their own thing. For the first time in decades, China is picking diplomatic fights with the United States and we are preparing to pick fights with it. Brazil is staking out positions at odds with our own on a widening range of global and regional issues. I could but will not go on.

Let me instead sum up. The United States remains militarily supreme but increasingly unable to work its will politically or economically on the global or regional stages. America’s fundamentals are sound. Our diminished influence is much more the result of dysfunctional behavior and organization — diplomatic incapacity aggravated by militarism — than of national weakness. Be that as it may, the world now looks elsewhere for leadership. With the inherited international system no longer working and no one in charge, an increasing number of urgent issues fester unattended. A resurgence in American leadership is needed. Such a resurgence is possible. It is, however, unlikely that our politicians or public will muster the determination to bring it off until catastrophe imposes it.

In the absence of reinvigorated U.S. diplomacy, others — including allies and friends as well as enemies — will craft solutions to issues in ways that exclude us. Solutions like that may benefit them. As likely as not, they will adversely affect the well-being and domestic tranquility of the United States. Opportunities to advance our national interests will meanwhile be lost. This is, in fact, already happening. An increased defense budget and greater capacity to use violence against foreigners will not turn this around — even if supplemented by additional diplomats and development specialists. That will certainly be the case if these civilian augmentees are neither professionally qualified nor properly trained.

The Cold War taught us to put military matters first. In the 21st Century, it has become clear that this does not work. As John Maynard Keynes once remarked, “the difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” To preserve both our liberties and our prosperity, Americans need to rediscover our values, remake our government, and reinvent our current militaristic approach to international relations. We have the potential to renew ourselves and the power to play a revitalized role at the center of world affairs. The longer we wait to do this, the harder it will be. Why not start now?

Bill Quigley writes for Truthout, one of those “liberal” websites that Tea Party types like to rant about.

Nine Myths About Socialism in the US

Bill Quigley

Glenn Beck and other far right multi-millionaires are claiming that the US is hot on the path toward socialism. Part of their claim is that the US is much more generous and supportive of our working and poor people than other countries. People may wish it was so, but it is not.

As Sen. Patrick Moynihan used to say “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. But everyone is not entitled to their own facts.”

The fact is that the US is not really all that generous to our working and poor people compared to other countries.

Consider the US in comparison to the rest of the 30 countries that join the US in making up the OECD – the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. These 30 countries include Canada and most comparable European countries, but also include some struggling countries like Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Korea, Mexico, Poland, Slovak Republic and Turkey.

When you look at how the US compares to these 30 countries, the hot air myths about the US government going all out toward socialism sort of disappear into thin air. Here are some examples of myths that do not hold up.

Myth No. 1: The US Government Is Involved in Class Warfare, Attacking the Rich to Lift Up the Poor.

There is a class war going on all right. But it is the rich against the rest of us and the rich are winning. The gap between the rich and everyone else is wider in the US than any of the 30 other countries surveyed. In fact, the top 10 percent in the US have a higher annual income than any other country. And the poorest 10 percent in the US are below the average of the other OECD countries. The rich in the US have been rapidly leaving the middle class and poor behind since the 1980s.

Myth No. 2: The US Already Has the Greatest Health Care System in the World.

Infant mortality in the US is fourth worst among OECD countries – better only than Mexico, Turkey and the Slovak Republic.

Myth No. 3: There Is Less Poverty in the US Than Anywhere.

Child poverty in the US, at over 20 percent or one out of every five kids, is double the average of the 30 OECD countries.

Myth No. 4: The US Is Generous in Its Treatment of Families With Children.

The US ranks in the bottom half of countries in terms of financial benefits for families with children. Over half of the 30 OECD countries pay families with children cash benefits regardless of the income of the family. Some among those countries (e.g. Austria, France and Germany) pay additional benefits if the family is low income or one of the parents is unemployed.

Myth No. 5: The US Is Very Supportive of Its Workers.

The US gives no paid leave for working mothers having children. Every single one of the other 30 OECD countries has some form of paid leave. The US ranks dead last in this. Over two-thirds of the countries give some form of paid paternity leave. The US also gives no paid leave for fathers.

In fact, it is only workers in the US who have no guaranteed days of paid leave at all. Korea is the next lowest to the US and it has a minimum of eight paid annual days of leave. Most of the other 30 countries require a minimum of 20 days of annual paid leave for their workers.

Myth No. 6: Poor People Have More Chance of Becoming Rich in the US Than Anywhere Else.

Social mobility (how children move up or down the economic ladder in comparison with their parents) in earnings, wages and education tends to be easier in Australia, Canada and Nordic countries like Denmark, Norway and Finland, than in the US. That means more of the rich stay rich and more of the poor stay poor here in the US.

Myth No. 7: The US Spends Generously on Public Education.

In terms of spending for public education, the US is just about average among the 30 countries of the OECD. Educational achievement of US children, however, is seventh worst in the OECD. On public spending for childcare and early education, the US is in the bottom third.

Myth No. 8: The US Government Is Redistributing Income From the Rich to the Poor.

There is little redistribution of income by government in the US in part because spending on social benefits like unemployment and family benefits is so low. Of the 30 countries in the OECD, only in Korea is the impact of governmental spending lower.

Myth No. 9: The US Generously Gives Foreign Aid to Countries Across the World.

The US gives the smallest percentage of aid of any of the developed countries in the OECD. In 2007, the US was tied for last with Greece. In 2008, we were tied for last with Japan.

Despite the opinions of right-wing folks, the facts say the US is not on the path toward socialism.

But if socialism means the US would go down the path of being more generous with our babies, our children, our working families, our pregnant mothers and our sisters and brothers across the world, I think we could all appreciate it.

Joel Pett is a cartoonist whose work frequently appears in the newspaper, USA Today. This particular cartoon appeared on December 7, 2009.

“They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.” – Thomas Brackett Reed

“He has the attention span of a lightning bolt.” – Robert Redford

“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts… for support rather than illumination..” – Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

“He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.” – Abraham Lincoln

“He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others..” – Samuel Johnson

We need to laugh about these idiots – I hope these quotes bring a smile to your faces.

Read the piece that Time Magazine published and see if he doesn’t intrigue you also. If you are, click on the link to Big Think and watch or read that interview, too. Interesting ideas, indeed. A friend of mine said, upon reading the The Dropout Economy, that the homeschool movement has been predicting this for over 30 years. News to me, but then, the older I get, the less I know….

Here is Reihan Salam’s essay, as published in Time Magazine on March 11, 2010:

The Dropout Economy

Middle-class kids are taught from an early age that they should work hard and finish school. Yet 3 out of 10 students dropped out of high school as recently as 2006, and less than a third of young people have finished college. Many economists attribute the sluggish wage growth in the U.S. to educational stagnation, which is one reason politicians of every stripe call for doubling or tripling the number of college graduates.

But what if the millions of so-called dropouts are onto something? As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that won’t exist, we’re on the cusp of a dropout revolution, one that will spark an era of experimentation in new ways to learn and new ways to live.

It’s important to keep in mind that behavior that seems irrational from a middle-class perspective is perfectly rational in the face of straitened circumstances. People who feel obsolete in today’s information economy will be joined by millions more in the emerging post-information economy, in which routine professional work and even some high-end services will be more cheaply performed overseas or by machines. This doesn’t mean that work will vanish. It does mean, however, that it will take a new and unfamiliar form.

Look at the projections of fiscal doom emanating from the federal government, and consider the possibility that things could prove both worse and better. Worse because the jobless recovery we all expect could be severe enough to starve the New Deal social programs on which we base our life plans. Better because the millennial generation could prove to be more resilient and creative than its predecessors, abandoning old, familiar and broken institutions in favor of new, strange and flourishing ones.

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.

Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality. The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian “hacktivists.”

Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they’ll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it’s coming.

This transformation will be not so much political as antipolitical. The decision to turn away from broken and brittle institutions, like conventional schools and conventional jobs, will represent a turn toward what military theorist John Robb calls “resilient communities,” which aspire to self-sufficiency and independence. The left will return to its roots as the champion of mutual aid, cooperative living and what you might call “broadband socialism,” in which local governments take on the task of building high-tech infrastructure owned by the entire community. Assuming today’s libertarian revival endures, it’s easy to imagine the right defending the prerogatives of state and local governments and also of private citizens — including the weird ones. This new individualism on the left and the right will begin in the spirit of cynicism and distrust that we see now, the sense that we as a society are incapable of solving pressing problems. It will evolve into a new confidence that citizens working in common can change their lives and in doing so can change the world around them.

We see this individualism in the rise of “freeganism” and in the small but growing handful of “cage-free families” who’ve abandoned their suburban idylls for life on the open road. We also see it in the rising number of high school seniors who take a gap year before college. While the higher-education industry continues to agitate for college for all, many young adults are stubbornly resistant, perhaps because they recognize that for a lot of them, college is an overpriced status marker and little else. In the wake of the downturn, household formation has slowed down. More than one-third of workers under 35 live with their parents.

The hope is that these young people will eventually leave the house when the economy perks up, and doubtless many will. Others, however, will choose to root themselves in their neighborhoods and use social media to create relationships that sustain them as they craft alternatives to the rat race. Somewhere in the suburbs there is an unemployed 23-year-old who is plotting a cultural insurrection, one that will resonate with existing demographic, cultural and economic trends so powerfully that it will knock American society off its axis.

Salam is a policy adviser at the nonpartisan think tank e21, a blogger for the National Review and a columnist for Forbes.com

Elizabeth Warren and Goliath

By Jim Wallis

I had a most instructive conversation this week with Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard economist who is also the Chair of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel. Warren has a way of cutting through the jargon and confusion of many economists and of this economic crisis — right to the moral core of the issues at stake. I knew her for her keen insights, but I didn’t know she was from, as she puts it, a “mixed marriage from Oklahoma” — Baptist and Methodist — and that she is a former Methodist Sunday school teacher. In the interview I did with her for Sojourners, her moral and even theological comments were as impressive as her economic analysis of our present crisis. She said the battle for financial regulatory reform is like the battle between David and Goliath.
Warren’s narrative of the U.S. economy, and the banking industry in particular, was very clarifying. For most of U.S. history, our country went through repeated periods of boom and bust, with all the consequences of those cycles. But after the Great Depression, a number of new financial regulations — rules for the road — were put into place that were designed to protect average Americans in particular from the continued abuses of the big banks and the often terrible results in bad times for ordinary people. Two important examples were the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) to protect people’s savings and the Glass Steagall Act of 1933 to prevent banks from speculating with depositors’ money. And the new rules worked for several decades, creating both prosperity and security for many American families and an emerging middle class. But starting in 1980, the rules were first watered down and gradually removed, and banks were free again to engage in both the abusive and very risky speculative behavior that helped to bring on the Great Depression, and resulted again in the current Great Recession.

She explained how credit card and mortgage application forms used to be only a page or two and were both clear and understandable to the average person — even allowing people to easily compare and contrast the deals offered. But now, as all of us know, these forms have expanded to 30 pages or more with lots of complications, hard to comprehend provisions, and “fine print” that cleverly hides a long list or traps, tricks, and a myriad of both exploitive arrangements and outright abuses that greatly benefit banks at the expense of borrowers and card holders. In clear moral terms, Warren described the current behavior of our biggest banks as deliberately deceiving, entrapping, and cheating unsuspecting customers into very precarious and ultimately disastrous financial positions. And with no more rules of the road, the banks were leading their customers into the financial ditch. An economic crisis has been the result with massive suffering and pain for millions of Americans.

We are now living in a “lawless” economic environment, according to Warren, where our biggest banks have become our most dangerous predators — and with no protections for the rest of us against the “law of the jungle,” as she puts it. The consequences for our economy, our culture, our families, and even our souls have been disastrous. This is not the way we should want to live, Warren says, and it is creating a world which we should not want our children to grow up in. She makes the urgent case for reform with the compelling analysis of a top economist, the family values of a grandmother, and the moral arguments of a person of faith. The sins of the financial world have become both a moral, and even religious, issue from the perspective of the Methodist tradition “which still shapes me.”

Warren is the “mother” of the idea for a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA),which is in the current financial reform bill recently passed by the House of Representatives, and is now slowly making its way through the U.S. Senate. But the big banks are aggressively fighting back, trying to prevent their own regulation only one year after the financial meltdown for which they were in large part responsible. There seems to be no remorse, let alone repentance, from the big banks — only record new profits enabled by their taxpayer-funded bailouts, and enormous bonuses to the executives who made the very decisions that brought the economic system down on the heads and hearts of so many Americans. The biggest banks in America are giving shame a bad name.

Why are new rules, regulations, and protections necessary? Because of the human condition, the realities of human nature, and a biblically orthodox understanding of human sinfulness. Yes, the reasons we need the protections offered by a Consumer Financial Protection Agency are as theological as economic. And it is amazing to me how many of those who oppose any regulation of Wall Street also claim to be religious conservatives. They subscribe to what I label in my new book, Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street — A Moral Compass for the New Economy, “the myth of the sinless market.” I am a conservative Christian too, conservative enough to have a healthy appreciation for human sins, human failings, and fallen-ness, and after witnessing the behavior of America’s biggest banks during this economic crisis, an old theological term called human depravity. It is simply bad theology to trust large corporations not to pollute our waters, poison our air, or cheat their unsuspecting customers. They have to be prevented from doing so for the sake of the common good. Good financial and economic rules reflect, not only good economics, but also good theology. And the free market fundamentalism of Wall Street’s defenders is, among other things, bad theology.

But as Elizabeth Warren, a good Methodist, warns, the banks are trying everything they can think of to kill financial reform. And we must not let them do that. In the name of a fairer economy, of family values, of moral values, and of sound biblical theology, the faith community must now make itself heard on the urgent issue of financial regulatory reform. We must hold our biggest banks accountable to the common good. So let our Senators not just hear from the bankers, but now also from pastors who see what such abusive banking behavior has done to their families and parishioners, to devastated communities with shuttered houses, to the prison of debt that more Americans find themselves in. People of faith across the land must now tell their elected representatives that we will be “watching and praying” to see what they will do about necessary financial reform. We don’t have the money in our financial coffers that the banks do to finance their political campaigns, but we do have our voice and our votes which will be turned against them if they vote against the best interests of our people and for the greed of the bankers. Jesus said it well — choose this day who you will serve, God or Mammon (Money). Let’s now put that choice to our Senators, who need to hear from us this next week while they are in their district offices during the Presidents’ Day recess. Critical decisions are being made for or against critical financial reform right now.

As evidence of the unfettered power of corporations in the political process in this country, I present to you an essay by Norman Solomon. It appeared on the website Truthout on February 2, 2010. A memorable line in the essay is this one: “We had to destroy our country in order to save it.” That line is from the Vietnam War era, when claims were made to that effect. This year’s “defense” budget is larger than last year’s and approaches the cost of the bailout at $744 billion dollars. That is $2 billion dollars a day, my friends. Is it any wonder why we can’t have decent health care for our citizens when we are bleeding treasure to kill “terrorists”? Just who is the terrorist, here, anyway? I think our own government, controlled by these same corporations, is the terrorist – for fear mongering us into meekly approving the transfer of our wealth to the multinational “defense” corporations to “defend” our country. In a speech linked to later in this post, Martin Luther King said much the same thing, in his Riverside Church speech on April 4, 1967. In that speech, he said that I “could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”

Don’t Call It a “Defense” Budget

This isn’t “defense.”

The new budget from the White House will push US military spending well above $2 billion a day.

Foreclosing the future of our country should not be confused with defending it.

“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,” The New York Times reported February 2.

It isn’t defense to preclude new domestic initiatives for a country that desperately needs them: for health care, jobs, green technologies, carbon reduction, housing, education, nutrition, mass transit …

“When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs must inevitably suffer,” Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out. “We can talk about guns and butter all we want to, but when the guns are there with all of its emphasis you don’t even get good oleo. These are facts of life.”

At least Lyndon Johnson had a “war on poverty.” For a while, anyway, until his war on Vietnam destroyed it.

Since then, waving the white flag at widespread poverty – usually by leaving it unmentioned – has been a political fact of life in Washington.

Oratory can be nice, but budget numbers tell us where an administration is headed. In 2010, this one is marching up a steep military escalator, under the banner of “defense.”

Legitimate defense would cost a mere fraction of this budget.

By autumn, the Pentagon is scheduled to have a total of 100,000 uniformed US troops – and a comparable number of private contract employees – in Afghanistan, where the main beneficiaries are the recruiters for Afghan insurgent forces and the profiteers growing even richer under the wing of Karzai-government corruption.

After three decades of frequent carnage and extreme poverty in Afghanistan, a new influx of lethal violence is arriving via the Defense Department. That’s the cosmetically named agency in charge of sending US soldiers to endure and inflict unspeakable horrors.

New waves of veterans will return home to struggle with grievous physical and emotional injuries. Without a fundamental change in the nation’s direction, they’ll be trying to resume their lives in a society ravaged by budget priorities that treat huge military spending as sacrosanct.

“At $744 billion, the military budget – including military programs outside the Pentagon, such as the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons management – is a budget of add-ons rather than choices,” said Miriam Pemberton at the Institute for Policy Studies. “And it makes the imbalance between spending on military vs. non-military security tools worse.”

Of course, the corporate profits for military contractors are humongous.

The Executive Director of the National Priorities Project, Jo Comerford, offered this context: “The Obama administration has handed us the largest Pentagon budget since World War II, not including the $160 billion in war funding for Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The word “defense” is inherently self-justifying. But it begs the question: Just what is being defended?

For the United States, an epitaph on the horizon says: “We had to destroy our country in order to defend it.”

As new sequences of political horrors unfold, maybe it’s a bit too easy for writers and readers of the progressive blogosphere to remain within the politics of online denunciation. Cogent analysis and articulated outrage are necessary but insufficient. The unmet challenge is to organize widely, consistently and effectively – against the warfare state – on behalf of humanistic priorities.

In the process, let’s be clear. This is not a defense budget. This is a death budget.

So what was my opinion of the address? Not that anyone is paying attention to my ideas, but I think the State of the Union is pretty sorry and Obama didn’t do much more than issue rhetorical platitudes. The only bright spot in the speech for me was when he criticized the Supreme Court for its recent ruling that corporations have the right of free speech. I particularly didn’t like the part where he said he was going to freeze discretionary spending starting in 2011, but said absolutely nothing about the out-of-control military spending in this country.

I’m becoming interested in the idea of hubris and nemesis and in that spirit, I’m offering an essay by Eli Zaretsky, who was born in Brooklyn, New York. He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1960 and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1978. His books include, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life and Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis. He has been a professor of history at Eugene Lang College, part of the New School in New York City, since 1999.

A storm has been building in this country since Bush took office in 2001. Today, we are more indebted, have fewer civil liberties, and are more unhappy than ever. Partisan bickering and finger-pointing are rife and no solutions to our troubles appear to be at hand. Mr. Zaretsky has identified some points to watch. As you read his points, keep in mind that Adolf Hitler’s rise to power did not involve any violence at all. He was elected to office and consolidated his power through legal means. I don’t know how nemesis is going to manifest itself in this country, but the scenario that Mr. Zaretsky outlines could be one possiblity. If you would like to learn more about what he is writing about, I can’t suggest a better source than Dave Neiwert’s blog.

Personally, since I am interested in social justice, I am praying for the opposite of the trend identified by Mr. Zaretsky. But I fear that the followers of Palin, Beck, Robertson, and Limbaugh have the upper hand in what passes for political discourse in this country. If the economy does not improve markedly soon (and I see little possibility that it will do so), it is entirely possible that we will soon be living in a country with startling parallels to Germany in the 1930s.

This essay, by Eli Zaretsky, appeared on the Tikkun Daily Blog on January 23, 2010.

Proto-Fascist Elements in America Today

If I were Barack Obama, I would be frightened right now, not so much because of the likelihood that there would be serious Democratic losses in the 2010 election, or even a strong challenge to my re-election in 2012. No, I would be frightened because I would feel that I was in danger of losing control of my party, of my authority in government generally, and of the respect I had among the American people. I would feel — if I had my pulse on the nation — that the country was in an unstable and volatile situation and that things could go pretty haywire pretty fast, and I wouldn’t be sure if I could control them. I would be frightened that I had taken on a job that was beyond my capacities, if I were Barack Obama.

The fact is that there are proto-fascist elements in America today, and I don’t mean the Tea-Party group or any easy, rightwing target per se. I say “proto” fascist because I don’t want to be alarmist, and because I don’t want to use the term “fascist” as a meaningless insult. There are, however, situations when proto-fascist or extra-legal authoritarian elements do seem to surface, and this is one of them. In what follows, I want to cursorily list a few of these elements and then say a word about what has brought about the present situation.

1. The anti-Congress mood: One of the most marked aspects of societies that move in authoritarian directions is contempt for Congress or Parliament. Although a certain amount of this contempt is typical and normal in a democracy, the present situation is extreme. Furthermore, it is not hard to see the reason for it. The blatant service of both parties to special interests, not just in the health care episode, but in TARP is unprecedented. The idea that Congress would spend a year working on health care, come up with the kind of bill that it did, and then not even pass it is amazing. The idea that it would abet the President in handing the country’s checkbook to the leading banks, without getting anything in return, is even more amazing.

2. Contempt for the President: For quite a while now, it has been clear that the President has very little real support in the country. His polling among African-Americans remains high, and a certain type of wonkish liberal supports him, as do such figures as David Brooks and Ross Douthat, who use their “admiration” for his supposed “thoughtfulness” as spin for their rightwing agenda. However, from the moment he took office he lost the support of the rest of his base, the antiwar folks, the “Left,” however defined, young idealists and the like, even though, understandably, they were reluctant to criticize the first black President. The truth is, however, that he is a weak President, unable to connect emotionally to the ordinary workingman or woman, and this makes for further instability.

3. The Supreme Court is in the hands of a fanatic group of five, with a passionate and unstoppable agenda. The decision on corporate campaign financing is only one example. It is not merely the content of the decision, it is even more the legal opportunism, the drive to turn a small sliver of opportunity into a big, epoch-making decision, the refusal to honor or even really consider precedent, etc. all of which threatens the idea of a nation under law. We already saw the Supreme Court behave in an extra-legal way in installing Bush in the 2000 election. Once again, one of the core elements of stability in any modern democracy, namely the courts, leads in the direction of instability.

4. Scapegoating of the Left: One of the strongest bases of a stable democracy is a responsible Left committed to liberal principles and democratic means, but attempting to articulate and bring into politics the interests of the weakest and most deprived members of the society. Contrariwise, one of the elements making for instability is the scapegoating of the Left, their marginalization from the national consensus. In the US, of course, this marginalization dates back to the seventies and eighties, and led to the transformation of the Democratic Party, which many hoped Obama would reverse, but which he deepened. The new factor, however, is the revival of a Left sentiment and a Left consciousness. Watch for liberals blaming the Left for the defeats of Obama, as one of the main signals that the country is on a dangerous path.

5. National Decline: One of the main causes of authoritarian and extra-legal political developments is a country in decline, or trying to reverse some apparently unfair international developments. The United States today is in danger of developing this kind of “decline” mentality. Even when it was far stronger (relatively) than it is today, it operated as a bully, regularly lying to the American people, and using force to get its will without regard for justice, or the “decent opinion of mankind,” as it used to be called. One of the things that made Obama attractive was the idea that he recognized this, and that he would help lead an orderly retreat, which is what the U.S. needs. But that, however, requires that he be strong. He is now far too weak to do that and, besides, we have seen in his Afghanistan decision that even when his Presidency seemed solid he was going to defer to the established powers, like the Pentagon.

6. The Corporate Elites: The US today has the greediest and least public-minded capitalist class of any country in the world. Yes, there might be exceptions that we could argue about such as the oligarchs in Russia in the nineties, or the comprador classes in various stages of Latin American history. Nonetheless, the fact remains, basically, as I stated it. Most Americans, I am sure, would be shocked to learn that in European countries, both Western and Eastern, in China, India and Brazil, and even in Russia, there are relationships and norms that more or less govern the behavior of capitalist corporations. Only in the United States, are greed, grasping, and exploitation celebrated and so-called “class struggle” or “Populism” mocked. Once again, a key element making for stability, a capitalist class that has a sense of responsibility for the national interest is missing, leading to further instability.

In raising these considerations, I am not predicting which way the country will go. I have no idea which way it will go. I do think, however, that some awareness of the dangers that face us is salutary.

Finally, I want to raise a last question: could it have been different? Of course, it could have. The United States has an extraordinary history of progressive reform and change and the 2008 election was potentially a transformative moment, as the election of the first African-American President seemed to suggest it would be. For reasons that remain unfathomable to me, Obama moved in a wholly different direction, and with every step he took he became weaker, and the enemies of a stable democracy became stronger. As to the future, we shall see.