Catherine Crier's Blog, page 3

Modern Conservatism and ‘The House That Reagan Built’

During the Reagan years, a dramatic shift took place within the Republican party. While President Reagan maintained his welcoming persona, conservative attitudes and policies became increasingly hard and authoritarian, exploiting cultural differences and financial inequities to serve powerful special interests. Today’s modern conservatives would likely find themselves at odds with many of the policies he touted in the ’80s.

We must stop voting on the rhetoric without examining the record. Remember Reagan’s “Trust, but verify.” Forget what you’ve been conditioned to believe is the liberal or conservative approach — both sides push a modern narrative that ignore real democratic values. Read Rick Perlstein’s latest op-ed on modern GOP ties to Reagan and share your thoughts.

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From Al Jazeera English

In Reagan’s nation

In Reagan’s America, “you don’t admit” that the magic-free market, on its own, “cannot solve all economic problems”.

By Rick Perlstein

Democrats, including President Obama, never get tired of pointing out all the things Ronald Reagan (centre) did that no Republican would ever dare propose today [GALLO/GETTY]

Republicans love Ronald Reagan. First in 2008, and again in 2012, they had nomination debates at the Reagan Presidential Library, each candidate jockeying to establish their bona fides as the most dedicated Che Guevera in something they call the “Reagan Revolution”.

“I’m a little too nervous to actually touch it,” debate moderator Anderson Cooper said of the original copy of Reagan’s diary laying before him during the 2008 event, as if it were a holy relic, so reverent were the candidates’ references toward what Mitt Romney called “the house that Reagan built”.

Romney has kept the reverence going this year. His trade policy proposes something he calls a “Reagan Economic Zone” for Asia. His “Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth” mentions Reagan nine times. “Romney Tax Plan Goes the Full Reagan”, reads an article republished on the campaign website. But what is this “Full Reagan” of which they speak?

Democrats, including President Obama, never get tired of pointing out all the things Ronald Reagan did that no Republican would ever dare propose today: signing a liberal abortion law as governor of California in the 1960s; raising taxes, negotiating with America’s sworn enemy the Soviets, and signing a law granting amnesty for illegal immigrants as president in the 1980s.

Republican myth

What’s more, again contrary to the Republican myth, Americans didn’t embrace Reagan for his pledge to slash government. The first year he was first elected president, only 21 per cent of Americans thought “too much” was being spent on the environment, health, education, welfare and urban aid programmes.

Four years later, only 35 per cent of Americans said they favoured cuts in social programmes to reduce the deficit. And yet they voted for Reagan in record numbers – even though 65 per cent of Americans understood, correctly, that Reagan was fighting for just such cuts.

So why do Republicans hug so closely to a cult of Reagan as a pure, Platonic manifestation of conservatism when they require them to ignore so much of the actual record? What, at the deepest level, is “Reaganism” all about? Why does it signify so deeply within American political culture – even, as we’ll see, among dyed-in-the-wool Democrats?

The answer derives from deep within America’s historic identity – a nation founded upon fault lines. The Southern colonies based their economies upon slavery and demanded low tariffs conducive to transnational trade; the economic and moral interests of the Northern colonies directly opposed that – and so, at the very moment of its birth, the fissure had to be papered over by a set of foundational compromises for the United States to even exist. Preeminent among them, the invention of an anti-Democratic chamber of Congress, the Senate, to equalise power between the slave states and the more populous North – a sort of institutional prayer for how the problem might magically disappear.

Instead, the problem just festered and 600,000 Americans slaughtered one another in the Civil War of 1860-65. That holocaust was superseded by another set of contradictions, these ones based upon class. Industrialisation shuddered across the nation, wrenching yeoman farmers from the land, forcing formerly independent artisans into degraded factory work, giving rise to “Robber Baron” fortunes, financial panics, wretched immigrant slums, a crisis that produced periodic violent convulsions well into the 1930s’ New Deal. The first, in 1877, the year Reconstruction ended, produced the most violent strike wave in American history.

But, and here’s the cusp of the matter, each of these crises of disunity was followed by frantic rituals of reconciliation. After the civil war, Confederate and Union soldiers paraded together down the streets of Boston, as patriotic orators pledged the nation to a new “union of hearts”. Accompanying the industrial convulsions of subsequent decades, Americans constructed a sentimental cult of patriotism unmatched by any nation in the world.

That’s how America works. They call us United States, but in many ways we’re the most divided nation in the world. That fact, almost entirely repressed in our official discourse, is thus accompanied by a frenzied propaganda that fetishises an imagined national “consensus” above every other possible ideal.

American exceptionalism

In the 1970s, the latest turn of that ever-twisting screw derived from the interlocking traumas of Vietnam the first war America ever lost, Watergate, where the nation learned their trusted leader was a crook, and the Arab oil shocks, which undid a post-World War II boom that Americans had imagined would last forever.

And the 1970s was the decade of Ronald Reagan’s unlikely rise to the presidency. He achieved it by inculcating a mythology that let people imagine those crises of disunity simply did not matter at all. It comprised the deepest part of his political being, something he could not compromise even if he wanted to. This is what the “Great Communicator” communicated: America was still God’s chosen nation, always had been, always will, and that anyone demurred should be ignored.

In 1973, when Los Angeles, a city only 20 per cent black, elected its first black mayor in 1973, Reagan explained that this meant America’s racial problems were behind her. That year and next, the nation twisted in agony as each new presidential lie was uncovered. Upon Nixon’s resignation in disgrace, politicians rushed to reverse the systematic corruptions Watergate was believed to have revealed in the American system – all except Ronald Reagan, that is, who insisted the Watergate felons were “not criminals at heart”, and that in fact Watergate revealed nothing essential about America at all.

It seemed perverse to commentators at the time, who said such obtuseness was destroying his political future. In fact, that blithe effect in the face of what others called chaos was central to his burgeoning political appeal – his ability to deliver one-man rituals of national reconciliation in the face of the nation’s latest crisis of disunity. No more true than in the case of Vietnam.

On his daily radio show, Reagan somehow even managed to translate the humiliating fall of South Vietnam to the Communists into a moment of national pride – spinning a bizarre homily about the aircraft carrier the USS Midway plucking refugees out of the water, performing shipboard miracles (“A tiny baby with double pneumonia was cured. People without clothes were given America clothes… Charity begat more charity…”). You almost wouldn’t know, listening to that, how the USS Midway over most of the past decade had served as a platform from which to carpet bomb the Vietnamese countryside. Which was the point?

In 1980, heading into the fall campaign, he called Vietnam America’s “noble cause”. “It’s morning in America,” went his re-election slogan in 1984. His fans term this Reagan’s “optimism”. It is better described as his gift for granting absolution – a quasi-religious office, just as the reverence at the Reagan Library debates suggest. Reagan’s ability to project American exceptionalism with such unblinking fervour, whatever the facts, is what every Republican politician seeks to emulate.

The core of ‘Reaganomics’

This might help explain what must be baffling to so many Europeans: when Republican politicians like Romney excoriate their adversaries for simple acknowledgment of empirical reality. “Never before in American history,” Romney says about Barack Obama, “has its president gone before so many foreign audiences to apologise for so many American misdeeds… It is his way of signalling to foreign countries and foreign leaders that their dislike for America is something he understands and that is, at least in part, understandable.”

He’s referring, apparently, to Obama utterances like his admission in France that America “has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive”. You don’t admit such things in Reagan’s America – in the same way, in Reagan’s America, you don’t admit that the magic-free market, on its own, cannot solve all economic problems. The core of “Reaganomics” encodes a blithe refusal of contradiction as well: that absent the messy intervention of human institutions, growth is inevitable and astronomical.

It’s childish, to be sure; but much about Ronald Reagan’s appeal is childish. But Americans’ constitutional difficulty accepting the contradictions and conflicts inherent in adult social life goes deep – and Barack Obama is not immune. Obama, citing Scripture in his inaugural address, said “the time has come to set aside childish things.”

He was also, however, on the record citing Reagan as his model as a “transformation figure” for his ability to tap into the discontent of the nation. On the occasion of the centennial of Reagan’s birth, his tribute ran as follows:

“Ronald Reagan was a believer. As a husband, a father, an entertainer, a governor and a president, he recognised that each of us has the power – as individuals and as a nation – to shape our own destiny. He had faith in the American promise… and in his own unique ability to inspire others to greatness.” 

There are unmistakable echoes of this rhetoric in a famous response he made shortly after he was asked how he would reckon with the crimes of the Bush administration like torture and warrantless wiretapping. He responded, “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward, as opposed to looking backwards.”

He repeated the point three separate times, as if in an incantation. A potential crisis of disunity. A frantic ritual of reconciliation. It is the American Way, Reaganite iteration – a kind of willed, enforced optimism, the magic thinking of an empire that refuses to call itself such. We’re a little nervous to actually touch it. We’re Ronald Reagan’s nation now.

Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which won the Los Angles Times Book Prize for history, and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, a New York Times bestseller that Newsweek called “the best book written about the 1960s”. A contributor to publications, including the New York Times, the New Republic, and Rolling Stone, Perlstein lives in Chicago.

Fears of Voter Intimidation in the Workplace As Election Day Nears

Employers have recently made numerous attempt to intimidate workers into choosing a presidential candidate that supports their company’s bottom-line. Mitt Romney, IL Rep. Joe Walsh, and Koch Industries have all endorsed the practice of goading employees to vote for Republican candidates this November.

No matter what their marketing campaigns may portray, corporate interests are not the same as those of a working community. Businesses do not live and work side by side with their employees and neighbors. Their political leanings are driven solely by what owners predict will further a company’s profit-margin. How do you think voter intimidation in the workplace will affect the outcome of the 2012 election?

From The Huffington Post

Joe Walsh To Supporters: Tell Employees They Could Be Out Of A Job If Obama Is Reelected

The Huffington Post | By Nick Wing

Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) encouraged supporters at a recent campaign event to scare their employees into voting for GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

In a video released by progressive super PAC CREDO and first reported on by the Chicago Sun-Times, Walsh can be seen advising business owners and managers to apply a little suggestive pressure on their workers.

“If you run, manage or own a company tell your employees. What was the CEO this week that said, ‘If Obama is reelected, I may have to let all of you go next year? If Obama’s reelected, if the Democrats take Congress, I may not be able to cover your health insurance next year,’” Walsh said. “If there’s ever a year where people who run, manage, or own their companies are going to energize their employees, it better be this year. We’re up against it.”

Walsh appears to be referencing a recent trend of wealthy businessmen contacting their workers to push them to support Romney. Last week, David Siegel, founder and CEO of giant timeshare company Westgate resorts, told his employees directlythat their jobs would be at risk if President Barack Obama won a second term. Days later, an email from Arthur Allen, CEO of ASG Software Solutions, leaked, showing that he’d told his workers that there would be repercussions for the company if Obama won in November.

Ohio-based Murray Energy, a coal company, has also drawn scrutiny over allegations that it coerced its staff into attending a pro-Romney rally, forcing them to give up a day of pay.

CREDO has been on the forefront of efforts opposing Walsh’s campaign for a second term. They’ve tracked many of his events, which have revealed no shortageof controversial remarks by the Tea Party-backed congressman. The super PAC has also made Walsh a member of its “Tea Party ten,” a list of controversial Republican lawmakers including Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) that the group is seeking to unseat.

The Sun-Times reports that CREDO has spent $165,437 in the district in hopes of making Democratic challenger Tammy Duckworth’s task less difficult. According to a separate report from the Sun Times on Tuesday, however, this sum has since been dwarfed by a $2.5 million super PAC negative ad buy against Duckworth. A day earlier, Duckworth’s campaign had announced a third-quarter fundraising total of around $1.5 million, five times larger than Walsh’s $251,000 over the same period.

Where does George Romney factor into Mitt’s political upbringing?

Walter De Vries, a longtime aide to Gov. George Romney, issued a scathing critique of Mitt Romney, calling him a businessman who “would say and do anything to close a deal – or an election.” Despite Mitt’s frequent claim that his father was highly influential in his political life, De Vries says George’s greatest strength “was his ability and determination to develop and hold consistent policy positions over his life.”

In a long-form exposé posted on BuzzFeed, John Bohrer posits that Mitt’s “chameleonic approach to politics” was actually a trait Romney picked up from his father. Read the following two articles on George Romney’s legacy and share your thoughts below.

From The New York Times

Romney Is Attacked by His Father’s Longtime Aide

By MICHAEL BARBARO

A longtime aide to George W. Romney issued a harshly worded critique of Mitt Romney, accusing him of shifting political positions in “erratic and startling ways” and failing to live up to the distinguished record of his father, the former governor of Michigan.

Walter De Vries, who worked for the senior Mr. Romney throughout the 1960s, wrote that Mitt Romney’s bid for the White House was “a far cry from the kind of campaign and conduct, as a public servant, I saw during the seven years I worked in George Romney’s campaigns and served him as governor.”

“While it seems that Mitt would say and do anything to close a deal – or an election,” he wrote, “George Romney’s strength as a politician and public officeholder was his ability and determination to develop and hold consistent policy positions over his life.”

Mr. De Vries’s stinging assessment was contained in a nearly 700-word essay that he distributed to a small group of journalists with whom he has spoken over the past year. He said it was an outline for a book that may or may not be published. A spokeswoman for the Romney campaign declined to comment.

A registered independent, who said he voted for Barack Obama in 2008, Mr. De Vries has previously expressed reservations about Mr. Romney’s political postures in interviews, but never with such sweep.

In a telephone interview, he said he was motivated to write the essay by “an accumulation” of Mr. Romney’s actions, like his comment about 47 percent of Americans and his decision to campaign with Donald Trump.

Mr. De Vries said he was annoyed by Mr. Romney’s repeated references recently to his father as inspiration and influence on him.

“I just don’t see it,” he said. “Where is it? Is it on issues, no? On the way he campaigns? No.”

Mr. De Vries continued, “George would never have been seen with the likes of Sheldon Adelson or Donald Trump.”

(Mr. Adelson, a casino magnate, is a major donor to the “super PACs” that support Mr. Romney.)

Mr. De Vries, who said he wished to the see the Republican Party return to its moderate roots, said he intended to vote for Mr. Obama on Election Day.

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Romney’s Business Ties to An E-Voting Manufacturer Operating in 13 States

In 2011, Romney’s former business partners at Bain Capital acquired Hart Intercivic, a voting machine company known for their vulnerable, insecure, and often 100% unverifiable voting and tabulation systems now being used in all or parts of CA, CO, HI, IL, IN, KY, OH, OK, OR, PA, TX, VA, and WA.

Unsurprisingly, the frenzied GOP legislators who claim voter fraud is real threat to our democracy haven’t yet disputed the conflicts of interest for public officials and voting machine manufacturers who could electronically flip the 2012 presidential election in their candidate’s favor. Truthout takes a look at how this scenario played out in Ohio during the 2004 presidential election.

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Hart Intercivic machines have famously failed in Tarrant County (Ft. Worth), adding 10,000 non-existent votes. The EVEREST study, commissioned by the Ohio secretary of state in 2007, found serious security flaws with Hart Intercivic products.

 

From Truthout

Will Bain-Linked E-Voting Machines Give Romney the White House?

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, The Free Press | News Analysis

A “mobile ballot box” by Hart InterCivic. Hart’s machines are infamous for mechanical failures, “glitches,” counting errors and other timely problems. (Photo: Stephen C. Webster)

Electronic voting machines owned by Mitt Romney’s business buddies and set to count the votes in Cincinnati could decide the 2012 election.

The narrative is already being hyped by the corporate media. As Kelly O’Donnell reported for NBC’s Today Show on Monday, October 8, Ohio’s Hamilton County is “ground zero” for deciding who holds the White House come January, 2013.

O’Donnell pointed out that no candidate has won the White House without carrying Ohio since John Kennedy did it in 1960. No Republican has EVER won the White House without Ohio’s electoral votes.

As we document in the e-book WILL THE GOP STEAL AMERICA’S 2012 ELECTION (www.freepress.org) George W. Bush got a second term in 2004 thanks to the manipulation of the electronic vote count by Ohio’s then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell served as the co-chair of the state’s committee to re-elect Bush/Cheney while simultaneously administering the election.

The widespread use of electronic voting machines from ES&S, and of Diebold software maintained by Triad, allowed Blackwell to electronically flip a 4% Kerry lead to a 2% Bush victory in the dead of election night. ES&S, Diebold and Triad were all owned or operated by Republican partisans. The shift of more than 300,000 votes after 12:20 am election night was a virtual statistical impossibility. It was engineered by Michael Connell, an IT specialist long affiliated with the Bush Family. Blackwell gave Connell’s Ohio-based GovTech the contract to count Ohio’s votes, which was done on servers housed in the Old Pioneer Bank Building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Thus the Ohio vote tally was done on servers that also carried the e-mail for Karl Rove and the national Republican Party. Connell died in a mysterious plane crash in December, 2008, after being subpoenaed in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit focused on how the 2004 election was decided (disclosure: we were attorney and plaintiff in that suit).

Diebold’s founder, Walden O’Dell, had vowed to deliver Ohio’s electoral votes—and thus the presidency—to his friend George W. Bush. That it was done in part on electronic voting machines and software O’Dell happened to own (Diebold has since changed hands twice) remains a cautionary red flag for those who believe merely winning the popular vote will give Barack Obama a second term.

This November, much of the Ohio electorate will cast its ballots on machines again owned by close cronies of the Republican presidential candidate. In Cincinnati and elsewhere around the state, the e-voting apparati are owned by Hart Intercivic. Hart’s machines are infamous for mechanical failures, “glitches,” counting errors and other timely problems now thoroughly identified with the way Republicans steal elections. As in 2004, Ohio’s governor is now a Republican. This time it’s the very right-wing John Kasich, himself a multi-millionaire courtesy of a stint at Lehman Brothers selling state bonds, and the largesse of Rupert Murdoch, on whose Fox Network Kasich served as a late night bloviator. Murdoch wrote Kasich a game-changing $1 million check just prior to his winning the statehouse, an electoral victory shrouded in electronic intrigue. The exit polls in that election indicated that his opponent, incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland, had actually won the popular vote.

Ohio’s very Republican Secretary of State is John Husted, currently suing in the US Supreme Court to prevent the public from voting on the weekend prior to election day. As did Blackwell and Governor Robert Taft in 2004, Husted and Kasich will control Ohio’s electronic vote count on election night free of meaningful public checks or balances

Hart Intercivic, on whose machines the key votes will be cast in Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, was taken over last year by H.I.G. Capital. Prominent partners and directors on the H.I.G. board hail from Bain Company or Bain Capital, both connected to Mitt Romney. H.I.G. employees have contributed at least $338,000 to Romney’s campaign. H.I.G. Directors John P. Bolduk and Douglas Berman are major Romney fundraisers, as is former Bain and H.I.G. manager Brian Shortsleeve.

US courts have consistently ruled that the software in electronic voting machines is proprietary to the manufacturer, even though individual election boards may own the actual machines. Thus there will be no vote count transparency on election night in Ohio. The tally will be conducted by Hart Intercivic and controlled by Husted and Kasich, with no public recourse or accountability. As federal testimony from the deceased Michael Connell made clear in 2008, electronically flipping an election is relatively cheap and easy to do, especially if you or your compatriots programmed the machines.

So as the corporate media swarm through Ohio, reporting breathlessly from “ground zero” in Cincinnati, don’t hold your own breath waiting for them to also clarify that the voting machines in what may once again be America’s decisive swing state are owned, programmed and tabulated by some of the Romney campaign’s closest associates.

 

The Rise and Fall of the Venetian Oligarchy

In November of 2006, Warren Buffett sat down with New York Times columnist Ben Stein to discuss the U.S. tax code and how much the rich pay as a percentage of what they can afford to pay. “There’s class warfare, all right,” he said, “But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Almost six years later, the divide between the rich and poor—actually between the top 10 percent and the rest of the country—is greater than it has ever been. Take a look at Chrystia Freeland’s latest op-ed, in which she draws similarities between the 14th-16th century Venetian oligarchy and the rise of a new, global class of super-rich individuals, and share your thoughts below.

From The New York Times

The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent

By CHRYSTIA FREELAND

IN the early 14th century, Venice was one of the richest cities in Europe. At the heart of its economy was the colleganza, a basic form of joint-stock company created to finance a single trade expedition. The brilliance of the colleganza was that it opened the economy to new entrants, allowing risk-taking entrepreneurs to share in the financial upside with the established businessmen who financed their merchant voyages.

Venice’s elites were the chief beneficiaries. Like all open economies, theirs was turbulent. Today, we think of social mobility as a good thing. But if you are on top, mobility also means competition. In 1315, when the Venetian city-state was at the height of its economic powers, the upper class acted to lock in its privileges, putting a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro d’Oro, or Book of Gold, an official register of the nobility. If you weren’t on it, you couldn’t join the ruling oligarchy.

The political shift, which had begun nearly two decades earlier, was so striking a change that the Venetians gave it a name: La Serrata, or the closure. It wasn’t long before the political Serrata became an economic one, too. Under the control of the oligarchs, Venice gradually cut off commercial opportunities for new entrants. Eventually, the colleganza was banned. The reigning elites were acting in their immediate self-interest, but in the longer term, La Serrata was the beginning of the end for them, and for Venetian prosperity more generally. By 1500, Venice’s population was smaller than it had been in 1330. In the 17th and 18th centuries, as the rest of Europe grew, the city continued to shrink.

The story of Venice’s rise and fall is told by the scholars Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive. Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.

The history of the United States can be read as one such virtuous circle. But as the story of Venice shows, virtuous circles can be broken. Elites that have prospered from inclusive systems can be tempted to pull up the ladder they climbed to the top. Eventually, their societies become extractive and their economies languish.

That was the future predicted by Karl Marx, who wrote that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. And it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further — ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place.

You can see America’s creeping Serrata in the growing social and, especially, educational chasm between those at the top and everyone else. At the bottom and in the middle, American society is fraying, and the children of these struggling families are lagging the rest of the world at school.

Economists point out that the woes of the middle class are in large part a consequence of globalization and technological change. Culture may also play a role. In his recent book on the white working class, the libertarian writer Charles Murray blames the hollowed-out middle for straying from the traditional family values and old-fashioned work ethic that he says prevail among the rich (whom he castigates, but only for allowing cultural relativism to prevail).

There is some truth in both arguments. But the 1 percent cannot evade its share of responsibility for the growing gulf in American society. Economic forces may be behind the rising inequality, but as Peter R. Orszag, President Obama’s former budget chief, told me, public policy has exacerbated rather than mitigated these trends.

Even as the winner-take-all economy has enriched those at the very top, their tax burden has lightened. Tolerance for high executive compensation has increased, even as the legal powers of unions have been weakened and an intellectual case against them has been relentlessly advanced by plutocrat-financed think tanks. In the 1950s, the marginal income tax rate for those at the top of the distribution soared above 90 percent, a figure that today makes even Democrats flinch. Meanwhile, of the 400 richest taxpayers in 2009, 6 paid no federal income tax at all, and 27 paid 10 percent or less. None paid more than 35 percent.

Historically, the United States has enjoyed higher social mobility than Europe, and both left and right have identified this economic openness as an essential source of the nation’s economic vigor. But several recent studies have shown that in America today it is harder to escape the social class of your birth than it is in Europe. The Canadian economist Miles Corak has found that as income inequality increases, social mobility falls — a phenomenon Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has called the Great Gatsby Curve.

Educational attainment, which created the American middle class, is no longer rising. The super-elite lavishes unlimited resources on its children, while public schools are starved of funding. This is the new Serrata. An elite education is increasingly available only to those already at the top. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enrolled their daughters in an exclusive private school; I’ve done the same with mine.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year, I interviewed Ruth Simmons, then the president of Brown. She was the first African-American to lead an Ivy League university and has served on the board of Goldman Sachs. Dr. Simmons, a Harvard-trained literature scholar, worked hard to make Brown more accessible to poor students, but when I asked whether it was time to abolish legacy admissions, the Ivy League’s own Book of Gold, she shrugged me off with a laugh: “No, I have a granddaughter. It’s not time yet.”

America’s Serrata also takes a more explicit form: the tilting of the economic rules in favor of those at the top. The crony capitalism of today’s oligarchs is far subtler than Venice’s. It works in two main ways.

The first is to channel the state’s scarce resources in their own direction. This is the absurdity of Mitt Romney’s comment about the “47 percent” who are “dependent upon government.” The reality is that it is those at the top, particularly the tippy-top, of the economic pyramid who have been most effective at capturing government support — and at getting others to pay for it.

Exhibit A is the bipartisan, $700 billion rescue of Wall Street in 2008. Exhibit B is the crony recovery. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that 93 percent of the income gains from the 2009-10 recovery went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The top 0.01 percent captured 37 percent of these additional earnings, gaining an average of $4.2 million per household.

The second manifestation of crony capitalism is more direct: the tax perks, trade protections and government subsidies that companies and sectors secure for themselves. Corporate pork is a truly bipartisan dish: green energy companies and the health insurers have been winners in this administration, as oil and steel companies were under George W. Bush’s.

The impulse of the powerful to make themselves even more so should come as no surprise. Competition and a level playing field are good for us collectively, but they are a hardship for individual businesses. Warren E. Buffett knows this. “A truly great business must have an enduring ‘moat’ that protects excellent returns on invested capital,” he explained in his 2007 annual letter to investors. “Though capitalism’s ‘creative destruction’ is highly beneficial for society, it precludes investment certainty.” Microsoft attempted to dig its own moat by simply shutting out its competitors, until it was stopped by the courts. Even Apple, a huge beneficiary of the open-platform economy, couldn’t resist trying to impose its own inferior map app on buyers of the iPhone 5.

Businessmen like to style themselves as the defenders of the free market economy, but as Luigi Zingales, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, argued, “Most lobbying is pro-business, in the sense that it promotes the interests of existing businesses, not pro-market in the sense of fostering truly free and open competition.”

IN the early 19th century, the United States was one of the most egalitarian societies on the planet. “We have no paupers,” Thomas Jefferson boasted in an 1814 letter. “The great mass of our population is of laborers; our rich, who can live without labor, either manual or professional, being few, and of moderate wealth. Most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich and the competent such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families.”

For Jefferson, this equality was at the heart of American exceptionalism: “Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?”

That all changed with industrialization. As Franklin D. Roosevelt argued in a 1932 address to the Commonwealth Club, the industrial revolution was accomplished thanks to “a group of financial titans, whose methods were not scrutinized with too much care, and who were honored in proportion as they produced the results, irrespective of the means they used.” America may have needed its robber barons; Roosevelt said the United States was right to accept “the bitter with the sweet.”

But as these titans amassed wealth and power, and as America ran out of free land on its frontier, the country faced the threat of a Serrata. As Roosevelt put it, “equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists.” Instead, “we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already.”

It is no accident that in America today the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the Gilded Age. Now, as then, the titans are seeking an even greater political voice to match their economic power. Now, as then, the inevitable danger is that they will confuse their own self-interest with the common good. The irony of the political rise of the plutocrats is that, like Venice’s oligarchs, they threaten the system that created them.

American Exceptionalism and the Fading American Dream

To admit that problems exist is not a denial of American exceptionalism; instead, it is a proclamation that our “can do” spirit is alive an well, that we can tackle and solve any issue. Howard Steven Friedman’s new book, The Measure of a Nation, pits ideas about American exceptionalism against hard data on where we actually stand among the international community.

The promise of the American Dream has been fading for quite some time, but as a nation, we are wonderfully, stubbornly optimistic and have kept the faith. What do you think—is the American Dream still within reach?

From Truthout

“The Measure of a Nation” Challenges Illusions of American Superiority

By Arthur Goldwag, Truthout

(Image: JR / TO; Adapted: JamesHenry,thefixer)

Book Review: Author Howard Steven Friedman compared the US with 13 competing countries on health, education, infant mortality, life expectancy and other critical social and economic indicators. He found only one in which America excels: producing billionaires.

In his book, “No Apology: The Case for American Greatness,” Mitt Romney laid his cards on the table: “I’m one of those who believe America is destined to remain as it has been since the birth of the Republic – the brightest hope of the world.”

Obama’s reluctance to acknowledge America’s manifest moral and economic superiority is for Romney a telltale of his essential foreignness. “American prosperity is fully dependent upon having an opportunity society – I don’t think President Obama understands that,” he told the Republican Jewish Coalition last Pearl Harbor Day. “I don’t think he understands why our economy is the most successful in the world. I don’t think he understands America.”

Romney and his fellow Exceptionalists believe that America isn’t just envied for its wealth, but for its health; they regard the US medical system (assuming that Obamacare is abolished) as the best in the world. Our public schools might come in for some bashing, but they blame extrinsic factors like affirmative action, political correctness and Democratic Party-friendly teachers’ unions for their failures. The best way to guarantee peace, they believe, whether at home or abroad, is by superior firepower. And they harbor no doubts whatsoever that America is the most democratic nation in the world, where everyone has a voice and anyone can become as wealthy as they.

Granted, Romney abides in a bubble of privilege and partisan politics and has long communicated in pre-packaged talking points. But this is a man, remember, who prides himself on his hardheadedness and business savvy. He hasn’t always been a politician, after all. He earned his reputation – not to mention his personal fortune – as a management consultant.

One thing that consultant Romney never did, I’d be willing to wager, is take a client’s senior executives at their word when they insisted that their company was doing as well as it ought to. He reserved judgment until he’d had a chance to crunch some serious numbers for himself – to scrutinize the company’s receivables and payables and inventory levels, to measure its cash flow and see what valuation the market was putting on its stocks and bonds. I’d bet he didn’t just talk to senior management either – he put his ear to the ground, so he could pick up the scuttlebutt from lowlier employees on the line, the people who knew how things really worked – and where all the bodies were buried.

He would have checked out the competition, too. Quoting the Bain Consulting Group’s founder, Bruce Henderson, Romney notes that:

In order to become a success, a business doesn’t just have to do well, it also has to do better than its competitors. Being number one isn’t just about bragging rights. Often it means the difference between prosperity and merely hanging on.

At least that’s what I imagine. But when you listen to candidate Romney, it’s painfully clear that he’s never put the country whose management he proposes to take over through remotely the kind of due diligence that he would have insisted on for a private concern. Fortunately for us, others have. Unfortunately for us, the intelligence they provide is not exactly reassuring.

In his new book “The Measure of a Nation: How To Regain America’s Competitive Edge and Boost Our Global Standing” (Prometheus, 2012), Howard Steven Friedman, a statistician and health economist for the United Nations and an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, compared the US’ standings on a variety of metrics concerning health, safety, education, democracy and income equality to those of 13 carefully chosen competitor nations: Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Portugal, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain and the UK. All of them are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); all have populations of at least ten million, and mean GDPs per capita of at least $20,000.

Using the lingo of the Boston Consulting Group (where Romney worked before he came to Bain), Friedman rated the top-performing countries as Stars, the worst-performers as Dogs, and the middling performers as Middle Children.

His bottom line? On most metrics, the US is a Dog.

Let’s start with life expectancy. Within its competitive cadre, the US is “the clear market Dog … falling more than one year shorter than the next closest competitor, Portugal. “Back in 1987, the US ranked seventh in the entire world for life expectancy – and it seemed a little scandalous that it wasn’t first. Today it doesn’t make the top 20. Of course there is geographic and ethnic variation within the US. For example, an Asian-American woman enjoys a life expectancy that’s 20 years longer than an African-American urban male’s; the average life expectancy in Hawaii is 81.5 years, compared to Mississippi’s 74.8, or West Virginia and Alabama’s 75.2.

In 1960, the US had the 12th-lowest infant mortality rate in the world. By 1990, it had dropped to 23rd and it was 38th in 2008. Some of this is driven, a little counter-intuitively, by the US’ leadership in pre-term births (a testament to advances in neo-natal care). By 2005, pre-term babies accounted for 69 percent of infant deaths. But that doesn’t remotely tell the whole story. Once again, geography and ethnicity are complicit. In 2005, African-American infants died at a rate of 13.63 per one thousand births, more than twice the national average.

One of the drivers of the US’ low life expectancy is its rate of “amenable deaths”- deaths before age 75 that might have been prevented through effective medical interventions. “Ranked as of 2002-2003,” Friedman notes, “our rate of amenable mortality was 109.7 deaths per 100,000 people – more than 50 percent higher than the best-performing countries of France (64.8 deaths per 100,000), Japan (71.2 deaths per 100,000) and Australia (71.3 deaths per 100,000). Another way to view this is to recognize that even if the United States had the lowest infant mortality in the competition, it would still have the lowest life expectancy.”

To add insult to injury, the US spends on average nearly “twice as much, and in some cases, up to four times more per capita than our competitors spend on health.”

Diet and obesity are two of the culprits that account for the US’ terrible cost/benefit ratio, as well as drug abuse (legal and illegal) and violent crime. Most significant is the way we pay for health care – out of pocket or through for-profit insurance providers, which exacerbates the effects of poverty. Pharmaceuticals cost about 50 percent more in the US than abroad, and “the United States is the only country in the competition with a significant percentage of its population uninsured.”

Though the US imprisons its citizens at more than four times the rate of its closest competitor, its homicide rate is twice as high. It is ten times higher than Japan’s and triple that of France’s.

Thanks to the Second Amendment and the lobbying efforts of the NRA, Americans own guns at twice the rate of French and Canadian citizens (the US’ closest rivals for gun ownership from within the 13 nations). Once again, ethnicity plays a role: The homicide rate for African-American men in 2006 was 7.5 times higher than of Caucasian males; it was 3.5 times higher for African-American women than Caucasian women.

American adolescents graduate from high school at a rate that is surpassed only by Korea and Canada, but they are low-to-middling performers when they are tested for their attainments in reading, math and science. When the TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) divided students into groups according to their level of confidence in their math skills, “31 percent of American students expressed high confidence in their math ability, compared with 10 percent of Korean and 6 percent of Japanese students. Yet the American students performed worse than both the high-confidence and medium-confidence math students from Korea and Japan.” Friedman dryly notes that “this isn’t unique; many other points of our research have shown a disconnect between America’s perceived excellence and real-world competitive intelligence.”

What accounts for America’s educational shortcomings? When you look only at the performance of students from America’s high-income schools (in which fewer than 10 percent of students are eligible for subsidized lunches), the reading scores leap to the top. When you look only at schools where three quarters of the students receive subsidized lunches, the scores drop to the bottom. Hispanic and African Americans score below the lowest-ranking country’s averages; on one test, African-American and Hispanic-American 12th-graders had the same scores as Caucasian 8th-graders.

What does America spend to achieve these less than stellar results? Much more than any of its competitor nations – 24 percent more than the UK for primary school students, and 10 percent more than the Netherlands for secondary schools (the second-biggest spenders in each category).

Why does the US get so little bang for its buck? Not to bash America’s public school teachers, but if they are putting out less effort than they might be, it’s worth noting that they are paid less than their colleagues in every competitive nation.

In 1970, the average American teacher made about 175 percent of the national GDP per capita, making the teaching profession a relatively well-compensated profession. By 2008, teachers earned roughly the same as the national GDP per capita, less than one-half that of lawyers and about one-third that of doctors. Just look how this compares to the market star, Korea: It pays its experienced primary school teachers about twice the national GDP per capita. It’s much the same at the secondary school level: Experienced secondary school teachers in Korea make about twice their national GDP per capita, while in America they earn about the national average. With these comparatively low levels of compensation, it is not surprising that nearly 50 percent of new teachers in America leave the profession in the first five years.

America spends much more of its educational budget on administration than its competitor nations (each of the 50 states has its own administrative apparatus). Local funding virtually guarantees that the poorest schools will stay poor.

Despite the rapidly rising costs of college educations, American students have less access to financial aid. Thirty years ago, Pell Grants covered about 75 percent of the cost of an undergraduate degree; today they cover only a third. The average student loan debt of a graduate in 2007 and 2008 was $23,186, double the average owed by 1995 graduates.

How do Americans rate when it comes to their political participation? At the very bottom – America has the lowest voter turnout of all its competitors. And how well are they represented? The US Constitution called for a ratio of one national representative per 30,000 people; the overall ratio today is one per 580,000. In contrast, the average level of national representation in the competitor countries is about one for every 85,000 people.

And finally there is income inequality – a metric that has been much talked about in the last few years, most quotably by Joseph Stiglitz, who popularized the phrase “the 1% (the Republican shorthand for this conversation is “class warfare”) and Timothy Noah (“The Great Divergence”). The top one percent of US earners accounted for nearly 25 percent of unadjusted income (up from 10 percent in the 1970s). The top one-tenth of one percent of US earners accounted for 7.7 percent of US income, a rate that’s much higher than any of the competitor nations.

At the same time, US minimum wage workers earn about 33 percent of GDP per capita, less than their Australian, Belgian, Canadian, French, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and UK peers. The US ranks .38 on the Gini Index of Adjusted Income – higher than any of its competitor nations. The Gini Index for wealth in the US is .80; again, much higher than any of the competitor nations. Race is a factor here, too – African-Americans have about 10 percent of wealth per capita that Caucasian Americans do; Hispanics about 12 percent. And gender: the UN Gender Inequality Index (GII) rates the US worse than any of its competitors.

Where the US does excel is in the production of billionaires: It has almost double the level of billionaires per million inhabitants than Canada and Germany, its closest competitors. Not coincidentally, the US also has the lowest level of tax collection.

In the last chapter of his book, Friedman invites his readers to participate in a thought experiment:

Imagine if we were to announce tomorrow that we are going to establish one of the wealthiest countries in the world. This country would offer a few special features: The rich can get richer than in other countries, but the poor will be comparatively poorer and will have less chance of breaking free of poverty. Those who can afford health care can purchase it, and the rest must rely on emergency care only. Education will be slanted heavily to favor the rich, while the jails will be filled with people mostly from lower-income families.

The fact that the nation we are living in looks much like that already has not made a dent in Republicans’ enthusiasm for America’s so-called Exceptionalism. Democrats, on the other hand, acknowledge the problems, but they are for the most part unequal to the challenge of doing something about them. How can they, when money buys as much political influence as it does?

The neoliberal regime that rose to power more than three decades ago has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. Freed from the shackles of regulation, taxation and unions, the portfolios of the wealthiest Americans have soared. In the midst of the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression, even Democrats are reluctant to champion aggressive Keynesian measures, never mind entertain “socialistic” solutions. Instead of pursuing the kinds of activist approaches touted in a report like Jacob S. Hacker’s “Prosperity Economics” (“when all members of a society share in the rewards of advancement – from better health to greater political freedom, from basic economic security to greater upward mobility – society is more likely to prosper in a sustained way … when the government plays an active role in the economy through investments in education and scientific research, economies are more dynamic and innovative”), they seek to reassure voters that a second Obama administration will be more fiscally conservative and austere than the first. Not that they have much choice in the matter. If Obamacare – a staggeringly generous gift to private insurance and Big Pharma – is as unpopular as it is, it’s hard to imagine how any more substantive reforms could ever be accomplished.

Americans – liberals and conservatives alike – are deeply invested in their illusions about their country’s present and future prospects. Friedman points out that there are surveys that show that Americans believe they enjoy much higher levels of social mobility than they actually do. “This suggests,” he notes, “something more like a religious belief in mobility than a willingness to look at the facts – a belief that permeates all demographic groups in the United States and crosses the political and ideological spectrum.”

As one of the nastiest and substanceless presidential campaigns of recent memory moves into full throttle, “The Measure of a Nation” throws a much-needed bucket of cold water on a nation that seems determined to sleepwalk its way over a cliff. One can only hope that Friedman’s book will become as much a part of the national conversation as Romney’s.

ICYMI: Vox Populi with Sean Astin

On Thursday, I joined Sean Astin on his podcast Vox Populi to discuss the Joe Biden-Paul Ryan debate in Danville, Kentucky. Download the show here (conversation starts at the 40 minute mark) and don’t forget to subscribe to Sean’s podcast on iTunes!

Littoral Combat Ship (LCS): Another Military Boondoggle, Waste of Taxpayer Money

On the heels of the Pentagon’s trillion-dollar commitment to the overrated, over budget, and under performing F-35 comes the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), a seven-year investment, now triple original cost estimates, that has negligible value to the Navy.

The LCS is fast on its way to joining the F-35, giant spy blimps, and the Medium Extended Air Defense System—another military-industrial boondoggle, wasting taxpayer money year after year.

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From Time

The Navy’s New Class of Warships: Big Bucks, Little Bang

By JOHN SAYEN

NAVY PHOTO / LT. JAN SHULTIS
The first two Littoral Combat Ships: the USS Freedom, rear, and the USS Independence, off the California coast. The ships primarily are designed to engage in combat close to shore.

The Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is not only staggeringly overpriced and chronically unreliable but — even if it were to work perfectly — cannot match the combat power of similar sized foreign warships costing only a fraction as much. Let’s take a deep dive and try to figure out why.

The story so far:

– Congress has funded the LCS program since February 2002. Its publically stated purpose was to create a new generation of surface combatants able to operate in dangerous shallow water and near-shore environments.

– By December 2009 the Navy had built two radically dissimilar prototypes, the mono-hulled USS Freedom (LCS-1) and the trimaran-hulled USS Independence (LSC-2).

– A year later it adopted both designs and decided to award block buy construction contracts for five more ships of each type.

– Since neither design had yet proven either its usefulness or functionality it seems that the Navy’s object was to make the LCS program “too big to fail” as soon as possible.

– It may be working: the 55-ship fleet is slated to cost more than $40 billion, giving each vessel a price tag north of $700 million, roughly double the original estimated cost.

Both LCS designs were supposed to be small (about 3,000 tons displacement), shallow-draft coastal warships that relied on simplicity, numbers and new technology to stay affordable and capable throughout their service lives.

When the ship’s mission changed it could quickly swap its current module for one that supported the new mission. This was a way to combine the advantages of both single and multi-mission platforms.

Foreign navies had already applied the concept successfully. The Danish Navy’s “Standard Flex” series of weapon modules had in particular grabbed the U.S. Navy’s attention.

Each LCS also has a flight deck and hangar able to accommodate up to two H-60 helicopters or up to four MQ-8B helicopter drones (one helicopter and two to three drones would be a typical mix). In addition, an LCS can carry and operate surface and sub-surface drones. Current modules in development are for mine warfare (MIW), anti-submarine warfare (ASW) and anti-surface warfare (ASUW).

The MIW and ASW modules are mostly sensors with only drone or helicopter launched weapons. The ASUW module is focused mainly on defeating speedboats and offers only two 30mm MK-46 guns and some short-ranged low payload Griffin missiles. None of these modules will even be testable until well into FY13 and none will be operational before FY16.

Outside of the modules an LCS has a permanent armament of a 57mm MK-110 automatic gun, some 0.50-caliber machineguns and a close defense missile system (RIM-116 SeaRAM).

Even with its modules the LCS compares poorly with similar-sized but much less expensive ships in foreign navies.

The new Russian Steregushchy-class frigate, for example, is (at 2,200 tons) about 30% smaller than an LCS and cost only 20-25% as much. Yet, it carries a 100mm automatic gun, 14.5-mm machineguns, close-in defense “Gatling gun” systems (AK-630), medium range surface to air missiles (S400 series), SS-N-25 anti-ship missiles (sub-sonic and shorter ranged than the US Harpoon but far more capable than the Griffin), 533-mm (21”) torpedoes, 324mm anti-submarine torpedoes and a helicopter. The ship is not only in production for the Russian Navy but also for the navies of Algeria and Indonesia. A version is also being built for China.

The Swedish Visby-class corvette was one of the models on which LCS was based. It carries the same 57mm gun plus antisubmarine rockets and torpedoes, anti-ship missiles, a radar-deflecting hull, and a helicopter pad (but no hangar, apparently). It can also reach 35 knots but it is only a fifth as large.

The Chinese have more than 80 Houbei-class fast-attack boats in service. Each costs only $40 million to build and displaces only 220 tons (one-fifteenth as much as an LCS). Yet they carry C-801 series anti-ship missiles that greatly outrange any weapon the LCS has.

About the only threat the LCS might handle is the “swarms” of Iranian machinegun and RPG-carrying speedboats in the Persian Gulf. Apart from the fact that the Iranian crisis will have been resolved for better or worse before most of the LCS fleet can be built, these Iranian small craft lack weapons big enough to menace any serious warship.

However the LCS itself may be more vulnerable to these speedboats than the ships it is protecting from them. This is because the ballooning LCS construction costs caused the Navy to try to save money by ordering that future ships be built to commercial standards.

This will reduce their survivability level (protection of ship, crew, and vital systems) to (or below) the lowest level (of three) the Navy recognizes. Survivability testing has been cancelled, as it would cause too much damage to the test ship. Instead, the LCS is rated as not survivable in a “hostile combat environment.”

Worse, the Navy has admitted that, unlike the foreign systems they were modeled on, LCS modules will not be swappable within day or two as originally envisaged. Instead, the process can take weeks. Practical and political limitations on storing modules and supporting them overseas are likely to make module swapping possible only in U.S. shipyards. An LCS entering a combat theater will have to be in a single “come as you are” configuration that cannot adapt to mission changes.

The LCS does lead its foreign competitors when it comes to speed. At the Navy’s insistence, each LCS carries a set of diesels for cruising. It also has a suite of gas turbines that can at least for short spurts propel it at speeds as high as 50 knots.

By contrast the LCS’ foreign competitors rarely exceed 35 knots (the heavily-armed Steregushchy is only good for 26). However, speed at sea is a terribly expensive capability. Except for large nuclear-powered ships, very high speeds are only possible for limited times and in good weather. Incremental speed increases require geometric horsepower increases. Gas turbines generating more than 100,000 horsepower and their associated fuel tanks must leave the LCS little space for armor, weapons, sensors or crew accommodations. Though the Navy has not said so, it is likely that these gas turbines have been the source of many of the LCS’ mechanical problems.

Why is high speed so important? Even high-speed minesweeping does not require more than 25 knots or so. For chasing small boats the LCS’s size advantage will let it catch nominally faster craft if any kind of sea is running. If this is not enough, the LCS has its helicopters and drones. The LCS may need speed to deploy quickly over long distances but is unlikely to need it for tactical maneuver. Without its gas turbines the LCS could be small (and cheaper), like the Visby, or powerfully-armed, like the Steregushchy. Instead, it is neither.

When asked why the LCS has sacrificed so much for speed, Navy spokesmen tend to become vague. In a recent interview, Rear Admiral Thomas Rowden, the Navy’s chief of surface warfare, could only explain the LCS’ speed requirement with clichés such as “speed is life” (is the LCS really an airplane? Does it outrun cruise missiles?) or “more is better” (more speed but less of everything else?). He even quoted John Paul Jones asking for a fast ship to go “in harm’s way.” Such fatuous statements might satisfy a fourth-grade civics class but this contemptuous dismissal of legitimate taxpayer concerns speaks volumes about what the Navy thinks of the people who ultimately pay its bills.

The surface-warfare chief went on to say that the Navy had yet to settle key LCS issues regarding missions, tactics and the design features to support them. In a sane world, such issues would have been ironed out before any ships were built. Once they are settled, the results will have to be applied to existing ships (to the extent that is possible) at enormous cost. Such are the effects of a “build first, design later” shipbuilding policy.

The level of incompetence the Navy has displayed with the LCS is truly breathtaking.

The LCS was supposed to be small and cheap, able to relieve larger more expensive ships of secondary tasks and to dominate coastal “brown water” environments. Yet, it is not cheap. Construction costs have ballooned to more than triple their original estimates. It is incredibly extravagant for some of its missions (those than any Coast Guard cutter could do), and very inadequate for most of the others. Its MIW and ASW capabilities are only those of the aircraft it carries. Even with its ASUW module, its firepower falls far short of foreign ships one-fifth the size. Its RIM-116 lacks the range to protect other ships. Its 57mm gun is short-ranged and cannot support troops ashore.

Taxpayers – and Navy personnel, past and present — may better appreciate the scope of the LCS disaster when reminded that current plans call for these pseudo-warships to comprise more than a third of the Navy’s surface combatants by 2020.

Nevertheless, the Navy is not worried. Congress will bail them out and ensure the LCS program yields some sort of product, even if it is a terribly overpriced and only marginally meets program requirements.

Meanwhile, foreign — not necessarily friendly — navies are building better and cheaper ships.

John Sayen retired from the Marine Corps in 2002 as a lieutenant colonel. He currently works in the defense industry and occasionally writes on current and historical military and naval issues.

 

ICYMI: MSNBC’s PoliticsNation with Reverend Al Sharpton

The Constitution details at great length that the expansion of voting rights is essential to the nature of our democracy. It’s simply extraordinary that over the past couple of years the Republican Party has attempted to decimate voting rights in the U.S.

On MSNBC’s PoliticsNation, I joined Reverend Al Sharpton and Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, to discuss Ohio Secretary of State John Husted’s efforts to appeal a federal court decision which upheld early voting in the crucial swing state. Watch the video of last night’s show and comment below with your thoughts on Ohio’s early voting controversy.

From PoliticsNation

Obama still has the upper hand in Ohio

Both candidates in the presidential election know the swing state of Ohio is critical to the election. President Obama is in the lead, but Romney is intensifying his efforts. Can Obama hang on to his lead? Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, and Catherine Crier, former judge, prosecutor, and journalist talk with Rev. Al Sharpton.

 

DHS Fusion Center Network: An Unwieldy, Bloated, and Unaccountable Waste of Taxpayer Dollars

A new Senate report on the Department of Homeland Security’s fusion center network exposes the federal behemoth for what it really is: an unwieldy, bloated, and unaccountable waste of taxpayer dollars that has encouraged the militarization of domestic law enforcement for nearly a decade.

Thanks to former President George W. Bush and a Republican-controlled Congress, programs such as these “have become pools of ineptitude, waste and civil liberties intrusions,” according to the report. When questionable tactics used in the legitimate pursuit of terrorism become a tool in “regular” criminal investigations, the rights of all American citizens are seriously jeopardized. What do you think?

From The Center for Public Integrity

Senate report says national intelligence fusion centers have been useless

Cash spent to watch televisions and report on suspicious bass fishing in Mexico

By R. Jeffrey Smith

An alarming report published by the Department of Homeland Security in March 2010 called attention to the theft of dozens of pounds of dangerous explosives from an airport storage bunker in Washington state.

Like many such warnings, it drew on information gathered by one of the department’s “fusion centers” created to exchange data among state, local and federal officials, all at a cost to the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars.

There was just one problem with that report, and many others like it: the theft had occurred seven months earlier, and it had been highlighted within five days in a press release by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which was seeking citizen assistance in tracking down the culprits.

The DHS report’s tardiness and its duplication of work by others has been a commonplace failing of work performed by fusion centers nationwide, according to a new investigation of the DHS-funded centers by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The centers were created with great fanfare over the past decade by Washington with the aim of redressing gaps in intelligence-sharing among local, state and federal officials — gaps documented by probes of the period before the Sept. 2001 attacks, when some of the attackers were stopped by police for traffic violations or other reasons, and then released.

In July 2009, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano called the fusion centers “a critical part of our nation’s homeland security capabilities.”  About 70 of the centers now exist, located in major cities and nearly all states.

But in its blistering, bipartisan staff report released late Tuesday evening,  the panel asserts that the centers – which were financed by federal taxpayers with the express aim of helping the counter-terror effort – frequently produced “shoddy, rarely timely” reports that in some cases violated civil liberties or privacy and often had little to do with terrorism.

“Most [relevant reports] were published months after they were received” from fusion centers in Washington, the subcommittee’s 107-page account said. And only a fraction of all the reports dealt with terrorism, because no one in Washington forced the centers to stay focused on that topic. The fusion center in southern Nevada – formally called a Counterterrorism Center — mostly tracks school violence, according to the report.

“Despite reviewing 13 months’ worth of reporting originating from fusion centers from April 1, 2009 to April 30, 2010, the Subcommittee investigation could identify no reporting which uncovered a terrorist threat, nor could it identify a contribution such fusion center reporting made to disrupt an active terrorist plot,” the document states. “DHS’s involvement with fusion centers appeared not to have yielded timely, useful, terrorism-related intelligence for the federal intelligence community.”

Matthew Chandler, a DHS spokesman, condemned the subcommittee’s report in a prepared statement, calling it “out of date, inaccurate, and misleading,” He also accused the investigators of refusing to review “relevant data,” in an apparent reference to their decision not to read fusion centers’ reports in classified form.

Chandler further asserted that the subcommittee, which closely scrutinized work produced by the centers in 2009 and 2010 and examined Bush and Obama administration policies through August of this year, had failed to understand that a key role for the centers is to “receive” intelligence information provided by the federal government, not just to produce it. Another Obama administration official, who declined to be identified, said the report “fails to reflect the totality of work done by fusion centers that directly supports our counter-terrorism efforts.”

But their comments did not address the report’s detailed findings, including its claim that the department cannot estimate how much money it has spent on the centers, and that it has never established any benchmarks for their success or measures of merit for those DHS employees assigned to write, edit, or disseminate their reports.

The subcommittee report, released by chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and ranking member Tom Coburn (R-Okla.),  said the department’s estimates of its expenditures on fusion centers ranged from $289 million to $1.4 billion. It also said that DHS has never tried to track or seriously audit how its funds were spent, with the result that tens of thousands of dollars were spent by state or local officials on vehicles, televisions, laptops, and other electronic gear that have yet to be used in counter-terror work.

In San Diego, for example, law enforcement officials used nearly $75,000 to buy 55 flat-screen televisions for “open-source monitoring,” a term they said essentially meant watching the news. In Arizona, officials spent $64,000 on televisions and monitors for a “surveillance monitoring room” even though that task was not part of their federal writ and they had no system for analyzing the data they might collect.

Specially-made, rugged laptops purchased by Ohio officials with federal funds wound up in a county medical examiner’s office. Millions of dollars in grants were given to a fusion center that DHS publicly claimed to have established in Philadelphia but which the subcommittee discovered did not – as of August this year— actually exist.

By operating what is essentially an open-ended grants program, with few rules and no oversight, DHS “is unable to identify what value, if any, it has received from its outlays,” the subcommittee report said.

Officials are, for example, supposed to file reports on “suspicious activity” that appears to be related to potential “terrorism or other criminal activity.” But the warnings sent to Washington included such humdingers as a notation that a car’s fold-down rear seats could be used to hide human trafficking; a claim that two men acted suspiciously in a bass fishing boat near the U.S.-Mexican border; and details of a day-long motivational talk and “lecture on positive parenting” provided by a Muslim organization.

A false report in November 2011 by the fusion center in Illinois could have sparked an international incident, the subcommittee staff wrote. It said the computer system of a municipal water system had been hacked from Russia and that a pump had been deliberately disabled. “Apparently aware of how important such an event could have been had it been real, DHS intelligence officials included the false allegations – stated as fact – in a daily intelligence briefing that went to Congress and the intelligence community.”

But the reality was almost comically different:  local officials had misread an internet contact with the system made five months earlier by a local repair technician on vacation in Russia, according to a subsequent FBI investigation. “The only fact that they got right was that a water pump in a small Illinois water district had burned out.” But DHS’s intelligence office never corrected its initial alert.

Those who wrote the reports were poorly trained, according to the subcommittee, and reviews were frequently conducted by contract employees that supervisors described in interviews as  substandard. Partly as a result, thirty percent of the fusion center reports produced in the 13-month period scrutinized by the subcommittee were killed inside the department because they had violated legal guidelines or they lacked useful information, the investigators determined after multiple interviews with current and former DHS officials.

The information contained in the banished drafts was kept by DHS, however, even when it appeared to violate guidelines, the subcommittee said.

On the relatively few occasions that officials shared information directly relevant to counter-terror efforts, such as reports of contacts between local law enforcement officials and persons named on a federal terrorist list, DHS passed the information to the National Counter Terrorism Center in Washington “several weeks or months” later, according to the subcommittee. The NCTC meanwhile would typically have gotten the same information on the same day as the contact through a competing FBI channel, the report said.

The investigators said many of their criticisms appeared in two internal reports that DHS officials were reluctant to share. One completed in 2010 said that a third of the established centers had no set procedures for sharing information and that most had no stated ambition to prevent a terrorist attack. Another less ambitious review completed in 2011 also found many shortcomings.

“Unfortunately DHS has resisted oversight of these centers,” said Sen. Coburn. “The Department opted not to inform Congress or the public of serious problems plaguing its fusion center and broader intelligence efforts. When the Subcommittee requested documents that would help identify these issues, the Department initially resisted turning them over, arguing that they were protected by privilege, too sensitive to share, were protected by confidentiality agreements, or did not exist at all. The American people deserve better. I hope this report will help generate the reforms that will help keep our country safe.”