David Sirota

Budget Showdown Aims To Quietly Exempt Pentagon and Focus All Cuts on Social Programs

2011-04-06T22:00:44-04:00

The unwritten and unspoken story of the budget showdown in Washington is the tale of both parties deliberately working to once again exempt the ever-growing Pentagon from America's larger budget/deficit discussion.

This is the thrust of the new Republican plan to pass a one-week continuing resolution for non-defense spending and at the same time pass a full year's status-quo Pentagon budget. Even though military spending is the single largest discretionary spending item in the budget, and even though there are blatant examples of Pentagon waste fraud and abuse, the GOP's proposal nonetheless insists that the Pentagon must be sacrosanct.

Meanwhile, whether deliberately or inadvertently, President Obama's tactic of citing soldier pay as the main reason to avoid a government shutdown reinforces the same embedded militarist ideology as the GOP budget proposal. It goes without saying, of course, that, delaying troop pay would be regrettable. But citing the military as the primary reason to avoid a government shutdown furthers the notion that somehow the largest discretionary budget item is the only budget item that should be considered Holy and therefore untouchable. (This is a message, by the way, that congressional Democrats have already embraced in recently offering to take yet more money from social programs and pour it into the Pentagon.)

In pursuing this course, the president is adding credence to the logic behind the GOP's "everything but the Pentagon" proposal. If troop pay is the major reason he opposes a government shutdown, then it stands to reason he would support the GOP's initiative to pass the status-quo bloated Pentagon budget for the rest of the year, while keeping everything else (read: social programs) on the chopping block.

The tragedy is that if the GOP's proposal passes, an even larger and more disproportionate amount of budget cuts will be focused almost exclusively on the relatively small portion of the discretionary budget that funds social programs. This is an outcome polls show polls show most Americans strongly oppose. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, the Reuters/Ipsos poll found "a majority of Americans prefer cutting defense spending to reduce the federal deficit rather than taking money" from social programs.

That's why this move to defy the public will and exempt the Pentagon from the national deficit discussion is being done under the veneer of a larger budget showdown. Both parties know they can't come out and overtly advocate the Pentagon exemption, so they are working to legislate it under the cover of continuing resolutions and threats of a government shutdown. Their goal is first and foremost protecting the Pentagon's budget - a long-term goal of a bipartisan Washington establishment now wholly owned and operated by military contractors.

As I show in my new book Back to Our Future, it has been the goal since the 1980s rehabilitated hypermilitarism as a winning political frame, and sadly, it looks like both parties may have finally engineered a budget showdown that delivers the results the military-industrial complex has been waiting for.

How Your Taxpayer Dollars Subsidize Pro-War Movies and Block Anti-War Movies

2011-03-16T12:39:29-04:00

All the buzz in the entertainment/tech world about the blockbuster new video game Homefront brings back memories of the 1984 film Red Dawn -- and rightly so. The creator of Homefront is none other than John Milius, the writer/director of the 1984 film that later became the deliberate namesake of the most famous operation in today's Iraq War. But it should also bring back memories of the larger militarist themes that continue to define our entertainment culture -- themes that ultimately bring up the direct but little-examined connections between the Pentagon and the entertainment industry. It is the legacy of those connections, first intensified in the 1980s, that continue to embed militarism in seemingly non-political products like video games and action movies.

As I show in my new book Back to Our Future, much of the video game industry was subsidized by the military and military contractors, and many of the earliest games were consequently martial in thrust. Think: Atari Combat and Missile Command, which then grew into a larger video game world that, as one Konami executive said in 1988, "takes anything remotely in the news and makes it a game." You could see that in Nintendo's Iran-Contra era game Contra just as you can see it in today's hits like Call of Duty. And in almost each of these games, the ideology of militarism (i.e. military action solving all problems) is reiterated and reinforced.

Same thing when it comes to the Pentagon-Hollywood relationship since the 1980s -- only in that case, we're now seeing military officials quite literally line-editing scripts to make them more pro-military.

Remember, the military has been working with filmmakers since 1927, when it helped produce Wings, the winner of the very first Academy Award for Best Picture. Pentagon involvement varied through the first two-thirds of the 20th century, but it always had kids in its sights. In the 1950s, for example, the military worked with Lassie on shows that highlighted new military technology and produced "Mouse Reels" for The Mickey Mouse Club, one of which showed kids touring the first nuclear submarine. As investigative journalist David Robb discovered, a Pentagon memo noted at the time that child-focused media "is an excellent opportunity to introduce a whole new generation to the nuclear Navy."

The 1970s saw far fewer Pentagon-backed war films for a public that was fatigued from Vietnam and its aftermath on the evening news. But according to The Hollywood Reporter, as Reaganite militarism began ascending, the 1980s saw "a steady growth in the demand for access to military facilities and in the number of films, TV shows and home videos made about the military."

For that access, the military began exacting a price. The Pentagon's focus on juveniles created the heavy hand it was beginning to use to shape popular culture in the 1980s. Increasingly, for filmmakers to gain access to even the most basic military scenery, Pentagon gatekeepers began requiring major plot and dialogue changes so as to guarantee that the military was favorably portrayed. In a Variety story from 1994, the Pentagon's official Hollywood liaison, Phil Strub, put it bluntly: "The main criteria we use [for approval] is... how could the proposed production benefit the military... could it help in recruiting [and] is it in sync with present policy?"

According to Strub, Pentagon-Hollywood collusion hit "a milestone" with 1986's Top Gun, a triumphalist teen recruitment ad about the navy's "best of the best," who, of course, never even think to ask the most basic of the basic questions. The movie's glaringly incurious characters and story were no accident. The script was shaped by Pentagon brass in exchange for full access to all sorts of hardware -- the access itself a priceless taxpayer subsidy. According to Maclean's, Paramount Pictures paid just "$1.1 million for the use of warplanes and an aircraft carrier," far less than it would have cost the studio had it been compelled to finance the eye candy itself.

As if that carrot-stick dynamic weren't coercive enough to aspiring filmmakers, the Pentagon in the 1980s expanded the definition of "cooperation" to include collaboration on screenplays as scripts were being initially drafted. "It saves [writers] time from writing stupid stuff," said one official in explaining the new process.

Such a cavalier attitude coupled with the box-office success of the Pentagon-approved Top Gun convinced studios in the 1980s that agreeing to military demands and, hence, making ever more militaristic films was a guaranteed formula for success. Consequently, between the release of Top Gun and the beginning of the Gulf War, the Pentagon reported that the number of pictures made with its official assistance (and approval) quadrupled, and a large portion of these action-adventure productions (quickly synergized into video games, action figures, etc.) were for teenagers.

The short-term impact of the military-entertainment complex was enlistment surges correlating to specific 80s box-office hits. As just one (albeit huge) example, recruitment spiked 400 percent when Top Gun was released, leading the navy to set up recruitment tables at theaters upon realizing the movie's effect. Medium term, of course, is the Red Dawn effect. Contemporary missions are now named after the film (and various other militarist fantasies from the 80s), tapping into the hardwired psyches of the "Wolverines who have grown up and gone to Iraq," as Milius recently called the 80s generation.

Then there are the standards that were set for the long haul. Today, the Pentagon offers Hollywood just as much enticement for militarism, and just as much punishment against antimilitarism, as ever. On top of the 80s militarism that is now endlessly recycled in the cable rerun-o-sphere, it's a safe bet that whichever Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay blockbuster is being fawned over by teen audiences is at least partially underwritten by the Pentagon, and as a condition of that support, these blockbusters typically agree to deliberately reiterate the morality of the military and war.

By contrast, as the director of The Hunt for Red October recounted, this new reality prompted studios in the 80s to start telling screenwriters and directors to "get the cooperation of the [military], or forget about making the picture."

This helps explain why for every one decidedly anti-war movie that's made, we see scores of movies made that glorify militarism. Since the 1980s, taxpayer dollars have been subsidizing militarist movies on the basis of their militarist content; at the same time those subsidies are withheld from anti-militarist movies on the basis of their anti-militarist content. That has created a movie market dynamic that then preferences the production of militarist films -- militarist films which have an obvious and ongoing psyche-shaping effect on our larger attitudes about militarist ideology.

NOTE: My new book Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now is out this week. This post draws on the research I did for this book about the deep connections between the Pentagon and the entertainment industry -- connections that intensified in the 1980s and still shape our culture today.

From Charlie Sheen to Reagan Nostalgia, the 80s Just Won't Go Away

2011-03-14T09:54:28-04:00

Charlie Sheen is hogging the spotlight. Tron and Wall Street have just left theaters. Muammar Gaddafi is the planet's top bad guy. Millionaires are enjoying budget-busting tax cuts. Conservatives are saber-rattling against Iran. Bon Jovi is on tour. And Ronald Reagan tributes are everywhere.

If you didn't know better, you'd think we'd all just stepped out of a 1.21 gigawatt-powered DeLorean and right back into the 1980s.

And in some ways, we have. This collective deja vu moment is part coincidence, part commodified nostalgia and part impulse to rehash successful old political and entertainment brands. But the similarities between today and the 1980s also reflect a country now run by those who came of age in that decade -- people whose worldviews were molded by an era that began with a Chrysler bailout and ended with foreign students protesting dictatorship in a distant square.

This lasting influence goes far beyond the impact of the Reagan Revolution; the cultural vernacular of the '80s has proved as enduring as the Gipper's most famous speeches.

No matter where we look for the roots of today's political debates, we find the tropes of '80s popular culture.

The origins of Barack Obama's supposed post-racial qualities? Some look to Bill Cosby and the "Huxtable Effect," which taught white America to embrace African Americans -- so long as they "transcend" their race.

Official deference to the nation's generals and ever-expanding war spending? Our politicians are trying to "let us win this time," as Sylvester Stallone's John Rambo demanded in First Blood.

The precursor of today's socially acceptable -- and congressionally sanctioned -- Islamophobia and prejudice against those of Middle Eastern descent? Try Marty McFly fleeing suburb-stalking Libyan terrorists in Back to the Future, or professional wrestler Sgt. Slaughter body-slamming the headdress-wearing Iron Sheik and promising to "clean up America of all this trash."

No meaningful crackdown on financial-industry abuse? Apparently, the bonfire of the vanities still burns, and Wall Street's masters of the universe remain largely immune from punishment.

The popular notion that government is either so inept or so corrupt that individuals or nonprofits must take matters into their own hands? It's inspired not just by Reagan's sarcastic quip about nine "terrifying" words -- "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help" -- but also by classic '80s television shows such as The A-Team, The Dukes of Hazzard and Knight Rider. The theme of that genre was self-sufficiency or even vigilante justice in the face of governmental uselessness or venality.

And what of the rare government success story? Turn to Top Gun, Die Hard, Beverly Hills Cop, Lethal Weapon and every other 1980s production that mass-marketed Ollie North-style bravado and affirmed the idea that government succeeds only when self-styled mavericks inside the system break the rules.

Yes, the 1980s are our very own Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game: Everything defining today's politics seems connected to that decade. And even though many of these political narratives were around before the Reagan era -- after all, the Marlboro Men of cowboy pulp were going rogue long before Axel Foley (not to mention Sarah Palin) -- they were vastly amplified by the new technologies, corporate reorganizations and federal policy changes of the time.

Recall that the '80s were the first decade when the majority of American households owned a TV and VCR and enjoyed cable service. This was the moment when companies from consumer-product manufacturers to fast-food chains to retail outlets became vertically integrated. That included the all-important media industry, which by 1983 saw just 50 corporations controlling the majority of U.S. newspapers, television stations, magazines, movies and publishing houses. Couple that with the move by Reagan's Federal Communications Commission to end major restrictions on child-focused television marketing, and the result was a media machine that could trap unsuspecting kids in a bubble of political propaganda.

In the 1980s, children didn't see E.T. just in a movie theater -- we saw that anti-government parable about kids fleeing faceless, jack-booted federal agents in our Atari cassettes, Happy Meals, board games, action-figure sets and Reese's Pieces wrappers. We didn't see Mr. T just in Hollywood bit parts -- we saw this offensive caricature of the "angry black man" in the cereal we ate, the Saturday morning cartoons we watched, the Trapper Keepers we used, the pro-wrestling matches we cheered and the A-Team lunch boxes we took to school.

In short, we didn't simply get disparate bits of popular culture -- the 1980s were the first time that kids were subjected to cross-platform marketing throughout the media landscape, and the effects were profound.

Take the change in the economic attitudes of young people. In 1980, a Higher Education Research Institute survey showed that less than two-thirds of college freshmen said being "very well-off financially" was their top priority. By the end of the decade, that number had risen to roughly three-quarters -- and has hovered near that mark ever since. What contributed to the change? A steady '80s diet of of Alex P. Keaton on Family Ties, Ricky Stratton on Silver Spoons and a larger "greed is good" ethos that equated the American Dream with following The Secret of My Success.

Likewise, at the beginning of the 1980s, Gallup polling found just 50 percent of Americans -- still carrying the scars of Vietnam -- expressing confidence in the military. But that number jumped to 85 percent by the end of the decade and has remained high. Why hasn't it dipped back down to early-80s levels, even in the face of bloated defense budgets and controversial wars? Because even as militarism received a short-term boost among adults in the 1980s via Reagan's chest-thumping and martial cheerleading, it was solidified for the long haul among '80s kids through war-glorifying films and martial video games -- not to mention combat-themed toys, which hit their highest sales levels since World War II.

Of course, one could dismiss all this as exaggerating the power of pop culture and entertainment. But since the 1980s began melding entertainment and reality ever more closely -- think of the Nintendo game "Contra" or Reagan citing Rambo when talking about national security -- social scientists have discovered even more evidence that fiction can influence our views of the world as much as fact.

This is particularly the case for children, whose brains do not yet fully distinguish fantasy from reality. None other than Reagan himself underscored that truth in 1983 remarks about the then-primordial video game industry. "Without knowing it, you're being prepared for a new age," he told an audience of kids at Epcot Center. "The computerized radar screen in the cockpit is not unlike the computerized video screen. Watch a 12-year-old take evasive action and score multiple hits while playing 'Space Invaders,' and you will appreciate the skills of tomorrow's pilot."

Today's drone pilots prove Reagan's prescience.

Near the end of the 1980s, political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared that the world was reaching the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution." He was writing about the intellectual triumph of democratic values and free-market principles, but he could have been referring to the entire zeitgeist of the 1980s -- one that the children of the decade have now re-created with a mix of Gordon Gekko economics, Top Gun militarism, Lethal Weapon criminal justice and Cosby Show racial attitudes.

History may not have ended, but we are stuck in a loop, our Walkmen endlessly rewinding and restarting the soundtrack to a movie we've seen too many times. It's time to turn it off -- or at least to recognize that it's still playing.

NOTE: This piece ran on the front page of this past Sunday's Washington Post Outlook section. It is based on Sirota's new book Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now, which is officially released on 3/15.

Today's Anti-Muslim Bigotry Rooted in '80s Pop Culture

2011-03-11T12:18:42-05:00

NOTE: David Sirota's new book Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now is out on 3/15. Read USA Today's new cover story about the book here and pre-order the book here.

The least intriguing aspect of Republican Rep. Peter King's congressional hearing this week on terrorism and the "radicalization in the American Muslim community" is the spectacle's obvious hypocrisy. King was himself a cheerleader of a terrorist group (the Irish Republican Army), and his hearings ignore new government statistics showing that since 9/11, right-wing and white supremacist terrorist plots have outnumbered those of Muslims. Indeed, as the law enforcement data prove, if "radicalization" is a concern, it is at least as much of a problem in the ultraconservative community as it is in the American Muslim community.

King has defended his hearing's narrow focus by saying that "there are a small percentage (of Muslims) who have allied themselves with al-Qaida" and that "the leaders of that community do not face up to that reality (and are) not willing to speak out and condemn this type of radicalization." In the wake of Joseph Stack's kamikaze attack on the IRS, Scott Roeder's killing of abortion provider George Tiller, and Byron Williams' Glenn-Beck-inspired terrorist plot (among other atrocities), King should be saying exactly the same thing about his fellow conservatives -- but he's not.

As I said, this hypocrisy isn't interesting because it's so utterly undeniable. However, what is interesting -- and profoundly telling -- is King's explanation for his behavior. He says simply that "It makes no sense to talk about other (read: non-Muslim) types of extremism."

The remark, of course, typifies a broader sentiment in America and raises the most important "why" question: Why do so many like King see extremist acts by non-Muslims as mere isolated incidents that "make no sense to talk about," yet see extremist acts by Muslims as a systemic problem worthy of military invasions and now congressional witch hunts?

The short answer is 9/11 -- but that's oversimplified. Anti-Muslim sentiment was embedded in American society well before that horrific attack stoked a bigoted backlash. The real answer, as I discovered in researching my upcoming new book, is connected to overwrought Reagan/Bush-era pop culture that first equated "terrorist" with "Muslim."

As film scholar Jack Shaheen discovered, roughly a third of the most blatantly anti-Muslim films of the last century were made in the 1980s alone. These movies used sporadic atrocities committed by individual Islamic extremists (the Lebanon bombing, the Berlin bombing, etc.) to demonize all Muslims. Consequently, Hollywood's go-to villain in the 1980s became the Muslim terrorist -- whether it was "Iron Eagle's" unnamed Middle Eastern country or "Back to the Future's" bazooka-wielding Libyans.

Notice that those two movies were aimed at '80s kids who have now grown up. That was the norm with Islamophobic pop culture in the Reagan/Bush period -- and not just in film. Early '80s editions of the G.I. Joe comic book, for example, had the heroes alternately fighting Iranians and "infiltrating a Persian Gulf nation." Likewise, in the lead-up to the first Gulf War, there were Muslim-demonizing board games for kids like "The Butcher of Baghdad" and "Arabian Nightmare." And, of course, there was the World Wrestling Federation, whose preeminent Bad Guy was the keffiyeh-clad Iron Sheik -- described by one wrestling publication at the time as an "evil hitman (who) shows no mercy in terrorist attacks on the USA's best."

And so what started as a cheap pop culture trope in the 1980s has now become the unquestioned assumption -- the assumption that King's hearings clearly appeal to. His inquisition and the sentiment it represents asks us to continue indulging the stereotypes we were sold as kids, and to ignore what should be the most frightening fact of all: the fact that no matter what stories we were told in the '80s, "radicalization" is a systemic problem, and not limited to any one religious minority.

Five '80s Flicks That Explain How the '80s Still Define Our World

2011-02-28T14:15:02-05:00

My upcoming book Back To Our Future (due out on 3/15) posits that the 1980s--and specifically 1980s pop culture--frames the way we think about major issues today. The decade is the lens through which we see our world. To understand what that means, here are five classic flicks that show how the 1980s still shapes our thinking on government, the "rogue," militarism, race, and even our not-so-distant past.

1. Ghostbusters (1984): Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler, and Winston Zeddmore seem like happy-go-lucky guys, but these are cold, hard military contractors. Between evading the Environmental Protection Agency, charging exorbitant rates for apparition captures, and summoning a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, the merry band shows a Zoul-haunted New York that their for-profit services are far more reliable than those of the Big Apple's wholly inept government. At the same time, the Ghostbusters were providing 1980s audiences with a cinematic version of what would later become the very real Blackwater--and what would be the anti-government, privatize-everything narrative of the twenty-first century.

2. Die Hard (1988): Though the 1980s was setting the stage for the rise of anti-government politics today, it was also creating the Palin-esque "rogue" to conveniently explain the good things government undeniably accomplishes. Hitting the silver screen just a few years after Ollie North's rogue triumphalism, John McClane became the '80s most famous of this "rogue" archetype--a government employee who becomes a hero specifically by defying his police superiors and rescuing hostages from the twin threat of terrorism and his boss's bureaucratic clumsiness. This message is so clear in Die Hard, that in one memorable scene, McClane is yelling at one police lieutenant that the government has become "part of the problem." Die Hard, like almost every national politician today, says government can only work if it gets out of the way of the rogues, mavericks, and rule-breakers within its own midst.

3. Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985): "Sir, do we get to win this time?" So begins the second--and most culturally important--installment of the Rambo series. The question was a direct rip-off of Ronald Reagan's insistence that when it came to the loss in Vietnam, America had been too "afraid to let them win"--them, of course, being the troops. The theory embedded in this refrain is simple: If only meddling politicians and a weak-kneed public had deferred to the Pentagon, then we would have won the conflict in Southeast Asia. Repeated ad nauseum since the 1980s, the "let them win" idea now defines our modern discussion of war. If only we let the Pentagon's Rambos do whatever they want with no question or oversight whatsoever, then we can decisively conclude the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan...and we can win the neverending "War on Terror."

4. Rocky III (1982): Before the 2008 presidential campaign devolved into cartoonish media portrayals of the palatable "post-racial" Barack Obama and his allegedly unpalatable "overly racial" pastor Jeremiah Wright, there was Rocky III more explicitly outlining this binary and bigoted portrayal of African Americans. Here was Rocky Balboa as the determined but slightly ignorant stand-in for White Middle America. Surveying the diverse landscape, the Italian Stallion could see only two kinds of black people--on one side the suave, smooth, post-racial Apollo Creed, and on the other side the enraged, animalistic Clubber Lang. Rocky thus gravitated to the former, and reflexively feared the latter, essentially summarizing twenty-first-century White America's often over-simplistic and bigoted attitudes toward the black community today.

5. The Big Chill (1983): This college reunion flick from Lawrence Kasdan is hilarious, morose, and seemingly nostalgic for the halcyon days of the past; but powerfully propagandistic in its negative framing of the 1960s. Over the course of the film's weekend, character after character berates the 1960s as an overly decadent age that may have been rooted in idealism, but was fundamentally destined to fail. Sound familiar? Of course it does. The 1980s-created narrative of the Bad Sixties can still be found in everything from national Tea Party protests to never-ending culture-war battles on local school boards. The message is always the same: If only America can emulate the Big Chillers and get past its Sixties immaturity and liberalism, everything will be A-okay.

Hickenlooper's Class Solidarity

2011-02-15T16:13:13-05:00

The Grand Junction Sentinel headline today says it all: "Hickenlooper Proposes Huge Budget Cuts." Yes, while Colorado's new governor campaigned on promises of being an education governor, he has just proposed historically massive cuts to Colorado's already comparatively underfunded public schools. If that wasn't enough, he had the nerve to pretend he isn't choosing this path for his state, telling reporters "There's nothing I've ever grappled with as long and hard as" education cuts.

Evidently, we should all shed tears for the allegedly remorseful guv... except, we shouldn't. Because he's as much making this choice as circumstances are dictating it.

Yes, it's true - the new governor must propose a balanced budget and the legislature cannot raise revenues in the short-term. Thus, the education cuts. However, it is also true that this governor has been running around Colorado insisting he cares about education while simultaneously saying he opposes efforts to raise public revenues through any changes to Colorado's hideously regressive tax code.

That's right, two weeks ago, our millionaire governor said he wants to make taxes on his corporate friends even more regressive (read: lower) than they already are. Then last week, at the very moment he was putting the finishing touches on his huge education cuts, the governor said he would use his bully pulpit to oppose a ballot measure to make Colorado's income tax slightly more progressive and in the process raise revenues to close the state's budget gap. Though this ballot measure would mean the same or lower taxes for most households in Colorado, Hickenlooper apparently doesn't like that it would slightly raise taxes on his fellow millionaires - even though it would also rescue the schools he publicly purports to care about.

This is class solidarity at its most powerful - a millionaire politician going to the wall for his millionaire brethren, with the hope that if he just stages enough photo-ops wearing pajamas while reading to kids, everyone will forget what he's really all about.

But now it's all too obvious to ignore. When you put Hick's budget cuts next to his royalist posture on taxes, we see that when it comes to a choice between defending the extremely wealthy and saving the basic public services the rest of us non-millionaires rely on, our new governor has decided which side he's on: Not ours.

ADDENDUM: Two other points to note. First, if you believe Hick's mantra that tax cuts will create jobs, read this Associated Press story and then STFU. Also, isn't it telling that within the 24 hour period that these budget cuts were announced, Colorado Sen. Michael "Education Is My Priority" Bennet (ie. the former school superintendent) isn't protesting the cuts, but instead insisting that the Obama budget doesn't cut domestic spending enough? Oh, that's right, I forgot - he was just Sen. Education on the campaign trail - in Washington, he's more like Sen. Thurston Bennet the IIId. My bad.

Idiocracy By the Numbers: New Data Show Many Americans Have No Idea They Receive Government Benefits

2011-02-10T12:31:44-05:00

How aggressively stupid is America when it comes to our debates over taxes, budgets and the size of government? That's been difficult to answer with any precision, beyond simply citing the Tea Partier who famously told his congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare." But now we have some hard numbers to tell us how deep this ignorance really goes.

According to new data crunched by Cornell University's Suzanne Mettler, large numbers of Americans who receive benefits from government social programs nonetheless tell pollsters they "have not used a government social program." And when I mean large, I mean large. For example, a majority of those who have received federally subsidized student loans, 44 percent of Social Security beneficiaries and 40 percent of G.I. bill recipients say they have not used a government social program.

These numbers go a long way to explaining why the economic debate in our country is so insane. Indeed, at a moment when taxes have hit a historic low, most politicians -- from presidents to governors to state legislators -- insist we must further cut taxes and shrink allegedly "Big Government." And they are finding a receptive audience in the general public because, as the numbers show, so many Americans wrongly believe they don't receive direct financial benefits from government.

Obviously, this aggressive stupidity politically props up the arguments of the anti-government right. With so many Americans evidently not knowing they receive benefits from the government, it's easy for opportunistic politicians to seize on our "me-first, screw everybody else" culture and misleadingly deride the government as some distant entity that exclusively benefits the "other." And if you don't know that, in fact, you are "the other," then you are more likely to conclude that that opportunistic politician is correct, and more likely to cheer on that opportunistic politician as he/she slashes the programs you directly rely on.

This, of course, is what Idiocracy looks like in practice -- a nation whose politics is inspired by "greed is good" self-interest, but whose voters often don't even know what "self-interest" actually is. In this case, we get many beneficiaries of government services actually cheering on cuts to their own benefits, not because they are ideologically against government -- but because they don't even think they get those benefits, when in fact they do. It's beyond the ignorance of not knowing that Medicare is a government program a la the fool who screamed "keep your government hands off my Medicare" -- it's not even knowing you are the beneficiaries of the policies you say you hate.

Beyond any single issue, that kind of aggressive stupidity is the true crisis in America.

America's Dictator Addiction

2011-02-03T12:39:11-05:00

As the Obama administration continues to treat the U.S.-taxpayer-financed dictator Hosni Mubarak with kid gloves, media outlets like Salon have rightly pointed out that our support of undemocratic tyrants is not limited to Egypt. It has become more the norm than the exception. The question is: why? Why are we, a supposed beacon of democracy, so invested in so many dictatorships?

Obviously, there are many answers to that question. Some of it has to do with imperial aspirations, as taboo as that is to even mention. Some of it has to do with good ol' fashioned Big Money lobbying, as I showed yesterday. And some of it has to do with what Dr. Martin Luther King identified in his Riverside Church speech: We back dictators over democracy because we "refuse to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments" -- profits often guaranteed by dictators where they wouldn't be so guaranteed by popularly elected governments.

As powerful as these motives are, however, there is still one other factor at play: addiction.

Dictators are, in a way, like a drug. We start out backing them, perhaps thinking it will be a momentary alliance, just like a person might take a single hit from the pipe. But then, the subjugated population begins to revolt, just like the body begins to revolt without the drug. So we start intensifying our support for the dictator to keep the increasingly restive population down, just like the addict starts to consume more drugs to prevent the body from going into a more painful withdrawal.

This cycle of addiction then snowballs (to badly mix metaphors). The more angry the subjugated population becomes at the dictator and us for backing him, the more we feel an urgency to help prop up the dictator for fear of an ever-more powerful backlash against that dictator and, by extension, us. It's like the addict thinking the only way to survive and mitigate pain is to keep upping the dosage.

Of course, the only way to truly fix the problem is some sort of intervention -- to break the cycle on our own terms, rather than effectively overdose. Instead of, say, unendingly backing dictators like the Shah of Iran until the repression creates the condition for a catastrophic fundamentalist revolution (overdose), we should be looking for ways to proactively break this addiction cycle completely as a way to avoid such catastrophe.

That's what the Egypt protests still (amazingly) provides us right now -- a way to break that cycle without helping to further create the conditions for catastrophe. Right now, we have an out -- protests in the street still give us a fleeting opportunity to back away from our addiction to dictatorship (in this case, the Mubarak dictatorship). Incredibly (and thankfully), despite our 30 year backing of Mubarak, it doesn't seem like we are at that overdose point yet -- that point of, say, an Iran-style revolution based on raw anti-American anger. And indeed, if we are truly worried about an Iran-style conflagration in Egypt, the best way to try to avoid it isn't to back the dictator creating such a backlash - it's to stop backing the dictator.

Certainly, there will be unpleasant moments if we finally decide break our dictator addiction -- just like its painful for the junkie to go cold turkey, we may feel uncomfortable with newly democratic governments choosing to do things we don't like. But if we continue taking more hits of Mubarak's dictator drug, we will be doing our part to guarantee that much more painful overdose, because we will be further aligning ourselves with the regime the subjugated Egyptian populace so despises. And more generally, if we perpetuate this cycle of dictator addiction by continuing to so forcefully back all those other dictatorships around the globe, we will be helping guarantee other overdoses in the future.

How Money Has Framed the Egypt Debate

2011-02-02T14:04:09-05:00

The question of why the American government has been so hesitant to push dictator Hosni Mubarak from power is typically answered in our media through the construct of "pragmatism." If Mubarak leaves, the talking point goes, there could be a new government in Egypt that could threaten "regional stability" with an Iranian-style revolution. This talking point is both bigoted and imperial: It assumes that all Muslims and revolutions are monolithically the same (despite Egypt being Sunni and Arab and Iran being Shiite and Persian), and it assumes that "regional stability" is automatically threatened if a nation exists in the Mideast that isn't under our thumb.

Nonetheless, the "pragmatism" talking point persists, and thus our government continues to deal with the dictator with kid gloves. But here's the thing: We're playing footsie with Mubarak not just because of the self-serving neoconservative construct of "pragmatism" -- but also because of cold, hard cash. Check this dispatch out from the Politico:

Two of the biggest lobbying firms representing the Egyptian government made more than $400,000 during the last six months of 2010 lobbying lawmakers, military officials and their staffs on behalf of the embattled government, according to newly filed disclosure reports. In the period ending just weeks before Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's dramatic announcement Tuesday, Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta's firm, the Podesta Group, brought in $279,000 and made about 30 contacts, largely with Senate staffers, according to the report.

It's boring saying again what I so often say (to the point of writing an entire 2006 book about it called Hostile Takeover), but it's worth repeating right now: Most issues that enter our political arena are influenced by our system of legalized corruption and bribery.

The Egyptian crisis, though far away and though about our own (supposed) democratic ideals, is no exception. Power brokers in both parties are making huge money backing a brutal dictatorship -- and the government officials those power brokers influence are consequently backing away from their own purported commitment to democracy. It's cause and effect in a simple political machine -- money goes in, behavior comes out. And as I argued in my book, money doesn't just buy legislative favors. It buys the very language and postures that confine our political debate within very narrow parameters -- in this case, it frames the Egyptian situation as a choice between "pragmatism" (i.e. backing the dictator) and potential terrorism (i.e. allowing Egyptians to democratically elect their own government). Indeed, look at how Toby Moffett, a Democratic congressman turned high-paid Mubarak lobbyist, put it:

"This is a very important strategic ally of the United States and it's about the country not flipping over into the hands of somebody who wants to make it anything other than a secular state," he said.

This "Stick with Mubarak or Get Terrorists" bumper sticker slogan is exactly the same thing you are hearing from so many high-profile American politicians these days as they attempt to pretend they support democracy, while cautioning against removing the despot. Those politicians are framing the debate in exactly the terms the lobbyists want them to. That artificial framing may be somewhat expensive to achieve, but it is quite effective. And while it's not complicated -- it is destructive.

Key Investors Tout Immelt as Vehicle for Corporations to Sculpt Obama's Economic Policy

2011-02-01T12:33:01-05:00

As I've long maintained, the business press is often the best place to get the real story about what's going on in American politics. That's because it's focused almost exclusively on telling its investor-readers how to make money, rather than on the political media's manufactured red-versus-blue story lines -- story lines that distract us from our transpartisan oligarchy. A particularly good example of the value of the business press in telling the real political story comes from the latest issue of Businessweek.

After a week of the political press corps in Washington telling us how "pro-business" President Obama is for appointing General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt to a top White House position, Businessweek lets us know what those in the know think this is really all about: Profits, corporate control and insider information. Check out this excerpt:

To some investors, [Immelt] taking the role is practically a fiduciary duty. Stephen Hoedt, a Cleveland-based analyst for Key Private Bank, whose parent company owns 17 million GE shares, says Immelt may be "able to affect policy at the highest level." Brian James, co-head of research at fund manager Loomis Sayles, says he hopes Immelt, a Republican, gets "some insights into what's going to impact GE coming out from Washington," adding "this appointment simply can't be bad for GE."...

Given the uncertainty in GE's home market, not to mention opportunities to participate in earmarked projects and policy debates, Sterne Agee analyst Nick Heymann argues, Washington is a good place for Immelt to be. "This is where the opportunities to influence are," he says.

So there it is. Unlike our political elite who try to portray everything as a grand story of good and evil, of statesmen and Great Men, the people with Big Money on the line are open about what this appointment really is: Namely, the institutionalization of corporate influence -- the kind that likely means bigger profits for job outsourcing firms like General Electric. As they say, Immelt's new job will likely provide a current CEO with power to shape the policy that governs his company, as well as exclusive advanced (read: insider) knowledge of those policies.

This is exactly why I've said on my radio show that for Obama the Immelt appointment isn't about creating jobs. How could it be, considering GE has been one of the biggest outsourcers in America? No, for Obama this is about cold hard cash -- and campaign contributions in specific. In putting a sitting CEO* inside the economic apparatus of the government, he is broadcasting to corporate America that they now have a direct conduit to policymaking -- with the unstated by strongly implied suggestion that the conduit is open to those with the resources to pay up in 2012.

In that sense, I guess Obama has achieved a modicum of the transparency he promised: He has fully formalized the pay-to-play corruption that was once hidden from view, but is now right out in the open.

*It's one thing for a White House to hire someone who leaves his/her job as an executive to work full-time in the government. That's bad enough (think: Dick Cheney). But it's quite another thing to take a sitting CEO and make him/her simultaneously a top White House economic policymaker. The dual roles -- CEO and government policymaker -- define the phrase "conflict of interest."

'A Sharp, Dizzying History Lesson That Packs a Punch'

2011-01-31T12:33:28-05:00

I'm about seven weeks away from the launch of my third book, which is entitled BACK TO OUR FUTURE: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now.. This is usually the time I start freaking out and fearing for the worst. But in the last week, the book has gotten a huge boost from the publishing industry's three premiere pre-publication review magazines.

The first came from Kirkus Reviews (which, incidentally, slammed my last book). Here's an excerpt of their review:

Born in 1975 and a proud child of the '80s, In These Times senior editor and nationally syndicated newspaper columnist Sirota ponders what it means when America has suddenly started "speaking the ancient 1980s dialect of my youth."...The scope of the author's period knowledge is indisputable, and he parlays his experience as a Democratic strategist into politically charged discussions about the anti-governmental preaching on The A-Team, Ronald Reagan's questionable approach to Vietnam veterans and the bulletproof vigor of movies like Rambo, Red Dawn and Top Gun. While applauding the morale-boosting heft of Nike's 1988 "Just Do It" campaign, Sirota evenhandedly criticizes today's reality-TV-obsessed, attention-starved Facebook generation for its self-centeredness as something "the 1980s did to us, and what the 1980s mentally makes us want to be."...Maybe most important is Sirota's chapters on the impact The Cosby Show and others like it had on '80s black America and, now, on Obama's "postracial" image.

A sharp, dizzying history lesson that packs a punch.

Then, at the end of last week, Book Forum published a review saying this:

"Sirota has picked through the decade's cultural detritus to reconstruct the scene of a generation's ideological poisoning...In Sirota's telling, this transformation was a group effort, with much of the credit going to Rambo, Rocky, "Dirty Harry' Callahan, the A-Team, Michael Jordan, Alex Keaton, Crockett and Tubbs, Murtaugh and Riggs, Maverick and Goose, Charles Barkley, the insipid yuppies of Thirtysomething, and Hulk Hogan and Sergeant Slaguther...

He tells the tale with wit and subtlety - stressing (the) way that adept mythmaking, wedded to new media technologies, exerted a strong pull on his mind and those of others who feasted on '80s pop culture, and in the process transformed (the) nation."

And now this from Publishers Weekly this morning:

Sirota (The Uprising) ushers readers back to the era of big money and bigger hair, the yuppie and the Gipper to show how the 1980s transformed--and continues to influence--America's culture and politics. As Carter's presidency began to crumble in 1978, a revival of back-to-the-'50s theater, television, and film productions (Grease, Happy Days, La Bamba) overtook grittier 1960s imagery of "urbanity, ethnicity and strife" and came to define the Reagan era in a country eager to forget--or unwilling to learn from--the failure of Vietnam...His arguments are well informed and sparkle with wit and irreverence.

Obviously, I'm pretty psyched that the early reviews are so positive. Writing is an incredibly tough way to make a living, and it can be really demoralizing - so this is a really big psychological boost. And I hope after reading those reviews you will pre-ordering the book. If you like my work, are interested in the 1980s and the decade's relevance today, please consider it!

Rahm Emanuel and the Triumph of Feudalism

2011-01-26T17:03:06-05:00

In the saga of longtime D.C. resident Rahm Emanuel trying to use a truckload of financial industry money to buy the mayoralty of Chicago, columnist John Kass of the Chicago Tribune really nails what the debate over Emanuel's residency is really all about: The rule of law. Here's an excerpt of this must-read column:

The law is dry, without personality. And whether it fits your politics, whether it hurts your favorite mayoral candidate, it is the law. It is the law even if it helps those other candidates.

The law in Illinois is absolutely unambiguous in the matter concerning Emanuel's candidacy. A candidate must reside in Chicago for a year prior to the mayoral election... And Rahm wasn't living in Chicago. He was in Washington. And despite all the spin, he wasn't a general in the army serving his nation. He was in the top political job, White House chief of staff, serving the political interests of President Barack Obama.

Rahm has all that big money behind him, that Chicago corporate and business muscle, and more money from the coasts... It reinforces in the mind of the people that in Chicago, election laws apply only to those without clout. And when you hope to bend the law to suit your politics, even if the politics are the right politics, there's another cost. You're not talking about the rule of law anymore. You're talking about feudalism.

Emanuel is relying on this feudalism to vault him to the top job in the Windy City. He is, in other words, banking on the elitism embedded in our politics -- the kind that says laws apply only when they help the rich and powerful.

As Kass says, whether you like the residency law or not, it is the law -- and has been since the 1870s. Moreover, Emanuel is not some form of unintended collateral damage of this statute -- that is to say, he's not being accidentally tripped up by a law that really isn't intended to stop him. This law is specifically designed to prevent people like him from doing what he's trying to do, so as to ensure that Chicago has a mayor who actually has a minimum amount of ties to the city. Again, you may not agree with the law's intent, but it was passed by a democratic process, has been on the books for more than a century and is explicitly tailored to prevent the Emanuels of this world from doing what he's trying to do -- and if you believe in the rule of law, then it's not really clear how you can also be for making a singular special exception for one person. Just like you can't be half pregnant, either the law is the law -- or it isn't.

Then again, this is 21st-century America where laws increasingly seem only to apply to the non-rich and non-powerful. Indeed, the idea of an outside interloper like Emanuel dropping into a city and insisting he is above that law is grotesque, but sadly, it has become the norm in American politics. If, despite this, he is permitted to circumvent the law, gets put on the ballot and Chicago voters then elect him to office, then frankly those voters deserve the corporatist administration they will almost certainly get.

GOP Mantra: For Me, but Not for Thee

2011-01-24T15:05:32-05:00

"For me, but not for thee" -- this could be the motto of 21st-century elitists, or Republican politicians (which are more or less the same thing) and two stories this week show how that mantra works in practice.

The first comes from ThinkProgress about how 97 percent of Republican congresspeople are keeping their taxpayer subsidized health insurance while voting to deny that kind of health insurance to other Americans... because, you know, government health care is great for Republican politicians, but apparently too lavish for the Rest of Us:

According to a ThinkProgress analysis, seven, or just three percent of all the Republicans in the House have agreed to give up their insurance while they vote to repeal coverage for some 32 million Americans...The majority of the GOP still sees nothing wrong in purchasing tax-payer subsidized insurance while trying to deny coverage to the taxpayer.

The second story comes from Ohio's new archconservative governor, John Kasich. Here's an excerpt from the Akron Beacon Journal's editorial explaining the situation:

John Kasich kept his promise. When word surfaced that the governor would pay his top aides significantly higher salaries than paid during the Ted Strickland years, Kasich explained that his overall staff budget would be lower than his predecessor spent...Kasich suffers from a flaw in his logic. He argues that he must pay his staff members more because he is competing with the private sector for their talent...

(The) disconnect involves the governor's harsh words for many in the public sector, especially unions, about failing to understand the principle of sacrifice. Kasich insists they make do with less. Then, he turns around and pays his chief of staff $47,000 a year more than the Strickland chief of staff.

So when it comes to Gov. Kasich getting a top-notch, taxpayer-funded entourage around himself, he says he needs to pay employees a whole helluva lot more than they made under previous administrations. But when it comes to state services for his constituents, Gov. Kasich says taxpayers should cut pay for state workers and thus, by his own logic, not attract a top-notch workforce to deliver those services.

As I said -- the attitude among these Republican elitists is "For me, but not for thee."

Maddow Shows How the 'National' Media Isn't National at All

2011-01-20T13:24:31-05:00

Last night, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow rightly asked a taboo question of our "national" media: Why has it largely ignored what the FBI says is a major terrorist bombing attempt on Spokane, Washington? In the segment, you can see she cites examples of the "national" media hyperventilating about bomb scares that ended up being false alarms. She cites these examples to wonder why, in the face of a bomb scare that's actually real, the same "national" media has ignored the Spokane story?

I have an answer to that question -- it's an answer I've previously written about in a 2006 post entitled "It's the Geography, Stupid." As you can see from the clips Maddow cites, the "national" media has devoted wall-to-wall coverage to bomb scares that have occurred specifically in New York and Washington, D.C. That's not a coincidence from a "national" media that isn't "national" at all. Indeed, what passes for a "national" media these days is almost exclusively New York/D.C.-based media that focuses almost exclusively on New York/D.C.-centric stories.

Watch the typical news broadcast on a given night and you'll see what I'm talking about. Despite having satellite feeds and news facilities all over America, almost all of the "national" shows you will see are nonetheless primarily featuring anchors and guests living in, working in and focusing on Washington and New York.

Now, obviously, New York and Washington are important places, deserving of ongoing news coverage. But in a nation of 300 million people, they are not the only place where news happens -- and certainly not the only place that has worthy anchors and guests.

And yet, that's what our "national" media effectively suggests with its tunnel-vision focus on New York and D.C. to the exclusion of the Rest of Us. It suggests that what happens outside the New York/D.C. bubble is not important -- and if it is, it's only important in how it affects New York/D.C. A good example of this is the Tucson shooting -- most of the "national" media discussion in the aftermath of the tragedy focused on how it would affect future debates in Washington.

Now, Maddow courageously provides us another even more telling and undeniable example with the lack of coverage devoted to the Spokane bomb.

Why haven't the "national" media covered it in any serious way? Because the story is happening outside of the New York/D.C. media bubble -- i.e. a place that the "national" media and political elite see as an unimportant Siberia. It isn't being covered, in other words, because while it's a serious story affecting the faceless masses, it doesn't affect that New York/D.C. political and media elite in any personal or professional way.

The problem with this, of course, is larger than any one story -- even one about domestic terrorism in the Pacific Northwest. The "national" media's New York/D.C.-centric nature helps explain why the parameters of our entire political discourse are so skewed on every issue, and why this "national" media so often presents policy proposals as "centrist" even when those policy proposals are nowhere near the center of national public opinion. It's because many of these fringe policy ideas -- like, say, cutting Social Security -- are indeed "moderate" and "centrist" within the confines of elite social circles in New York and Washington. So to a "national" media disproportionately oriented to reflect only those circles, such policies seem "centrist" -- even when they clearly aren't.

As I said, "it's the geography, stupid" -- and because we've allowed our "national" discourse to become a homogenized argument primarily between competing New Yorkers and Washingtonians, we get a political and media class that is increasingly out of touch with the Rest of Us.

What the U.S.-China Summit Is Really All About (Hint: It's Not About Preserving American Jobs)

2011-01-19T12:17:14-05:00

No, it isn't about getting tough on trade and currency manipulation. And no, it isn't about anything to do with human rights or the environment. As Bloomberg News suggests, it's all about serving the multinational corporate class that underwrite America's politicians:

Chief executive officers from Microsoft Corp. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will be among the corporate leaders the Obama administration is bringing together today for a meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao aimed at expanding U.S. business interests in China.

CEOs Steve Ballmer of Microsoft and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman will be joined by General Electric Co.'s Jeffrey Immelt, Jim McNerney of Boeing Co. and 10 other U.S. business leaders for the meeting, the administration announced.

Is there a similar meeting being set up by the White House between President Hu and, say, labor leaders? Do I even need to ask? Absolutely not, especially considering that "expanding U.S. business interests in China" is mediaspeak for "moving production facilities to China" - which, unto itself, is a fancier way of saying "outsourcing more American jobs abroad."