Nature Abhors a Vacuum but so do Wingnuts: The Bailout and our National Security

Taxpayers may be forced to bail out Wall Street today, but don't forget that this crisis is
actually a victory. Who really won? Ronald Reagan and his army of conservative operatives who have been selling off, systematically dismantling and scorning the guardians of the public sector--for decades now. And this has happened across all sectors of government, including agencies responsible for national security.

This philosophy directly impacted me as a child. My mom, my sisters and I packed up and left our home in the late 70's--in the wake of the conservative revolution in California. My mother was a school nurse--and seen as an unnecessary drag on the public budget. She lost her job.

Theories of market efficiency and principles of competition are helpful in organizational management, including government. But the lack of public confidence in American finances that precipitated today's crisis is not an accident. It is an outcome. Conservative lip service to ideas like free markets and a strong defense produced neither. These "values"--while
excellent campaign rhetoric--were never actually turned into priorities for policy making. I witnessed these effects first hand while working on Capitol Hill during the 1990s. One of the reasons Congress stopped doing thorough oversight at that time was because very few were asking hard questions. Among Newt Gingrich's first moves as Speaker was to wipe out
much of the institutional memory of the House of Representatives. Long term staff--along with their issue expertise--were eliminated. The science and technology experts dedicated to Congress in the Office of Technology Assessment were axed along with their organization. Huge numbers of committee staff disappeared. The bipartisan staff of the caucus system were
booted--eliminating one of the built-in ways for Members to get to know each other outside their party identification. The Democratic Study Group is perhaps the best known casualty. It provided unmatched rapid response help on issues -- and it was so effective that it had dozens of Republican members.

The results of this legislative lobotomy led to long-term structural damage to our democracy-- with dire consequences for individual Americans. The Republicans' elimination of public sector knowledge created a vacuum that was then outsourced to conservative think tanks, political allies and commercial lobbyists. No issue has been more damaged by this cavalier attitude about institutional memory that our nation's security.

Why? Because commercial interests don't transfer naturally to public service. For the former, its about expanding a business plan, for the latter, a larger cause, ostensibly for the common good.

National security is a slow-burning crisis in our country. Don't even get me started on lack of attention to terrorism after 1991. Today, the most obvious example of negligence on security oversight is the fact that it took four years into the Iraq war to get a counter-insurgency doctrine, making civilian protection paramount. Why? Partly because the conservatives in charge of Congress failed to learn the lessons of the 1990s. From Somalia to Bosnia, our Army and Marines were conducting peace and stability operations and reporting back immense shifts in threat environments. What did Congress do? Declare a readiness crisis because we weren't adhering to Cold War standards.

The Program on Government Oversight reports that between 2000 and 2006, contract spending by the government more than doubled, going from $200 billion to $420 billion dollars. Much of this increase happened in national security spending. Yet we still have a huge lack of skilled personnel in our government to deal with it. Conservatives--who constantly attack " lazy bureaucrats"--have created a situation where contractor oversight itself has been outsourced! This is like going from drinking the kool-aid to mixing the kool-aid--to soaking in a kool-aid jacuzzi.

My personal low-point happened just a few years back, on a trip to see missile defense in Alaska. The industry reps were the only ones who could answer questions from Hill staff in our "classified" briefings. When I pointed out weaknesses in the high tech system (obtained on a public university website) our guide growled: "that's secret!" It was not. But the rest of the staff took note. Of course, his lobbyist colleagues had no problem following us around the state picking up bar tabs--or our private rail car up the Seward Peninsula, or on our chartered fishing boat off Kodiak Island, where we spent 2 hours with the Navy Seals and 8 catching Halibut. Out of our large group, four of us (including the military liason) were continually appalled. What was worrisome was that most of the other staff didn't know that they should have been picking their jaws up off the floor the entire time.

Last fall, on a flight from Denver to DC, I sat next to an Air Force Officer. A friendly guy, I sighed when he started spouting Rush Limbaugh talking points about the election. So I asked him how he saw private interests impacting his role as a military officer. He didn't hesitate. "They are ruining the Air Force" he said. "I'm a missileer. I need to be the one who makes the decisions about operational procedure and launch, but the defense contractor who writes our instruction manuals makes the language so confusing, that we have to have them in the room when we make decisions" I asked him what he did about it. "I complained and they just laughed and said they would wait me out."

His story, in a nutshell, is what happens when our elected leaders privatize the memory of how you keep us safe. Fundamental national security decisions have stopped being part of a larger cause and started being part of a business plan expansion.

These days, I travel around the country training women candidates how to talk about real security. While they all recognize the value of a strong military, they question why diplomacy isn't given more credit, or why items like levees for New Orleans, and medical personnel aren't national security priorities. They don't see this as a guns versus butter tradeoff. Indeed, most fundamentally understand (like the Army) that the world has changed. A strong military remains important, but public health staff are defense against pandemic disease, roads and bridges that don't crumble are critical infrastructure.

So my mom, the California school nurse, was a security asset before her time. But in reality, our leaders remain stuck in the seventies. I had to laugh during last night's debate when Governor Palin kept telling Senator Biden that he was "looking backward". Not that she's from Alaska--given my impression of that state's outright sense of entitlement to kool aid jacuzzis-- but that Biden has been one of the most forward looking, most responsible Senators on issues of foreign policy and security in the US Congress for decades.

Yep. Palin would have fired my mom, too. Even today, with the House passing the bailout and despite the fact that the sun has finally set on Reagan's "morning in America." the myth about salvation through unfettered privatization and public sector destruction has not quite run its course. I pray that we don't have a national security equivalent to the Wall Street crisis.

And I hope the obsolete rhetoric fades away after election 08-- just like the shiny mirages in the Mojave desert that disappeared in the rear-view mirror as we drove to my grandparents house in New Mexico.

Comments

[catfood73]

Great post, Lorelei. Thanks for the reminders of what's happened to Congress since our glory days at Grinnell. I also echo XCITIZEN's recommendation of Klein's "The Shock Doctrine."

[chasemonster]

We can flush a trillion dollars down the toilets of Iraq and then dump another trillion dollars down the sewers of Wall Street, just so long as America's poor don't get to see one red cent of it.
Because they are such a drag on our economy.
This isn't Russia, you know!

[larry278]

Is it possible to coin a new word to replace 'oversight' as House Committee on Oversight? As I recall one popular use of oversight is, "It was my oversight. I never saw it.". That implies that you never say it; a cynic may infer that you weren't looking for it either.

[Jennie90291]

I'm disappointed in the "oversight" of Waxman's committee A. since he's my congressman, and B. because I thought oversight meant " before the action happens" as opposed to way after the crime has been committed. Lorelei, the image of Eric Prince testifying before the committee stays in my mind after reading your post. As Tennessee Williams once wrote, "There's an air of mendacity...." You bring oversight where none existed, Lorelei, and I wish you'd run for office, or at the very least, no, forget it, there is no other option, you must run for office because you'd become the unafraid voice for oversight that I thought I had already voted for in Henry.

[Fabini]

I am thankful I found this blog. I shall go back and read your past blogs. Your views on privatization resonate with me.

[Jackalheadedgod]

Thanks

[Jackalheadedgod]

This is most disturbing. I am especially distressed whenever I read about the goings on and the attitudes at the Air Force. I have been long confounded by the bible thumping at their academy in Colorado Springs. Their iconic chapel has become a symbol of a very worrisome development; evangelizing the guardians of our missile defense system. Now we find out that when they are not being goaded by the likes of Ted Haggard, they are listening to that fathead, Rush Limbaugh. We are screwed.

God help us.
Jack

[XCITIZEN]

Lorelei, thanks very much for an excellent post. It fits perfectly in with Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine - the neocons are privatizing everything from Education to War - it's got to stop.

Everybody reading this, please go out and get The Shock Doctrine - it's in paperback. It's a MUST READ!

Thanks again Lorelei!

[WritusMaximus]

Any word for them dem wing nuts who supported deregulation and the many more who voted for the bailout? You are not biased, just forgetful?

Spare me the cherry pickin' and give us the truth and the whole truth at that.

[DCdefensewonk]

Sorry WritusMaximus. There is no comparison. However, I take your point that the fever to deregulate, run against the left, and privatize is contagious in both parties. And it is unacceptable in both parties.

[Synoia]

A health economy, positive balance of payment, and positive cash flow into the government are the foundations for national security.

Without a healthy economy, what do we have that needs defending? The rich?

We need to ask the question:
What are we defending?
How many Nuclear submarines (and other very expensive toys) do we need to defend marriage between one man & one woman? Or to eliminate a woman's right to choose? Or to protect Wall St (they do a wonderful job every 70 years or so of killing the economy on their own)?

How do we protect our National Security from:
General Motor's stunning corporate incompetence where they loose market share in every one of their market segments for 30 years?
Ford's complete inability to bring their fuel efficient European models into the US market?
The enormous cost of our dreadful "Health Care" System?
Guns before Butter?

If we don't get control of the economic issue, we don;t need "national Security" as we'll have nothing worth defending.
1. We need to get a grip on a National Security, is to cut the DoD budget by 75%, so we can put that money to productive us.
2. We need change our culture so Democracy permeates all our institutions, Corporations, Government Departments, and and other Institution.

Feudal Baronies are a bad form of Governance, yet we continue to use it in all our institutions. We know that democracy is a better form of Governance, yet will not use it in our

[darker]

I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment!

We cannot count on hearing truth from Republicans.
Years of Republicans trashing America got to be their BAD HABIT.

We cannot afford more years of Repubs. who CANNOT GOVERN and DON'T WANT TO GOVERN.
They just corrupt. It's CORRUPTION VALUES they want.
No more years for Republican corruption.

[freshnotbitter]

The problem was PHIL GRAMM.

At the end of the Clinton administration he used the political momentum of Gingrich's republican revot of 94 (contract with america) to push on us all some legislation which repealed the firewall between the banking system and the rest of the financial world which had existed since the time of FDR for the purpose of preventing another great depression.

Result: When the speculators on Wall Street got the chance they infected the banking system with their greedy speculative schemes. The casino on Wall Street moved into the banks on Main Street. In the absence of a firewall we did what we should have all expected: We called 911 and asked for the US Taxpayer firedepartment to come and put out the fire when banks began to fail under the weight of massive Wall Street speculation. The result? A massive bail out that now has moved the casino from Wall Street, to the banks on Main Street, and finally, into the Treasury department of the United States.

Welcome to Argentina.

It is clear as day, folks:

PHIL GRAMM would be the Treasury Secretary in a McCain administration.

His wife sat on the board of Enron. He sat on the board of Swiss bank. Phil Gramm is nuts. Phil Gramm is McCain's campaign chairman.

Vote for McCain and you are voting to cut your own throat.

[island-in-alabama]

I hope you're right Lorelei.

The free market is not accountable to America. America's government must be accountable to its people. When government is accountable to a nation, the government is forced to be effective.

We must separate the machinery of business from government. The two were purposefully integrated to destroy our government's effectiveness. That destruction fundamentally undermines the security of our nation.

No nation can maintain an effective defense when national cohesion, governmental effectiveness, economic underpinnings and national infrastructure are crippled - as has happened under the policies you decry.

We must understand that privatizing governmental function was not done out of misguided belief that the private sector could be more efficient or effective even if it was sold as such.

Privatizing government makes it easier to loot from the public trough, increases the cost, decreases the value, and destroyes the cohesion of, our government. Our society's cohesion, in turn, is damaged by a relentless onslaught of cultural division, anti-intellectualism and bigotry. The hate machine (talk radio, Fox) parroted by the Air Force officer are part of this destructive wingnut strategy.

Americans must face up to the fact that those who design these policies, and use tools like The Shock Doctrine, are America's real enemy (cancer). Until then, we're just fighting symptoms.

Destroying (intellectually) the ridiculous idea of privatizing government functions is a key to recovering our nation, but our problems are deeper than this. As Hoelder points out, they are not entirely unique in history either.

[BlackHeli]

After reading the posts I had my IQ retested, it turned out to be 55, thus too high to post again. Ciao!

[BlackHeli]

Please Make Sure your comments support the Author, or we will have to abort them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[GatoPreto]

Fantastic post! You put the tail on the donkey (and it's about time somebody did too). You've just gained a new regular reader. Bravo!

[jhNY]

The responsibilities of our federal government have been farmed out to corporations at great increase in cost to taxpayers, for which we receive fewer services. The treasury has now been delivered over by corporatists to corporations, for the purpose of making good their debts. Both political parties joined in a contest to see who could more cheefully deliver the debt to the people. And these corporate terrorists, having threatened world depression were they not relieved of their obligations, now being given all they wanted, will doubtless like all the other blackmailers in crime, slink away with the dough and never threaten us again...
We have no national security. We have a national security industry. We have no health care. We have a health care industry. Distrust in the doings of government institutions is but the happy face of a two-faced god whose other face is privitization, a face that is all mouth, the better for devouring all the money.

[darcy]

jhNY, that's it in a nutshell. We are so screwed in this country. And who's going to fix things? - Obama, who voted for the bailout?