American Empire | Stop The Spirit of Zossen 2.0

Demotic Hierarchy And Exclusion – Get Used To It

2011/04/19 By Dr Leo Strauss Leave a Comment

What’s most bothersome about this invitation [from the Hirshhorn Museum] is the statement about members: “Members get in free and have access to VIP area.” You can see that line for yourself in the picture at left.

“A VIP area”? At a public museum, an arm of the Smithsonian Institution? . . . And now, the Hirshhorn — no doubt in an effort to raise money (the lowest level of membership costs $100 to $249 a year ) — is creating a VIP lounge within an already questionable activity? After Hours seems to involve gallery tours as well as “music and live performances on the plaza.” Guess which is the draw?

As a subsequent press release said:

From his infamous dance parties (RAW, MIXTAPE) to his guest spots at numerous DC nightlife events, audience favorite DJ Shea Van Horn sheds his drag alter ego, Summer Camp, and returns to After Hours to stir up the dance floor and leave a trail of exhausted revelers in his wake.

We’ve been left behind in steerage for some time. It’s the little details that speak volumes. It’s tempting to see this through the prism of elitist art, etc. — in fact, precisely how the Movement assaults ‘wealthy’ union families earning $49,000 a year. Or perhaps some well-intentioned if clueless ‘Yes we can!’ believer thought a rave party at the Hirshhorn would improve visibility, attendance and promote art (somehow).

We agree the larger, more important issue the symbolic: the non-chalant acceptance of class privileges in public spaces.

Share and Enjoy

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: American Empire, culture, Demotic goo, Imperial City

Erik Prince, True To Form

2011/01/20 By Dr Leo Strauss 13 Comments

The NYT discovers Prince is trying to insert himself into the Somalian civil war even as he exits Blackwater/Xe. Of course, the Times gets only part of the story. Prince the past 18 months or so has been prospecting a whole host of African conflicts to use in his search for new financial sponsors.

There’s the old business phrase ‘turn around meeting’. It’s where a party goes in expecting to discuss X but finds the other party surprisingly make it all about the opposite, discussing er, Z. Prince inflicted that on one unsuspecting non-governmental but supremely influential institutional figure. This figure thought the meeting would be about Prince making charitable contributions. Instead, Prince made the meeting about this non-governmental entity funding him to ‘solve’ a human crisis in Africa by killing any identified bad guys. Just one example of many.

We’re all for the Times keeping an eye on Prince. But if the Stiftung knows all this, then surely an intern at the Times could put it together.

Share and Enjoy

Filed Under: Acolytes In Aktion Tagged With: American Empire, Imperial City, War

Garfinkle’s ‘Obama As Innocent Abroad’ — American Foreign Policy As Rorschach Test

2010/11/22 By Dr Leo Strauss 19 Comments

We first met Adam Garfinkle 30 years ago or so when he was starting out at FPRI. We’re under no illusions about his ideological prisms. His re-printed piece in “The American Interest”, ‘An Innocent Abroad: The Obama Foreign Policy’ easily could come from Hudson or the usual suspects. Yet he correctly observes:

Indeed, the fuzzy indeterminacy that characterizes the Obama foreign policy holds true even at the highest echelon of strategy. The United States is the world’s pre-eminent if not hegemonic power. Since World War II it has set the normative standards and both formed and guarded the security and economic structures of the world. In that capacity it has provided for a relatively secure and prosperous global commons, a mission nicely convergent with the maturing American self-image as an exceptionalist nation. To do this, however, the United States has had to maintain a global military presence as a token of its commitment to the mission and as a means of reassurance to those far and wide with a stake in it. This has required a global network of alliances and bases, the cost of which is not small and the maintenance of which, in both diplomatic and other terms, is a full-time job.*

[Read more...]

Share and Enjoy

Filed Under: Foreign Policy Tagged With: Afghanistan, American Empire, Foreign Policy

Can We Tweet You Major Tom?

2009/08/31 By Dr Leo Strauss 13 Comments

Diminishing Powers seem to grasp reality in phases. Past self images lurch to synchronize painfully with events. Just ask the Romans, Ottomans, the Chinese Emperors, Sovs or Brits and Dutch et al.

There’s little reason America should be different. It may be even harder for us. We generally are oblivious to America as metropole. Until 2008 we took the fringe benefits for granted. We should expect our flashes of recognitions to surprise. Like a baseball bat in a dark room. If how a Power rides the adjustment curve says as much as its Noontide reign? We have massively surreal moments ahead. Just ask ~~Clement Atlee~~ Obama in three or eight years.

We’ve all discussed at length (and seemingly agreed) that the British should have known the Empire was over in 1940, their actual bankruptcy. American financing and willingness to at least pretend to a quasi-subordinate role after May 1945 cushioned matters. Americans got a longer ride from Japan and then China from 1980s till Fall 2008.

Hindsight brutally reveals that the 1947 Greek Crisis and the Marshall Plan pulled the mask on British feebleness. Psyches are a tricky thing, though. Just a year later, in 1948, the British — still embued with imperial self image — sought to ‘guarantee’ Western European defense with the Treaty of Brussels. The prostrate Europeans saw more clearly than British delusions. In 1949 the Western Europeans demanded Americans handcuffed to them all, keeping the Germans down and the Russians out – hence NATO.

Suez was a shock in London no doubt. It still took 20 years after 1947 and a Chancellor of the Exchequer, Roy Jenkins, to jam financial reality to the fore and force British withdrawal from military footprints East of the Suez (Singapore, Malaysia and the Persian Gulf). George Lazenby’s fiasco in 1969 served as exclamation point. America unfortunately likely will not have until 2029 to adjust.

Whatever Happens Be Gentle With Tom Hanks

Where does the collapse of the American civilian space program fit? Do Americans really care about it? Few deny it’s a hangover imperial luxury. Shouldn’t we just let it go?

Landing on the Moon remains perhaps the last truly astonishing triumph of the American idea (beyond wearing out the Sovs). But in terms of the popular culture, it’s about as relevant as a Woodstock reminiscence clip. Americans only seem to care about space when it’s well done on a movie screen. (American military reliance on space deserves a separate topic (but then the American people have almost no familiarity with military – again unless on TV or a movie screen)).

Bush launched an absurdly ambitious boondoggle for American contractors to return to the Moon and Mars. A Mars Mission is a long running fantasy among certain Movement demographics for various biological, philosophical and spiritual reasons. You may recall Movement types in the 1980s — including a back bencher named weirdly ‘Newt’ pushing for Mars. Under Bush 41, Bill Kristol/Dan Quayle’s office served as the campfire around which the various constituencies gathered. Newt then picked up the Mars torch in 1995-96. After 8 years of exile under Bubba — presto! The Warlord eventually is manipulated to make it happen. (Remember Dave Chappelle’s now hoary ‘Mars, bitches !!’)

Like the Warlord’s other schemes it falls apart. Obama appointed a NASA Review Panel to find cheaper ways to get into space. Today his Panel reports NASA can’t go anywhere even on $80 billion through 2020. Not even the Moon. Meanwhile, nefarious *ferriners*, the Indians, Japanese, Chinese and even the Germans have or are planning on sending probes to the Moon. American public reaction? Yawn.

So shoot the horse. It’s time to put down the civilian space program as a grossly unjustifiable self-perpetuating government-industrial sector. Closing out this consortium of interests seeking handouts and subsidies to find a reason to get more money is overdue. Billions spent and to be spent on a rocket engine (Ares) even Obama’s Review Panel excludes from 3 of its 4 castrated scenarios. As some totem of uplifting nationalism the program is useless as even Sally Ride and others on the Review Panel concede. Who really believes seeing more pictures from the Moon would restore faltering legitimacy to a federal government? More than a functional jobs program? That wad has been shot. NASA (as currently configured) is the poster child of past tense Imperial self imagery and indulgence.

Obama by all accounts set up the Review Panel look for budget efficiencies. Upon receipt of the Panel’s Report he may even pretend that he has options. The always formidable Norm Augustine noted “Our view is that it will be difficult with the current budget to do anything that’s terribly inspiring in the human spaceflight area.”

Squandering control of national destiny has consequences. The Warlord was too stupid to realize it. Your job, Mr. Obama, is to ease the American people into the truth. Before your own East of Eden moment is forced upon you. You don’t have 20 years.

Share and Enjoy

Filed Under: Culture, Pop Culture Tagged With: American Empire

A Black Hole Party: Five Things You Would Send From The Imperial City

2009/08/08 By Dr Leo Strauss 12 Comments

It’s the new jenga you’ve seen on the InterTubes. You know, throwing black hole parties. How does it work? For example, GameLife offered a list of games so bad they should be tossed into a black hole (Sonic was number one). In July gadgets got The Gong.

Why not here? The Imperial City in August itself is relatively quiet if one is not enmeshed in the health care morass. Brownshirts are out on location. Even Novak’s Corvette doesn’t menace drivers and pedestrians like just a few scant years ago.

So, what should go into a black hole? We’re setting some boundaries. First, we can exile things or persons that started in, or have a {Barry McCaffery’s-best-closing-new-client-retainer-voice} ‘center of gravity’ {/Barry-McCaffery-voice} in D.C. So, for example, News Corp. itself is out of bounds. Conversely, Britt Hume’s All Stars aren’t. And so on. Here’s our list and why. By all means, offer better suggestions or save a candidate:

1. Focus Groups

They’re a disgrace. What a crude thing to exert such a cynical, corrosive impact on political conversation in America. Two specific individuals are probably responsible for staking this statistically meaningless, rare and theatrical practice into the heart of American politics. What followed for those two was a tsumani of personal wealth, empty posturings and professional copy catters. These farcical bull sessions with 20 or so participants are the political equivalent of the Wall Street fake wealth creation of the 2000s. CDOs with zero real value and lots of toxicity. Yet the practice determines the very vocabulary that almost everyone uses on a policy issue, changing estate taxes to ‘death taxes’, global warming to ‘climate change’, and so on whether they know it or not.

We cop to using them, too, to manipulate a Congress, media and White House on behalf of private sector clients. Mostly because our clients believe in the stuff like some arcane druidic rite. Sadly, it also works. (You’d be surprised how ‘sophisticated’ media, politicians, other operatives lap it up). There was a time when a politician or their speechwriter offered the best words they knew how at the time. America was a better place then.

Don’t believe us? You must adore Xe!

Extra Credit For Those Who Smile Seeing This

[Read more...]

Share and Enjoy

Filed Under: Pop Culture Tagged With: American Empire, Imperial City

Top Ten Emperors

2009/02/16 By Dr Leo Strauss 12 Comments

From Hua Zhe Feng's 'Lives of Ten Emperors' (2047)

The CSPAN ‘historians’ list of presidential rankings offers the usual suspects:

1. Abraham Lincoln
2. George Washington
3. Franklin D. Roosevelt
4. Theodore Roosevelt
5. Harry S. Truman
6. John F. Kennedy
7. Thomas Jefferson
8. Dwight D. Eisenhower
9. Woodrow Wilson
10. Ronald Reagan

As usual, the ineffectual Kennedy is vastly overrated for specious reasons. People clinging to Camelot AgitProp like Gollum and his Precious. Cuban Missile Crisis aside his legislative and international accomplishments are essentially nil. And one can make a compelling case that Kennedy’s own callowness led directly from Vienna to the Berlin Wall to Cuba (and let’s overlook Vietnam out of politeness).

We would rank Washington ahead of hollow Lincoln gushing so much in vogue in Sally Quinn’s universe. First, few Americans understand he told the U.S. Army to stand down, not overthrow the Congress in Philadelphia and obey civilian government. He also declined the crown and did not want it offered three times. More importantly, he later stepped down voluntarily. Creating is so much more difficult than preserving or destroying.

Jefferson was actually a calamitous president and his Neo-con-esque Jacobin policies largely not understood by modern scholarship. Points for the Louisiana Purchase geopolitically — although students of republican theory then and today understood the expansion meant inevitably some form of political decay devolving inexorably to an imperial endgame of some sort.

Woodrow Wilson? Please explain to the Stiftung how this disaster is not in the bottom 20.

Overall, morons like Tweety who purport to be be pros with his fluffer Howard Fineman miss the fundamental dynamic with this pseudo intellectual exercise. Tweety suddenly blurts he’s mystified how ‘liberals’ made this ranking. Fineman gushes his number one president would be JFK. Allowing these people more air time is crime against the future.

Contrary to what Tweety and Fineman claim, the Eisenhower re-evaluation began in the early 1980s. The Stiftung had many a conversation back then with Princeton Professor Joanne Gowa about her research on this very topic. Sabato and Brinkley should know better when they did their Mutt and Jeff turn on the Tweety obscenity. Is truth determined by what popularizers like Ambrose churn out? It continues to boggle the Stiftung’s mind how vacant, shallow and superficial our self-styled media (cough) intelligentsia remains.

Modern individuals are given more credence — either way — because of the imperial dimension. Teddy marked a turning point, but FDR marked the dawn of President as Global Emperor. The throne by necessity elevates those upon it, even those named Bush. This essential geopolitical reality can’t be escaped. Hence the Warlord’s ranking.

What will be interesting is to see how the diminished presidency and dissipated American global hegemony affects the re-evaluation prism going forward. Perhaps C-SPAN will be wise enough to allow our Chinese landlords to have input on the next round.

Share and Enjoy

Filed Under: Acolytes In Media Tagged With: American Empire

Shapes Of Things To Come

2008/12/12 By Dr Leo Strauss 9 Comments

Dystopian portraits of American futures typical rely on deus ex machina global erasures — post nuclear (The Terminator stuff), plagues (The Stand, I Am Legend) or environmental messages (The Day After Tomorrow, the new The Day Earth Stood Still). The dissolution and decay (social or political) that led to these ‘resets’ are almost always given short shrift. It’s no wonder, especially recently. Who, after all, doesn’t remember the mind numbing horror of watching the words ‘taxation dispute’ come down the scroll in Phantom Menace?

Put bloated billionaire Lucas’ clueless story telling instincts aside. The getting there is in many ways the valuable part of any allegory, fable or instructive myth. Consider Tolkien. Echoes of the far earler Falls (Elven and Numenor) embued his Lord of the Rings with such rare, almost 3D tangibility.

Detroit’s failed bid to gain government loans shines a brief light on what will become a more common occurrence — U.S. elected officials acting as surrogates for direct foreign investment at the cost of the fraying larger American marco economic weal. This our real life version of how we ‘got there.’ All can see in this case because our current rudderless government allows the Senate’s Sourthern GOP Posse to act out without immediate consequences. And to be fair, most Americans at their root core today view themselves and their purpose as primarily consumptive bipeds.

The Executive is farther along this trajectory. The hundreds of billions pimped to AIG and CitiGroup? It’s true American self interest underlay some of the high minded sound bites about ‘global system risk’ etc. Also true? Our Chinese and Japanese creditors hold too many dollars and too many toxic products we (and the Brits) shoveled around.

Are we at a tipping point with the GOP sabotage of the Detroit deal? Not yet. It’s still a novel meme for the media to note with at least apparent surprise that senators would act in support of foreign capital. The tipping point comes when such actions are decisive and accepted without comment.

Who knows? Maybe that bloated rich toy merchant might have the last laugh. And a Fall of American Empire introductory title scroll begins with ‘collateralized debt obligations’ . . .

Share and Enjoy

Filed Under: Economic Meltdown Tagged With: American Empire, Demotic goo

Ashes In The Maelstrom

2008/10/11 By Dr Leo Strauss 17 Comments

The IMF purports to be optimistic after the U.S. and U.K. acted to nationalize banks through direct capital injections. True, Paulson did not intend this even a week ago. But rather than excoriate him for improvising we applaud the flexibility. The question many might ask is why would a direct capitalization overcome fear of lending contra say Fed rate cuts and the open discount window.

Time outpaces ideology or statutes. We were skeptical Paulson could stand up and run auctions in ‘weeks’. We worked with the FCC and industry setting up and implementing the first ever spectrum auctions in the early 1990s and those that followed. Even skipping Reed Hundt and Blair Levin’s Gore-esque GOSPLAN regulatory mania for a down and dirty bare bones gig in 2008, those spectrum auctions each had a defined homogenous res (a specific band of frequencies) compared to current unknowable facility’s toxicity, etc. Even a reverse auction to function must have *some* kind of uniform or at least common baseline, however attenuated. That is simple auction theory 101.

___________________

Some comparable statistics of other economic declines are sobering and possibly reassuring:

The average downturn after recent banking crises in rich countries lasted four years as banks retrenched and debt-laden households and firms were forced to save more. This time firms are in relatively good shape, but households, particularly in Britain and America, have piled up unprecedented debts. And because the asset and credit bubbles formed in many countries simultaneously, the hangover this time may well be worse.

But history teaches an important lesson: that big banking crises are ultimately solved by throwing in large dollops of public money, and that early and decisive government action, whether to recapitalise banks or take on troubled debts, can minimise the cost to the taxpayer and the damage to the economy. For example, Sweden quickly took over its failed banks after a property bust in the early 1990s and recovered relatively fast. By contrast, Japan took a decade to recover from a financial bust that ultimately cost its taxpayers a sum equivalent to 24% of GDP.

All in all, America’s government has put some 7% of GDP on the line, a vast amount of money but well below the 16% of GDP that the average systemic banking crisis (if there is such a thing) ultimately costs the public purse. Just how America’s proposed Troubled Asset Relief Programme (TARP) will work is still unclear. The Treasury plans to buy huge amounts of distressed debt using a reverse auction process, where banks offer to sell at a price and the government buys from the lowest price upwards. The complexities of thousands of different mortgage-backed assets will make this hard. If direct bank recapitalisation is still needed, the Treasury can do that too. The main point is that America is prepared to act, and act decisively.

All of which leads to the real issue: What Comes After. As The Economist notes “If foreigners ever flee the dollar, America will face the twin nightmares that haunt emerging countries in a financial collapse: simultaneous banking and currency crises. America’s debts, unlike those in many emerging economies, are denominated in its own currency, but a collapse of the dollar would still be a catastrophe.”

The American ability to inflate our way out of our own stupidity is a short term Sword of Damocles over the IMF meeting this weekend in Washington and among the EU leadership. We agreed with Spengler before in an earlier post — Asian and European alternative capital architectures are not yet in place. It is, however, just a matter of time.

The Warlord destroyed the ‘American’ brand across the board. Centuries of brand equity squandered in front of a connected global audience. It will not be coming back by chanting ‘Yes we can’. Footsteps away with the whisper ‘Never again’ will dictate events.

In two debates both the Boy King and McCain avoided answering how this crisis constrained their options. Perhaps it is good politics to deny that the United States is a bankrupt hegemon. Even so, neither of them shows the necessary leadership to prepare the American people for the real hardship to come: life as a debtor nation in a post U.S. global financial system.

Share and Enjoy

Filed Under: Economic Meltdown Tagged With: American Empire, Economic Reform, Federal Reserve

Tick, Tick, Tock It’s A Quarter To 3:00 AM, I’m Done, Tired Of Waiting For You, I’m Hung Up . . . Ring Ring Goes The Telephone*

2008/08/15 By Dr Leo Strauss 18 Comments

Demotic absorption and bombardment . . .

Missing anything, really? We turn today from external geopolitics to the formless synaptic response by the American demos.

Our diagnosis is clear. As said by readers here recently, we know the pathology. ‘Facts’ are short, blurred and dissolve into mere ‘belief’. Overrun by a cacophony of orchestrated attacks on passive viewers’ self-esteem to galvanize passivity into consumptive action. All overseen by a largely amused (if disparate and unconnected) plutocracy or oligarchy, offering manufactured personalities literally responding to voices whispering in their head. Success is delivering maximum stimuli to the lower brain cortex through the optic nerve (auditory aspects secondary). The political and cultural implications can not be segregated from the commercial.

* See photo below

[Read more...]