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America's University of Imperialism
This essay is a review of Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire by Alex Abella (Harcourt, 400 pp., $27)
The RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, California, was set up immediately after World War II by the U.S. Army Air Corps (soon to become the U.S. Air Force). The Air Force generals who had the idea were trying to perpetuate the wartime relationship that had developed between the scientific and intellectual communities and the American military, as exemplified by the Manhattan Project to develop and build the atomic bomb.
Soon enough, however, RAND became a key institutional building block of the Cold War American empire. As the premier think tank for the U.S.'s role as hegemon of the Western world, RAND was instrumental in giving that empire the militaristic cast it retains to this day and in hugely enlarging official demands for atomic bombs, nuclear submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers. Without RAND, our military-industrial complex, as well as our democracy, would look quite different.
Alex Abella, the author of Soldiers of Reason, is a Cuban-American living in Los Angeles who has written several well-received action and adventure novels set in Cuba and a less successful nonfiction account of attempted Nazi sabotage within the United States during World War II. The publisher of his latest book claims that it is "the first history of the shadowy think tank that reshaped the modern world." Such a history is long overdue. Unfortunately, this book does not exhaust the demand. We still need a less hagiographic, more critical, more penetrating analysis of RAND's peculiar contributions to the modern world.
Abella has nonetheless made a valiant, often revealing and original effort to uncover RAND's internal struggles -- not least of which involved the decision of analyst Daniel Ellsberg, in 1971, to leak the Department of Defense's top secret history of the Vietnam War, known as The Pentagon Papers to Congress and the press. But Abella's book is profoundly schizophrenic. On the one hand, the author is breathlessly captivated by RAND's fast-talking economists, mathematicians, and thinkers-about-the-unthinkable; on the other hand, he agrees with Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis's assessment in his book, The Cold War: A New History, that, in promoting the interests of the Air Force, RAND concocted an "unnecessary Cold War" that gave the dying Soviet empire an extra 30 years of life.
We need a study that really lives up to Abella's subtitle and takes a more jaundiced view of RAND's geniuses, Nobel prize winners, egghead gourmands and wine connoisseurs, Laurel Canyon swimming pool parties, and self-professed saviors of the Western world. It is likely that, after the American empire has gone the way of all previous empires, the RAND Corporation will be more accurately seen as a handmaiden of the government that was always super-cautious about speaking truth to power. Meanwhile, Soldiers of Reason is a serviceable, if often overwrought, guide to how strategy has been formulated in the post-World War II American empire.
The Air Force Creates a Think Tank
RAND was the brainchild of General H. H. "Hap" Arnold, chief of staff of the Army Air Corps from 1941 until it became the Air Force in 1947, and his chief wartime scientific adviser, the aeronautical engineer Theodore von Kármán. In the beginning, RAND was a free-standing division within the Douglas Aircraft Company which, after 1967, merged with McDonnell Aviation to form the McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft Corporation and, after 1997, was absorbed by Boeing. Its first head was Franklin R. Collbohm, a Douglas engineer and test pilot.
In May 1948, RAND was incorporated as a not-for-profit entity independent of Douglas, but it continued to receive the bulk of its funding from the Air Force. The think tank did, however, begin to accept extensive support from the Ford Foundation, marking it as a quintessential member of the American establishment.
Collbohm stayed on as chief executive officer until 1966, when he was forced out in the disputes then raging within the Pentagon between the Air Force and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara's "whiz kids" were Defense intellectuals, many of whom had worked at RAND and were determined to restructure the armed forces to cut costs and curb interservice rivalries. Always loyal to the Air Force and hostile to the whiz kids, Collbohm was replaced by Henry S. Rowan, an MIT-educated engineer turned economist and strategist who was himself forced to resign during the Ellsberg-Pentagon Papers scandal.
Collbohm and other pioneer managers at Douglas gave RAND its commitment to interdisciplinary work and limited its product to written reports, avoiding applied or laboratory research, or actual manufacturing. RAND's golden age of creativity lasted from approximately 1950 to 1970. During that period its theorists worked diligently on such new analytical techniques and inventions as systems analysis, game theory, reconnaissance satellites, the Internet, advanced computers, digital communications, missile defense, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. During the 1970s, RAND began to turn to projects in the civilian world, such as health financing systems, insurance, and urban governance.
Much of RAND's work was always ideological, designed to support the American values of individualism and personal gratification as well as to counter Marxism, but its ideological bent was disguised in statistics and equations, which allegedly made its analyses "rational" and "scientific." Abella writes:
"If a subject could not be measured, ranged, or classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all -- the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical."
In my opinion, Abella here confuses numerical with empirical. Most RAND analyses were formal, deductive, and mathematical but rarely based on concrete research into actually functioning societies. RAND never devoted itself to the ethnographic and linguistic knowledge necessary to do truly empirical research on societies that its administrators and researchers, in any case, thought they already understood.
For example, RAND's research conclusions on the Third World, limited war, and counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War were notably wrong-headed. It argued that the United States should support "military modernization" in underdeveloped countries, that military takeovers and military rule were good things, that we could work with military officers in other countries, where democracy was best honored in the breach. The result was that virtually every government in East Asia during the 1960s and 1970s was a U.S.-backed military dictatorship, including South Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan.
It is also important to note that RAND's analytical errors were not just those of commission -- excessive mathematical reductionism -- but also of omission. As Abella notes, "In spite of the collective brilliance of RAND there would be one area of science that would forever elude it, one whose absence would time and again expose the organization to peril: the knowledge of the human psyche."
Following the axioms of mathematical economics, RAND researchers tended to lump all human motives under what the Canadian political scientist C. B. Macpherson called "possessive individualism" and not to analyze them further. Therefore, they often misunderstood mass political movements, failing to appreciate the strength of organizations like the Vietcong and its resistance to the RAND-conceived Vietnam War strategy of "escalated" bombing of military and civilian targets.
Similarly, RAND researchers saw Soviet motives in the blackest, most unnuanced terms, leading them to oppose the détente that President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger sought and, in the 1980s, vastly to overestimate the Soviet threat. Abella observes, "For a place where thinking the unthinkable was supposed to be the common coin, strangely enough there was virtually no internal RAND debate on the nature of the Soviet Union or on the validity of existing American policies to contain it. RANDites took their cues from the military's top echelons." A typical RAND product of those years was Nathan Leites's The Operational Code of the Politburo (1951), a fairly mechanistic study of Soviet military strategy and doctrine and the organization and operation of the Soviet economy.
Collbohm and his colleagues recruited a truly glittering array of intellectuals for RAND, even if skewed toward mathematical economists rather than people with historical knowledge or extensive experience in other countries. Among the notables who worked for the think tank were the economists and mathematicians Kenneth Arrow, a pioneer of game theory; John Forbes Nash, Jr., later the subject of the Hollywood film A Beautiful Mind (2001); Herbert Simon, an authority on bureaucratic organization; Paul Samuelson, author of Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947); and Edmund Phelps, a specialist on economic growth. Each one became a Nobel Laureate in economics.
Other major figures were Bruno Augenstein who, according to Abella, made what is "arguably RAND's greatest known -- which is to say declassified -- contribution to American national security: . . .the development of the ICBM as a weapon of war" (he invented the multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle, or MIRV); Paul Baran who, in studying communications systems that could survive a nuclear attack, made major contributions to the development of the Internet and digital circuits; and Charles Hitch, head of RAND's Economics Division from 1948 to 1961 and president of the University of California from 1967 to 1975.
Among more ordinary mortals, workers in the vineyard, and hangers-on at RAND were Donald Rumsfeld, a trustee of the Rand Corporation from 1977 to 2001; Condoleezza Rice, a trustee from 1991 to 1997; Francis Fukuyama, a RAND researcher from 1979 to 1980 and again from 1983 to 1989, as well as the author of the thesis that history ended when the United States outlasted the Soviet Union; Zalmay Khalilzad, the second President Bush's ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations; and Samuel Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb (although the French military perfected its tactical use).
Thinking the Unthinkable
The most notorious of RAND's writers and theorists were the nuclear war strategists, all of whom were often quoted in newspapers and some of whom were caricatured in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. (One of them, Herman Kahn, demanded royalties from Kubrick, to which Kubrick responded, "That's not the way it works Herman.") RAND'S group of nuclear war strategists was dominated by Bernard Brodie, one of the earliest analysts of nuclear deterrence and author of Strategy in the Missile Age (1959); Thomas Schelling, a pioneer in the study of strategic bargaining, Nobel Laureate in economics, and author of The Strategy of Conflict (1960); James Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense from 1973 to 1975, who was fired by President Ford for insubordination; Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War (1960); and last but not least, Albert Wohlstetter, easily the best known of all RAND researchers.
Abella calls Wohlstetter "the leading intellectual figure at RAND," and describes him as "self-assured to the point of arrogance." Wohlstetter, he adds, "personified the imperial ethos of the mandarins who made America the center of power and culture in the postwar Western world."
While Abella does an excellent job ferreting out details of Wohlstetter's background, his treatment comes across as a virtual paean to the man, including Wohlstetter's late-in-life turn to the political right and his support for the neoconservatives. Abella believes that Wohlstetter's "basing study," which made both RAND and him famous (and which I discuss below), "changed history."
Starting in 1967, I was, for a few years -- my records are imprecise on this point -- a consultant for RAND (although it did not consult me often) and became personally acquainted with Albert Wohlstetter. In 1967, he and I attended a meeting in New Delhi of the Institute of Strategic Studies to help promote the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was being opened for signature in 1968, and would be in force from 1970. There, Wohlstetter gave a display of his well-known arrogance by announcing to the delegates that he did not believe India, as a civilization, "deserved an atom bomb." As I looked at the smoldering faces of Indian scientists and strategists around the room, I knew right then and there that India would join the nuclear club, which it did in 1974. (India remains one of four major nations that have not signed the NPT. The others are North Korea, which ratified the treaty but subsequently withdrew, Israel, and Pakistan. Some 189 nations have signed and ratified it.) My last contact with Wohlstetter was late in his life -- he died in 1997 at the age of 83 -- when he telephoned me to complain that I was too "soft" on the threats of communism and the former Soviet Union.
Albert Wohlstetter was born and raised in Manhattan and studied mathematics at the City College of New York and Columbia University. Like many others of that generation, he was very much on the left and, according to research by Abella, was briefly a member of a communist splinter group, the League for a Revolutionary Workers Party. He avoided being ruined in later years by Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI because, as Daniel Ellsberg told Abella, the evidence had disappeared. In 1934, the leader of the group was moving the Party's records to new offices and had rented a horse-drawn cart to do so. At a Manhattan intersection, the horse died, and the leader promptly fled the scene, leaving all the records to be picked up and disposed of by the New York City sanitation department.
After World War II, Wohlstetter moved to Southern California, and his wife Roberta began work on her pathbreaking RAND study, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962), exploring why the U.S. had missed all the signs that a Japanese "surprise attack" was imminent. In 1951, he was recruited by Charles Hitch for RAND's Mathematics Division, where he worked on methodological studies in mathematical logic until Hitch posed a question to him: "How should you base the Strategic Air Command?"
Wohlstetter then became intrigued by the many issues involved in providing airbases for Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers, the country's primary retaliatory force in case of nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. What he came up with was a comprehensive and theoretically sophisticated basing study. It ran directly counter to the ideas of General Curtis LeMay, then the head of SAC, who, in 1945, had encouraged the creation of RAND and was often spoken of as its "Godfather."
In 1951, there were a total of 32 SAC bases in Europe and Asia, all located close to the borders of the Soviet Union. Wohlstetter's team discovered that they were, for all intents and purposes, undefended -- the bombers parked out in the open, without fortified hangars -- and that SAC's radar defenses could easily be circumvented by low-flying Soviet bombers. RAND calculated that the USSR would need "only" 120 tactical nuclear bombs of 40 kilotons each to destroy up to 85% of SAC's European-based fleet. LeMay, who had long favored a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union, claimed he did not care. He reasoned that the loss of his bombers would only mean that -- even in the wake of a devastating nuclear attack -- they could be replaced with newer, more modern aircraft. He also believed that the appropriate retaliatory strategy for the United States involved what he called a "Sunday punch," massive retaliation using all available American nuclear weapons. According to Abella, SAC planners proposed annihilating three-quarters of the population in each of 188 Russian cities. Total casualties would be in excess of 77 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe alone.
Wohlstetter's answer to this holocaust was to start thinking about how a country might actually wage a nuclear war. He is credited with coming up with a number of concepts, all now accepted U.S. military doctrine. One is "second-strike capability," meaning a capacity to retaliate even after a nuclear attack, which is considered the ultimate deterrent against an enemy nation launching a first-strike. Another is "fail-safe procedures," or the ability to recall nuclear bombers after they have been dispatched on their missions, thereby providing some protection against accidental war. Wohlstetter also championed the idea that all retaliatory bombers should be based in the continental United States and able to carry out their missions via aerial refueling, although he did not advocate closing overseas military bases or shrinking the perimeters of the American empire. To do so, he contended, would be to abandon territory and countries to Soviet expansionism.
Wohlstetter's ideas put an end to the strategy of terror attacks on Soviet cities in favor of a "counter-force strategy" that targeted Soviet military installations. He also promoted the dispersal and "hardening" of SAC bases to make them less susceptible to preemptive attacks and strongly supported using high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft such as the U-2 and orbiting satellites to acquire accurate intelligence on Soviet bomber and missile strength.
In selling these ideas Wohlstetter had to do an end-run around SAC's LeMay and go directly to the Air Force chief of staff. In late 1952 and 1953, he and his team gave some 92 briefings to high-ranking Air Force officers in Washington DC. By October 1953, the Air Force had accepted most of Wohlstetter's recommendations.
Abella believes that most of us are alive today because of Wohlstetter's intellectually and politically difficult project to prevent a possible nuclear first strike by the Soviet Union. He writes:
"Wohlstetter's triumphs with the basing study and fail-safe not only earned him the respect and admiration of fellow analysts at RAND but also gained him entry to the top strata of government that very few military analysts enjoyed. His work had pointed out a fatal deficiency in the nation's war plans, and he had saved the Air Force several billion dollars in potential losses."
A few years later, Wohlstetter wrote an updated version of the basing study and personally briefed Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson on it, with General Thomas D. White, the Air Force chief of staff, and General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in attendance.
Despite these achievements in toning down the official Air Force doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" (MAD), few at RAND were pleased by Wohlstetter's eminence. Bernard Brodie had always resented his influence and was forever plotting to bring him down. Still, Wohlstetter was popular compared to Herman Kahn. All the nuclear strategists were irritated by Kahn who, ultimately, left RAND and created his own think tank, the Hudson Institute, with a million-dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
RAND chief Frank Collbohm opposed Wohlstetter because his ideas ran counter to those of the Air Force, not to speak of the fact that he had backed John F. Kennedy instead of Richard Nixon for president in 1960 and then compounded his sin by backing Robert McNamara for secretary of defense over the objections of the high command. Worse yet, Wohlstetter had criticized the stultifying environment that had begun to envelop RAND.
In 1963, in a fit of pique and resentment fueled by Bernard Brodie, Collbohm called in Wohlstetter and asked for his resignation. When Wohlstetter refused, Collbohm fired him.
Wohlstetter went on to accept an appointment as a tenured professor of political science at the University of Chicago. From this secure position, he launched vitriolic campaigns against whatever administration was in office "for its obsession with Vietnam at the expense of the current Soviet threat." He, in turn, continued to vastly overstate the threat of Soviet power and enthusiastically backed every movement that came along calling for stepped up war preparations against the USSR -- from members of the Committee on the Present Danger between 1972 to 1981 to the neoconservatives in the 1990s and 2000s.
Naturally, he supported the creation of "Team B" when George H. W. Bush was head of the CIA in 1976. Team B consisted of a group of anti-Soviet professors and polemicists who were convinced that the CIA was "far too forgiving of the Soviet Union." With that in mind, they were authorized to review all the intelligence that lay behind the CIA's National Intelligence Estimates on Soviet military strength. Actually, Team B and similar right-wing ad hoc policy committees had their evidence exactly backwards: By the late 1970s and 1980s, the fatal sclerosis of the Soviet economy was well underway. But Team B set the stage for the Reagan administration to do what it most wanted to do, expend massive sums on arms; in return, Ronald Reagan bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Wohlstetter in November 1985.
Imperial U.
Wohlstetter's activism on behalf of American imperialism and militarism lasted well into the 1990s. According to Abella, the rise to prominence of Ahmed Chalabi -- the Iraqi exile and endless source of false intelligence to the Pentagon -- "in Washington circles came about at the instigation of Albert Wohlstetter, who met Chalabi in Paul Wolfowitz's office." (In the incestuous world of the neocons, Wolfowitz had been Wohlstetter's student at the University of Chicago.) In short, it is not accidental that the American Enterprise Institute, the current chief institutional manifestation of neoconservative thought in Washington, named its auditorium the "Wohlstetter Conference Center." Albert Wohlstetter's legacy is, to say the least, ambiguous.
Needless to say, there is much more to RAND's work than the strategic thought of Albert Wohlstetter, and Abella's book is an introduction to the broad range of ideas RAND has espoused -- from "rational choice theory" (explaining all human behavior in terms of self-interest) to the systematic execution of Vietnamese in the CIA's Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. As an institution, the RAND Corporation remains one of the most potent and complex purveyors of American imperialism. A full assessment of its influence, both positive and sinister, must await the elimination of the secrecy surrounding its activities and further historical and biographical analysis of the many people who worked there.
The RAND Corporation is surely one of the world's most unusual, Cold War-bred private organizations in the field of international relations. While it has attracted and supported some of the most distinguished analysts of war and weaponry, it has not stood for the highest standards of intellectual inquiry and debate. While RAND has an unparalleled record of providing unbiased, unblinking analyses of technical and carefully limited problems involved in waging contemporary war, its record of advice on cardinal policies involving war and peace, the protection of civilians in wartime, arms races, and decisions to resort to armed force has been abysmal.
For example, Abella credits RAND with "creating the discipline of terrorist studies," but its analysts seem never to have noticed the phenomenon of state terrorism as it was practiced in the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America by American-backed military dictatorships. Similarly, admirers of Albert Wohlstetter's reformulations of nuclear war ignore the fact that these led to a "constant escalation of the nuclear arms race." By 1967, the U.S. possessed a stockpile of 32,500 atomic and hydrogen bombs.
In Vietnam, RAND invented the theories that led two administrations to military escalation against North Vietnam -- and even after the think tank's strategy had obviously failed and the secretary of defense had disowned it, RAND never publicly acknowledged that it had been wrong. Abella comments, "RAND found itself bound by the power of the purse wielded by its patron, whether it be the Air Force or the Office of the Secretary of Defense." And it has always relied on classifying its research to protect itself, even when no military secrets were involved.
In my opinion, these issues come to a head over one of RAND's most unusual initiatives -- its creation of an in-house, fully
accredited graduate school of public policy that offers Ph.D. degrees to American and foreign students. Founded in 1970 as the RAND Graduate Institute and today known as the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS), it had, by January 2006, awarded over 180 Ph.D.s in microeconomics, statistics, and econometrics, social and behavioral sciences, and operations research. Its faculty numbers 54 professors drawn principally from the staffs of RAND's research units, and it has an annual student body of approximately 900. In addition to coursework, qualifying examinations, and a dissertation, PRGS students are required to spend 400 days working on RAND projects. How RAND and the Air Force can classify the research projects of foreign and American interns is unclear; nor does it seem appropriate for an open university to allow dissertation research, which will ultimately be available to the general public, to be done in the hothouse atmosphere of a secret strategic institute.
Perhaps the greatest act of political and moral courage involving RAND was Daniel Ellsberg's release to the public of the secret record of lying by every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Lyndon Johnson about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. However, RAND itself was and remains adamantly hostile to what Ellsberg did.
Abella reports that Charles Wolf, Jr., the chairman of RAND's Economics Department from 1967 to 1982 and the first dean of the RAND Graduate School from 1970 to 1997, "dripped venom when interviewed about the [Ellsberg] incident more than thirty years after the fact." Such behavior suggests that secrecy and toeing the line are far more important at RAND than independent intellectual inquiry and that the products of its research should be viewed with great skepticism and care.
Chalmers Johnson's latest book is Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, now available in a Holt Paperback. It is the third volume of his Blowback Trilogy. To view a short video of Johnson discussing military Keynesianism and imperial bankruptcy, click here.
Copyright 2008 Chalmers Johnson
33 Comments so far
Show AllEach new generation is presented with the threat of a Global takeover...
But, guess what... it happened a few hundred years ago!
For hundreds of years the world has been treated to a cabal of interests manipulating events to embroil now this and now that set of groups into conflict...
The elite of Spain, Germany/Austria, France, England... conspire to deceive... and maintain power.
The restructuring of Japan in the 1800's; who was there to revamp, revise and prepare for the coming genocide of China... to pave the way for its revision... and on and on...
Travel about. See for yourself. There is not a single patch of dirt not directly under the rule of the world's elite!
A network of anti-globalists???? The ones being set-up by the CIA? I've met many: vegans, fair-trade advocates, environmentalists... all effectively thwarting the initial and quite genuine movements, slandering their true cultural creatives and champions... and fracturing and co-opting to the CIA's heart's content.
What about Russia? The great Lenin fraud... after slaughtering a Czar for breaking with the will of the 'group', a method to co-opt the aspirations of the peasantry was devised... and the peasants were then held in even more war-making servitude...
Nope, the Nazi World Order has been running things for quite awhile. Who conspired on all continents to orchestrate the great genocide of the 1940's? called WWII?
Anyone who is not aware of the totalitarian state of global affairs is either not very old, or not a very careful reader of world history, or is terribly stupid, or... is just another paid liar!
Today's reality is one of an elite ruled prison planet. There are no countries. That at least should be obvious to any careful observer.
ALL countries are instruments of deception and control; created, maintained, manipulated and decimated according to the interests of the world's elite. (study: Japan, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Argentina, Chile and even the US)
Take the blinders off. Welcome to It's A Nazi World Order!
Oh, forgot to mention, 9/11 was one of their recent 'big events' to push through another war of genocide (process by which the aspirations of nations and or people are defeated and thus their continuing servitude is assured).
Ike kay may 1
Clinton once again shows her irresponsible thinking at any price to gain the American nomination to be able to continue to lead the world to oblivion. I read with interest the comments of Americans here as in other blogs. I consider myself a humanist and not one that has the USA tattooed to my backside, although I gave three years to the military and so have a right to speak. Nationalism, is always based in me-firstism, let the rest of the world be damned mentality. IT IS NOT ONLY ABOUT CLINTON AND THIS PROPAGANDIST, O'REALLY; Ii is about the very fabric of the USA, its people and the change necessary.
The economic system that determines all peoples survival regardless of where they exist, also determines what a country will become, much of it the result of chance. In that regard the USA has been lucky, with well-worn imperialist ideas brought over with the Pilgrims. America has taken this country from the people whom were here before, the European model, used by the pilgrims, stripping them of their land without paying them. Some of us here know the story. The so-called, "free market market system", formerly American capitalism, and now globalization into which it has now morphed continues these same policies. The US with its European allies has created the current means of controlling everything for the few. The G 8 has developed ever-greater means to develop these ideas and to take what it wants from the rest of the world and its own populations.
The African Americans, the Africans, the Hispanics, Asians and Indians have been the slave classes have built the white European and American wealth. The historic exploitation of the working classes of America brought from the entire world into its "melting pot" with the so-called freedoms and democratic ideals built from the blood spilled to form in all proceeding generations. Compared with European monarchies and divine kingship, so-called Democracy was unique in the world. It once held promise to give humanity a system to live with harmoniously The freedoms bought so dearly, from "Divine Kingship" gave birth to the new kings the "Robber Barons" and now, corporate power elitism.
To keep the masses mollified and to build the lives of Americans so they believed this to be human progress, consumer ideology supplanted education - the study human purpose- and became a goal in itself. The economic forces, which have built their power from this conditioning aided with advertising and media, care little for human development and survival. They care largely for their continued power as an end in itself- to continue for the few there lust for wealth and power with a huge military force, hence the oil wars in Iraq. All this to support an auto centered disposable consumer society.
The expense of privilege in the community of nations may become the death of the globe and its entire people as a result of the American and European economic system, now out of control. Many American economists, Jeffrey Sachs, Joe Stiglitz, and others view these historical developments as a threat to global harmony and survival.
American wealth once had an altruistic quality about it. The post-World War II USA developed the Marshal Plan and cared about the condition of the world. Now the top one percent, those who have taken so much, continue to be supported by the thirty percent of Americans who still believe George Bush, and his myth of global superiority at the expense of the rest of the world. It is clear that to many of Clinton's opinions continue the Bush doctrine, of unilateralism and tokenism.
We sit on the edge of an environmental and economic disaster. The American system is out of control and the economic meltdown will continue regardless of who occupies the Oval office. The only difference is exists within the Obama campaign. He is intelligent enough to know that there are fundamental change needed in the way America and the so-called "free world" do business. 

Rev Wright, addresses continued black slavery in a world of exploitation of all people led by the US and now the power elite of the G8 in collusion with governments to continue the "American Dream" mentality, represented now by corporate multilateralism and their continued wealth and power. Corporate elitism cares for itself alone at the expense of all people, and the environment, the human experiment, its freedoms, and so called democratic ideals, which has become nothing more than an oligarchy.
We should not be too pejorative about Rev Wright who simply rails against the exploitive aspects of the Western mentality and points out the deficiency in the USA of having evolved thinking toward the slave classes and the human species. The Rev. Wright, having been able to experience directly because of his skin color, these abuses is perhaps too angry which limits his effectiveness. His experience and intelligence in seeing the wreckage of black America, has caused him to take up the defense of the disenfranchised.
America has a history of caring about others, once a genuine American direction, led by people, despite their failings like: The Kennedy's, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and so many others who died for their belief in a better America and a better world, and caring about humanity.
The media carries their continued assault against those, who would in any way, attempt to bring different thinking to bear on the so called "American Dream" which has become the world's nightmare must be seen by the masses for what it has become. The media must begin to understand its roll as an objective commentator to the necessary changes that must be made to the USA and the world if humanity is to survive.
The media above all must be changed once again to give democratic exposure to all-important ideas. The media must present an understanding of the complex thought necessary to be brought to bear on global complex issues of survival. A departure is required from the simplistic superficial treatment ad-nauseam we witness each day, which passes for news presented by the Barby-Doll class of newsreader called journalist.
workreno
Thanks for posting that link, I've read other studies on that subject that are related. How evolution has been affected on a natural level by some of these agents, but it is logical that a lot of manipulation has been going on. There are a lot of unexplained things that get answered in that video. Thanks again.
Sioux:
Its not change, I think in more cases it has to do with something NEW, on different levels. Think of it as a sheet of white paper, time and experiences is the brush that's applying paint to that paper at a set rate.... For some people, they've got the same brush paint their paper for so long it's only one color. Should any other color gets applied it is deemed as a disruption of coherence to the overall picture and is kicked out. While others, by going through some experiences in life, got their brush changed from time to time, so often that they are not as hostile to a new colors or shapes being applied to their paper...some even actively seek new ones.
Wisdom...ah, a glimmering banner. Hey here's one: Do not think in "Bring" but "let". Don't bring happiness to people, let them be happy. Don't bring order to the world, let the world be orderly. Don't bring enlightenment to others, let them find it .......
WORK RENO: I have dial up so usually can't download all the "groovy" sites CD posters offer.
BINNN & 4TheFuture: As for finding the balance, I believe I read somewhere that WISDOM was the midpoint between informed thought AND compassion. Do we doubt the exquisite wisdom of The Councils on Truth and Reconciliation that defused a long-term racist situation in S. Africa through the intelligent deployment of mutual respect?
All of the Master teachers note the importance of compassion, and it's based on empathy. When I speak of heart, it's essentially relating the NEED for greater empathy. How the average American watches sporting events when their nation is deliberately MURDERING others, is not even countenanced or FELT. Doctorow, I believe, called Bush the "unfeeling" president, and of course, we can see "judge the tree by its fruit" style, he IS a sociopath.
The idea that behavior is repeated makes sense as many fear change, have been taught by authoritarian religions to doubt their own innate instincts & intuition, and there too is the need to control one's environment, a fiction at best, one rapidly unraveling as those who respect life not the least have the power to decimate far too much of it for the rest of us. This is where the LIGHT innate to those who have not yet awakened, must reach a powerful collective radiance to offset the dense darkness that has engulfed so much of Western civilization under the guise of progress. The film The Matrix was correct in suggesting modern behavior is not unlike that of a virus... multiplying while destroying its own basis for survival.
Stock market
A new book written by a leading globalist luminary provides a blueprint for how 6,000 elitists plan to completely end national sovereignty, impose a system of global governance, and how they will deal with an international network of people that resist their agenda.
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making is a manifesto for how the elite plan to shape the course of the planet and impose a new world order while combating the inevitable "global network of antiglobalists" who will rise up against it.
The author of the book, David J. Rothkopf, is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and has previously served as the Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade during the administration of Bill Clinton before he became managing director of Kissinger and Associates in January 1996.
A Salon.com review alarmingly details the brazen premise of Rothkopf's book - a global elite now run the planet and have usurped the power of national governments while ensuring laws constrained by borders are all but obsolete.
"Each one of them is one in a million. They number six thousand on a planet of six billion. They run our governments, our largest corporations, the powerhouses of international finance, the media, world religions, and, from the shadows, the world's most dangerous criminal and terrorist organizations. They are the global superclass, and they are shaping the history of our time," states the promo for the book.
The threadbare notion that Rothkopf's book is a critical and impartial investigation of the global elite can be rejected out of hand just by looking at the author's biography - in reality he is a cherished insider.
Throughout the book Rothkopf fawns over the global elite of which he too is a member. The Salon review notes his "palpable thrill" at "recognizing CEOs, oil company executives and Harvard professors on his way to a fondue restaurant," in the globalist enclave of Davos, Switzerland and his obsession with listing every banal "achievement" of each elitist he speaks with.
According to the article, the kind of elitist celebrated in Rothkopf's book "have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations."
Rothkopf himself concurs that laws and regulations defined by borders and nation states are obsolete and need to be replaced not by a global government but by "global governance". The fact that the ultimate goals of the two - the total elimination of national sovereignty - are essentially identical is not lost on globalists who know that a more subtle imposition of centralized control needs to be enacted in order to con the serfs into sacrificing their identity. A sharply defined "world government" is too visceral a concept and would attract fierce opposition, therefore a method of forcing countries to adopt harmonized policies of "global governance" is the new approach that globalists have embarked on.
Rothkopf ominously expresses the plan to mandate the "Registration and management of Internet domain names (via a collection of organizations)" under a global umbrella, which the informed will recognize as a bastardized version of Internet 2, where individuals require government permits to operate a website under tight regulation.
The article concedes that, "Rational as it may sound to set up such systems, they just aren't directly answerable to the populace at large — they're undemocratic," which Rothkopf admits will give rise to rebellions and pave the way for more people like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who he labels as being part of "the global network of antiglobalists," and a man who has "made political theater out of taunting and thwarting the global elite."
Rothkopf's answer to the inevitable antagonism that will be directed towards the globalists as their agenda unfolds is to hoodwink the commoners into thinking they have influence in the new world order that is being built around them - a method otherwise known as the Delphi Technique, which is universally recognized as an underhanded and unethical ploy of achieving consensus through deception.
According to Rothkopf the, "Superclass ought to be smart enough to foresee any such crisis and head it off by doing more to make the currently disenfranchised feel like "stakeholders" in the new global order."
The fact that the same elitists Rothkopf affords such sycophantic adulation are also personally responsible for the policies that result in the slaughter of untold millions and the misery of countless others across the globe matters little to Rothkopf, who also has no qualms about including Osama Bin Laden in a group of 6,000 "global elite" who now control the world and "whose connections to each other have become more significant than their ties to their home nations and governments."
Superclass maintains that the elite, who mainly comprise "older males of European descent who graduated from prestigious Western colleges," are "an improvement on those of the past," but this rings hollow when we consider the state of the planet that they have crafted.
A million-plus dead Iraqis since 2003, a global economy in chaos and individual freedom under attack in every corner of the world suggests the much-vaunted global elite - worshipped in Rothkopf's book as saviors of the Earth - are more accurately parasites and a cancer upon humanity.
Watch Rothkopf give a lecture on the power of the global elite. He identifies Bohemian Grove as a key meeting venue for the globalists. Decide for yourself whether he is a fawning sycophant or an objective critic.
Rothkopf's approach is to blame the world's problems on free-market capitalism and and imply that global elitists are a new phenomenon and therefore part of the solution, when in reality the elite created monopoly capitalism and have been a hidden-hand manipulating world events and offering solutions to problems they created for centuries.
uh, 4thefuture, thats when my second sentence comes in: what they believe, or thought, will achieve an effect. And this links to their mental state. I'm suggesting in some cases people's behavior are either to reach or maintain a certain mental state that they are in or experienced (subconsciously). Using this point of view to examine your example, their behavior in their early stages of life, and the mental state that was associated with it got passed onto their later stages in life. If they recognize a lot of things are different, they subconsciously try to make the the circumstance to resemble what happened before so they could apply the things that worked before: to repeat what worked. If they for some reason did not recognize the difference, they apply what worked before and expect the same result.
....bah, maybe I should put it another way
1. A person had an experience during which he developed two things:
A) knowledge on certain ways to do certain things that reach a certain result (assuming it is "desirable" in the end)
B) Comes to a mental state due to that experience
2. The person thereafter can only see things through that mental state. And since that mental state was reached via a limited set of conditions, the person's behavior, whether consciously or subconsciously, will be to recreate those conditions so the same things(or, the same desirable feeling they experienced in the end) can happen again. Whether they are able to achieve it or not is another thing.....
binnnn suggested that people's behavior often is based on achieving some desired effect. I have heard that often people act in ways that meant survival at an early age but then keep repeating them even when the act/s no longer help in any way, and in fact might even cause harm.
I think it is important to think about one's actions rationally and to analyze just how effective one is in achieving one's goals. That, of course, is just the starting point. I've been able to catch a few, sometimes even before I do them but usually after they happen, sometimes right after, and that's a step in the right direction. I've been doing that fairly often for a few years now. Figuring out how to stop the problem behaviors and what to replace them with, ah, there's the rub.
Read Paul Virilio's old but prescient classic, PURE WAR---documenting The Pentagon's full intention to "get as much as possible of the entire U.S. GNP devoted to war." They've done a heckuva job!
Tonight…Orielly interviews Hillary…PartII
Fox news at 8PM
Be informed for once
your friend banjoman
too bad you missed Part I, it was good
to those of you who claim to have both heart and reason, maybe it helps to reflect on how you aquired them, and what prevented others from also aquiring them?
Just a thought; some peoples behavior are based on whatever works to achieve an effect..or at least, whatever they believe will achieve that effect. From some of the people I examined, it's like they are on drugs: they desperately want to experience the same thing over and over again, and this result our behavior seeks is hidden in many forms: be it overcoming and subduing another, be it being recognized as the best, be it the taste of banana(er, I really do know someone who's obsessed with banana....), be it the feeling of achievement, of enlightenment, of discovery when you solved a complex phenomenon....
This is just one of the many ways a person's mind can tweak. With the right amount of releveant information, you can fully explain the behavior of anyone and predict accurately what will happen and what is causing what.
But then assume you could use such information to your ends, what purpose will it serve? Use them to convince others of what you think is right? Are you certain that what you think will definetly be better in all aspects than others?
anyway just some random mind babbling that probably don't make any sense. Please ignore them if you can't understand to prevent logic contamination, haha.
The more I pay attention the less I can sleep.
workreno - thanks. I thought I was the only one up at such hours!
armybrat nails it once again...
I'm glad to run into you tonight.
I've been takin shit for a couple days on the other threads.
Good to see some enlighting posts here.
Soiuxrose I hate to show you this,but you should see it:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8674401787208020885
I hope we can get past this..
"And it's a hard rain that's gonna fall"
Even on this site, there is little quest for real understanding. Instead of asking questions when one disagrees with a post, there's often just an attack. It's disheartening - especially when I'm really trying very hard to communicate with an alien species - the Left. It's not that I take things personally - just than I'm disappointed. It's even more difficult for me because of autism - it helps that I don't have to deal with body language and facial expressions that I don't understand - yet I often feel we're living in different universes.
Fascism isn't something that poppped up with that idiot-Bush - it's been brewing since before the official entrance of the US into WWII. I know some of the wackos that work on these frightful 'toys' - they're arrogant, paranoid, and suffer from groupthink (which I feel also infects many of the Left) - and they're very good at scaring people into falling in line, as they did with Eisenhower. At least my dad saw right through them - he hated those nut-jobs right from the start. (And he was there on ground-level as they built their macabre machinery.) These guys enlist sociopaths - and other unbalanced individuals - because they're easy to manipulate. That's where Pogo comes in. Nothing is more threatening to us than the US government machinery - but you couldn't tell people that before, and many won't believe you today. That's why there's been no armed revolt. Complacency, ignorancy, apathy - all give these lunatics a bubble in which to indulge their worst paranoid fantasies.
Siouxrose, I agree on the need for both heart and mind. But I find that far too often those who claim to be speaking from the "heart" seem to have left their minds out to lunch, thereby discrediting and undermining almost everything they say. We do need a balance but right now, I fear that many have abandoned reason in favor of nonsense, which makes the heartfelt part easy to dismiss or at least overlook. The language of the heart would do well to engage the language of reason when putting forth their ideas in order to help communicate to the other side rather than alienate them. And of course the same goes for those who are so locked into the rational that they can't imagine the human element as being valid. jakenewton comes to mind in this respect.
I like to think I am both, but what that usually means is that neither side wants to listen to me. How can we get past this mental lock-out? Does only one side have to give? I'd appreciate your thoughts, assuming you check back to this thread, and same for me.
JOHN R: I like your posting. Where I weigh my response to this essay is noting that masters of mathematics, a hard, cold world of analysis where human nuance, emotion, compassion, and sensitivity are ignored/avoided/undervalued to the point they are never considered... with the type of MIND capable of inventing sophisticated weapon systems, the type of mind that focuses on WAR as an inevitable, perhaps even (in their case) desirable expression of the human condition.
There is a reason why there are two genders, why everything living requires equal genetic sums from BOTH parents, why we have TWO brain hemispheres. Focus merely on rational thought disables the heart, and what we see from centuries of this type of cerebral process trumped over more caring, inclusive bases for sentience, is a world literally off its rocker, pursuing a course of mass death... be it by over consumption, global warming, and/or escalating war and arms trafficking (think the bloodshed across much of Africa).
The Rand Corporation, "team B" and recently military analysts (in the employ of defense contractors) who shill for the Administration; and these are what the Republicans and Democrats expect us to accept as examples of democracy? They are rather, in keeping with the electable class's definition of the word citizenry, whether here or abroad.
"We must include an awareness that we are basically ignorant in our comprehension of the universe."
Hear hear. The fact that we do not admit that we are basically ignorant in our comprehension of the universe, that mediocrities and morons like Bush rule this planet, assures our eventual extinction. This is what it's like to live through the beginning of the end.
We all know the problems. They are endlessly discussed on this and other fine forums. I'm more interested in solutions to the problems.
If an organization is causing problems for the nation and the world then get rid of it! America is a gun-toting society so what's the holdup? Isn't that what all those guns are for, to protect each citizen against evil forces and evil governments?
How come there's a disconnect? Are the guns for show?
P.S. Depravity on my blog!
Reading this "lauditory" article on one of the original think-tanks remeinded me of my visit to their "offices" forty years ago, exactly, to inquire about employment. The room was a spare former W.W. II barracks like structure, innocuous to say the least. The women looked at the sheet which I had filled out and conveyed an impression - "We invite potential emmployees here; they don't simply come in randomly." I've never forgotten the look of bemusement on one face. As usual, Chalmers Johnson is superbly accurate in his assessments of our checkmated political economy.
The critical passage from the piece in my estimation is:
Following the axioms of mathematical economics, RAND researchers tended to lump all human motives under what the Canadian political scientist C. B. Macpherson called "possessive individualism" and not to analyze them further.
Too often the sophists in the employ of the predatory corporatists succeed in convincing the hoi polloi that economics is a well-understood natural science rather than a poorly understood social science. It would help to understand human neural processes and how those apply to behavioral psychology, and how behavioral psychology applies to branches of sociology (economics could be categorized as a branch of sociology, e.g. "Production and consumption in human society"), in any effort to attempt to analyze the potential for (including the probability and extent in any likely scenarios) any forms of economic behavior. Oversimplification that follows from assumptions (often self-serving) which disregard all motivations outside of those of "possessive individualism" is not only deadly but could very well put us on the path to extinction by creating unnecessary and excessively dangerous competition for dwindling resources.
"But Team B set the stage for the Reagan administration to do what it most wanted to do, expend massive sums on arms; in return, Ronald Reagan bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Wohlstetter in November 1985."
Reagan also gave Weinberger the Medal of Freedom, and we all know all the nasties the bush admin gave them to.
I will forever assume the Medal of Freedom is tantamount to window dressing for some toady that did something horribly illegal, immoral, and unethical in order to politically bolster prez and party.
RAND=Lame acronym
Research ANd Development
Quote "Adopting its name from a contraction of the term research and development, the newly formed entity was dedicated to furthering and promoting scientific, educational, and charitable purposes for the public welfare and security of the United States." Source: http://www.rand.org/about/history/
Funny, Christini...! [Thanks]
"This article provides great insight to the origins of the military industrial media complex (that Ike warned us about)that is destroying the US and will ultimately destroy the world."
You mean, that 'Ike helped to Create/Enable/Fund/Succor...' (and, he referred to it as the "Congressional/Military/Industrial-Complex" when he slunk-off into 'retirement'). [The 'Media' was a fairly-recent acquisition...actually]
Well, that explains why RAND (is it an acronym?) occupies a shiny new office building right next to Carnegie Mellon's own war institution, the Software Engineering Institute. Lots of nice glass covering the both buildings.
I'm sure things will work out OK - once oil gets so expensive that no planes can fly and no ships sail (except nucular-powered ones and rowing boats). I see it now - a Nimitz class carrier pootling up and down the Straits of Hormuz, unescorted, its aircraft grounded, its crew all on the lookout for two guys in a kayak with an IED. Stalemate.
I recently read Wendell Berry's essay, "The Way of Ignorance". I reccomend everyone in the modern industrial and post-industrial worlds read it. These hubristic men, who think they can calculate how to run the world, are instead, ruining it and ruining everyone's lives. Considering their high degree of mathematical literacy, they have no excuse for being unaware of Godel's theorem and its implications that logic and abstraction break down. So other ways of knowing must be employed if we are to make sensible choices. We must respect our own limitations (as traditional cultures were so well aware). We must include an awareness that we are basically ignorant in our comprehension of the universe. We'd do well to fire the technocrats and think-tank idealogues, and put them to work planting vegetables.
The empire has a life of its own now. The legal and political infrastructure is in place to serve the needs of the empire. Everyday we see examples of Americans being 'good Americans' in their treatment of others. Our rapidly declining empire is unfortunately taking with it much of the earth.
Hoa binh
This article provides great insight to the origins of the military industrial media complex (that Ike warned us about)that is destroying the US and will ultimately destroy the world.
"For example, Abella credits RAND with 'creating the discipline of terrorist studies,' but its analysts seem never to have noticed the phenomenon of state terrorism as it was practiced in the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America by American-backed military dictatorships. Similarly, admirers of Albert Wohlstetter's reformulations of nuclear war ignore the fact that these led to a 'constant escalation of the nuclear arms race'."
Just so, the corporate media is filled with reports like this recent one at Yahoo:
"The United States is accusing Iran and Syria of trying to destabilize Iraq. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told the U.N. Security Council on Monday that Iranian-backed groups have launched numerous attacks on Iraqi civilians and multinational forces this year. He cites estimates suggesting that 90 percent of foreign terrorists enter Iraq through Syria. In a report to the council on behalf of the multinational forces, Khalilzad says Iran and Syria must stop sending weapons and foreign fighters into Iraq. Iran and Syria have repeatedly denied trying to destabilize Iraq."
The recent drumbeats of such reports read objectively as farce but of course are produced and heard with utter seriousness by those who call the shots.
Now this:
[satire]
Iran Accuses US of Invading Iraq; US Issues Denial
Iran today accused the US of invading Iraq over 5 years ago in 2003, and claims that the US has been "deliberately meddling" ever since by "conquering Iraq, by causing and creating wanton bombing and slaughter and refugee flight" in that country, as well as in Afghanistan. Iran, however, a leading oil exporter, did put in a good word for the great increase in oil price that the purported US invasion has created and sustained.
Through its chief spokesman Stan D. Garde, the US denied that it "invaded Iraq in any traditional sense of the word" but instead has made more of a "preventive visit" only to find itself "invited to build a few bases and stay on" by the Green Zone Iraqi government that the US defends from the vast majority of the rest of the country still known as Iraq. As for any refugee flight, reportedly involving millions of Iraqis, the US spokesman acknowledges that there has been some "limited well-advised and optional relocation of Iraqis but that Iraq is a more lean and harmonious nation today because of it."
Spokesman Garde noted dismissively that he had "no precise figures at hand about Iraqi deaths" and further stated that the matter is "none of the business of Iran," Iraq's close neighbor, which also happens to be under threat of US attack. Spokesman Garde said "Good Iranians" have nothing to fear, even as leading US policy advocates proclaim that "Good Americans go to Baghdad, but Real Good Americans go to Tehran" - capital city of Iran. "Besides, we would only visit," Garde asserts. "Oh sure, we might make a few enduring gestures but nothing particularly permanent, I would think."
Leading US presidential candidates and perennial war funders J McPummel, B Obomba, and H Coldgun were not immediately available to elaborate upon their related respective positions, though of course Mr. McPummel has talked warmly of a 100 year "visit" in Iraq, while Mr. Obomba has expressed much support for the official US position generally, and Ms. Coldgun has recently pronounced upon the conditions under which she would "obliterate" Iran.
Spokesman Garde responded to reports of young Americans building forts and playing Cowboys and Iraqis and Cowboys and Iranians with a chuckle and nod. "We Americans respect Indians and the like," Garde explained. "We always have."
http://apragmaticpolicy.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/iran-accuses-us-of-invading-iraq-us-issues-denial/