Introduction
The
United States has experienced the biggest political upheaval in its
recent history: the transformation of a burgeoning welfare state
into a rapidly expanding, highly intrusive and deeply entrenched police
state, linked to the most developed technological innovations.
The
‘Great Transformation’ occurred exclusively from above, organized by
the upper echelons of the civil and military bureaucracy under the direction
of the Executive and his National Security Council. The ‘Great
Transformation’ was not a single event but a process of the accumulation
of powers, via executive fiats, supported and approved by compliant
Congressional leaders. At no time in the recent and distant past
has this nation witnessed the growth of such repressive powers and the
proliferation of so many policing agencies engaged in so many areas
of life over such a prolonged period of time (a time of virtually no
internal mass dissent). Never has the executive branch of government
secured so many powers to detain, interrogate, kidnap and assassinate
its own citizens without judicial restraint.
Police
state dominance is evident in the enormous growth of the domestic security
and military budget, the vast recruitment of security and military personnel, the
accumulation of authoritarian powers curtailing individual and collective
freedoms and the permeation of national cultural and civic life
with the almost religious glorification of the agents and agencies of
militarism and the police state as evidenced at mass sporting and entertainment
events.
The
drying up of resources for public welfare and services is a direct result
of the dynamic growth of the police state apparatus and military empire.
This could only take place through a sustained direct attack against
the welfare state in particular against public funding for programs
and agencies promoting the health, education, pensions, income and housing
for the middle and working class.
The Ascendancy of the Police State
Central
to the rise of the police state and the consequent decline of the welfare
state have been the series of imperial wars, especially in the Middle
East, launched by every President from Bush (father), Clinton, Bush
(son) and Obama. These wars, aimed exclusively against Muslim
countries, were accompanied by a wave of repressive ‘anti-terrorist’
laws and implemented through the rapid build-up of the massive police
state apparatus, known as ‘Homeland Security’.
The leading advocates and propagandists of overseas militarism against
countries with large Muslim populations and the imposition of a domestic
police-state have been dedicated Zionists promoting wars designed to
enhance Israel’s overwhelming power in the Middle East. These American
Zionists (including dual US-Israeli citizens) secured strategic positions
within the US police state apparatus in order to terrify and repress
activists, especially American Muslims and immigrants critical of the
state of Israel.
The
events of 9/11//01 served as the detonator for the biggest global military
launch since WWII, and the most pervasive expansion of police state
powers in the history of the United States. The bloody terror
of 9/11/2001 was manipulated to institute a pre-planned agenda transforming
the US into a police state while launching a decade- long series of
wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and, now,
Syria as well as covert proxy wars against Iran and Lebanon. The
military budget exploded and government deficits ballooned while social
programs and welfare were denigrated and dismantled as the ‘Global War
on Terror’ swung into full gear. Programs, designed to maintain
or raise living standards for millions and increase access to services
for the poor and working class, fell victim to ‘9/11’.
As the wars in the Middle East took center-stage, the US economy tanked.
On the domestic front vital public investment in education, infrastructure,
industry and civilian innovations were slashed. Hundreds of billions
of tax payer dollars flowed into the war zones, paying mercenaries (private
contractors), buying off corrupt puppet regimes and providing a golden
opportunity for military procurement officers and their private contractor-cronies
to run up (and pocket) huge billion dollar cost overruns.
As
a result, US military policy vis a vis the Middle East, military policy,
which at one time had been designed to promote American imperial economic
interests, now took on a life of its own: wars and sanctions against
Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya had undermined profitable oil contracts
negotiated by US multi-nationals while enhancing militarism. Indeed,
the Zionist-Israeli power configuration in the United States has become
far more influential in directing US Middle East military policy than
any combination of Big Oil and all to the benefit of Israeli regional
power.
Imperial Wars and the Demise of the Welfare State
From
the end of World War II to the end of the 1970’s, the US managed to
successfully combine overseas imperial wars with an expanding welfare
state at home. In fact, the last major pieces of welfare legislation
took place during the bloody, costly US-Indo-Chinese war, under Presidents
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The economic basis of welfare-militarism
was the powerful industrial-technological foundations of the US war-machine
and its dominance over world markets. Subsequently, the declining
competitive position of the US in the world-economy and the massive
relocation of US-MNC (and their jobs) overseas strained the ‘marriage’
of domestic welfare and militarism to the breaking point.
Fiscal and trade deficits loomed even as the demands for welfare and
unemployment payments grew in part because of the shift from stable
well-paid manufacturing jobs to low paid-service work. While the
global US economic position declined, its global military expansion
accelerated as a result of the demise of the Communist regimes in the
USSR and Eastern Europe and the incorporation of the new regimes of
the former Eastern bloc into the US-dominated NATO military alliance.
The
demise of the Communist states led to the end of competing global welfare
systems and allowed capitalists and the imperial state to slash welfare
to fund their massive global military expansion. There was virtually
no opposition from labor: the gradual conversion of Western trade unions
into highly authoritarian organizations run by self-perpetuating millionaire
‘leaders’ and the reduction of trade union membership from 30% of the
work force in 1950 to less than 11% by 2012 (with over 91% of private
sector workers without any representation) meant that American workers
have been powerless to organize strikes to protect their jobs,
let alone apply political pressure in defense of public programs and
welfare.
Militarism
was on the ascendency when President Jimmy Carter launched his multi-billion
dollar ‘secret war’ against the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan and
President Ronald Reagan initiated a series of ‘proxy wars’ throughout
Central America and Southern Africa and sent the US Marines into the
tiny island of Grenada. Reagan oversaw the escalation of military
spending boasting that he would ‘bankrupt’ the Soviet Union with a new
‘arms race’. President George Bush, Sr. invaded Panama and then
Iraq, the first of many US invasions in the Middle East. President
Bill Clinton accelerated the military thrust, along the way slashing
public welfare in favor of ‘private workfare’, bombing and destroying
Yugoslavia, bombing and starving Iraq while establishing colonial enclaves
in Northern Iraq and expanding the US military presence in Somalia
and the Persian Gulf.
The
constraints on US militarism imposed by the massive popular anti-Vietnam
War movement and the US military defeat by the Vietnamese Communists,
were gradually eroded, as successful short term wars (like Grenada and
Panama) undermined the Vietnam Syndrome public opposition to militarism.
This prepared the American public for incremental militarism while chipping
away at the welfare system.
If
Reagan and Bush built the foundation for the new militarism, Bill Clinton
provided three decisive elements: together with Vice-President
Al Gore, Clinton legitimized the war on welfarism, stigmatizing public
assistance and mobilized support from religious and political leaders
in the black community and the AFL-CIO. Secondly, Clinton was key to
the ‘financialization’ of the US economy, by de-regulating the financial
system (repealing the Glass-Steagal Act of 1933) and appointing Wall
Street financiers at the helm of national economic policy. Thirdly,
Clinton appointed leading Zionists to the key foreign policy positions
related to the Middle East, allowing them to insert Israel’s military
view of reality into strategic decision-making in Washington.
Clinton
put in place the first series of repressive police state ‘anti-terrorist’
legislation and expanded the national prison system. In sum, Bill
Clinton’s Middle East war policies, his ‘financialization’ of the US
economy, his ‘war on terror’, his Zionist orientation towards the Arab
world and, above all, his own ideological anti-welfarism led directly
to Bush Junior’s full scale conversion of the welfare state into the
police state .
Exploiting
the trauma of 9/11, the Bush and later the Obama regimes nearly tripled
the military budget and launched serial wars against Arab states.
The military budget rose from $359 billion in 2000, to $544 billion
in 2004 and escalated to $903 billion in 2012. Military expenditures
financed major foreign military occupations and colonial administrations
in Iraq and Afghanistan, border wars in Pakistan and US Special Forces
covert operations (including kidnappings and assassinations) in Yemen,
Somalia, Iran and seventy-five other countries world-wide.
Meanwhile
financial speculation ran rampant, budget deficits ballooned, living
standards plunged, international trade deficits reached record levels
and public debt doubled in fewer than eight years. Multiple imperial
wars dragged on without end; the costs of these wars multiplied while
the financial bubble burst. The contradiction between domestic
welfare and militarism exploded. Finally, the massive roll back
of basic social programs for all American topped the Presidential and
legislative agenda.
Previous
‘untouchable programs’ like Social Security, Medicare, the US Post Office,
public sector employment, services to the poor, elderly and handicapped
and food stamps were all put on the butcher’s block. At the same
time the federal government increased its funding of private military
and police contractors (mercenaries) overseas and extended the scope
and depth of US Special Forces clandestine operations. Bush-Obama
vastly increased spending for the military and espionage agents
in support of wildly unpopular, brutal collaborator regimes in Pakistan
and Yemen. They funded and armed foreign mercenaries in Libya,
Syria, Iran, and Somalia. By the first decade of the new
century it had become clear that imperial militarism and domestic welfarism
were in a zero sum game: as imperial wars multiplied, domestic
programs were slashed.
The
severity and depth of the cuts to popular domestic welfare programs
were only in part the result of imperial wars; equally important was
the huge increase in the funding for personnel and surveillance technology
for the burgeoning police state at home.
The Origins of the Conversion of the Welfare State to the Police State
The
precipitous decline of the welfare state and the dismantling of social
services, public education and access to affordable health care for
the working and middle classes cannot be explained by the demise of
organized labor, nor is it due to the ‘right-turn’ of the Democratic
Party. Two other deep structural changes loom large as fundamental
to the proces: the transformation of the US economy from a competitive
manufacturing economy into a ‘FIRE’ (finance, insurance and real estate)
economy; and secondly, the rise of a vast police legal-political-administrative
state apparatus engaged in permanent ‘internal warfare’ at home, designed
to sustain and complement permanent imperial warfare abroad.
Agencies
and personnel of the police state expanded dramatically during the first
decade of the new century. The police state penetrated telecommunications
systems, patrolled and controlled transport outlets; dominated judicial
procedures and oversaw the major ‘news outlets’, academic and professional
associations. The expanded police state covertly and overtly entered
the private lives of tens of millions of Americans.
The
loss to taxpayers in terms of citizen rights and the welfare state has
been staggering.
As
the biggest and most intrusive component of the police state apparatus,
christened ‘Homeland Security’, grew exponentially, the budget and agencies
providing welfare and public services, health, education and unemployment
shrank. Tens of thousands of domestic spies have been hired and
costly intrusive spyware has been purchased with tax-payer money, while
hundreds of thousands of teachers and public health and social welfare
professionals have lost their jobs.
The
Department of Homeland Security (as of the end of 2011) is composed
of approximately 388,000 employees, including both federal and contracted
agents. Between 2011-2013 the DHS budget of $173 billion has faced
no serious cuts. Homeland Security’s rapid expansion occurred
at the expense of Health and Human Services, education and the Social
Security Administration, which currently face large scale ‘retrenchment’.
Among
the top officials, appointed by the Bush, Jr. Administration to key
positions in the police state apparatus, there are two who have been
the most influential in setting policy: Michael Chertoff and Michael
Mukasey.
Michael
Chertoff headed the Criminal Division of the Justice Department (from
2001 2003). During that time he was responsible for the arbitrary
arrest of thousands of US citizens and immigrants of Muslim and South
Asian heritage, who were held incommunicado without charge and subject
to physical and psychological abuse without a single resident alien
or Muslim US citizen linked to 9/11. In contrast, Chertoff quickly
intervened to free scores of Israeli spy suspects and 5 Israeli Mossad
agents who had been witnessed filming and celebrating the destruction
of the World Trade Center and were under active investigation by the
FBI. More than any other official, Michael Chertoff has been the
chief architect of the ‘Global War on Terror’ co-author of the notorious
‘Patriot Act’ which trashed habeas corpus and other essential components
of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. As Secretary of Homeland
Security from 2005-2009, Chertoff promoted ‘military tribunals’ and
organized the vast internal spy network, which now preys on private
US citizens.
Michael Mukasey, the Bush-appointed US Attorney General, was an enthusiastic
defender of the Patriot Act, supporting military tribunals, torture
and overseas assassinations of individual suspected of what he called
‘Islamic terrorism’ without trial.
Both
Chertoff and Mukasey are zealous Zionists with longstanding ties to
Israel. Michael Chertoff was believed to hold dual US-Israeli
citizenship as he launched the Administration domestic war on US citizens.
A
cursory review of the origins and direction of the police-state apparatus
and the top echelons of the global war on ‘Islamic terrorism’ code
languages for military imperialism reveals a disproportionate number
of Israel-Firsters, who placed greater importance on persecuting potential
US critics of the Middle East wars for Israel than in upholding Constitutional
guarantees and the Bill of Rights.
Back
in ‘civilian’ life, Michael Chertoff profited greatly from the bogus
‘War on Terror’ promoting radioactive and degrading body scanning technology
in airports throughout the US and Europe.He established his own security
consulting firm Chertoff Groups (2009) to represent the manufacturers
of surveillance body scanners. Americans can thank Michael Chertoff
every time they pass through the humiliation of an airport body scan.
The
fusion of the police state apparatus with the industrial-security complex
and its prominent overseas links with its corporate security counterparts
in the state of Israel, underscores the imperial state’s ties to the
Israeli military establishment.
As
the police state has grown it has created a powerful lobby of high tech
surveillance industry backers and beneficiaries who push federal and
state ‘security’ spending at the expense welfare programs.
The
police state’s squeeze on social programs, education and welfare has
a powerful ally on Wall Street, which emerged as the dominant sector
of US capital in terms of access to and influence over US Treasury and
its budgetary allocations.
Unlike
the manufacturing sector, financial capital does not need a population
of educated, healthy and productive workers. Its own ‘labor force’
is composed of a small educated elite of speculators, analysts, traders
and brokers at the top and middle levels and a small army of ‘contract’
office sweepers, secretaries and menial workers at the bottom.
They have their own ‘invisible’ army of domestic servants, cooks, caterers,
gardeners and nannies devoid of any ‘Social Security’, health coverage
and pension plans. And the financial sector has its own private
networks of doctors and clinics, schools, communications systems and
messengers, estates and clubs, and security agencies and body guards;
it needs not an educated, skilled public sector; and it certainly does
not want national wealth to support high quality public health and educational
systems.
It
has no interest in supporting this mass of public institutions which
it views as an obstacle to ‘freeing up’ vast amounts of public wealth
for speculation. In other words, the dominant sector of capital
has no objection to ‘Homeland Security’; indeed it shares many sentiments
with the proponents of the police state and supports the shrinking the
welfare state. It is concerned about lowering taxes on finance
capital and increasing Federal bail-out funds for Wall Street while
controlling the impoverished citizenry.
Conclusion
The
conversion of a welfare state to a police state is the result of militarized
imperialism abroad and the ascendancy of finance capital at home, as
well as the proliferation of security state agencies and related private
industries and the strategic role of rightwing Zionists in top positions
of the police state apparatus.
This convergence
of international and domestic structural changes took hold during the
1980’s and 1990’s and then accelerated during the first decade of the
21st century. The downgrading of the vast public services of the
welfare state was covered up by a massive government propaganda campaign
to promote the ‘global war on terror’ together with a fabricated widespread
domestic ‘terrorist threat’ involving the most hapless of suspects (including
oddball Haitian millenarianists entrapped by FBI agents). The
supporters and beneficiaries of the welfare state found themselves on
the margins of any national debate. The mass media/regime propaganda
campaign demanded and successfully secured massive increases in
centralized powers of domestic policing, surveillance, provocations,
disappearances and arrests.
Throughout the past decade what the welfare state lost in support and
funding, the police state gained. The rise of financial capital
and the deregulation of the financial system crowded out any public
subsidies to promote and sustain the competitiveness of the US manufacturing
sector. This has led to a major break in the links between industry,
labor and the welfare state. Huge tax write-offs to big business,
combined with the growth in expenditures for a non-productive police
state bureaucracy and the series of costly overseas wars, has caused
unsustainable budget and trade deficits, which then became the pretext
to further savage the welfare state.
Significant
political, cultural and ideological shifts have aided the rise of the
police state over the public welfare state. The success of prominent
American Zionists in securing power within key media propaganda mills
and obtaining appointments to critical position in the top echelons
of the police state apparatus, judiciary and in the imperial state bureaucracy
(Treasury and State Department) has put Israel’s colonial interests
and its own police-state apparatus at the center of US politics.
The US police state has adopted Israeli-styled repression targeting
US citizens and residents.
US
society is now split into two sectors: the ‘winners’ linked to
the expanding and lucrative financial security complex embedded in
the police state while the ‘losers’, tied to the manufacturing welfare
sector, are relegated to an increasingly marginalized ‘civil society’.
The police state purges dissidents who question the ‘Israel-First doctrine’
of the US security-military apparatus. The financial sector, embedded
in its own luxurious ‘cocoon’ of private services, demands the total
gutting of public services directed toward the poor, working and middle
classes. The public treasury has been taken over in order to finance
bank bailouts, imperial wars and police state agencies while paying
the bondholders of US debt.
Social Security is on target to be privatized. Pensions are to
be reduced, delayed and self-financed. Food stamps, access to
affordable health care and unemployment support will be slashed.
The police state cannot pay for glitzy new repressive technologies,
greater policing, more intrusive surveillance, arrests and prisons while
financing the existing welfare state with its vast educational, health
and human services and pension benefits.
In
sum, there is no future for social welfare in the United States within
its powerful financial-imperial-police state system. Both major
political parties nurture this system, support serial wars, appeal to
the financial elites and debate over the size, scope and timing for
further cuts in social welfare.
The
American social welfare system was a product of an earlier phase of
US capitalism where US global industrial supremacy allowed for both
military spending and welfare support and where US military spending
was constrained by the demands of the domestic socio-economic sectors
of manufacturing capital and ‘labor’. In an earlier phase Zionist
influence was based on wealthy individuals and their congressional ‘lobby’
--- they did not occupy key Federal policymaking positions setting
the agendas for war in the Middle East and domestic police state.
Times
have changed for the worse: a police state, linked to militarism
and perpetual imperial wars in the Middle East has gained ascendancy
and now impacts our everyday life. Underlying both the growth of the
police state and the erosion of the welfare state is the rise of an
inter-locking ‘financial-security power elite’, held together by a
common ideology, unprecedented private wealth and the relentless drive
to monopolize the public treasury to the detriment of the vast majority
of Americans. A confrontation and full exposure of all the self-serving
propaganda, which undergirds the power elite is an essential first step.
The enormous
budgets for imperial wars are the greatest threat to US welfare.
The police state erodes real public services and undermines social movements.
Finance capital pillages the public treasury demanding bailouts and
subsidies for the banks. Israeli Firsters, in key decision-making
positions, serve the interests of a foreign police state against the
interests of the American people. The state of Israel is
the mirror opposite of what we Americans want for ourselves and our
children: a free and independent secular republic without colonial settlements,
clerical racism, and destructive self-serving militarism.
Today
the fight to restore the advances in citizens’ welfare established through
public programs of the recent past requires that we transform an entire
structure of power: true welfare reform requires a revolutionary strategy
and, above all, a grass-roots mass movement breaking with the entrenched
‘two party’ regime tied to the financial- imperial- internal security
system.
Likud, Kadima, Labor, or new centrist party leadership hardly matters.
Israel remains hardline, belligerent, and repressive. Arab citizens
have no rights.
They and most Jews chafe under neoliberal harshness. Instead of improving
conditions, they're worsening.
Malcolm X once said "I see America through the eyes of the victim. I
don't see any American dream - I see an American nightmare."
Israelis face similar harshness. Remaining rights are eroding en route
to being lost altogether. Populist change demands sustained public rage.
Nothing else can work.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
His new book is titled "How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized
Banking, Government Collusion and Class War"
http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge
discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News
Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time
and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy
listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour
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