TheMillerCircle.org

Note: This article has been sitting in my computer for nearly a year, beginning about the time that I felt  the subprime mortgage disaster was likely to be far more serious than we were then led to believe. So, I am bringing it forward now, at a time when it seems, well, more timely. But, while the crisis is self-evident, and its short-term causes are apparent, its long-term origins, the most significant source of understanding how to right our ship,  are not obvious and in fact are not even considered as an item on the discussion table.  As we look increasingly to Google FDR, searching for solutions to fix our fiscal crisis, we should look to Sputnik and our response to that challenge, to see how, just 50 years ago,  we began to invest in our infrastructure of higher education and how that investment can be used to rebuild our economy into a powerhouse based on saving the planet and reducing our dependency on something we don’t have very much of these days–oil.  So here are my thoughts on the issue of how we got to where we are.  I have broken it down into two sections, as I realize that even one of them may be a pill that will prove hard to swallow: FOLLY COMPOUNDING IN AMERICA, PART 1

Folly Compounding (FC) happens when you don’t recognize your error or Folly and allow Folly Interest (FI) to accumulate until you have one big, giant looming Folly that is hard to deal with. By that I mean how a country or a person makes a mistake, perhaps one of great colossal dimensions, though it may not seem so at the time, and then spends a long duration, perhaps a lifetime, or many lifetimes for a country, reaping the misery or the incalculable results of that mistake because the problem wasn’t fixed early on, when it was eminently more fixable. But, by not identifying the problem early in its development, FC is just that: the problem gets bigger and more unmanageable because compound interest on your Folly balloons by margins more than you ever thought possible. It’s like a retirement system in reverse, putting your future into debt rather than building up a nest egg. Instead of getting a check when you retire, you get a bill, maybe a very big one. That, unfortunately is where we seem to be today, this year, right now. Some say it took us less than thirty years to get here, but the reality is far far different. The place we stand today got started after WW II, when we sat at the very top of the heap and committed our most important and first Folly–that of dividing the World in two.

Have we seen this movie before? Today, we are witnessing a replay of the old movie that we saw twenty years ago, called the “Savings and Loan Scandal” which played in American theaters in the 1980s. It was the result of advancement in our free market economy, a result of deregulation of the Savings and Loan Banks. The difference between the new and the old release of the movie is that this time, it’s our entire financial system that we are bailing out and the bill will be proportionately larger. Indeed we are witnessing an almost daily enhancement to the bailout costs as Citi Bank has needed and received financial help and many other banks are known to be teetering. When you couple the bailouts for the financial institutions, with other funds that may be funneled into the American automobile manufacturers, with complete uncertainty as to whether any of these funds will be recovered or repaid, the number reaches into the $ trillions and a seemingly unlimited sea of national debt. And then folks, get ready for the really big one in 20-30 years or so because the bigger they get, the more likely they will have the Federal government as their ultimate guarantor. You saw the problem with Lehman Brothers–they were too small for Federal Bailout. AIG was larger however and seemed to have its sticky fingers in too many different financial pies. The message is clear, get bigger and then you can keep on truckin’. With an FDIC guarantee of $250,000 per deposit, as part of the new bailout agreement, our banks will grow and grow and if someone doesn’t monitor what they do with the largess of all this new money, then the really big one may be still ahead of us. Let’s hope we can fix it now and fix it for good. But, the fix we did earlier started at the wrong end of the problem and in all likelihood, its magnitude may prevent us from fixing the gigantic social problems that need our attention, the most serious of which is our badly broken health care system. But, there is a way out and it is spelled MILITARISM, the solution for which is to shrink the completely insensible budget of the military and eliminate our corrupt and incompetent intelligence system. It doesn’t protect us anyway! But let’s get back to the nature of Follies before we tackle the really big one.

The Unforeseen Folly: There are of course Follies that cannot be seen as such when they begin: who would have thought that the beginning of the industrial revolution was going to give us global climate change in ways we have yet to fully understand. But, based on what we know now, our planetary future doesn’t look so good. At the very least, things will be different climate-wise and maybe our lovely little frogs, salamanders and toads will disappear during our lifetime. In some areas they have been wiped out already. The FC through environmental change, with perhaps a new mass species extinction underway, is the Mother of All Follies. Yet, that Folly is going to play itself out in some way that we can’t do anything about, at least not in the short run. It was like lighting a very long fuse a hundred and fifty years ago, connected to a bomb that is about to go off without us ever understanding how powerful the explosion is going to be. Whether we can fix that Folly in the long run is the mother of all challenges, but far removed from the kinds of Follies I am talking about here. In this space, we are considering political and social Follies, the ones that are fixable through political and social change, those that will have a short-term and perhaps long-term benefit if we recognize them as such and do some repair work on them. Indeed, fixing these kinds of Political Follies could serve as a model for fixing the long-term Mother of all Follies–the environmental one.

We will go through a period in which the environmental changes will seem permanent, because of the long half life of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (50-200 years). But our models of global climate change are too primitive yet to fully understand the scope of what lies ahead of us. Yet the predictions of global climate change have thus far been too conservative, particularly in projecting the rate of loss of the polar ice caps, since it is now clear that the slowly melting ice cap model, the ice cube in a glass of water model, does not account for what really takes place during polar ice cap melting. But again, fixing the Mother of all Follies, will require that we have to fix the FC of political origins, those that can be solved through the political and social changes demanded by our current state of a very un-American America.

The Economic Crisis of Today: Our current economic crisis, and the poor solutions we have used to fix it, will mean borrowing ourselves further into a hole without fixing some of the most critical elements the country faces, such as our broken health care system. Our solution to the meltdown is likely to mean that we will no longer control our own financial destiny, at least not on the sea of international currencies. We face the very real prospects that other countries will use our current state of financial collapse as a tool to reduce our influence in the World, even though at the moment it seems like we have dragged the rest of the countries down with us. But the countries that are buying our debt, like China, have a grip on our economy that we have never allowed before. Inflation of the dollar is very likely to be the only way out for America to reduce its debt and, with a further declining value of the dollar, there could well be pressure to push for another currency, like the Euro, as the basis for a new, more stable international exchange system, even though, right now, the dollar looks pretty stable. But the amount of money committed by our government to fix this economy is so far hovering around $7 trillion (loans, promises, purchases, stocks), a sum unimaginably large and unimaginably impossible to contemplate as an entry in the credit and debit columns. However, much of the borrowing that we are doing could be eliminated and we could stabilize our own economy if we dramatically reduced our military spending and began investing in the areas that help bring us an innovative economy, not the one we have today. Converting our military-industrial complex into the innovative technologies needed to address greenhouse gas reduction, as a new component of our economic engine, is one way to think about getting us out of a permanent war footing that stagnates our economy and the way we look at the world. Remember that we spend more than $1 trillion dollars each year on military and military-related costs, so that in principal, we could fund our own bailout without heavy borrowing. But these huge debts we face, are only going to multiply if we continue to go down the road of treating the military budget as untouchable. Massive public and private debt through military spending, wars, excessive speculation and credit card frenzies are the result of the accumulated Follies that are now arriving at our doorstep, all derived from the concept of Folly Compounding Interest (FCI), addressed below.

Fixing Follies Early: There is great danger in delaying the corrections needed to avoid serious FC. The greatest of these is that by putting off the fix for your Folly for a very long time, you may have forgotten what the folly was that started to get you into trouble in the first place, and, instead of fixing the original Folly , you fix the wrong thing, perhaps you actually introduce another Folly, which itself begins to accumulate as FCI. Worse, you might unravel some of the good stuff, keep the doodo, add some doodo of your own and then let somebody else worry about it later. Does that in any way feel like what we are faced with as a result of the presidency of GW Bush and his partner in crime Dick Cheney? It feels that way to me: nothing but a sea of doodo in front of us. Fortunately, we don’t have to worry about the free market hoax as a serious economic strategy, since we recently socialized a good part of our financial system. But of course, we only fixed things at the top, further depriving us of resources to fix things that truly need fixing.

Huge Problems for a New Administration: Ordinarily, a new administration coming into the American Presidency has to face a difficult issue or two. But in this case, what Bush leaves behind is so extensive and pervasive, almost across the board, that it seems like a vast sea of problems, way beyond counting with just the fingers of your hand and way beyond simple solutions. No incoming President in our history has ever had to face two different ongoing wars (a third one is the “war on terror”). And to face them with a military that is shattered in its morale and strained to the breaking point from the stress of excessive, unfair, over-taxing service. There is a recent report out that claims the suicide rate of soldiers who have been in Iraq, after coming home, is such that the death toll from that source is higher than the death toll of soldiers in combat.

Domestic Issues: Our medical care system is an embarrassment and badly broken as an effective and fair health care delivery system: it is too expensive and serves too few people. It doesn’t look anything like a solution by the so called “can do” Americans. Wages have declined over the past eight years for the middle class and were stagnant for a good part of the last 25 years; good jobs have been replaced by bad ones. People are losing their homes through money-gouging schemes that banks themselves have created in another far more extensive version of the Savings and Loans scandal of the 1980s. On Wall street, we have privatized profit and socialized risk. We have a magnitude of public expenditures on the military that is a noose around our neck with a budget of about $1.1 trillion, when all military items are added up, including the DOE costs for maintaining our nuclear arsenal, which itself remains more of a threat to all Americans than a source of security. It would seem that these many problems, none of which can be solved with a single band-aid, must have multiple causes. At first it might seem impossible that all of our current Follies, each of which is gathering FCI, can be traced to a single source. Yet, it is intriguing to at least explore the possibility that we can in fact, trace all of our current problems to a single Folly which we germinated and hatched in one of the past iterations of America–this would be the Mother of all Political Follies. Is it even remotely possible that one errant move of national dimensions in our past behavior has led to our current state of multifarious misery? That is the subject of this little note. But before exploring the issue in any significant detail, we must explore the nature and origin of Follies in our history and better understand FC, before switching to the Mother of All Political Follies.

Folly Compounding is Endemic to Institutions. All institutions make mistakes and countries tend to make very big ones. When a Folly befalls a company, which has a profit motive and a bottom line, it usually needs to be corrected quickly, or else the company could go out of business. British motorcycle manufacturers for example, were at one time king of the hill, with Norton, Triumph and others at the head of the class. Yet, by resting on their laurels, they fell victim to the energetic post-war Japanese, who provided, among other things, electric start motors, which helped propel them into the front ranks of motorcycle manufacturing. Today it looks like something similar may be happening to the American automobile manufacturers as a result of a kind of ossification in corporate leadership that maybe more related to the class dividing line of workers and management.

Follies are hard to fix for a Country: For a country, where there is no profit motive per se (it primarily serves a security function for those engaged in undertaking high profit activities), the motivation for correcting mistakes is always in the context of political survival rather than the health of the country. It’s good if they’re congruent, but GW has demonstrated to us how completely incongruent their alignment can be. It is far more likely for a country to get ossified from its Follies than a person or a business. And, the primary reason for this relates to the concept of constituency, because national political Follies are created by, and need to serve, a political alignment that brings you to power in the first place. And quite often, in modern America, that political alignment means telling the American people that one or more of the greatest Follies committed in their name, was in fact, a great American initiative. In America, political influence has created a false history of the country, such that a gifted politician, fed by a party with deep pockets, has no trouble convincing a large segment of our population, that pursuing Follies can be a noble cause. Nations suffer when they cannot properly identify their Follies and fix them before FCI comes due as a massive payment of unapproachable dimensions. It is not possible to change course unless you want to sacrifice your own career, which few people do. Under those circumstances, a politician survives by helping his constituency find better words for their Folly, words that allow the Folly to continue by another name: the invasion of Iraq had to be sold as a search for “weapons of mass destruction”  (WMD), not for oil and that myth still exists for many Americans today, particularly those with a deep need to believe their country can do no wrong. Unfortunately, these people are often the families and friends of soldiers that get called up to fight these wars and propagate the folly.  As another example. the Southerners didn’t fight intensely over slavery, but over States RIghts–the political version, which goes down more smoothly than the more barbaric term “slavery.” When corrected early on, a Folly does not accumulate FCI but, unfortunately, some Follies are seemingly impossible to avoid and invoke FCI not out of choice but out of circumstances.

The Civil War as FC. Some FC may be unavoidable and you may even realize at the time, that one preferred choice may necessitate adopting a Folly, perhaps a major one. When the founding fathers of America couldn’t resolve the issue of slavery at the time the union was first formed, seventy years later we had the bloodiest conflict in our history in the form of a civil war and, still alive today, we face the aftermath of that war and the slavery mentality in the form of racism and prejudice that has become a major political tool, stimulating the great realignment politics of the 20th Century, in which the Republican party converted Southern Democrats into Republicans, feeding the political horror shows of Reagan, Bush I and Bush II.

The Benefits of Slavery: One must keep in mind that the Folly of slavery, of allowing slavery to become rooted as an economic system, without which the slave states could not exist as they did, was not restricted to the South. During the peak of slavery, a very large fraction of wealthy British had acquired their wealth through the slave trade. Northern Americans profited from slavery through ship building and financing and many of the most successful slave traders were in fact Northerners by residential criteria. It’s been estimated that until the 19th Century, about 1/3 of wealthy British owed their wealth to the slave trade. The South was the recipient of the slave trade, but not necessarily the profiteer of the slave procurement system. The bill for perhaps the unavoidable FC of slavery came due during the civil war, which involved 3 million armed fighting men and 600,000 lives lost, many of whom died of poor medical care after being wounded (it was that event that stimulated the beginning evolution of medical care to move away from the primitive colonial medical methods, to adopt more modern techniques and ideas and eventually this process led to the fusion of science into medicine towards the end of the 19th century).

Still Paying for the Civil War: If the heavy price of the Civil War in lives lost and mass carnage wasn’t enough, in many ways it proved to be something of a down payment for future atrocities and future wars. Indeed, we continue to pay on that bill in ways that seem challenging at each new turn. Like global climate change, the impact of the Civil War will likely be with us forever. The historic institution of slavery created huge wealth for many and an unsustainable economy for a significant population of Americans. Yet, the very nature of slavery was such an anathema to the founding of our nation, such a completely farcical notion in the face of the wording found in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal” that continuity with the past had to be sharply altered. Otherwise it was hard to sleep. You can only wonder if addressing global climate change will prove to match the titanic struggle we went through over slavery. It seems to be shaping up that way. There is after all, a giant economy and huge profits derived from fossil fuels and the suppression of science that tries to tell us about the Folly Compounding nature of pursuing cheap carbon-based energy sources.

The Civil War did not end FC from Black enslavement. As devastating as the civil war was, it didn’t really solve the problem of slavery. It was only the beginning of a solution as we faced a long interim period of converting from slavery to enslavement. If you believe that the civil war ended slavery in the South, think again. In Douglas Blackmon ‘s book “Slavery by Another Name ” (a summary of which can be read/watched on Bill Moyers Journal) the author discusses how post-slavery enforced labor camps created a new form of slavery in the South that re-enslaved thousands of blacks who became indentured laborers. Blackmon has compiled strong documentation that Southern states, which had Slave Codes that regulated the behavior of slaves before the civil war, formulated new codes after reconstruction that allowed them to bring back slavery in a new form–forced labor camps. Immediately after the civil war, Southern States tried to replace “Slave Codes” with “Black Codes” to achieve something similar in creating cheap black labor in the South. But these laws were struck down and the South responded by creating new laws that would fall on blacks to effectively recapture their free labor. These new laws were more subtle and included the concept of “vagrancy” which itself became a code word for rounding up blacks and getting them into forced labor camps from which they might have escaped previously or be recruited anew. These new laws helped to create labor camps that effectively replaced slavery, and, in essence, accomplished very nearly the same thing. From Blackmon’s interview with Bill Moyers: “Well, and but what the picture also demonstrates [referring to a photograph in his book] was the level of violence and brutality, the venality of things that were done. And so, this kind of physical torture went on, on a huge scale. People were whipped, starved. They went without clothing. There were work camps where people reported that they would arrive looking for a lost family member, and they would arrive at a sawmill or a lumber camp where the men were working as slaves naked, chained, you know, whipped. It was it’s just astonishing, the level of brutality.” Blackmon continues–”And some of the most prominent families and individuals in the creation of modern Atlanta, their fortunes originated from the use of this practice. And the most dramatic example of that was a brick factory on the outskirts of town that, at the turn of the century, was producing hundreds of thousands of bricks every day.The city of Atlanta bought millions and millions of those bricks. The factory was operated entirely with forced workers. And almost 100 percent black forced workers. There were even times that on Sunday afternoons, a kind of old-fashioned slave auction would happen, where a white man who controlled black workers would go out to Chattahoochee Brick and horse trade with the guards at Chattahoochee Brick, trading one man for another, or two men.”

The Black Law of Vagrancy: During the forced labor camp era in the South, you could be arrested on the streets and charged with vagrancy, appear before a judge who ordered you moved to a labor camp from which it was testified you escaped. Apparently the North looked the other way after reconstruction as if to say “we will not tolerate slavery in the North, but if you are a Black man and decide to stay in a former slave state, you’re on your own.” These labor groups existed throughout the South until the beginning of the Second World War. So when you walk the streets of Atlanta think about the fact that the city probably could never have been built without modern slave labor. It just wasn’t called slavery.

A Modern carryover of Slavery. In modern times, post-Barry Goldwater, manipulation of this “Southern block” of former slave states created the new political coalition that polluted the Republican Party and gave us Reaganism. Modern Republicanism was built on the unethical manipulation of Southern Whites who were pissed off with the Democratic Party, because of Civil Rights Legislation, passed when Lyndon Johnson was President. It was Barry Goldwater himself who suggested, after his stunning defeat to Johnson in 1964, that the Republican Party should recruit the Southern States who were ready to jump ship from the Democrats after the Civil rights legislation passed under Johnson; that was the beginning of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy.” It proved to be the most significant political realignment of the post civil war era and it still dominates our political landscape. Hopefully the 2008 political victory of Obama has helped to destroy this block of voters that eliminated any liberal, progressive legislation from ever passing. You may notice that until the recent healthcare bill was passed this year (2010), no progressive legislation had been passed by our national congress since the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. The power of the South can only permanently be eliminated by eliminating or changing the senate to a proportional system and eliminating the electoral college system all together.  Otherwise, unified Southern power can be reborn again, many times over.

Could we have done without Slavery? Would we have been better off today by insisting on a slave-free union written into our constitution when we first formed our country? That is what some, like John Adams wanted to do. But it proved to be a bridge too far. One of the most prominent states, Virginia, was a slave state and its most prominent political figure of that era and author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves and sired children by at least one of them (although he wanted to rid Virginia of slavery earlier in his career and concluded, by the opposition that he ran into, that the time was not ripe for such a sea change in the culture, that it would have to wait until some future date when the country was more mature. Of course, that maturity never came). Even if one could have formed a slave-free union and defeated the British, a new smaller union, one formed of slave-free states might not have survived the war of 1812, if the Southern block served as allies with the British, permanently changing the landscape of America and perhaps restoring British rule, at least in some regions of the country. It was not until the war of 1812 was concluded that the British decided against ever seeking dominion in North America again. As an aside, perhaps the American Indian culture would have been better off, for it was their alliance with the British during the war of 1812, that resulted in the Indian purges by Andrew Jackson, as he drove some southern Indians into Florida, and forced the Cherokee Indians of Georgia to march the “Trail of Tears” to relocate into what is now Oklahoma, ostensibly as punishment for their alliance with the British, but in reality it served as continuity for American expansionism. Thus, Indian genocide was greatly accelerated by the War of 1812 (Northern Indian alignment with the British during the Revolutionary war also figured in the hardened attitudes that the new American government had towards Native Americans).

One last try for the British: Until the battle of New Orleans, which the Americans were supposed to lose, Britain had a strategy for retaining American holdings. Even though the 1812 peace agreement was signed in London before the Battle of New Orleans, Britain insisted that it had to be carried over to the US for its signature there, hoping that in the intervening travel time, the battle of New Orleans would be a decisive victory for them and the treaty would be renegotiated or canceled, giving Britain a new opportunity for continued presence in the New World. But that all ended when Andrew Jackson pulled off a stunning victory in the Battle of New Orleans. As a result, the British never again challenged American hegemony in North America, by trying to establish a foothold in America. Of course, the American aim, of driving out the British in Canada did not succeed, as our invasion into Canada was a bit like our invasion of Iraq.

More on Follies: Part of FC is institutionally endemic, because when large organizations make decisions of great momentum, often when they first get started, or get a fresh start for some reason, they very rarely change or adapt to new circumstances. Indeed institutions or countries are designed to propagate FC: that’s why they can accumulate such huge levels of FCI as it is hard or perhaps impossible to avoid. This is not because they feel they made the right decision in the first place, but rather their decisions create constituencies and an internal momentum, such that going back on the foundations of their decision-making might risk the entire enterprise and certainly put those in charge at greater peril, politically or otherwise. Once you make a big folly, it is hard to undo it. Indeed preservation of the folly means preservation of the folliers. I have heard in recent months elected members of the House of Representatives take the floor to remind Americans that there is no greater duty to country than that of continuing to fight communism. Presumably, they are referring to Cuba or North Korea as the remaining giants of communism, as China is now evolving into a new relationship with the United States, in this case, an economic one (mind you, our current and developing relationship with China was initiated by Nixon when he realized that he could not solve the war in Vietnam without going through China. So forgetting that China was a communist country was more like a forced choice on Nixon, rather than a contemplative option). For the Chinese, the American loss in Vietnam was an overwhelming, but expected victory.

Folly Compounding by undoing the wrong Follies: Folly compounding is different for an individual when compared to a nation, largely because a person has only one or at most a small group of people to worry about, not a large constituency. The individual is always better prepared to correct follies, especially those that have significant financial implications. The ultimate financial crisis can lead to bankruptcy which at least gives you something like a fresh start. But for countries, such as the United States, once an initial decision is made, succeeding presidents tend to enforce those decisions rather than unravel them: if you try to unravel prior decisions you always run the risk of unraveling the unraveler. After the Bay of Pigs disaster for example, President John F. Kennedy might have wanted to expunge the CIA, and apparently intimated that in one of his comments. But, he never really had any intention of doing so (despite numerous rumors that he did), because had he seriously tried it, he would have unraveled all the narratives of the post-war era and too many American heroes would have bit the dust. Any attempt on JFK’s part to do that might well have put the Democratic party into the dust bin of history. Even by the 1960s, the false narrative of our country was not a pretty story. But if the Follies of a predecessor might get recognized early on as a Folly, it is far easier to let the Folly continue to perpetuate itself, continue to grow at compound interest rates, so that the new guy can make Follies of his own and look forward, rather than spend his time unraveling the Follies of his predecessor(s) and always be looking through the rear view mirror. Every incoming president wants to do something new, and only in our recent history have we had presidents (like Reagan and G.W. Bush) who were seriously committed to undoing what others had done before them (OK Jefferson did it to Adams’ presidency during his first term, but that was pre-industrial). For Reagan it was more subtle, like hiring incompetents to head organizations like the EPA, whereas for GW it was not subtle at all, as he tore up prior laws and international treaties and went out on his own (Under GW Bush, the Clean Air Act is gone, as is the Endangered Species Act). Unfortunately, these new undoers, Ronald Reagan and G. W. Bush, undid the wrong stuff and further added to FC and the FCI that goes with it. We have only begun to contemplate the payback in store for us from the changes in the environment and our climate. The only thing we know for sure is that the worst is yet to come.

The Bill for Folly Compounding:has it arrived? The responsibility of a new administration is to plan a new set of programs, many of which are likely to initiate new follies and, at the same time, it’s important to put a band-aid on the follies of your predecessor so that the bill for the old ones won’t come due during your presidency, otherwise you will get the blame. The Republican Party of today does not object to Obama or McCain becoming President this time around, because there are so many Follies coming due that the new President will get blamed for his inability to solve them. It seems to be turning out however, that G. W. Bush and his neocon buddies weren’t smart enough to band-aid the old follies with ones that stick and we may be witnessing the bill for all the old Follies coming due during the last months of his presidency. Although, with nearly two months to go, the bill could still get higher (note added later–it did!).

America’s last gasp Folly? The last log to put on the fire for the American economy was the housing bubble, created by low interest rates by the Fed and sub-prime mortgages conjured up largely by investment banks as securitized stocks. These instruments were so complex that few understood them. Now that it is burning out, it seems like it might turn into a nuclear star, the predecessor to a black hole. Wall Street got hooked on bubbles. The dotcom bubble was created out of hype, when internet companies could issue stocks one day and see their worth soar to hundreds of times the opening share price without ever showing a profit. Any fool could tell you that this bubble couldn’t last and when it burst, the feds quickly moved in to help create a new bubble–the housing bubble–seemingly the last log to put on the fire. There is no economic factor or bubble on the horizon that is waiting in line to replace the speculative housing bubble: with a consumer-based economy and so much public and private debt, at such high interest rates when credit cards are used to finance the debt, the cupboard is now bare. The bursting of this bubble has now led to $ trillions in debt and loan guarantees. This is nearing a 10 on the Richter Scale. It may not seem believable that the huge financial meltdown we are going through had its origins in the era immediately following the end of WW II, when we stepped into a leadership vacuum, without clarity of mission or technique. Instead of learning from the FDR era about going softly on issues such as how we would deal with Russia, the right-wing was able to veer Truman into the same anti-communist  frenzy that had been  unleashed during World War I when the Russians quit the war as a result of their revolution. We sent American troops into Russia in that period to help the White Russians overcome the Bolshevicks. That intervention in another country’s internal struggle was against the very principles we were founded on as a nation. And, many Russians still remember the U.S. treachery in those years, fed by the rabid anticommunist frothing churned up by the right wing Republican fanatics. And, part of the solution to these problems lies in the 900 lb gorilla in the room that no one wants to talk about yet–the excessive military expenditures that drain our resources. But this too is a double-edged sword, as our “bomb economy” puts a lot of people to work in the defense industry. Bush may be too mired in ideology to generate the vision necessary to find at least a temporary solution (in case you haven’t noticed how many untoward disasters that are all around us and seemingly have us properly on the edge) to the most pressing problems that are currently falling into his watch. One needs to face the housing disaster as a national disaster, like Katrina, but do it this time so that it works. Get people back into their homes and stop the financing that has allowed wealthy people to make more wealth off of the poor. Reduce the interest rates on credit card debt and make it easier for people to get out of that form of debt. Yes banks will fail, they are failing now, but we have faced that problem many times before: remember the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s? Yes, it may no longer be possible for a financial wizard to make hundreds of millions of dollars each year for doing very little, except contributing to the national level of FCI. Folly Compounding gets harder and harder to fix the longer you wait. If you wait too long, no one can remember what the folly was in the first place that got you into your current dilemma.

There is always great opposition to fixing Follies. The Republicans don’t want anyone to go back and examine how we really got into our present fix, with a bloated military, runaway military expenditures, the need to create new demons and dragons to slay, calling ourselves a superpower, all the while internally evolving into a third-world country. No leader, no party, no single person on the political horizon with the exception of Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson, wants to connect the dots between our huge military expenditures and our inability to provide health care for our citizens or our concern for the internal economic stability of our country. That is the FCI bill that is coming due today. We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg. We are in a country where any wealth we could apply to fix our current fiscal problem goes to the military to fight off our enemies, most of which are imaginary. As a result, all of our financial bailout is created by money borrowed through the printing press and selling bonds.

When did we begin Folly Compounding? No one seems willing to go back far enough to recognize that our biggest source of FC began at the close of WW II, when we launched the Mother of all Political and Social Follies, by making Russia, China and communism into a giant monolithic threat that seemingly wanted to enslave us all, all of us wee little capitalists. This threat was created by the rabid right-wing elements who wanted to preserve capitalism at all cost and sucked the inexperienced Truman into being the guy with the banner. In retrospect it was all too easy. But Truman was aided by one big ace in the hole that made his creation of the Cold War too tempting: Leslie Groves, the air force general who guided the development of the Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bomb, promoted the idea that, by dropping the bomb on Japan, we would be serving notice to the Russians, letting them know that this new ultimate death weapon could be used against them and this single act (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) would give Americans hegemony over the Russians and the threat of advancing communism for at least forty years. In the words of Groves, “the Russians couldn’t even build a decent jeep.” It was in fact Truman’s adoption of this attitude, however naive that it was (many have argued for example that the Russian T34 tank was a good match for the German Panzer tanks, much better than our own Sherman tanks, which were poorly matched against them when head to head confrontations began after D-Day and in Africa and Italy). It was the seemingly seductive gift of the atomic bomb that made Truman jump onto the slippery slope of using militarism as the chief weapon against the contrived threat that the Russians would be advancing communism throughout the World, now that they were a true superpower, created by their dominant role in defeating Germany in WW II. The Russians did not want the Cold War. Stalin had lost 20-24 million people and badly needed time to heal as a nation. He did not support the communist party’s in Europe in the aftermath of the war, because he didn’t want another conflict to absorb his energy. He had too many things to do at home. At the end of WW II, the great Russian army that defeated Germany was largely demobilized–they had to rebuild their country.

When the Cold War Began: It has been argued that only days after FDR died (1945), Truman met with Russian Ambassador Molotov and chewed him out for the Russian demands in controlling Poland. This was a little odd, since Russia had experienced Polish soldiers who participated with the German army during the invasion of their homeland and the Battle of Stalingrad: why wouldn’t the Russians insist on control of Poland after WW II? The old axium that to the victors go the spoils is still true in case of war. Of course there were Russian atrocities against the Poles when Hitler and Stalin signed a pact and carved up Poland before the Germans opened up their fatal second front against Russia. The abrupt hostile attitude and contempt that Truman showed for Molotov has been used by historians to mark the beginning of the Cold War and, for America, it was the beginning of their greatest Folly. Folly by fiction is the greatest of all Folly sins, because to fix those, you have to recognize the fiction before you can get to the Folly. The cold war was conceived and executed by a small group of Americans in the Truman administration who would never have had the authority on policy had it not been for WW II, which gave them the access they should never have been allowed to have. The Cold War was nothing more than a policy to propagate world-wide American hegemony.

Follies are propagated: As another example (hardly trivial for those on the receiving end) of this kind of propagating Folly, you can see it in how we support our military, more specifically, how we support the soldiers on the ground. We have all been disgusted by the lack of good armor for our troops in Iraq, where roadside bombs have been the single biggest cause of death and injury, a situation in which simple armor plating of the vehicles could save lives and reduce injury and ultimately, long-term care costs to those who get injured. Although conditions have improved, most of us reel in irritation and feel that soldiers are underpaid and certainly under protected. The revelations about the poor health care conditions at Walter Reed Hospital confirmed and expanded our disgust with our own government. Can’t the world’s only superpower protect its soldiers and care for them any better than this? But that attitude is endemic to the way we have always looked at our foot soldiers, the grunts in the trenches. George Washington almost quit as the commander of the Continental Army because Congress would not adequately fund his troops, many of whom went without shoes and adequate clothing. The winter at Valley Forge was nothing short of a nightmare for Washington. His army was replete with desertions, infighting, quarrelsome interactions and bad morale. The only thing that kept the Valley Forge army together that winter was Washington’s constant visits to the camp and his engulfing presence. But once this policy was formulated, that we would be stingy with the troops, it became our cultural standard and has been carried forward as part of our modern view of the military at the level of the grunt: don’t spend any more than you have to on the soldier who does the actual fighting. If any succeeding president wanted to undo what congress established during the revolutionary war, it would be challenging and most presidents want to promote continuity of presidential lineage, not a series of disjunctive changes of the guard, where you spend most of your time unraveling the old stuff and much less time threading some new. With the exception of GW Bush, no president wants to be part of a historical yo-yo. In the case of the foot soldier, any advantages that our modern troops have over Washington’s, were carved out of the need to give incentives for recruiting an army of adequate size and skill, particularly as the population from which they were derived became more educated and sophisticated. It would be far better if we completely outsourced our military at the foot soldier level. But, will the Chinese be willing to serve their army and ours?

How is our treatment of soldiers relevant for Folly Compounding? Nixon eliminated the military draft in 1969 and the last drafted soldier to serve was called up in 1973. Since then we have an all  volunteer army. At the present time, the unpopular war in Iraq has seriously compromised our ability to recruit qualified soldiers. This inability to recruit quality personnel for the military has forced the military to reduce the standards for army recruits, such that high school dropouts and people with marginal ability or those with criminal records can qualify today, where they were banned previously. These soldiers are much more likely to engage in torture and abuse, simply because of their background. More importantly, professionalizing the army, as we have done, puts the nation at greater risk for a military junta or takeover. You have only to look at the composition of our police and military to know which political philosophy would prevail in a military takeover. So it might be the case that this source of Folly Compounding is yet to extract its ultimate price. The other component to this issue is that by calling up the National Guard to serve in Iraq, we have robbed the governors of access to a military force when confronted with an emergency. All these elements lie smoldering under the surface and, by the time pressure for more army personnel comes up, the escalation to a permanent war footing may be necessary, at which time reconstituting the draft may be required. Currently the army is stretched to the breaking point and the National Guard is completely dispirited.

One feature of Folly Compounding that consistently rings true, is that looking back, it seems utterly irrational when you try to visualize how we moved from enemies to friends or the other way around. Continuity is not among the landmarks of our retrospective trail. Take for example how we react to Cuba vs China. Both are communist states, the presumed mortal enemy of our capitalist society. Yet, we simply disregarded the communist state of China to engage them in an act of symbiotic economic interdependency, but oh yes, Cuba is different—it’s a communist state and we have no economic or political will to change our attitude about that country right in our own backyard. For Cuba, it’s the ideology stupid! But it’s not the ideology of the political system that counts, it’s the ideology of corporate America. We will have an embargo against Cuba until we get to use Havana again as a vacation/gambling resort and Castro is no longer around.  It’s that simple. Hypocrisy doesn’t even matter anymore. We no longer have a free press that is willing to draw attention to our corporatist state and the false history that is needed to sustain it. We have reached a state in our society where outright plain lies spoken by our president are never challenged in the press. You have to go to the blogs to find reality.

The Roman Empire was a classic example of Folly Compounding: the only problem is that no one knows with certainty which of her many follies was the most important one accounting for her decline and fall.  Did she jump into the dust bin of history by the sheer weight of too many accumulated Follies, or was there one in particular that outweighed all the others? Corruption? Too many wars? To many armies to feed and support? Bloated aristocracy? Blowbacks from all the indigenous people she had trampled and slaughtered? For the last sixty years, America has been Folly Compounding and, at the moment, it does not look to anyone that we will last anything comparable to the duration of the Roman Empire, which lasted about a thousand years.

Our one-time attempt to erase our Folly: a decade of restoration: There is one sliver of hope that we can draw on from a long forgotten page in our post war history which gives us encouragement that something like a cure can still be found. Perhaps our economic collapse has given us an opportunity to address these problems as we did previously. Lately, we hear a lot more people asking “what would FDR do?” The Google list for “FDR” has exploded with new options for information. But we should also think about Googling sputnik, the Seaborg Report or Vannevar Bush. In fact, we did go through a brief ten-year period (1958-1968) where it looked like America might recover, as she attempted to set a new course for herself and tried to right her tilted ship of state. This happened as a result of Sputnik, the Russian satellite launched in 1957. Sputnik I, followed a month later by Sputnik II shocked the world and terrified the hard right-wingers. Physicist Edward Teller, the patron saint of the hydrogen bomb, said the United States had lost “a battle more important than Pearl Harbor.” Senator Henry Jackson, a war hawk Democrat, proclaimed that Sputnik was a “devastating blow to the prestige of the United States as a leader in the scientific and technical world.”  The hardliners throughout the country were flummoxed. They couldn’t respond with more military buildup and a new round of nuclear warheads (although they did that too), because the lesson of Sputnik was a lesson of being bested in the game of science and technology. For the Russians, Sputnik was a major propaganda victory and yet it was a scientific disaster. Before Sputnik was sent into space, Russian technicians were having a hard time getting the Geiger counter on the satellite to send signals to a receive for making measurements of radiation in space. Kruschev was so worred about getting the Russian satellite up there first (it was a geophysical year and others, including the U.S. were trying to launch a satellite as well), that he sent it up without the ability to make measurements. Ironcially, several months after Sputnik, the Americans sent up their first satellite–Explorer I–which did have measurement tools and was able to measure the first of the two Van Allen Radiation Belts. With the launch of Explorer I America grabbed the lead in the science of space exploration, while ceding to the Russians the propaganda victory in the struggle between two political systems. Scientists in America had argued since the close of WW II that new government expenditures for research had gone mostly to the military and that basic science research was not developed as promised after the war. Sputnik forced America to re-examine her research investment priorities. Clearly something in America was wrong if the Russians, germinating from a supposedly inferior system, could best the United States in an area that they had claimed for themselves. America was first with the bomb, how could they not be first into space?

Eisenhower assigned a committee to make recommendations about how to respond to Sputnik. The Seaborg report of 1960 concluded that the Russians were ahead of America because their students were better trained in math and science. America had too few research universities for proper science exposure to its student population. More would have to be built. A doubling of research universities had to be initiated. The Seaborg report further emphasized that the kind of investment they were proposing represented a sound investment in America and her future. In addition to the construction of more research universities, the Seaborg report emphasized that support for students and the infrastructure for training future Ph.D.s would be a necessary system of support. Prior support of universities had been too narrowly focused.  A national consensus developed that America should increase the number of research universities  (there were about 16 in that era, about the same number as those that existed in the 1930s) and embellish those that were already designated as such (based on the % of nation’s Ph.D. students). So began the Golden Era of the American Research University, in which new  universities began and  students were encouraged to go to college and received support through student loans and scholarships. Low interest student loans were made available and funding for graduate students was  expanded together with a gigantic expansion of the research facilities throughout the country. Collectively this  formed a new industry, one  never before seen in this country–an industry to educate and grow, with a new emphasis on science, engineering and technology all viewed as a new investment strategy for America.

More on Sputnik. The new national mood created by the response to Sputnik reflected one of the great transforming moments in American history. Although Americans were encouraged to study Russian, as they seemed to be the dominant scientific community of the post-Sputnik world, there was palpable relief from the old McCarthy era days when students had to get under desks to practice drills for an atomic bomb attack, as one of the means for indoctrinating the country against an enemy that did not exist. Instead of beating America’s chest for developing American hegemony on the basis of military achievements and deployments, we began to emphasize the fundamentals of education and began to appreciate more intellectual developments and individual cognitive growth: America needed to get a lot smarter. The projected growth for  the American research university system was pegged at 15% per year and in 1968, the research university program reached its highest percent spending of the economy at .025%. The country was aroused and responded dramatically to these new education and research opportunities. This new effort became the center piece of Kennedy’s “New Frontier” that brought him into office, as he promised continuity with the program and expansion of teacher education throughout the country. This ten year period, the Golden Era, proved that America can do remarkable things when a national focus is made that improves the lives and outlook for all Americans. No child left behind did not need to be included in the dialog, because the great civil rights awareness was just appearing on the horizon as a national dilemma. The scientists and engineers brought into universities in that era changed the face of science and brought the new disciplines of molecular biology and neuroscience into the American sphere of influence, while keeping other disciplines such as physics, as premier disciplines in American universities. Indeed the term “neuroscience” is an American term brought into existence in the 1960s, when the Society for Neuroscience was formed in the United States. But, tragically, this new emphasis on education and research, though it restored American prestige by putting a man on the moon ahead of the Russians in 1969, did not continue in the same way, as the Vietnam War began to capture the resources that had been flowing into our higher education system. In addition to that, the civil rights movement clearly established that America had a long way to go before justice for all its citizens could be established. But, by investing in education and expanding our research universities in the 1950s and 1960s, we are better prepared today to soften the blow that currently rests on our doorstep. Indeed, without that investment in the 1950s and 1960s, we would not be as prepared as we are today to rebuild our economy along the lines that can take advantage of the investments we made in that long forgotten Golden Era. So, there is a way out–we did it once before. While we look back to FDR for hints about dealing with our fiscal crisis, we should look back at Sputnik as an example in our history where, for a decade, we started to get things right. But, after this brief flurry of relief, when America had an opportunity to right the ship and set a new course, whamo, we got back on the Folly Compounding train through Vietnam, the rise of Southern politics and the corporatist reaction to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” which put the brakes on our development of higher education and turned on the spigot once again as we turned our back on that enriching decade to reassert our pursuit of compound interest on our Follies. Vietnam is part of the bill that seems to be coming due right before our eyes. But that too is only part of the story.

Do we finally recognize our Follies? GW Bush, our current president, has been able to achieve something no other president in the history of the United States has managed to do: he has shown us how you can Folly Compound on a scale so unimaginable that almost everyone today either understands or feels what Folly Compounding is or does to the country as well as the individual citizen. The financial cost and the social implications of what he has done to our treasury and the cultural threads that bind us together are both visible, palpable and planted somewhere in our gut. We can see in the course of a single presidency what has taken nearly 6 decades to otherwise achieve. Bush has the unique distinction of not only spawning a whole new slew of Follies, but he has done what presidents seldom do–he did go back and undo his predecessors decisions and convert good decisions into a new brand of Folly. Bush didn’t undo any of  his predecessors Follies, but instead undid their positive contributions. Things like the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act. He undid those good deeds that worked well and kept his predecessors bad ones, tilting the windmill ever further towards the point of no return. Many have argued that we are just one or two terrorist attacks away from a military dictatorship. GW had already cleared the way for this action, since he struck down Posse Comitatus, thus making it legal for our military to patrol the U.S. The military establishment of NorthCom should frighten every American, because it is a new military field of operation, targeted at the United States with the possibility of using our own military for a takeover of the country, if the situation warrants it. But who decides whether any situation requires military action and martial law? Yep, GWB. Bush has “legally” established that in the “War on Terror,” the U.S. is a potential battlefield and the “decider” will choose whether the conditions warrant military action. It will be a stain on all of us that GWB and Cheney were not impeached during their tenure as president and vice-president. Will that failure become America’s greatest Folly?

The National symptoms of Folly Compounding: Even in the face of such a devastatingly high level of Folly Compounding , for some, recognition of this phenomenon still travels below the radar screen of verbalization. Perhaps this is still true for the majority of our citizens: for them, the awareness of Folly Compounding comes in the form of a gnawing, uncomfortable rumbling in the gut, accompanied by a low grade nausea, possibly with gas or the disquieting sensation of convulsive-like, peristaltic waves gurgling in our abdomen and rippling within our gut. At times this discomfort makes one feel as though the lunar tides have settled in the abdomen as a full-blown nighttime repetition of what one goes through less subtly during the day. Antacid sales go up and Insomnia, depression, poor performance on the job, being easily distracted, more irritable mixed with confusion and anger are all part of the Folly Compounding syndrome when it reaches the subconscious level of our citizenry, those who don’t know quite know enough to verbalize the problem. You don’t know what it is, but your gut is telling you that something is very wrong. For these types, things just aren’t right–there is a feeling of doom lurching around the corner. They will know a better country when they see one or feel it in their gut. Religion might be their antidote and perhaps it already is. There is a mood shaped by these tormented intestinal rumblings, a thread throughout the nation, a feeling that something bad has happened, but something worse is on its way. Perhaps we are ripe for an alien invasion, as the Martians have been waiting for signs of weakness and now they feel the time is ripe for a launch. But, for others, they know exactly what is going on and why. Their insight has reached the stage of verbalization and perhaps well beyond. Yet, for this group too, our present circumstances leaves them somewhat paralytic, facing a sense of despair about the future, because political realities are such that change in a big way, something that might put limits on Folly Compounding, and begin to reign them in, those seismic events usually require a major disaster, a sea change that leaves no doubt that mistakes were made and choosing to go down the road we have been on was a disaster: we need a brand new direction. We need to re-lurch the ship. Do something that will register on the Richter scale. The listing ship is there, but the will to right it has yet to emerge.

America has lacked palpable disaster: In a way, America has never had a major disaster visited upon it from another shore. Our major Follies have come when we have attempted to influence other countries through our growing militarism. But, we have yet to recognize these missteps for what they really represented. So, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq should have been viewed in that way and, had that kind of viewpoint prevailed, then Folly Compounding might have had a much more restricted visitation in setting the course of our current and future history. One might argue that 9/11 was America’s first disaster of foreign origin, but that is stretching the meaning of the concept and the significance of the event. 9/11 was visually horrific, but nothing less or more than a “blowback,” the stage for which we created for ourselves and upon which we became the principal actors. It did not signify an act of war, but rather an act of terrorism combined with pure luck and extremely poor awareness on our part about the dangers we create for ourselves, the alarm for which should have been the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, an event that should have set off an alarm and triggered a more rational way of dealing with our own domestic security. The same person who financed the World Trade Center bombing, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed also helped plan 9/11. Preceding 9/11, the same group had planned a terrorist attack in the Philippines that involved boarding numerous planes and using them to crash into selected targets. But the story behind the 9/11 attack, a story of Folly Compounding, began in the 1970s during the Carter administration, when we were feeling so clever and invincible about ourselves. We rope-a-doped the Soviets into invading Afghanistan and as a reward, got 9/11, Iraq, the Taliban, Pakistan and a new narrative for the false history of America. Charlie Wilson’s War was a Folly and another example of the short-term thinking that dominates our government strategy. 9/11 was another notch in our Folly Compounding belt, but much of the country has yet to recognize it as such, for the Republicans have been successful in telling and warning the country “don’t go there.” If you go there you will suffer “paralysis by analysis.” It is the Republican tendency for developing irrelevant jingoism that seems to work for them as it distracts the public. Only in the last few weeks of our post-war history is this Republican form of  sloganism beginning to ring very hollow. It seemed to ring hollow in the 2008 election.

The origins of modern Folly Compounding: Since the close of WW II, the United States has embarked on Folly Compounding by generating great, disjunctive moments in our history where abrupt, hard political turns were made that lurched America inexplicably in new directions: two of these seismic shifts were destructive and one was restorative. All three bear examining. Yet these giant political lurches, a Folly Compounding spree if you will, begged most fundamentally at the question of why. Why does a country seemingly on the verge of a breathtaking pinnacle of opportunity for peace, social tranquility and economic prosperity, choose instead the most paranoid and destructive option of all available choices? How did a country that had come through a challenging but uniting war, under strong, popular Democratic leadership, a leadership that advocated a vision for a peaceful future, with reduced imperialism as a global objective, how did that country make such a hard right turn after WW II? How did America make such counter-intuitive choices? No single American ever voted for the option of the Cold War and it was never really a matter of public debate. How did the promises and vision of FDR suddenly get trashed by Truman, with the country veering sharply right, setting us on an new unchartered course which so abruptly changed our anticipations, that we had to begin the process of inventing a national mythology just to live with it all: the lurches were too unnatural, our enemies too unreal and too invisible. The Red Scare of the 1950s was an essential component to the plan for lurching the nation. We remain in a lurched posture today.

Let the Follies begin! No on knew it at the time, or could possibly foresee, but the childlike paranoia that was forced onto the American consciousness, beginning with the death of FDR near the end of WW II, would initiate the process of Folly Compounding , the bill for which has been accumulating interest and is coming due in our current generation, perhaps beginning in the last few years. It certainly accounts for a great deal of our current financial crisis. Tragically, the generation who will have to pay this bill was not even born when our greatest Folly Compounding adventures began. The seeds were sown, the plants emerged and the harvest has begun. Why did we set sail on a ship of militarism when other options were so readily available and so seemingly more attractive? In the space of a single war and two decades of an uneasy peace, a country that didn’t want anything to do with foreign affairs after WW I became the country that wanted to dominate the World–big time–after WW II. Perhaps it is inevitable that complex cultures choose Folly Compounding almost unavoidably.  But if so, that too only serves to emphasize and repeat the question– Why? You can have a citizenry that is educated and thoughtful, but as one ascends the ladder of their political leadership, the brain mechanisms that subserve national behavior become more and more dominated by the amygdala of the brain, rather than the frontal lobes of our cerebral cortex. We initiated and sustained sea changes in our culture through giant ideological transitions, each of which demanded a new narrative for the country in order to be seemingly coherent about the need for change and the justification for such a dramatic transition. In each case these new narratives so stretched our conceptual boundaries, that for some, a religious epiphany was required to gleam any sense of clarity about the motivation for such dramatic changes or derive any meaning to the transition. Continuity was always absent. Indeed, continuity was the mortal enemy of where we were going. To decipher these transitions, we needed a royal version of a Rosetta stone, since the facts before us seemed so disjunctive. We needed more than one Rosetta stone as we embarked on our adventure of Folly Compounding and all of them would come from Washington. The beltway was the eager, willing mint for the new coin of the realm, the Rosetta stones to guide our future and soothe those who had any doubts. We needed reliable new narratives and the ability to interpret them. But, eventually, we ran out of good narratives and the Rosetta Stones became useless and costly. Our current president, GW Bush never learned the art of minting high quality Washingtonian Rosetta stones. Now he waits for the cold harsh judgement of history. Yet, by not minting any new Rosetta stones, Bush was seemingly an ally to those who thought it was high time to take the rose-colored glasses off. With GWB, almost everyone agreed that the emperor’s clothes had come off.

The hard right wasn’t so hard: It turned out that the hard right in our history wasn’t so difficult to make after all. Red-baiting was the ready tool available to apply to any politician or citizen who disagreed with our new direction. The wicked new right suddenly found themselves with allies and power they never counted on before, most notably in the form of Harry Truman and key people in the administration, such as Leslie Groves (who ran the Manhattan project that created the atomic bomb) and James Forestall, Secretary of the Navy and eventually Secretary of Defense under Truman. The list goes on, but it isn’t all that deep. Aided by the hardliners in the administration, some of whom rose through the wartime footing to gain positions of influence that otherwise would never have been available to them, a small group got hold of the steering wheel of the nation and forced a hard right turn, lurching us into the era of Folly Compounding.

Justifying the turn: The social methods used to justify this sea change in our political course, selected one of the most effective methods from the new shelf of social indoctrination: take the single, best known members of our culture, those who work in Hollywood and the entertainment industry and persecute a few of them as communists, getting them blacklisted from their livelihood and use their popularity against them, to infect Americans with the new virus– the virus that our enemies are right here in America–the communists and “pinkos” among us. But, unlike today, the enemies of that era were not terrorists, even though we thought that somehow they wanted to fuck things up. We weren’t sure what they were doing, but they could be our neighbor, you never knew. We also knew that they all had good jobs, so they must be smart, because they spent most of the day trying to fuck up the country. The Communist scare had nothing to do with reality and in burying reality for all time in America, we launched our ship on the sea of Folly Compounding that would reshape the world according to our own view of it. We would eventually discover, that viewing the world from space, showed us we were a blue planet, but Washington was busy trying to paint the world bright red, or at least pink.

We turned against our own history: The greatest irony for Americans was that when we launched our ship of Follies at the end of WW II, we did so against the countries that were trying to copy our own historic agenda. The close of WW II had very little to do with advancing international communism and everything to do with countries that, seeing an opportunity, a break in the imperialist grip on the world, they wanted to take advantage of the change in world order to throw off the shackles of imperialism and focus on their own national development and unification. It was not a new world trying to enslave us, but a new world trying to emulate our own history. What we didn’t see at the end of WW II was that the rest of the World, especially those countries that had been enslaved by imperialism, wanted to use the American model to create Independent, nationally oriented states free from the imperialism that had enslaved much of the undeveloped world. But we took the low road. Instead of Truman responding to Ho Chi Minh’s letter asking for help to prevent the French from coming back to Indochina, Truman opposed FDR’s intentions and sided with the French, who joined in our new narrative and borrowed our Rosetta Stone as they declared that they would re-enter Vietnam and prevent the Communists from taking over. The French and eventually all other nations learned how to play the American fiddle–just say communism and America would come to your rescue no matter how absurd the circumstances. So, to make this all work, we took all aspiring nationalist leaders and turned them into communists. Just like the message at home: if you leaned left you were a communist or a communist sympathizer–a “pinko.” In any case, you were on the wrong side of our line in the sand, the imaginary line that separated those we would support and those we would oppose. It was a black and white world or a blue and red one. Now the real trouble with this line was that it was more properly termed “antidemocratic” and “pro dictatorship” for there is not a single instance in which our foreign policy supported the overthrow of a repressive dictatorship in support of democracy. There are many instances, beginning in Guatemala and Iran in the early 1950s, where we participated in the overthrow of Democratically elected leaders to favor repressive regimes that allowed our continued growth of American Corporatism, which was in fact, the real line in the sand. Truman tilted, but he wasn’t the real leader of the tilt machine.

Ronald Reagan as an anticommunist: A new star was born in that post-war era. Ronald Reagan, whose own reach for stardom as an actor was diminishing, as he lacked the innate skills to maintain his stardom, found a new occupation, one that would carry him to the pinnacles of power in America. He willingly cast aside his FDR liberalism (I think he voted for FDR during each of his Presidential campaigns), to become the national shill for promoting the idea that America was rotting from within. We had disloyal Americans, not only in Hollywood, but throughout the country, that were secretly working to sell the free America we had been working for, to some kind of takeover by the Soviets, enslaving America to the antithesis of its national objectives. You had to forget the fact that moments ago, the country that we now proclaimed to be our mortal enemy, the Soviet Union, was our badly needed ally during WW II and inflicted something like 92 percent of the casualties inflicted on the German Army.  You had to dash those memories, they were fallacies of the real world and once you expunged your brain of those misunderstandings, you could appreciate that WW II was merely an interruption of a few years from the titanic struggle between two systems, a good one and a really bad one. It’s freedom or enslavement. Anyone who disagrees is suspect and must be working for the other side. If you weren’t a communist, you must be a Commie Sympathizer. It didn’t matter that the Communist Party was a legal, recognized political party in America, nor did it matter if you really belonged. What really mattered is that by making a fool out of you, our government could scare the country. If you have ever watched any of the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), you can see that the willing door to door salesmen for this charade were the race-baiters, red-baiters, red-neck members of Congress, many of whom were from the South, with a new opportunity to launch their own national careers by finding communists underneath the carpet. If it couldn’t be proven or if you didn’t admit that you were a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, then your liberal views or your left-leaning philosophy meant you had to be a “Commie Sympathizer” or “Pinko” which was every bit as bad as being the card carrier. Nor did it matter that some people joined the Communist Party in the 1930s expressly to support the anti-Franco democrats in Spain. Franco had lavish support from Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, but FDR refused to support the government of Spain engaged in fighting Franco. Many of the young who joined the CP in the 1930s were young academics and they would pay by losing their academic appointments. This happened throughout the country, but was too far below the radar screen of the more celebrated events, like  by McCarthyism and finding communists in the State Department and Hollywood. J. Robert Oppenheimer paid a similar price, but he did not ever belong to the CP: He was merely in the way of America’s launching of Folly Compounding , which he tried, single-handedly, to prevent and for which he paid a heavy price. But that was bomb science, what did that matter?

Committed for good: When the vote was finally taken, America’s passive stand on the unfolding events of Folly Compounding contributed effectively to the new lurch in our history. The right-wing learned to coin labels before we had good label makers. So successful was this national hysteria, that the word “socialism” would be cast aside as just another form of communism and eventually “liberalism” would become an equally unacceptable word for you to apply to your politics or your beliefs. Red-baiting was out to label communists, socialists and liberals as part of the same ugly block of un-Americans. Atheists and agonistics are all in the atheist camp–the evil anti-deists who don’t deserve to live in America and who must be left-leaning and dangerous. So successful was this campaign of national hysteria, that even today, you have democratic politicians that avoid the word “liberal” as if it was roughly equivalent to “tertiary syphilis.”

The new historians: As we embarked on the first round of Folly Compounding , it was clear only to a few that our history would no longer be history by historians, but history by politicians, who wrote history by decree and not by acts of scholarship. Scholarship too was the enemy of the new narrative. Indeed, Washington would eventually insist that their Rosetta stones, minted fresh for each transition, each new narrative, were the only legitimate means of interpreting the new world, the one they created for us. Secrecy was essential: if you only knew what we knew about our enemies, you would think of nothing else, you would be paralyzed. So, let us worry for you. Turn on your TV, watch the soaps and take some Valium. For each Rosetta stone, and there were many, a national constituency was formed among the stone believers, who claimed a tiny slice of truth imparted by their special reading of the stone, the interpretation of a temporary narrative; these were like roadside bombs or casualties we had to leave along the roadside as the need for new narratives was always in our future. To hell with the rear view mirror. Americans were naive about the world and they wanted to keep it that way. So, the Rosetta stones from Washington were welcomed into our homes because their arrival meant we didn’t have to learn anything about the world around us: we could focus on movie stars (those not blacklisted), video games, cars and our teenage children. The new Michael Jordan shoes of that era got more attention that did our own history or any grasp of whether we lived in a nation of Folly Compounding.

Swift boaters remind us of past Follies: The Swift boat Vietnamers who targeted John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign, never got beyond what is by now an ancient Rosetta stone. For most people, the Rosetta Stone that interpreted our narrative for Vietnam has been discarded. But, not everyone threw theirs away. Those who got hit by this special roadside bomb we call Vietnam, might have been forgotten, but, they could be called upon for special duty through political support in a tight election, since their Rosetta stone had told them that Vietnam was a noble cause, a near victory denied to us by the traitors at home, the cowardly liberals, our internal enemy. Wasn’t after all the Tet Offensive really a military victory for our noble anti-communist crusade? Then too wasn’t it painful to watch John Kerry, a very legitimate Vietnam Hero, be afraid to stand up and claim his proper title as a legitimate war hero, in the face of the Swift Boat Vietnamers who claimed he was something other than what he really was. How silly, but how American.

Sixty years of narratives: For the last sixty years, we have been piling up stacks and stacks of narratives, that can only be interpreted through the Rosetta Stones minted by Washington and, in the process, we have been adding to our Folly Compounding, until we were visited upon by the presidency of G.W. Bush, who is currently going through an implosion type of presidency. GWB assumed an office for which he has no skills; he was unable to provide any new Rosetta stones. He didn’t have the talent. He had to retread the old ones, and in doing so, one could see the country unraveling. One could finally begin to see that the old Rosetta Stones had lost their luster and completely lost their power: Folly Compounding hit in a dramatic way on 9/11, to which Bush responded by attempting to reinforce the old narratives only to find they really didn’t work anymore and it was even a source of national embarrassment to hear them once again. Fewer and fewer believed them. Simplistic platitudes like “freedom” didn’t fit. We were free but getting poorer. Who profited by ridding the world of communism? Perhaps the Russians and the Chinese? No new narrative could be generated by the talentless group that remained in charge of the Rosetta stone mint. As much as anything, it was the sheer lack of talent that prevented Bush and his crew from formulating a new believable narrative. Iraq started to do for America what Vietnam could not achieve: the complete unraveling or our post-war narrative. Bush and Cheney have been reduced to a single hope: to prevent America on their watch from waking up from the national nightmare of their leadership and their view of the world and realize the magnitude of Folly Compounding. But in the past few weeks, we have witnessed a glimpse of all this that is coming due from our Follies. The compound interest over sixty years had produced a national treasure of Follies, we just didn’t know when the real bill would arrive, or in what form it would really take. All Bush needed was to get to 51% of the vote and then he didn’t need any narratives, or so he thought. He could do what he wanted. The process was simple, the way had been paved so well by his predecessors. But every new misadventure requires a new narrative and Bush proved too lazy or too unskilled to formulate his badly needed new narrative for Iraq and the “war on terror.” And, it was too late to repaint the world again. We had done that once before and found the color we applied lacked the color and hue of the one we saw on our television screens from outer space: we live on a blue planet and Bush wanted us to believe it was red. He was a very poor salesman. His attempt at a new narrative, the “War on Terror” seemed oddly phrased, as if we were going to war against an emotion, not a country. But this attempt at a new narrative for America, expanding the military budget to new heights to confront an enemy of a few dozen to a few hundred to a few thousand? This war was hard to swallow, even for those committed to expansion of our military hardware. In the meantime, we were storing too many cluster bombs.

Bush is the reward for our Follies: GW Bush was the inevitable president. Inevitably incompetent, but just competent enough to reveal the complete incongruity of all other narratives that preceded him and the stupidity of those that proposed and propagated them. Reagan and Reaganism have not toppled yet, but Reagan’s likeness will never be on Mt. Rushmore. Yet these forces were just stupid enough to ruin the country, a country that was always a fragile enterprise from its very beginning–an experiment from the get-go. Our Declaration of Independence is like a manifesto for Ayn Rand and our Constitution reinforced the federalist role for our fledgling country: take your pick. And they lasted long enough to generate new constituencies for their policies and watch the Folly Compounding gather interest. There is always a constituency for new narratives or even the attempt the create one. So, like it or not, the country now has a new constituency that likes torture, especially the type that was so successful during the Spanish Inquisition, that of waterboarding. How many voters will now believe that torture should be part of our policies for making war or responding to a threat? A thousand? A million? Many million? Who knows? Is waterboarding Folly Compounding? Will we pay a future debt for our use of torture? Is there another blowback in our future.

Bush as the decider and aggressor: Bush succeeded in only one way: he made his followers feel that America could lead in one international dimension only–that of aggression. We could still be the world’s leader in that important arena. We had a huge military and enough military bases throughout the world to launch a global threat at any moment and we would get better and better in time, because we were going to arm space itself to push for the final victory of permanent American hegemony over all our rivals. To permanently maintain this military largess, it would be necessary to permanently impoverish the country, a country that is only beginning to understand that there is a bill out there that will need to be paid, a Folly Compounding bill against our future. We are already paying that bill, but far more will be required of us, especially as we lose our national wealth, largely created by manufacturing. As one example, we have the highest per capita health care costs in the World, yet have 47 million Americans are uninsured for health care. Every year workers get less and less health care coverage, as our declining national wealth drives us into a state of numbed paralysis and unidentifiable aches and pains.

Bush gave us reality: Under Bush, the emperor’s clothes fell off and the entire bottom fell out of the large bushel of narratives: there were too many and one could not distinguish between them, it became mix and match, take your pick, relax and smoke a new narrative. A Chinese feast of narratives was available. Narratives are always best, especially if you are going to recycle one, if they begin or are attached to a sound byte jingo. So, “better a smoking gun than a mushroom cloud ” uttered by C. Rice in response to questions about the motivation for invading Iraq and whamo, the recycled narrative will have a bit more life to it. Could the Republican reliance on jingoism have more life? Not according to the polls, where Bush’s popularity continued to erode no matter what got recycled or what jingo could be brought to bear on the subject at hand. Jingoism was dying. It couldn’t pay the bills. Folly Compounding was now a dark cloud on the horizon, a looming ugly mass of growing magnitude. People were tired of hearing Bush say that he stood for “freedom” when he appeared that he didn’t really know anything at all about the concept. And, since terrorism is really a technique, applied by all insurgents against those in power, including the American revolutionaries against the British, Bush was asking us to go to war faithfully with him against a technique that was central to our own national aspirations: a jingo or two and perhaps you can get a way with it. But, that lethal combination of poor jingoism and terminology requires a quick entry and exit strategy and Bush was unable to engineer and fulfill that requirement through sheer incompetence.

Short-lived narratives: The multitude of narratives made it possible for G.W. Bush to incite the introduction of al-Qaeda into Iraq which was followed by the instantaneous new narrative as the reason for our invading that country, followed by using that as the main reason for staying there. A cyclical merry-go-round. But, on this one, you can’t get off. Indeed, we are now in “the long war” a never ending engagement against those that want to do us harm and send a bomb our way. According to Bush, we are not really fighting Iraqis, but terrorists, among whom al-Qaeda is the dominant force. Likewise, the Democracy and secular government we were bringing to Iraq was oddly juxtaposed to our engagement in a civil war to eliminate the secular Sunnis and support a conservative Muslim government, more closely allied with Iran. Indeed, it is more accurate to say that we are fighting a proxy war for Iran, without their direct approval, even though Iran thinks it is a good idea for Americans to stay there for a while–to lighten their ultimate load. The list goes on and on and on. Surely no one is dumb enough to swallow all this. Then again, we have the Swift Boaters and the Evangelicals. A house of cards and all the cards were stacks of narratives, none of which could fit. What then really happened to generate our spaghetti of narratives, our Chinese feast of options? A continuous thread of continuity exists in our post-WW II history with our problems of today.  The anti-communist strategy we developed under Truman began to dictate who our leaders would be. Ronald Reagan would never have made it to the White House had the anti-communist strategy not been successful. His rise in visibility was generated by his role in serving the interests of the House Un-American Activities Committee, when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild. His indoctrination from FDR supporter to flaming right-winger was done when he worked for GE as host of the General Electric Theater and worked under the tutelage of GE Vice President Lemuel Boulware. It was Boulware’s influence that tipped the scales, as Reagan supported Goldwater for the Presidency in 1964 (before that he had supported and voted for FDR, Truman and Eisenhower as a member of “Democrats for Eisenhower”).  Reagan supported Helen Gahagan Douglas in her U. S. Senate contest against Republican Richard Nixon. His conversion began with his tilt by the anti-communist lurch of the country and was then reshaped into staunch conservatism by his experiences with GE. He was a gifted politician, proving that grade B acting can lead to a galvanizing politician, but he was a dupe, a shill for the right-wing and the single most disastrous President we have ever had, simply because he started to unravel the country from its most successful economic period in history that began with FDR and the New Deal.  GW Bush is the culmination of linear history in which he and his family are tied to Nazism and Hitler before and during World War II and the reshaping of the right-wing as the army against communism, armed with the supposed advantage of “the bomb.”

Next: Part II, where we really begin to connect the dots.

RFM

     Print This Post