Dueling Systems and the Five Stages of Collapse

Over the past week and a half or so, I've been chatting with a number of Cobb's commenters and intermittently with the man himself. Here lately, he's embarked on an apologia for war socialism. Brahman has a tendency to get caught up in philosophical rather than practical or empirical argumentation. I've begun to suspect that a significant part of his political orientation is attributable to this tendency. In opting for philosophy and abstraction - both he and his conservative co-religionists have a tendency to get lost in flights of metaphorical fancy.

Case in point yesterday afternoon on a post he called The Morality of War he asked;

"Are you suggesting that we should not have fought Stalin?"

Last I checked, we didn't...., but that minor historical quibble aside, this was not a discussion of history, philosophy, or morality per se. Rather, it was the branching of a prior thread in which I was accused of blaming G-Dub for the American war socialist posture. A brief review of Jay Hanson's warsocialism site will clearly dispel any such notions of contemporary blame - and - put the concept of war socialism on its proper historical footing. Hanson calls the system of American governance a war socialist system - I happen to find his arguments concise and very persuasive.

Aside from the countless tragic, wasteful, and destructive proxy wars that it spawned - the political, philosophical and moral dimensions of the Cold War hold little interest for me - I won't be pursuing any of those issues at great length. Rather, what I'd like to bring to your attention is the way in which the former Soviet Union survived it's own economic and industrial collapse - and - invite you to compare and contrast the adaptability and survivability of our own war socialist system of governance in the face of impending collapse. Dmitry Orlov writes;

the collapse of the Soviet Union - our most recent and my personal favorite example of an imperial collapse - did not reach the point of political disintegration of the republics that made it up, although some of them (Georgia, Moldova) did lose some territory to separatist movements. And although most of the economy shut down for a time, many institutions, including the military, public utilities, and public transportation, continued to function throughout. And although there was much social dislocation and suffering, society as a whole did not collapse, because most of the population did not lose access to food, housing, medicine, or any of the other survival necessities. The command-and-control structure of the Soviet economy largely decoupled the necessities of daily life from any element of market psychology, associating them instead with physical flows of energy and physical access to resources. Thus situation, as I argue in my forthcoming book, Reinventing Collapse, allowed the Soviet population to inadvertently achieve a greater level of collapse-preparedness than is currently possible in the United States.

Having given a lot of thought to both the differences and the similarities between the two superpowers - the one that has collapsed already, and the one that is collapsing as I write this - I feel ready to attempt a bold conjecture, and define five stages of collapse, to serve as mental milestones as we gauge our own collapse-preparedness and see what can be done to improve it.

IMOHO - this is the type of systematic thinking that we need to enjoin in America as we gird ourselves up to cast what may be operationally and systemically decisive votes in this year's presidential election. I sincerely believe that the U.S. is caught up in a still civil dispute among its ruling elites over the type and pace of contraction and collapse that citizens will be subject to over the next twenty to thirty years. I believe that the frontrunning presidential candidates literally embody the respective elite camps and their dueling perspectives on how this should shake out.

olduvai theory: toward re-equalizing the world standard of living

Warsocialism | This study is based on: (1) historic population and energy data from 1965 to 2008 and (2) backup studies by several scientists. The Olduvai Theory is explained by disaggregating the World into the U.S., the OECD nations, and the non-OECD nations standards of living (SL). The U.S. SL peaked in 1973 (Figure 1). The World SL rapidly increased from 2000 to 2007 (Figure 2). This increase was caused by just a few non-OECD nations (Figure 3). The OECD SL peaked in 2005 (Figure 4). The Olduvai Theory shows each SL curve trending toward the same average SL value that the World had in 1930 (Figure 5).

the hoodwink and bamboozle of warsocialism...,

ClubOrlov | The lesson that the United States desperately needs to learn is that their trillion-dollar-a-year military is nothing more than a gigantic public money sponge that provokes outrage among friends and enemies alike and puts the country in ill repute. It is useless against its enemies, because they know better than to engage it directly. It can never be used to defeat any of the major nuclear powers, because sufficient deterrence against it can be maintained for relatively little money. It can never defuse a popular insurgency, because that takes political and diplomatic finesse, not a compulsion to bomb faraway places. Political and diplomatic finesse cannot be procured, even for a trillion dollars, even in a country that believes in extreme makeovers. As Vladimir Putin put it, “If grandmother had testicles, she’d be a grandfather.”

Reinventing Collapse, 2nd ed., p. 41 Fist tap Dale.

Blueprint for Modern Warsocialism

NSC-68 or National Security Council Report 68 was a 58 page classified report issued in the United States on April 14, 1950 during the presidency of Harry S. Truman. Written in the formative stages of the Cold War, it has become one of the classic historical documents of the Cold War. NSC-68 would shape government actions in the Cold War for the next 20 years and has subsequently been labeled its "blueprint." Truman officially signed NSC-68 on September 30, 1950. It was declassified in 1975.

The document outlined the de facto national security strategy of the United States for that time (though it was not an official NSS in the form we know today) and analyzed the capabilities of the Soviet Union and of the United States of America from military, economic, political, and psychological standpoints.

This document is critical to an understanding of the Cold War, its legacy on similar national security documents, such as the National Security Strategy March 2005, also provides insight on current US foreign policy. The implementation of NSC-68, although the proposal was initially refused, shows to what extent it marked a 'shift' in US policy not only towards the USSR but indeed all other communist governments. The signing of the document showed the clear defined and coherent US policy that to some extent did not exist until 1950 under the Truman administration. Furthermore, it can be argued that this document proposed by the security council solved Truman's problem from attack from the American right just after the 'reds in the beds' scare and the Alger Hiss case. Although not made public, it did show up on the surface as an increase in both conventional and nuclear capabilities of the USA, and indeed provided the USA with a greater financial burden.

Original document here.

Gorbachev to the Candidates On Warsocialism

There has been unusual interest throughout the world in the U.S. presidential race.

Skeptics, of whom there are quite a few, say the campaign is just a marathon show that has little to do with real policymaking. Even if there's a grain of truth in that, in an interdependent world the statements of the contenders for the White House are more than just rhetoric addressed to American voters.

Major policy problems today cannot be solved without America - and America cannot solve them alone.

Even the domestic problems of the United States are no longer purely internal. I am referring first of all to the economy. The problem of the huge U.S. budget deficit can be managed, for a time, by continuing to flood the world with "greenbacks," whose rate is declining along with the value of U.S. securities. But such a system cannot work forever.

Of course, the average American is not concerned with the complexities of global finance. But as I talk to ordinary Americans, and I visit the United States once or twice a year, I sense their anxiety about the state of the economy. The irony, they have said to me, is that the middle class felt little benefit from economic growth when the official indicators were pointing upward, but once the downturn started, it hit them immediately, and it hit them hard.

No one can offer a simple fix for America 's economic problems, but it is hard not to see their connection to U.S. foreign policies. Over the past eight years the rapid rise in military spending has been the main factor in increasing the federal budget deficit. The United States spends more money on the military today than at the height of the Cold War.

Yet no candidate has made that clear. "Defense spending" is a subject that seems to be surrounded by a wall of silence. But that wall will have to fall one day.

In yesterdays International Herald Tribune - From Russia with alarm, questions for the candidates. Obamamandius is challenged to become the least parochial, most broadly encompassing president in U.S. history. The singular nature of this challenge calls for a unique capacity to maintain that rorschachian quality onto which myriad folks project their interests and priorities and come out the other end with at least a little something they can articulate in their post hoc rationalization of the many things this administration will be called upon to do.

the personification of corporation

Warsocialism | One of the essential and central notions which give our industrial feudalism logical symmetry is the personification of great industrial enterprise. The ideal that a great corporation is endowed with the rights and prerogatives of a free individual is as essential to the acceptance of corporate rule in temporal affairs as was the ideal of the divine right of kings in an earlier day. Its exemplification, as in the case of all vital ideals, has been accomplished by ceremony. Since it has been a central ideal in our industrial government, our judicial institutions have been particularly concerned with its celebration. Courts, under the mantle of the Constitution, have made a living thing out of this fiction. Men have come to believe that their own future liberties and dignity are tied up in the freedom of great industrial organizations from restraint, in much the same way that they thought their salvation in the future was dependent on their reverence and support of great ecclesiastical organizations in the Middle Ages. This ideal explains so many of our social habits, rituals, and institutions that it is necessary to examine it in some detail.

IN which it is explained how great organizations can be treated as individuals, and the curious ceremonies which attend this way of thinking. Thurman W. Arnold, THE FOLKLORE OF CAPITALISM, Yale Univ Pr 1937, CHAPTER VIII:

all-volunteer warsocialism a recipe for military, government, and societal failure...,

therealnews |  I'm Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore. Larry Wilkerson is a retired United States Army colonel and former chief of staff to the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. Larry, thank you so much for joining us today.

LARRY WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: Thanks for having me, Sharmini.

PERIES: Larry, you've been reading a very important book, Skin In the Game: Poor Kids and Patriots by Gen. Dennis Laich, where he makes a compelling case that the all-volunteer military force no longer works in a world defined by terrorism and high debt and widening class differences. Tell us more about the book and the case he makes in it.

WILKERSON: Gen. Laich, Dennis Laich, is a 30-plus year member of the United States Army Reserves. Obviously became a general officer, and now he's written this book. And this book very vividly and very dramatically illustrates how what the Gates Commission created for Richard Nixon in 1972-73, the all-volunteer force, is no longer sustainable. It demonstrates it's not sustainable physically, that is to say it's not sustainable in dollar terms, and it probably is not sustainable in terms of the moral impact on the nation.

As we've seen throughout these last 14 years of war, we've had poor people, essentially, less than 1 percent of the nation, bleeding and dying and defending the other 99 percent. This is an ethical and moral position I think that's unsustainable. The fiscal position, though, is such that if you just do a linear progression of the defense budget and the cost of people out to about 2025, 2030, you wind up spending almost the entire Army and Marine Corps budget on people. So it's impossible to sustain this force. Another indicator is how we've gone from 2.7 percent women in the ranks to over 15 percent women in the ranks because we can't find enough men. This is not the way to fill out your military. However equitable and egalitarian you may think it is, it's not the way to fill out your military. And it's not the way to build a military that is sustainable over the next few years.

We've come up with a solution, I think, and the solution's rather unique. It's drafting by lottery into the reserve components. Not into the active components. Therefore I think deflecting some of the political criticism and political opposition we'd get, though we don't hesitate to say this is going to be a difficult task to achieve.

PERIES: And one of the other issues surrounding this question is the fact that the United States used to have a military, and military that is equipped to respond in a situation of war if needed. But now we seem to be in a perpetual state of war where we are constantly financing the military and arms and the military forces to be able to respond to all the time. What do you make of that?

WILKERSON: I think you're onto a point that we see as part of this ethical, moral dimension of this all-volunteer force. It is clear to us after lots of conversations with military leaders, with civilian leaders and actual security experts and others, that part of the reason that the president of the United States feels no real strain or pressure about going to war and staying at war is the fact that no one has any skin in the game. When you've got people who are not capable, really, because of their intellectual capacity or more often their ability to pay, to be in college or to be in some other more productive employment than being in the military, then they have to be in the military.

And that's how we're creating our military these days. We're taking the 1 percent that can't get it anywhere else, by and large, and we're putting them in the military. And we're putting upon them the burden of defending this nation. Defending the other 320-some odd million people in this country who don't have any skin in the game at all. When you have congressmen with no skin in the game, when you have business leaders, corporate leaders, others, religious leaders, no skin in the game, then you have the ability to go to war without any real restraint on you. And this is in addition to other problems we have, the military-industrial complex, other forces that are constantly agitating agitating for conflict, for war. And it makes it just too simple for the President of the United States to go to war.

PERIES: Larry, if you replace the current volunteer system to address the class nature of our military with a draft system, how would it change the nature of the force?

WILKERSON: We put it this way. You don't find the Ivy Leagues in the Army. You don't find the Ivy Leagues in the Marine Corps. If you do it's the exception that proves the rule, like Seth Moulton from Harvard, for example, now a congressman. But there are not many Ivy Leaguers in the Army or the Marine Corps.

And what's happening in order to recruit those people who are in the services, especially in the infantry, the Marine Corps and the Army, is really unconscionable. Let me just point out a few factors here. First of all, of the 2-2.5 million 18-year-olds that come into the Selective Service system every year, roughly one-third of them are not recruitable because they're too fat. They're too obese. Another third can't pass the ASVAB, which is the basic entrance exam for the armed forces. So that cuts the pool to a third of that 2-2.5 million every year.

Warsocialism?

Speaking of founding criminals..., I gladly yield the floor to the ultra hardcore Jay Hanson who in various lists and newsgroups over the past decade or so has laid it all out for your collective consideration.

Nowhere is there to be found a more succinct and damning appraisal of what precisely has gone wrong with the path chosen for us by those who we have permitted to rule us.

Our Founders, for excellent reasons, didn’t trust government, so they founded [1] a government that was controlled by the rich. It’s based on three core assumptions:

1: The best way to solve social problems is through economic [2] growth.

2: Individuals know best how to improve their lives.

3: The best way to increase economic growth is to simply ask people who are good at it for advice. That’s why lobbyists are absolutely necessary to the function of our government. Without lobbyists, our corruptible-but-otherwise-unqualified elected officials and their appointed cronies would have absolutely no idea what to do!

In other words, elected officials ask the factory owner what government can do to increase his profit so he will build more factories, provide more jobs, and then individuals can make themselves better off. Keep giving the rich a greater fraction of the economic pie and they will keep increasing the size of the pie.

That’s how our Founders designed it, and that’s how public policy is made today:

“The policy formation process begins in corporate boardrooms... where problems are identified as issues to be solved by new policies. It ends in government, where policies are enacted and implemented.” – William Domhoff

Our Founders saw the “common good” as the sum of “individual goods” which could be measured by spending [3] – the more, the better. Obviously, now that we are entering a decades-long period of declining global economic activity (in the physical sense – not GDP), all of our Founders’ core assumptions are known to be wrong …

Which hardcore appraisal is why - in a nutshell - I'm not wetting my pants about the prospects for genuine or lasting change. I have yet to hear a single policy initiative that deviates from the core warsocialist modus operandi.

How about you?

DELIBERATE LIE #3. People are “rational utility maximizers”

Warsocialism | Although even economists admit this is a lie, [7] it is still boilerplate economic theory. Economists MUST lie about this because if people are being manipulated by marketing, then the so-called “free market” obviously requires government intervention.

In a Liberal Democracy, tax payers are ultimately responsible for an individual if that individual becomes destitute or a criminal. Economists use the “rational utility maximizer” lie to prevent government intervention in markets when intervention would serve the common good. For example, a rational government would intervene in markets to prevent con artists from peddling their worthless shit to an unsuspecting public. (We have all seen those suckers dumping their last dollar in a slot machine.)

Economists argue that government can not possibly know what an individual “needs”. If people are manipulated by advertisers, flashing lights, and sex symbols, then government has a good reason to intervene in the market for an individual’s welfare because these causalities are dumped on government to care for after the con artists have cleaned them out. For example, a federal law could be passed that would limit legalized gambling to high net worth individuals (it’s now done with options and futures trading).

By having university-trained liars (economists) convince the victims that they alone are responsible for their own actions (instead of a team of best-professionals-money-can-buy who were hired to exploit the public), the rich evade responsibility for their actions. Thus, “the market” repeats the basic motif of American politics and illustrates what makes it so clever: the rich manipulate unsuspecting citizens for fun and profit, deplete common resources, externalize social costs onto the tax payer, and blame the victims themselves or the elected screw-ups and their cronies for social problems. It’s brilliant!!!

It's 3:00AM and You Are On Your Own....

3:00 has come and gone in Georgia. In a country whose entire way of life has become predicated on a delusional pattern and praxis of warsocialist supremacy - have the candidates' responses to this ill-considered and badly botched imbroglio impressed upon you how totally and completely the American experiment in warsocialism has failed? Not only has righteous force projection and national defense capability been usurped, it has also been hollowed out and rendered largely impotent. The Caucasus incident - what went into it and its ignominious aftermath - underscores the need for the U.S. to immediately cease and desist all further foreign adventurism, reinstitute the draft, and ensure representative U.S. armed services composition.

pope going full-in on warsocialism

Western Catholic Reporter | Pope Francis, who has already broken new ground in his outreach to a suffering humanity, has put the weight of the Catholic Church behind a new humanitarian movement to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

The pope sent a message to the recent conference in Vienna, attended by more than 150 governments, to advance public understanding of what is now called the "catastrophic humanitarian consequences" of any use of the 16,300 nuclear weapons possessed by nine countries.

In his message, delivered by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, a leading Holy See diplomat, Pope Francis stripped away any lingering moral acceptance of the military doctrine of nuclear deterrence: "Nuclear deterrence and the threat of mutually assured destruction cannot be the basis for an ethics of fraternity and peaceful coexistence."

He called for a worldwide dialogue, including both the nuclear and non-nuclear states and the burgeoning organizations that make up civil society, "to ensure that nuclear weapons are banned once and for all to the benefit of our common home."

Pope Francis has now put his firm stamp on the Church's rejection of nuclear weapons, to the enormous satisfaction of the delegates crowding the Vienna conference. No longer can the major powers, still defending their right to keep possessing nuclear weapons, claim the slightest shred of morality for their actions.

The pope's stand was supported by a remarkable Vatican document, Nuclear Disarmament: Time for Abolition, also put before the Vienna conference. The document did not mince words: "Now is the time to affirm not only the immorality of the use of nuclear weapons, but the immorality of their possession, thereby clearing the road to abolition."

The Church has now put behind it the limited acceptance of nuclear deterrence it gave at the height of the Cold War. That acceptance was given only on the condition that nuclear deterrence lead progressively to disarmament.

Washington, London and Paris, the three Western nuclear capitals where the Church's words influence, to some degree, government policy, used this limited acceptance to justify their continued nuclear buildup.

When the Cold War ended, they continued modernizing their arsenals and refused demands, reiterated at the UN many times, to join in comprehensive negotiations with Moscow and Beijing.