“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."
Editor’s note: This column was originally published on June 21, 2011, and is being reposted, says Truthdig Editor in Chief Scheer, “as a cautionary tale, given that Hillary Clinton has promised to turn over the task of job creation to her husband if she is elected president.”
Does Bill Clinton still not grasp that the current economic crisis is in large measure his legacy? Obviously that’s the case, or he wouldn’t have had the temerity to write a 14-point memo for Newsweek on how to fix the economy that never once refers to the home mortgage collapse and other manifestations of Wall Street greed that he enabled as president.
Endorsing the Republican agenda of financial industry deregulation, reversing New Deal safeguards, President Clinton pursued policies that in the long run created more damage to the American economy than any other president since Herbert Hoover, whose tenure is linked to the Great Depression. Now, in his Newsweek piece, Clinton has the effrontery to once again revive his 1992 campaign mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid,” as the article’s title without any sense of irony, let alone accountability. But that has always been the man’s special gift—to rise above, and indeed benefit from, the messes he created.
His list of safe nostrums—painting tar-surface roofs white and seeking more efficient solar and battery production—to be featured at his lavishly funded Clinton Global Initiative conference in Chicago next week is vintage Clinton hype. All of those solutions are of the win/win sort that he loved to ballyhoo as president; who in his or her right mind would be against green job creation? But that hardly speaks to a crisis in which, as was reported Tuesday, the housing meltdown continues unabated as the toxic mortgages sold and packaged by the leading banks and investment houses clog the real estate market, destroying consumer confidence and hobbling job creation.
Conceding that the bailed-out banks are sitting on $2 trillion that they won’t lend, Clinton offers not a word about mortgage relief for swindled homeowners. With an all-time high of 44 million Americans living below the poverty line, Clinton once again brags of his success in ending the federal welfare program.
There is only a one-sentence reference in the Clinton article to the era of financial greed: “The real thing that has killed us in the last 10 years is that too much of our dealmaking creativity has been devoted to expanding the financial sector in ways that don’t create new businesses and more jobs and to persuading people to take on excessive debt loads to make up for the fact that their incomes are stagnant.” Now that’s a clear description of the consequence of President Clinton’s policy of radical deregulation of the financial industry, but he writes as if that outcome has nothing to do with him.
Clinton signed off on the reversal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the legislative jewel of the Franklin Roosevelt administration designed to prevent financial institutions from getting too big to fail. In signing the Financial Services Modernization Act, which broke down the barrier between high-rolling Wall Street investment firms and consumer banks carrying the deposits of ordinary folk, Clinton gushed in 1999, “Over the [past] seven years we have tried to modernize the economy. … And today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down those antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority.”
The first beneficiary of that legislation was Citigroup, a corporation that resulted from a merger that would have been banned by Glass-Steagall. Upon signing the law, Clinton handed one of the pens he used to a beaming Sandy Weill, Citigroup CEO and a close friend and financial supporter of the president. Clinton’s treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, then went off to be a $15-million-a-year exec at Citigroup and was in a key position there when the bank made those toxic derivative packages that would have forced it into bankruptcy had U.S. taxpayers not bailed the bank out.
So much for the “modernizing” that Clinton had bragged about.
A year later a variation of that same word appeared in the title of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Clinton signed and which exempted from government regulation all of the collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps that would later prove so toxic. That legislation led to the explosion of the market in unregulated mortgage-based securities, the key source of the financial-sector “dealmaking” that Clinton now bemoans.
In his memoir Clinton pays tribute to Rubin as “the best and most important treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton.” He wrote that line in 2004, when Rubin, who had come to Clinton from a top job at Goldman Sachs and later left for Citigroup, was already clearly defined as someone who profited mightily from the very bills that he had pushed through while working for Clinton.
As with so much in the Clinton record, the former president remains in deep denial over having any culpability for his misdeeds. In his thousand-page memoir there is no reference to the above-mentioned radical deregulation of the economy that he presided over. As evidenced by his Newsweek article, the man has long been convinced that there is no problem or contradiction of his that cannot be simply plastered over with blather. Sadly, he may be right.
Read more of Robert Scheer’s writings about Bill Clinton here, here and here.
Click here to check out Robert Scheer’s new book, “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street.”
Hillary Clinton’s recent foreign policy speech was an attack on Donald Trump but was also a reminder that Clinton is a deeply flawed and worrisome candidate. Her record as Secretary of State was one of the worst in modern US history; her policies have enmeshed America in new Middle East wars, rising terrorism, and even a new Cold War with Russia. Of the three leading candidates, only Bernie Sanders has the sound judgment to avoid further war and to cooperate with the rest of the world.
Clinton is intoxicated with American power. She has favored one war of choice after the next: bombing Belgrade (1999); invading Iraq (2003); toppling Qaddafi (2011); funding Jihadists in Syria (2011 till now). The result has been one bloodbath after another, with open wounds until today fostering ISIS, terrorism, and mass refugee flows.
In her speech, Clinton engaged in her own Trump-like grandiose fear mongering: “[I]f America doesn’t lead, we leave a vacuum - and that will either cause chaos, or other countries will rush in to fill the void. Then they’ll be the ones making the decisions about your lives and jobs and safety - and trust me, the choices they make will not be to our benefit.”
This kind of arrogance - that America and America alone must run the world - has led straight to overstretch: perpetual wars that cannot be won, and unending and escalating confrontations with Russia, China, Iran and others that make the world more dangerous. It doesn’t seem to dawn on Clinton that in today’s world, we need cooperation, not endless bravado.
Clinton professed her belief “with all my heart that America is an exceptional country - that we’re still, in Lincoln’s words, the last, best hope of earth.” Yet surely President Lincoln was speaking in moral terms, not in Clinton’s militaristic terms. Lincoln did not mean that the last best hope of earth should send NATO bombers into Libya, the CIA into Syria, and Special Ops forces into countless other countries. Surely Lincoln would have been more prudent than to push NATO expansion to Russia’s very doorstep in Ukraine and Georgia, thereby triggering a violent response from Russia and a new Cold War.
Clinton lacks all self-awareness of how poorly she performed as Secretary of State. She trumpets her “successes” as follows:
Unlike [Trump], I have some experience with the tough calls and the hard work of statecraft. I wrestled with the Chinese over a climate deal in Copenhagen, brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, negotiated the reduction of nuclear weapons with Russia, twisted arms to bring the world together in global sanctions against Iran, and stood up for the rights of women, religious minorities and LGBT people around the world.
Pure braggadocio. While Clinton “wrestled with China” over a climate deal, she failed to achieve one. While she “brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas,” she failed to head off the disastrous Gaza War in the first place. While she “negotiated the reduction of nuclear weapons with Russia,” she championed a remarkably confrontational approach with Russia based on NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia and a new nuclear arms race that will cost American taxpayers more than $355 billion over a decade. While she claims to have “stood up for the rights of women [and] religious minorities,” her Syrian adventurism left Syria devastated, displaced 10 million people, and destroyed the religious minority communities she claimed to defend.
Clinton declared that she has a plan to defeat ISIS, but ISIS wouldn’t even exist were it not for Clinton’s “regime change” policy in Syria. ISIS emerged as a result of the US policy to partner with Saudi Arabia to topple Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. This mistaken policy created the chaos in which ISIS gained ground and weaponry, including US weaponry that was diverted from American-backed jihadists.
Clinton rightly accused Trump of being unpredictable, yet Clinton is dangerously predictable. She is always trying to prove how tough she is, how tough America is, how exceptional is America’s power. Trump is unqualified to be President because he lacks both the necessary experience and good judgment. Clinton, by contrast, has the extensive experience that proves that she too lacks the good judgment to be President.
Bernie Sanders, by contrast, not only offers a vastly better economic program than Clinton, but also a foreign policy based on wisdom, decency, and especially restraint. As a result, the American people trust Sanders rather than Clinton. She wins the closed primaries while he wins the open ones, that is, primaries that include the independent voters who will decide the November elections.
The Democrats would be foolhardy to accept Clinton as the “inevitable” nominee; she is the voice of foreign policy failure, while Sanders is the voice of hope, the young, and the future, and who is far more likely to beat Trump this fall.
A civil war within the US military is raging, and it isn’t just a case of inter-service rivalry over scarce dollars, pitting the Army against the Air force: it’s also a reflection of the foreign policy debate that’s taking place among civilians – interventionists versusAmerica Firsters. And I know what side I’m on.
The Civil War Inside the US Military - Antiwar.com Original
Interventionists and America Firsters face off in budget battle
In early April, a battalion of senior military officials appeared before a Senate panel and testified that the US Army is “outranged and outgunned,” particularly in any future conflict with Russia. Arguing for a much bigger budget for the Army, they claimed that, absent a substantial increase in funding, the Russians would overtake us and, even scarier, “the army of the future will be too small to secure the nation.”
The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! And before you know it, Brooklyn will be renamed Putingrad.
Of course it was pure coincidence that, shortly after these alarm bells were rung, a piece appeared in Politico magazine purportedly showing that the Russians were breathing down our necks: it revealed a “secret study” – revealed for the first time! – that supposedly detailed Russia’s deadly new capabilities as demonstrated in Ukraine. Included in this potpourri of propaganda was the assertion by none other than Gen. Wesley Clark, former presidential candidate and well-known Russophobe, that Moscow had developed a tank that is for all intents and purposes “invulnerable.”
Perhaps embarrassed by what seemed like an exercise in inter-service internecine warfare, Politico recently ran an article by Mark Perry throwing new light on what is really going on here. Citing senior military figures, Perry’s piece threw a rhetorical hand grenade into the Army’s argument:
“’This is the ‘Chicken-Little, sky-is-falling’ set in the Army,’ the senior Pentagon officer said. ‘These guys want us to believe the Russians are 10 feet tall. There’s a simpler explanation: The Army is looking for a purpose, and a bigger chunk of the budget. And the best way to get that is to paint the Russians as being able to land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. What a crock.’”
The “secret study” supposedly showed a level of technological prowess on the part of the ragtag Ukrainian rebels that many retired officers found unbelievable:
“’That’s news to me,’ one of these highly respected officers told me. ‘Swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles? Surprisingly lethal tanks? How come this is the first we’ve heard of it?’”
The reason may be because the source of this dubious intelligence is most probably the Ukrainian government, and they are notoriouslyunreliable: these are the same people who have been citing “evidence” of a full-scale Russian invasion for years now. Aside from demanding more economic aid to keep their bankrupt and notoriously corrupt economy afloat, Kiev has been eager to wheedle offensive weaponry from the US, constantly warning that, unless they get what they want, Putin will soon take the whole country. Former NATO Supreme Commander Philip Breedlove has been buttressing these warnings with what are nothing more than outright lies, claiming that tens of thousands of Russian troops armed with the latest weaponry are present in eastern Ukraine. As the German intelligence agency BND has pointed out, the sophisticated Russian military equipment supposedly pouring into eastern Ukraine is nonexistent. And German diplomats have denounced Breedlove’s overtly political interventions as “dangerous propaganda.”
What is clear is this: inter-service rivalry is driving this latest episode of “The Russians Are Coming!” Forced by budgetary considerations to choose between modernization and expansion, the Army wants to have its cake and eat it too. And they want the whole cake. They are arguing that a bigger Army is absolutely necessary in order to face down Putin in Europe – a region where, by dint of geographical reality, the Russians will always outnumber us no matter how many troops we pour into the continent. The Army’s position is that we just need more of everything – especially in terms of personnel. But as retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula and Doug Birkey, director of government relations at the Air Force Association, wrote:
“No war has been won through the mere presence of personnel or material – whether they are infantry, tanks, ships, or airplanes. If that were the case, the United States would have prevailed in Vietnam with the presence of half a million US boots on the ground in 1968, or through the expenditure of over one trillion dollars on personnel and resources over the past 14 years in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bottom line – it takes an insightful, flexible, and prudent strategy to deliver victory in any military operation.
“History stands in testament to this reality. No amount of bravery at a personal level can overcome the lack of a robust plan. Whether discussing the strategically bankrupt Rolling Thunder bombing campaign from 1965 through 1968, the failed 1980 Operation Desert One rescue mission In Iran, or the poorly planned and botched execution of Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan in 2002 – the raw projection of personnel and equipment into harm’s way without a viable course of action leads to disaster. It is fundamentally immoral to ask America’s sons and daughters to exercise bravery and sacrifice to fill the void of inadequate strategy.”
Deptula, now director of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, told Politico:
“It’s time to stop waving the bloody red shirt. Calling for more resources because you’re taking casualties is a wake-up call for a new approach – not for throwing more folks into the meat grinder. We really need to think in a deliberate goal-oriented way to secure national interests, not just parochial Army interests.”
The Army, resistant to budget constraints – and to any reform of its antiquated Vietnam era strategic perspective – is playing hawks in Congress for fools. And of course the hawks are eager to seize on any excuse to expand an already bloated US military budget – one that exceeds Russian military expenditures by seven-fold.
As for Wesley Clark’s “invulnerable” Russian tank, one officer told Politico: “What nonsense. If the Russians have developed tanks that can’t be destroyed that would be the first time that’s happened in the history of warfare.” Well, yes, but war propaganda has nothing to do with the facts: Clark, as Politico noted, is infamous for his eagerness to go up against the Russians. It was Clark who commanded a British officer to confront the Russians in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, during the Balkan wars. And Clark has been going around making speeches in support of Kiev’s demands for lethal weaponry, echoing the Ukrainian coup leaders’ assertions that a “’renewed offensive from the east’ before VE day, on May 8” was imminent. That was May 8 of last year, and there’s still no sign of the Russian offensive.
It’s a vicious civil war unfolding in the US military, pitting “bigger is better” arguments proffered by Army advocates against the Air Force and the Navy, who say bigger isn’t better and we need to improve not only our capabilities but also our strategy – and, by implication, change US foreign policy to a less interventionist mode.
In an article supporting the Army’s position, former Army chief of staff Gordon Sullivan argued that ignoring the Army’s demands would result in more casualties: “It’s soldiers we are thinking of when we worry about the undermanned, under-ready and under-funded Army we’ve created,” he averred. Retired Col. Douglas Macgregor, cited by Politico, had a ready answer for him, laden with foreign policy implications aplenty:
“The statement is sickeningly false. If the generals actually gave a damn about the soldiers the last 15 years would have been totally different. What happened to the thousands of lives and trillions of dollars squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan? What happened to the billions lost in a series of failed modernization programs since 1991?”
The US Army has an institutional interest in our globalist foreign policy: the alleged necessity of stationing tens of thousands of soldiers in foreign lands, occupying territory, and pouring in megatons of military equipment and support networks means bigger budgets to play around with. The problem is that this strategy has failed – and it’s bankrupting us. One Pentagon officer put it to Perry this way:
“You know, which would you rather have – a high-speed rail system, or another brigade in Poland? Because that’s what this is really all about. The debate is about money, and there simply isn’t enough to go around. Which is not to mention the other question, which is even more important: How many British soldiers do you think want to die for Estonia? And if they don’t want to, why should we?”
An even more pertinent question is: How many American soldiers want to die so that the ruling oligarchs in Kiev can hold on to their power and pelf, living high on the hog at US taxpayers’ expense? The answer, I’m willing to bet, is none. And the American people will back them up in this, of that I have no doubt.
A civil war within the US military is raging, and it isn’t just a case of inter-service rivalry over scarce dollars, pitting the Army against the Air force: it’s also a reflection of the foreign policy debate that’s taking place among civilians – interventionists versus America Firsters. And I know what side I’m on.
The anti-Russian propaganda campaign has been ongoing for years: the military-industrial complex and their neoconservative allies (and beneficiaries) need a new enemy now that the “war on terrorism” is wearing a little threadbare. That’s why the media and the politicians are yelping about the alleged Russian “threat.” The only real threat, however, is to our ever-expanding military budget and the prestige of those ancient cold warriors who long for a return to the 1950s, when the prospect of World War III loomed large and Americans were digging bomb shelters in their backyards.
Antiwar.com has been debunking this shameless war propaganda for years: the overblown comparisons of Putin to Stalin (who killed some 60 million!), the regime-change operation that overthrew the elected leadership of Ukraine (with plenty of funding from the US) and installed a gang of cutthroats and authoritarians in the name of “democracy,” the provocative (and profitable!) expansion of NATO that threatens to encircle the Russians and is designed to elicit a military response – all of this and more has been exposed in these pages.
The truth of the matter, however, that is we can’t continue to do it without your help. We are being outspent by the War Party by a factor of a million to one: they have the “mainstream” media on their side, and they have absolutely no budget constraints. They can spend millions without even thinking about it.
We, on the other hand, have only you – our readers and supporters – to counter the massive propaganda campaign they have launched.
To debunk this barrage of lies we need your tax-deductible donations right now – because, yes, there is an imminent threat, and it isn’t emanating from Moscow. It’s coming from Washington , D.C., where the neocons, the foreign lobbyists, and the arms industry are agitating for a direct confrontation with the Russians. As US forces edge closer to Russia, it’s only a matter of time before a near-miss becomes a direct hit – and we’re suddenly faced with World War III.
You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.
Baghdad advances on Fallujah but “slows down” for fear of Civilian Casualties
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
Iraqi Prime Minister Haydar al-Abadi said Thursday that his troops were in position to move into the city of Fallujah from the south, after advances made during the past two days, but that he would “slow down” the assault for fear of civilians trapped in the city. The Iraqi military and its Shiite militia auxiliaries have met with fierce resistance by Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) fighters holding the city, which fell to them in January 2014.
Estimates of non-combatants still inside the city range from 20,000 to 50,000 and there is fear they will be caught in the crossfire or hit in artillery barrages or aerial bombardment. Daesh has more or less kidnapped them and is making it very difficult for those in the city center under their watchful eye to flee.
Yet Russia Today reports that Iraqi forces are continuing a steady advance on the city from all four directions, especially from the south, where they have taken Apple Bridge. They unfurled an Iraqi tribe over the bridge.
Iraqi Sunni lawmakers have criticized the participation in the campaign of Shiite militias, given that Fallujah is a bastion of Sunni Islam, and they have also been scathing about the planning role assumed by Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani, head of the the special forces or Jerusalem Brigade (Quds Brigade) of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards corps.
Iran is alarmed that Daesh considers Shiite Muslims to be apostates who renounced true Islam (this is not true). Daesh is therefore a strategic danger to Iran, which is why that country has played such a forward-leaning role in the Fallujah campaign.
The YPG is softening up al-Raqqa for invasion and also feathering the nest of Kurdish Syrian nationalism.
On Tuesday, according to BBC Monitoring, the Turkish state-funded news agency Anadolu (also known as Anatolia) put on its website in Turkish remarks of Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, who slammed ‘the United States for cooperating with the PYD [Democratic Union Party] on the pretext that Al-Raqqa was going to be seized by regime forces.”
He said that US and Turkish special ops forces would be better placed than the Kurdish YPG to close the smuggling gap from which Daesh profits.
BBC Monitoring translates the Anadolu report: “Criticizing the United States for collaborating with the PYD on the pretext that Al-Raqqa was going to be seized by the Syrian regime forces, Cavusoglu it was never right or humanitarian to collaborate with another terrorist organization. Stating that the PYD’s goal was to partition Syria by seizing more land, Cavusoglu said: “In that respect America is unfortunately embarking on a process with the PYD that is very dangerous for Syria’s future. We already warned them. Yet, if we were to join forces; they have their special forces and we have our special forces, but unfortunately both the United States and Russia see a terrorist organization as a partner and they are supporting it. This is what we are objecting to . . .”
If Manbaj soon falls, as seems likely, Turkey will face the fait accompli of a new Kurdish mini-state on its border. Ankara is obviously furious at the US, which is urging the Kurds on. Despite Turkish oral offers of assistance, the US Pentagon has clearly decided that the YPG Kurds are the only game in town if the goal is to defeat Daesh in its lair of al-Raqqa. There are likely to be long-term repercussions for the US-Turkish relationship, on both sides, of these dramatic events.
☞☞☞☞☞
The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has expressed severe misgivings over the Pentagon’s cooperation with the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Unit (YPG), a group Ankara views as a terrorist organization. Photos that emerged last week showed US Special Forces operating with the YPG insignia.
