Plutocratic Insurgency
Preface: I’ve been developing the concept of what would be termed a plutocratic insurgency since 2011. The concept ties into earlier work done by John Robb (Onward to a Hollow State, 2008),Nils Gilman (Deviant Globalization, 2010), and others. This new concept will be highly controversial— it involves global elites and lacks the traditional trappings of an insurgency (i.e. an armed struggle). It is a counterpart to the criminal insurgency concept initially developed by John Sullivan. However, instead of being based on illicit economies and bottom up in nature, it is derived from sovereign free economies and top down in nature. The following elegantly crafted blog entry is one of the first public discussions about plutocratic insurgency. You will be reading more about this concept in this venue and others in the future.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 05, 2012
Nils Gilman
I recently engaged in a private exchange with leading 4GW thinker Robert Bunker on the question of how to periodize what he calls "plutocratic insurgency." Here are a few notes I took in the course of that exchange. The point of departure for this sort of an inquiry is to ask what the JohnGaltification of society would actually look like in practice—what would it seriously mean for the wealthy to opt out of participation in the collective institutions that make up society?
This may be the defining issue of our time, and ultimately much more important than our war on Islamic Extremists. When profit is the only motive and ethics play no role in constraints on behavior it is likely we will continue to see the erosion of control of the state and in democracies people are at risk of losing control of the government whose politicians are bought and paid for by the plutocrats.
Initially I thought this article was left leaning and another attack on capitalism, but this quote seems to ring true to me.
“Ultimately, however, I don’t think this is really a liberal or conservative matter. It’s a question of national and social coherence as such: do people living together in a contiguous territory feel themselves somehow to be “in the same boat,” willing to share responsibilities and risks collectively? Those engaged in the plutocratic insurgency answer that question with a defiant “No!” The plutocratic insurgency from above thus mirrors the deviant globalization insurgency from below, and taken together they embody the contemporary crisis of the nation-state.”
The growing divide betweens the haves and have nots, and the emergent system which limits the ability of the have nots to get ahead is a the beginning of a real social crisis. This isn’t just due to unethical plutocrats, but also due to ineffective government which was well illustrated in the documentary “Waiting for Superman.” This is focused on our failing education system and does an excellent job of pointing out factually that teacher unions which in their own way buy politicians are more interested in protecting their jobs than educating our children. All serious attempts at fixing the public school system are undermined by the teachers themselves, so unfortunately many kids are doomed to failure. The unions have already waged a successful insurgency by establishing effective control over the local politicians, and corporate raiders have also established an unbelievable level of control over the economy, and this level of control was given/sold to them by politicans sitting on both sides of the aisle. In both cases it comes down to ethics. We as a people need to decide who we really are and what type of society we ultimately want. It isn’t a matter of left and right views, because these issues transcend that noise. There should be and I believe there are more common interests between the left and right than opposing interests, and both should want the people the control the government, not the unions or big business.
http://www.movieguide.org/reviews/movie/waiting-for-superman.html
I am such an ass. I actually wrote “catch more flies with honey that with vinegar” earlier on in the thread. What would I ever know about anything like that?
The Deep State and its subpart the military industrial complex is in complete denial about its relationship to Donald Trumps rise, even the cravenness of the media that wants access and attention and money most has promoted his presidency. It’s Aldous Huxley dystopianism come to life.
All that precious tweeting about anyone else but Trump. If not Trump, someone worse next time if the same policies that got us here are pursued and if there is no change, no courage, from the coat holders and apparatchiks in Washington.
How strange to live in such a bubble but if you had a job at some company in DC that lives on contractor money, what could you do really? How could you find a job with those qualifications except to curry big data contracts?
Interesting times, indeed.
What is the real purpose of this ‘Open Letter to Donald Trump’ at War on the Rocks, a letter by the architects and supporters of the Iraq War, AfPak, the Syrian proxy war with Saudi Arabia and the Gulfies as our partners, and a re-upping of the Cold War?
Can they possible be this dim? Or is this elite signaling to ensure the jobs and appointments to various think tanks and government bureaucracies continues?
How strange. The Tump phenomenon is complex but surely a part of it is a rejection of the pain and suffering caused by these very people? Whose children marched around trying to prove big COIN?
I remember when Daniel Drezner supported the Iraq War, got linked all the time by Instapundit*,, and then got denied tenure at U of C (big scandal on Instapundit’s blog) while moving to, where is it now? Tufts?
How strange.
*(I was in the right camp then and attended the National Review gathering during the DNC convention in Boston in 2004. I really mean it when I say that I wanted to be inside the system. I’m a narcissist and liked imaging myself an egghead analyst to big and important people. Then life happened and I grew up, a little (not online, obviously). I saw what I had done by cheering on a war. Some people are exactly the same no matter what happens. How strange, indeed.
Why isn’t it considered crazy to saber rattle with nuclear weapons and imagine a winnable nuclear war, which is what some of those people are into as “intellectuals”. Why is that not crazy? Because it’s crazy, as crazy as Trumps erratic behavior.
Mitt Romney is the guy that ‘laid off the Trump supporters’, you know? Has he lost his “off-shore accounts to get out of taxes” mind? This is the counterinsurgency to the Plutocratic Insurgency in all its messiness and this is what they come up with?
Eric Schmidt of Google is now at the DOD, in charge of some BS innovation? Wow. I wonder where “cyber” came from.
Elite signaling for jobs, or else they really are this stupid. Either is depressing to think about.
Desert Storm hasn’t been forgotten. It’s just that everything blurs together in the Forever Wars. Who are we fighting again? Where today? It’s always someone and it’s always somewhere.
Once again, because technology is awesome:
– Former Google CEO Schmidt to head new Pentagon innovation board (Reuters). Links won’t embed again, so can’t link.
Nothing worrisome about this public private partnership. Lots of contractor big data money here. Big Data = F-35, just a fancy way to transfer money.
Ashton Carter and Robert Work and Centaur Armies. What happened in AfPak while your centaur drones were patrolling the skies? Who was hiding out where? How many nukes did the fungible aid given for drone access buy?
All those MBA Silicon Valley worshiping Defense Entrepreneur military guys and gals ought to read up on the story of Theranos, which is what Eric Schmidt will do to you. Heck, everyone at West Point being fed cyber pablum ought to read up on Theranos:
– What should we learn from the problems Theranos is facing? Quora
The President is a technoutopian, isn’t he? He was on the cover of Popular Science recently and he seems to think everyone in the future will be a coder for Silicon Valley. They really got to him, didn’t they? Between McCain and the President and Washington Post, Silicon Valley now trumps (ha ha) Wall Street.
I can’t believe you all fall for this. Like I said, about the time of the crash, during my year in Palo Alto, I’d look up from my medical books and ask how a certain company was going to make money. No one ever had a real answer.
That’s Silicon Valley for you. You are going to get Theranos-ed up the wazoo.
That National Interest article on Robert Work was hilarious but I guess This Town is buzzing about something else today:
From Twitter (how much money is it making again? That’s what Eric Schmidt, Silicon Valley, Robert Work and This Town will do, I’m guessing. Oh, why don’t I just start up my own This Town defense blog filled with amusement, bitchiness and bile? Hedda Hopper looks at the This Town!):
Indeed. Why be a conduit for smaller fry when bigger fry is ready to do business? Well, NATO and the Atlantic lobby aren’t really small fry.
Aw, the news business. No wonder Trump is doing well. Who informs anyone about anything? It’s all just Politico gossip.
The Borg absorption is complete. Well, enjoy the victory lap and remember, those that give favors can take them away abruptly and without warning. Have a plan B.
It doesn’t show but I actually kind of admire him in a weird way.
And I will never admit this again and if you bring it up I will deny it, but I sort of admire Dr. Exum too. Well, in the sense that he is the real deal, all those gifts from the gods, the health to have been in the Rangers was it? and to be as intellectually gifted. But why waste it on careerism and This Town? I will never understand those whom the gods bless with good health and all the rest. Why waste it?
This piece by Michael Lind in The National Interest is one of the best things I’ve read in ages. It’s a bit inside baseball in terms of American conservatism but it is remarkably empathetic to the frustration of different groups in the US and the relationship of that frustration to structural features in American politics. Trump isn’t all about racism or nativism, it’s a complicated response to changing economic interests:
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-neocons-are-responsible-trumpism-15417
To those that might object to the political nature of these comments for a site dedicated to Small Wars, well, we in the vaunted “West” do this to other nations all the time, try and understand their instability through their political process as SOF and the US military talks or the State Dept. about “shaping” (i.e. political meddling) a foreign policy environment.
Without the link, then:
The American Plutocracy, Google and the Washington Consensus:
Meet the man whose utopian vision for the Internet conquered, and then warped, Silicon Valley (Washington Post, links won’t work)
Aside from the trolling for contracts, why are certain members of the military prone to marketing and hype? From COIN to Cyber to Gray zones? What is this psychologic predilection?
The hype machine and the Washington Consensus:
Check the Hype — There’s No Such Thing As ‘Cyber’
http://www.wired.com/2010/03/cyber-hype/
I like to research but I don’t like to write, lurking young people (no, I know they lurk). Help me out, will you? I do a lot of the grunt work for you, so get going….
The Plutocrats are the security achilles heel, all by themselves:
http://www.innovationendeavors.com
How long before all the innovation gets to the Russians and Chinese? You know, a kind of intellectual Operation Evil Airlift with the “Musharraf-cation” of everything, meaning, personal connections that people don’t understand and are at the forefront when crisis happens?
Does American counterintelligence just throw up its hands, or what?
Yeah, Dr. Kilcullen, Abbottabad as a model has no application anywhere else. I think he missed something in his analysis, it’s about what the location did the the general public in terms of its understanding of the security state that is the interesting point of analysis.
Don’t worry, everyone else is blind to this, including the progressive left that looks at AfPak solely through drones, Islamaphobia and unhappiness with the BJP or Afghan corruption. There are no other narratives than those of American left or right….
DuckDuckGo!
Does anyone else find it disgusting that the coat holders for the Plutocrats blame the economic losers for their pain and frustration which is lashing out in various ways, including, frighteningly, supporting someone like Trump? He’s not wrong about everything though, and, anger can only be assuaged when it is acknowledged and something real is done for the person that has been abused by globalization.
I see people that are affected by both BlackLivesMatter and the Trump caucus, meaning, poorer whites and blacks, on a daily basis. It’s disgusting for educated privileged people to make fun of either group. You have resources and education they don’t have. And if you’d ever bother to leave the DC consensus, you’d see how people live and how they struggle.
.
.
.
.
So, he’s struggling to get a can of Coke out of a vending machine but he can’t see very well and he’s in a wheel chair. White haired, overweight, struggling. “Hey, I can get that for you,” but even though he’s paid nothing has come out of the machine. “You have to get a refund in the cafeteria,” I say apologetically. He doesn’t look well. As I walk away, I see a sticker on the bottom of the wheel chair, a Trump sticker, hidden almost.
Who will love the unloved?
At any time and without any warning, you can become one too. Don’t kid yourselves, intellectual masters of the universe. Don’t kid yourselves.
The British media really doesn’t like President Obama, does it, assuming you can write about a collective “media”:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3032394/Google-Obama-White-House-sitting-tree-search-giant-s-relationship-president-stretches-2007-cozy-be.html#ixzz42KAXVJs0
Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the Cult of the MBA! Running a country is just like running a company!
The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand. – Joel Spolsky
Hard to believe there are various cultural backlashes going on….
Learning how to manage people, budgets, logistics is fine. It’s the cult part with the lazy adoption of buzzwords that’s problematic but I suppose that has to do with the people who go about trying to learn. What I mean is, some people genuinely want to learn and others are doing, what is that wonderful phrase from the military? Ticket punching?
Those interested in the topic of an plutocratic insurgency and its counteractions in the US have probably already seen this (I ran into the link via Glenn Greenwald’s twitter feed):
Thomas Frank in the Guardian.
The are getting so many comments and the most interesting to survey are the non-Americans. It’s interesting how widespread the disappointment in globalization there is in the West, the ordinary working and middle class West and how this seems to have blind-sided the Washington and Brussels Consensus.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support
The other comments about nativism and bigotry make sense too but as many (non-American) commenters point out, bad times draw out a lot of ugly things.
*On a side not related to Plutocratic Insurgencies, Google news sure doesn’t like to highlight anything by Bernie Sanders. It’s quite blatant. The young that are his supporters are probably developing a sense of the company that may prove quite hardened in the future. The military picked a great time to rebrand itself with that brand.
OTOH, ease of using apps and the powerful marketing of a brand that is ubiquitous may prove too tough for such worries to do much to the company. We shall see.
Blogger Miss P once said that corruption and trying to figure out how to take care of megapopulations were going to the be the great challenges of this century. I sometimes agree, and sometimes don’t with the good Miss P but corruption is the great eater of souls and we are seeing its effects globally:
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/03/09/two-corrupt-establishments/
Maybe we can send a Human Terrain System around the US to figure out what’s going on….
Someone I know used the word “frustration” to describe the American mood, as in, “people are frustrated, Madhu, that’s why things are the way they are.”
I like that word. I like it because frustration can be justified or unjustified, but it is felt strongly and reactions to frustration can be good and bad.
There is more than racism or the desire for an authoritarian leader going on. The frustration is real and in many instances justified. The frustration is long standing, has deep roots and can’t be pinned on just one factor. Globalization in its myriad facets–as opposed to pure trade–pushes on fault lines.
My “people” are “revolting” in India, too, so to speak, but that was portrayed as caste rioting by Jats. Apparently, caste is something that the West believes in too.
It might have been the 19th century to read some of the Western commentary. The NYT was particularly bad. Caste is bad in India. So is class. So is urbanization, droughts, poverty, governance, the rest of it.
A certain stipend was cut to farmers and it is hard to make money off of the land that has traditionally been theirs. Poor Jats exist too. Caste prejudice is terrible in India. But it is a country with states that have populations of entire European countries. The local is hard, there, I mean, understanding local dynamics.
It’s hard here in the US too.
The world is a complicated place but complicated thinking requires humility. The DC consensus lacks that. The people weep. And it’s not an act.
A global phenomenon:
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/articles/2016-03-07/globalization-has-had-political-consequences
From Real Clear World
Okay, I’ll lay off for a bit. Sorry to kind of mess things up with political things but it’s interesting to use the same tools we normally do when looking at other societies and apply them to our own. DC consensus doesn’t do that enough, I think.
Fascinating:
War on the Rocks has this from a post about American Exceptionalism and West Point:
West Point and American Exceptionalism, David McCormick
Is this the same Bridgewater Associates, or is it a different company?
Without links, once again, because links won’t work:
– Wait What? blog post, jonathanpelto.com
Is it the same hedge fund?
Doc M, or Nassim Nicholas Taleb (via Zenpundit’s twitter acct):
He sounds like me on the Big H:
https://www.facebook.com/nntaleb/posts/10153658794008375
If you are looking for an answer, for heaven’s sake, the issue is that it works when you are kept on a leash and used appropriately, such as the removal of the Taliban while working with the Northern Alliance, or Desert Storm if we hadn’t stayed on, or the mix of money and modest training given the Ukranian Army plus Russian sanctions which seems to have worked at keeping being overrun and is reasonable. If we’d get out of our own way, the American Military is fine, it’s the careerism and fantasy stuff. You know this.
We are fine. The amount of money you get is enormous. The focus should be on internal reform and reigning in retired trouble makers in DC, not trying to scare up great new theory of war.
Study your own history these past 15 years, soberly and seriously. Take notes, collect information, interview people, review records, just careful work.
Bainbridge Associates. McCain. War on the Rocks. Oh, now I see….
From 2007:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2007-04-01/the-candidates-on-wall-street
So, it went like this in 2008:
Google = candidate Obama
Bainbridge Associates = candidate McCain
Goldman Sachs = candidate Clinton
No wonder there is so much auditioning for a future Clinton administration at War on the Rocks. My guess: none of this goes away whatever happens with Trump and Kasich and Sanders and Clinton, none of the fault lines. More like a tilting upwards over time “sine curve”, I am guessing, flare ups dying down until slowly something new evolves.
Hey, is that a macro trend? I can guess as well as the next guy or gal.
What a racket, This Town.
Wasn’t there a comment by Bruce Fleming that was deleted at War on the Rocks or did I imagine it?
Don’t they every feel embarrassed, the think tank or “defense” crowd? It’s all so blatant. I suppose it works. I predict great things some day, moving up the greasy pole….
Bainbridge? Where’d I get Bainbridge? I must have mashed together Bain Capital and Bridgewater Associates. Well….
Sorry.
From War on the Rocks (you have to verify your comments there and I don’t want to give Google any more data, LinkedIn is for morons, linking to the article ruins the comment here, etc.)
HOW TO EXPLAIN NUCLEAR DETERRENCE TO YOUR NEIGHBOR
JONATHAN ALTMAN AND JONATHAN SOLOMON
The American people understand plenty and that sort of lecturing borders on disrespectful.
It’s not quite so clear cut as the authors make out. Many of the gains from the last 20 years never made it into ordinary American pockets. Our overlords forgot this part.
Future generations have so much debt built up that the math doesn’t quite work quite as the “we need nukes to save the American way of life” authors might suggest.
It’s like developers that get local government to give them tax breaks to develop a piece of property under the guise of some future tax revenues from anticipated business. In the meantime, schools have to be paid for, roads fixed, etc. The revenues that might eventually come in don’t quite make up for the current lost tax revenues or loss to the ordinary taxpayer.
Why do you think consumer spending is so flat? It’s not just worries about the economy, the future, not getting a raise for a decade, it’s changing habits about buying. Twenty years of cheap junk hasn’t satisfied spiritually, emotionally or materially.
There is a lecture by Barry Posen (MIT) where he mentions, sort of offhand, how much US GDP is generated internally within the US. The number surprised me. I need to find that lecture.
Sorry, the links just never work. I don’t know why. From that War on the Rocks article:
The authors “are Analysts with Systems Planning and Analysis, Inc”. in Alexandria, Virginia.
Is that this company (sorry, links just don’t work. Will try later):
What does that mean?
The government contracts these things? Why?
I quote from my own comment below (Narcissist! I shoulda cashed in and wrote intellectual product for the Deep State. What a jerk I am!):
So, I’m the sort of consumer people are trying to get at, but I’m not interested, even if there is spare change around.
I’m all capsule wardrobe, Tiny House Nation, Real Simple, you know?
So, the “we need a big military to support our lifestyle” just don’t work anymore.
Google data mining forgets that humans are fickle emotional creatures that need all sorts of things to make life worthwhile.
Just wait until the fashion for Amazon peaks or the trends I describe above get into the heads of Millenials who are conscious of debt and limited environmental resources. Well, I stole it from them actually, where do you think capsule wardrobes and Tiny House Nation come from?
I don’t want the world you made, Washingtonian mercantilists.
Oh Thanks, War on the Rocks! This is the number I was looking for and it is close to the number I remember from the Barry Posen lecture:
FREE TRADE, TRUMP’S BRAIN, AND LOOSE-LIPPED BEN CARSON
ALEX WARD
WAR ON THE ROCKS (links don’t work).
That links to a NYT article:
The Era of Free Trade Might Be Over. That’s a Good Thing.
By JARED BERNSTEINMARCH 14, 2016
Links don’t work.
A lot of Americans are going to think, wait a minute, we provided what quality of life to our countrymen and women in the past when the trade volume was 10 percent?
(But the Google crowd cracks me up with their “internet of things” and everyone will be a coder. Sigh. Think it through. How is it I can do this and people inside the world of policy can’t seem to do the same thing? Is it so hard to break from fashion to voice skepticism when skepticism is warranted?
I know the answer. If you don’t play the game, you don’t get a call back and are marginalized. I know, it’s a tough balancing act).
On the other hand, re: Internet of Things, I would love to have my dental floss hooked up to wifi. Then maybe I can connect the voices from my fillings into the internet. I’m just saying….)
Why don’t Richie Rich just get a slightly cheaper jet and pay for some of worker bees dental or something? Why are they so stupid?
I think it’s because they are hopelessly bougie and play keeping up with the Smiths/Jones. That guy has a jet, I have to have a jet, that guy gives money to X charity, I have to give money to X charity. Phenomenal wealth tied to the kind of personality Ernest Hemingway made fun of years ago….
Now, here’s something you can blame so-called ordinary people for:
http://wgntv.com/2016/02/17/donald-trumps-multi-million-dollar-chicago-tax-break/
Trump supporters will just say, that’s the environment and he got the best deal he could for his company.
And the sick little thing is that Illinoisans sort of really like the everyday corruption that exists because everyone gets a cut in some way, well, not everyone, but those that want to play the system.
If you don’t want others to have power over you, you will have to give up these little fiddles and Illinoisans and Chicagoan don’t want to give up their personal little deals even if the means the whole ship goes down.
The academics say that because Chicago is the big city that all these small town–ers and immigrants move to, that it sort of developed a get rich or voting bloc mentality. Big money, big corruption.
The smaller states with less money have corruption, but on a smaller scale. And Chicagoans just laugh, many do nothing about the little corruptions around them. The upper middle class supposedly educated smarties really believe the developers too, they buy the future tax revenue nonsense.
So, this won’t get Trump but he will disappoint, I’m betting.
Yeah yeah, I have some more formal military related comments for other threads. I watch a lot of CSPAN, mostly because I kind of want to see how the Beltway types talk, dress, carry themselves. It’s a fascinating world mostly because it is so dull and so little real thinking goes on. It’s quite extraordinary really.
And they all have LinkedIn, even the retired Generals. What do you suppose foreign intelligence agencies do with that mapping?
Extraordinary group think. The levels of timidity. Extraordinary.
Plutocratic Insurgency:
It is a counterpart to the criminal insurgency concept initially developed by John Sullivan. However, instead of being based on illicit economies and bottom up in nature, it is derived from sovereign free economies and top down in nature.
Or are we simply developing ad-hoc a new form of governance? Should this ad hoc form of governance be viewed as part of plutocratic insurgency?
Listening to an YouTube (CSPAN Q&A) talk by Winslow Wheeler and he said something about the checks and balances being eroded, especially in military affairs with the loss of real Congressional oversight over the Pentagon.
From The National Interest:
Raymond Odierno, Michael O’ Hanlon
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/securing-global-cities-15563
Part of this from Brookings and JP Morgan Chase:
A company sees developing markets as their next big growth area. So the company funds intellectual activities toward presenting the importance of “global cities”. And the intellectual activities range far and wide and make a variety of claims, if we don’t have global cities then we are less secure, etc. And it’s not as if participants are not sincere but the end effect is to create the idea that cities must invest in a way useful to the funder.
I see.
http://www.brookings.edu/about/projects/global-cities
Creature of habit. I wish I’d stop. Hate to give up all that I’ve learned, though.
(I recently found a bunch of notes I thought I’d gotten rid of on AfPak and Unconventional Warfare across the border. At one time, I’d gone through 2001 transcripts and looked for comments on Musharraf made by everyone I could think of. Quite interesting. Big tough Frank Gafney bought it all too, actually, pretty much everyone I have read in any venue says roughly the same thing. Even Alec Station types. Soft “South Asian” bigotry, especially by so-called Progressives (Modi’s India is the left version like the right version of Putin’s Russia, a way to dumb down complicated realities so that all problems are boiled down to the leader in charge, really missed something, I think.)
Anyway, it’s all too corrupt to be interesting. National Security Professionals as a collective are part of such a corrupt system that it’s filled with money players, the less than bright, the ideologically fanatic, and the rest. Such a shame, really. A deeply corrupt system.
According to Brookings, I am the one percent. I better start protesting myself:
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/posts/2016/03/25-make-elites-compete-why-one-percent-earn-so-much-rothwell
If I worked at Brookings, I’d want to focus on this aspect of the one percent too, given the funding streams for many Washington think tanks.
Hilarious. Don’t you worry your pretty little heads about DC and Silicon Valley, Americans. We have found the real culprits!
(It’s not that it isn’t true, it’s just that it is one part of the whole story. That’s classic DC misdirection for you. Oh, and don’t worry, corporate hospital systems now make doctors as miserable as everyone else).
On a more serious note, if you widen the pool of health care workers, you have to work a little harder to bring those who score lower on tests up to standard, or those who train at less rigorous programs. That’s been my personal working experience in terms of teaching residents, fellows and students from a wide variety of backgrounds, some top notch, others less so in terms of training and education.
I’m glad to see corruption exposed via the Panama Papers but Washington’s attempts (or factions within) to spin some of it as propaganda may not work because most people fit it into a larger picture of behavior:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/31/citigroup-tax-shelters_n_3672029.html
This is what happens when you constantly lie to the American people, they are going to take a jaundiced view at how the Washington Consensus will push through some of the Panama Paper revelations into a DC friendly narrative.
But people know, they know this behavior is pervasive. It defines our age.
No one tell Daniel “They System Worked” Drezner, the Washington Post purveyor of elite opinion.
Tax avoidance has been a policy concern for the Obama administration for some time, hasn’t it? Interesting, in light of the Panama Papers scandal.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-01/obama-said-to-propose-taxes-on-foreign-earnings-offshore-profit
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-shows-how-60-billion-u-s-revenue-lost-to-tax-loopholes
How anyone in DC can lecture the global South on elite behavior is beyond me, the US is being torn apart by some of our finest global citizens.
Hey, I posted this link under the Macho Man! article here at good old SWJ.
Do you think it belongs here?
“What do all these people do anyway? And what are their relationships to private companies, foreign nations, think tanks, politicians, etc?
Isn’t there a profession whose job it is to look into these things? Something that rhymes with shmournalism?
http://www.defense.gov/About-DoD/Office-of-the-Secretary-of-Defense:
“
Consortium News has an interesting article about global activism and Syria:
“The Lure of a Syrian ‘No-Fly Zone”
(without the link, not working).
It reminds me of Chase Madar’s writing on the militarization of human rights activists.
I was wondering if global activism and the fascination with activists within American society is the populist analogue to a Plutocratic Insurgency? If we are activists, then we are one type of citizen and perhaps we don’t pay as much attention to daily duties of republican governance. Being an activist is a fine thing, but it’s not the same as showing up one month a week to discuss local school funding or potholes on a main street or the many boring everyday duties of an ordinary citizen.
In a way, it fits into the worry that the military has about the glorification of Seal Team Six and the loss of a kind of older ethos of the quiet professional.
We all want attention (me too, I’m not excusing myself from this very ordinary human attitude).
I’m sorry about my comment that was removed on another thread. I went too far, I suppose.
There is something very strange about the whole MegaCities conversation and I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. I can believe that futurists within many Armies have looked at increased urbanization and so worry about how they might have to deal with it, but there is still something very strange about the conversation. It shows up in so many think tank forums that I wonder if it is a proxy for multinational entities worried that the US will no longer so eagerly protect commercial logistic lines that now increasingly benefit others.
Very strange, indeed.
Richard Fontaine of CNAS has an odd little plea of an article in the American Exceptionalism series:
IT’S TIME TO START TALKING ABOUT AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM AGAIN
http://warontherocks.com/2016/04/its-time-to-start-talking-about-american-exceptionalism-again/
Why are there only two alternatives? The exact same thing we’ve done since WWII or Trump style tariffs?
What if the devil is in the detail and simply negotiating better contracts that might benefit the American people a little more but might ask multinationals lobbying Washington to pay American workers a little more or something like that?
Why are we not thinking creatively about a new form of trade and globalization? Think tanks are paid to think, aren’t they? Well….