Exposing the puppet masters behind the puppets

By (O)CT(O)PUS

Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!

A beggar on horseback lashes a beggar on foot.

Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!

The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.

- W.B. Yeats -

This weekend, your intrepid Octopus stirred up controversy within our ranks. It started with this post by our friend and colleague, Captain Fogg, who derived this post from our friend and colleague, Lindsay of Majikthise, about the latest Glenn Beckism. As Lindsay states:

In the clip, Beck claims that Americorps has "just received half a trillion dollars in funding." What the hell is he talking about? […] It's even fu nnier that Beck's guests played along with the half-trillion claim. Surely they knew it was false. This wasn't just an incidental mistake, it was the hook for Beck's crazy conspiracy theory.

No argument! Except that Glenn Dreck can spin lies and deceptions until the cows come home. Does this mean we should preoccupy ourselves with confutations every night after sunset? And what of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and the other dissemblers? Do we redouble our efforts and counter every lie from every dissembler in the Milky Way?

No doubt, Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh offend us on many levels. Deceptions offend us. Sneers and jeers offend us. Ridiculing a popular actor with Parkinson’s disease offends us. Accusing 9/11 widows of profiting from their husbands’ deaths offends us. They offend by invoking a deep emotional response within us: They remind us of schoolyard bullies who torment victims for sadistic pleasure. They push the boundaries of uncivil discourse deeper into unchartered cesspools. Outrageous people say outrageous things ... just to grab attention.

Here is my question: Do we allow fools to lead us by the nose when we pay too much attention? Do we aid and abet the viral spread of these messages? Lindsay offers a reasonable albeit expected response (August 29, 2009 at 06:50 PM):

It's a very tough question. I think it's one of those strategic decisions that can only be evaluated retrospectively … John Kerry initially ignored the Swift Boat Liars. In retrospect, it seems like he should have hit back hard and early …

In the face of uncertainty, my instinct is to counter the lies because I think that's an inherently worthwhile pursuit. I think it's worth knowing what these people are up to, even if the exposure gives them a little extra notoriety.

Captain Fogg agrees:

I don't think we can say Beck would go away if we ignored him. I think history proves over and over again that hate and bigotry have to be confronted.

Yet, I can’t help but ask this nagging question: If we pay too much attention to the puppet, do we ignore the puppet masters behind the puppet? Does the court jester divert our attention from the secret usurpers who plot against the throne with steal and guile?

Here is a little noticed footnote in American history. In 1934, retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler testified before Congress about a alleged plot to overthrow President Roosevelt. Although no prosecutions followed his testimony, one Gerald McGuire did attempt to recruit Butler to lead a 500,000 man march on Washington that would topple the President. An alleged conspirator was the Liberty League, which slandered FDR as a Communist who surrounded himself with Jews and whose membership included the plutocrats of American industry: U.S. Steel, Ge neral Motors, General Foods, Standard Oil, Colgate, Heinz Foods, Chase National Bank, and Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Names that figured prominently in the conspiracy: J. P. Morgan, Irénée DuPont, the Mellon and Remington families, and Prescott Bush.

Right-wing Republicanism was born in 1932, and the aim was to dismantle the New Deal and restore laissez-faire economics. Today, we are witnessing the same struggle against powerful interests, or as John Hoefle states in The Fascists Versus FDR, Then And Now: “This battle is not, as some would have us believe, a historical artifact, but an ongoing fight between a world which desires to be free, and a parasitic oligarchy [that] wishes to rule over us as if we were cattle.” The oligarchs of the 1930s may be long gone but their heirs and assigns live among us. Who are they?

Maybe we should start with William McGuire of UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s leading health insurer. According to Forbes’ list of highest paid CEOs, his pay of $124.8 million would cover the average health insurance premiums of 34,000 people. Two years earlier, William McGuire received $1.7 billion in pay and bonuses … roughly the health insurance premiums of 463,000 people. Why should one man be worth 463,000?

How about the Walton family, perhaps the most influential family in America with a combined net worth of more than $100 billion. They have used their Wal-Mart PAC to avoid paying taxes, block environmen tal regulations, resist corporate transparency, hinder workers rights, stop port security, thwart tighter regulations on food safety, oppose estate taxes, and kill universal healthcare. They are the quintessential state capitalists whose self-aggrandizing exercise of power leaves us poorer.

In contrast, Glenn Beck is the quintessential schlamiel who spins malapropisms and misspelled words from an alcohol-addled brain. When we focus on the village idiot of Pottersville, we ignore Mr. Potter at our peril. If Glenn Beck ever had booze on his breath, William McGuire and the Walton family have blood on their hands.

Thus, your tentacle-entangled Octopus would like to see the progressive blogosphere spend more time investigating the puppet masters and less time head-butting their puppets.

(Cross-posted at The Swash Zone.)

Climate change is a real national security threat, even for a realist

Guest post by Michael Lieberman

Michael Lieberman, a Truman National Security Project fellow, is an associate at Steptoe & Johnson LLP in Washington D.C., where he works on international regulatory and compliance issues. He was previously a law consultant at The Asia Foundation. (The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Steptoe & Johnson LLP.)

In a recent piece, Stephen Walt takes a skeptical view of the U.S. government’s developing view of climate change as a national security issue, as detailed in a recent Department of Defense-funded think tank report by CNA and increasing interest by Senator John Kerry, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The calamities portended by droughts, famines, refugees, storms, and floods in far-flung places do not, Walt suggests, obviously or necessarily pose a danger to the United States. Consequently, the country ought not exaggerate the threat, nor think of the consequences in terms of security at all. Rather, any U.S. military action to respond to climate-related disasters should be considered humanitarian in nature. “Climate change might also foster instability in various ‘volatile areas,’” he continues, “but it does not immediately follow from that observation that U.S. interests will necessarily be affected in any significant way.”

Matt Yglesias is also nonplussed: “This talk of climate change as a national security threat has a bit of a whiff of hubristic imperialism about it as I don’t think it makes a ton of sense to look at every possible instance of drought, famine, mass migration, civil conflict, and human tragedy abroad as a ‘threat’ to the United States per se.” Yglesias offers little to respond to, aside from noting how much he must have relished concocting the term “hubristic imperialism” and how inapposite it is. His position is interesting, though, as an example of the left’s almost reactive aversion to viewing multifaceted and largely non-military issues through the lens of security at all. What else explains the exaggerated charge of hubris and empire at a problem that the left in general rightly and loudly champions?

Walt’s argument is more elaborate and compelling, and follows directly from his grounding in (and espousal of) “realist” foreign policy strategies. Before looking at his substantive points, though, we should address the extensive hedging surrounding his argument. It need not “immediately follow” that U.S. interests “will necessarily be affected” by global warming catastrophes for us to treat them as potentially dire national security threats. These straw men must be put to pasture. It is sufficient for a non-negligible risk of danger to the nation to arise from the consequences of climate change for national security planners to think about it seriously.

Walt’s major point — that we should not equate catastrophes abroad due to global warming with threats to the security of the nation — derives from his bare bones notion of national security. Walt’s definition seems to be limited to external, essentially man-made dangers affecting our homeland or our citizens. Indeed, this is in large part why he calls for the United States to curtail its global engagements, exercise restraint in its global leadership, and let its allies shoulder a greater burden of their own defense.

Such a definition of the U.S. role, in my view, is inordinately spare, but that issue need not detain us. For now we can adopt his view. Even if we limit our definition to real mortal threats directed at U.S. citizens in the homeland, the consequences of climate change ought to raise the alarm.

Let’s consider Walt’s recognition of “instability in ‘volatile’ areas” as an agreed-upon consequence of climate change, and an uncontroversial national security threat, terrorists who want to attack the U.S. or key interests abroad. Even Pakistan should qualify as a “volatile” area to Walt; it teems with Al Qaeda, Taliban, and other affiliated groups whose leaders have expressed their desire to repeat 9/11 on an even larger scale and in even more macabre ways.

Now think of Karachi, already a redoubt for Taliban and affiliated militants, and the swarms of young men that would willingly join their ranks in the event of mass catastrophe. This would inevitably displace and dispossess thousands of young men in that area and provoke a further weakening of the Pakistani state. Now, in addition to their long list of grievances against the West, these groups could add the crime of polluting the atmosphere and destroying their homes. Similar scenarios could play out in other areas of Pakistan as well, as the Himalayan glaciers melt precipitously, causing flooding inland, and as rising temperatures diminish agricultural production upon which so many poor Pakistanis rely (including many of the Taliban’s local foot soldiers).

Beyond bolstering the ranks of Islamic terrorists, entirely new anti-Western groups could arise in other hard-hit areas of the world that blame their predicament on the fact that the United States accounts for a quarter of the world’s total annual greenhouse gas emissions, and surely a much larger share (from which we have become fabulously wealthy) over time. Such groups could strike U.S. assets or citizens abroad, demanding compensation or resettlement, or merely out of revenge.

Nor can traditional interstate conflict be ruled out either, as China and India, or Syria and Israel, become thirstier and the value of water rises, making military conflict a more plausible mode of dispute settlement. Such fights may fall outside of Walt’s strict definition of national security, true, but there can be no question that such scenarios would rightly be viewed as a grave security development to the United States.

Walt and Yglesias ignore such routine observations, seemingly due to some vague notion that the CNA report and the Pentagon are hyping the threat in service to the military-industrial complex. While it goes without saying we must match our response to the threat, and not all climate change catastrophes will warrant a response as a matter of national security (not all military missions would constitute such a response, e.g., humanitarian operations), there can be little doubt that heightened global instability will lead to the creation or revitalization of groups that want to damage the United States or its people. It is not a sufficient response to attribute this well-founded fear to hype or to overly broad definitions of national security.

As general Anthony Zinni (ret.) states, “It’s not hard to make the connection between climate change and instability or climate change and terrorism.” Nor is it hard to make the connection between climate change and U.S. national security, however defined. Hopefully Walt, Yglesias, and others will see this linkage and lend their voices to crafting constructive responses rather than dismiss the real dangers we face.

(Cross-posted from Operation FREE.)

The truth about Republicans (and health-care reform)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It's often edifying when Republicans show their true colours, even if they're not exactly "beautiful like a rainbow."

On health-care reform specifically, Republicans on Capitol Hill have for the most part either been obstructionists or outright opponents, hurling their lies and propaganda about "socialism" and "death panels" with all the strength they could muster, much of it latching on with an irresponsible media establishment that emphasizes not the facts, not the truth, but the partisan battle, thereby giving credence to Republican dishonesty, as well as with the public, much of which lacks the capacity to be able to make an informed decision.

And the whole bipartisanship angle has been, from the start, a charade -- and a farce. Republicans simply aren't serious compromise, about making a deal. Most are against reform altogether, preferring the status quo, or more of it, to fixing what is a broken and costly system that leaves tens of millions of Americans without adequate care or without coverage altogether, on the outside looking in. A few, including the three in the so-called "Gang of Six" on the Senate Finance committee, supposedly seek compromise -- meaning, concessions from Democrats -- but what they really want, at most, is to water down the legislation to such a point that reform is meaningless.

But, let's face it, even those supposed compromisers, the supposed moderates, don't really want reform at all, as we've suspected -- indeed, as we've known -- all along.

As Ezra Klein reports, for example, Charles Grassley, the leading Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has actually been fundraising against reform back home in Iowa. Furthermore, as Brian Beutler notes, Mike Enzi, another GOP Gang of Six member, has "trashed Democratic reform ideas," even picking up on the "death panel" lie. The White House, apparently, has had enough. Elsewhere, RNC Chair Michael Steele said that Republicans won't be "guilted" into reform, as if this is what Democrats are trying to do, as if the only way Republicans will do reform is out of guilt. And now we learn that Republicans would actually repeal health-care reform if they won in 2010.

Joe Klein is right. The charade is over:

It is not impossible that other Republicans who are not Senators from Maine can be located to support health care reform. But it's also entirely possible that the Republicans will continue their kamikaze ways and oppose a reform that is likely to prove very popular with the American public when it's enacted (which is why, in truth, the GOP nihilists oppose it).

Which is why the Democrats should, as I and many others have argued many times, go it alone. Which won't, of course, be easy, given Democratic opposition to the so-called "public option," not least from the Blue Dogs. But what is the alternative? To continue to negotiate with an opposition party that has no interest negotiating in good faith? To continue to seek compromise with an opposition party that has no interest in compromise? To continue to work for a bipartisan solution with an opposition party that is unwaveringly partisan and that puts party before all else, including the good of the country?

Simply put, it's time to move on, and to do what is right, which is health-care reform with a robust public option. Republicans have had their say. It's with the Democrats now, the Democrats alone, and they, and Obama, must take charge.