Robots at war: will humans stay in the loop?

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Dan De Luce
August 16, 2009 - AFP

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Going off to war has always meant risking your life, but a wave of robotic weaponry may be changing that centuries-old truth.

The "pilots" who fly US armed drones over Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan sit with a joystick thousands of miles (kilometers) away, able to pull the trigger without being exposed to danger.

Other robots under development could soon ferry supplies on dangerous routes and fire at enemy tanks.

The explosion in unmanned vehicles offers the seductive possibility of a country waging war without having to put its own soldiers or civilians in the line of fire.

But analysts say the technology raises a host of ethical and legal questions, while political and military leaders have yet to fully grasp its implications.

"What's the effect on our politics? To be able to carry out operations with less human cost makes great sense. It is a great thing, you save lives," said Peter Singer, author of "Wired for War."

"On the other hand, it may make you more cavalier about the use of force," he told AFP.

Commanders see unmanned vehicles as crucial to gaining the edge in combat and saving soldiers' lives, freeing up troops from what the military calls "dull, dirty and dangerous" tasks.

Cruise missiles and air strikes have already made war a more remote event for the American public.

Now, robots could offer the tantalizing scenario of "pain-free" military action, said Lawrence Korb, a former US assistant secretary of defense.

"That raises the whole larger question -- does it make it too easy to go to war, not just here or anyplace else?" he said.

Robotic technology is taking armies into uncharted territory where tens of thousands of sophisticated robots could eventually be deployed, including unmanned vehicles possibly designed to automatically open fire.

US officials insist a human will always be "in the loop" when it comes to pulling the trigger, but analysts warn that supervising robotic systems could become complicated as the technology progresses.

Military research is already moving toward more autonomous robots that will require less and less guidance.

The trend is illustrated by the US Air Force's plans to have a single human operator eventually supervise three drones at once instead of one aircraft.

Even if humans can still veto the use of force, the reality of numerous robots in combat producing a stream of information and requiring split-second decisions could prove daunting.

Future robotic weapons "will be too fast, too small, too numerous and will create an environment too complex for humans to direct," retired Army colonel Thomas Adams is quoted as saying in "Wired for War."

Innovations with robots "are rapidly taking us to a place where we may not want to go, but probably are unable to avoid," he said.

Experience has shown humans are sometimes reluctant to override computerized weapons, placing more faith in the machine than their own judgment, according to Singer.

He cited the tragic downing of an Iranian airliner in 1988 over the Persian Gulf, when US Navy officers deferred to Aegis missile defense computers, which identified the plane as "an assumed enemy." The officers' radar and radio information had indicated it was a civilian plane.

The military is still trying to figure out how an armed robot on the ground should be designed and operated to conform to the law of armed conflict, said Ellen Purdy, the Pentagon's enterprise director of joint ground robotics.

"Nobody has answered that question yet," Purdy said. "There's a threshold where just because you can, doesn't mean you should."

As dozens of countries join the robotic arms race, human rights groups are beginning to take notice of its implications for warfare.

Although in theory drones provide more precise targeting that can minimize civilian casualties, rights activists are concerned about weapons that could shoot without a human issuing the order.

If an entirely autonomous machine committed a war crime, experts say it remains unclear how the atrocity could be prosecuted under international laws drafted decades before the advent of robots.

"Who's responsible?" asked Marc Garlasco, a military adviser at Human Rights Watch.

"Is it the developer of the weapons system? Is it the developer of the software? Is it the company that made the weapon? Is it the military decision-maker who decided to use that weapon?" he continued.

"No one has really dealt with that because luckily, we're not there yet."

What if they gave a war and nobody knew why?

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Obama Still Trying to Define Victory in Afghanistan

Ted Rall
Aug 13, 2009 - Uexpress

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What if they gave a war and nobody knew why?

When the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan in October 2001, America's war aims were clear: capture or kill Osama bin Laden, overthrow the Taliban government, deny Al Qaeda training camps and a safe haven.

Of course, two out of three of these goals were based on lies; both bin Laden and most of Al Qaeda's camps and personnel were in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. There was also a fourth unmentioned war aim, a lie of omission: lay an oil and gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan. Still, the Bush Administration deserves credit for articulating clear goals--metrics, in bureaucratese--against which success or failure could be measured.

President Obama has rebranded Bush's Afghan War as his own. Afghanistan, Obama said during the campaign, was the war America should be fighting. And so we are. Obama has dispatched tens of thousands of additional troops to the "graveyard of empires," many redeployed from Iraq.

But, unlike Bush, he still hasn't told us why we're in Afghanistan.

When he took office, Obama's stated war aims were muddled: propping up U.S. puppet Hamid Karzai, training local Afghan police, and reducing opium cultivation. The first two led to no clearly-enunciated end; how long would they take? If we really cared about number three, we might as well have put the Taliban--who'd had some success in getting rid of opium--back in charge.

Obama reads the polls, which reflect increased skepticism about his Afghan war. So, in May, Obama attempted a reset. "We have a clear and focused goal," he assured a White House audience: "to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future."

In other words, back to Bush.

Here again, let's give Bush credit. He never floated war aims in a country--namely Pakistan--which we weren't actually fighting in.

Sure, the CIA is firing missiles from remote-control drone planes at every Pakistani wedding party in sight. But Al Qaeda will never be defeated with air power alone. As things stand, Pakistan remains a heavily-funded U.S. client state--not an enemy with which we are at war. There are no U.S. ground troops in Pakistan. Until that changes, Obama's aim in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) remains prima facie unachievable.

Ten and a half time zones away from Washington, American soldiers are fighting and dying in Afghanistan. Afghan resistance forces are fighting and dying too, protecting their homeland. And Afghan civilians are dying in the crossfire. But, eight years into this misbegotten war, "the Obama Administration is [still] struggling to come up with a long-promised plan to measure whether the war is being won," reports The New York Times.

Proposals for such measurements range from the insipid to the absurd. The "number of operations in which Afghan soldiers are in the lead," for example, will be tabulated and reported to a typically credulous media. Whether said sorties are effective won't matter. Also being considered is "an opinion poll to determine Afghan public perception of official corruption at national, provincial and district levels." Never mind that most Afghans live in areas controlled by violent local warlords, who may not be big fans of free speech among their subjects.

When you can't tell whether you're winning or losing, you're losing.

Lay Off Layoffs

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"At Will" Employment Laws Unproductive, Barbaric

Ted Rall
Aug 6, 2009 -

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You've seen how TV covers the immediate aftermath of a disaster. A tornado or earthquake or whatever has just ripped through a community. Rubble and bodies lie scattered. Asked to comment, stunned survivors weep and confirm the obvious--they've lost everything.

Then the reporter's wrap-up: "Now, the rebuilding begins. Back to you, Bob."

The impulse to clean up and move on after taking a hit is universal. But the underlying assumption--that everything will eventually be OK again--is uniquely American. Taking office four months into the economic collapse, President Obama played to our belief that gumption cures everything, saying in his inaugural address: "Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America."

They don't roll that way in Yugoslavia, where Serbs still seethe over a battle fought in 1389. Nor in the Middle East, where displaced Palestinians hold on to deeds and house keys for homes they lost 60 years ago. People nurse resentments. They long for revenge.

Here in the United States, the overall unemployment rate is over 20 percent and rising. Corporations collected trillions of dollars in government bailouts, while ordinary workers got nothing. Millions of people are losing their homes to foreclosure, yet the president has yet to lift a finger to help them. Meanwhile, companies like Goldman Sachs are paying their officers obscene bonuses. How come there's no social unrest? Where's the outrage?

As the little girl in the "Addams Family" movie said: "Wait." In the meantime, Americans' tolerance for getting fired and becoming homeless owes everything to that trope: "Now, the rebuilding begins."

Lost your job? Hit Monster.com and cut-and-paste your résumé until your index finger turns sore. Lost your house to foreclosure? Your brother-in-law's couch will see you through. And those CEOs who profited from your misery? Admit it--you're jealous. You'd do the same if you were in their position.

But there's a rub. A big rub. After a layoff, the rebuilding doesn't begin.

"On average, most workers do not recover their old annual earnings" after being laid off, Till von Wachter, a Columbia University economist, tells The New York Times.

Wachter studied the income histories of workers who lost their jobs a quarter-century ago, during the Reagan recession of 1981-1985. The results were startling. "Even 15 to 20 years later, most on average had not returned to their old wage levels," he found.

The former layoff victims now earn 15 to 20 percent less than comparable workers who had not gotten canned. "One of the main reasons for the [lower pay], according to economists, is that workers who endure a layoff are more likely to be laid off again," reports the Times.

"What tends to happen is the worker has to start over with a new employer, sometimes in a new industry," explains UC Davis economics professor Ann Huff Stevens. "You're at the bottom of the totem pole again."

Many of the people Wachter studied "had been forced to drastically change their lifestyles to cope with lower incomes. Several have struggled with long bouts of unemployment. Some were laid off several times. Many have been forced to lean heavily on spouses' incomes."

Layoff victims followed the rules. But it didn't do any good. During the 1980s and 1990s the rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the middle class withered away. Now, among industrialized nations, only Russia has a smaller middle class and higher poverty rate than the United States.

Maybe the rest of the world has it right. If Americans began holding grudges against the corporate chiefs and politicians who exploit their labor and rip them off, they wouldn't have to silently absorb losing their jobs so some rich executive can give himself another raise.

There is a better way: ban layoffs.

In France, on the other hand, almost every worker receives a written employment contract. Almost all French employment contracts are for an indefinite term. You can keep your job as long as you---not your boss--feel like it.

Firing an employee in France is hard. "Dismissals are subject to stringent, and often bureaucratic, procedural statutory constraints," says the Parisian law firm Triplet & Associés. "Redundancies, or layoffs on economic grounds, are subject to separate and complex procedural and substantive constraints particularly in the case of multiple dismissals...It is extremely easy and at virtually no cost for an employee to start litigation against his (ex) employer before separate Labor Courts...It is rare that the plaintiff be other than an employee and just as rare that claims be dismissed with no award whatsoever being made against the employer."

French workers don't have to dig out of nearly as many layoffs. When they do, they're entitled to generous severance packages.

Don't these pro-worker protections allow slackers to keep their jobs? Don't they hurt the economy? Nope. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, hourly productivity is higher in France than in the United States.

It's time to eliminate the barbaric wage slavery of "at will" employment. Only then can the rebuilding--of the American middle class--truly begin.

"Now Make Me Do It"

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Ralph Nader
August 8, 2009 - CommonDreams.org

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Companies that specialize in stock market forecasting and trading—such as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase—pay very high salaries to their employee-vendors. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo just released data showing that these and other large banks are giving each of their 5000 trader-forecasters bonuses of at least one million dollars.

In return, these fat cats are very frequently wrong in their recommendations and decidedly unprofessional in their fiduciary relationships with the clueless, trusting clients who rely on them. Win or lose, they get their fees.

These firms and brokers are making money largely from other people's money—pensions, savings and investments. Overall many produce little more than gambling tips. When these moneyboys try to justify their doings as providing liquidity, hedging against risk, assembling capital for productive investment, listeners are permitted to robustly laugh. This is especially so now during Wall Street's massive, self-inflicted financial collapse. The economy, and taxpayers, are paying for this reckless speculation.

Meanwhile, outside this paper economy, people are producing for the real economy—manufacturing, repairing and maintaining products and structures, offering needed services for consumers. These people are far lower on the income ladder. Unlike their speculating counterparts, if the workers in the real economy stayed home, the economy would stop cold.

I was rummaging recently through some old publications and randomly came across the March 24, 2008 issue of Barron's, a leading financial weekly. Its contributors and interviewees are supposed to be among the savviest around. Here are some samples of their perspicacity.

The cover story asserts that "the financial sector's strongest players probably don't have further to sink, even with the ongoing pressure of negative news. Stocks of the industry's strongest players could climb by 10% to 20% over the next year as panic recedes, earnings improve and price-to-earnings multiples expand."

The author, Jacqueline Doherty, got specific. She cited Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bank of America, Washington Mutual, among others, for the predicted upswing. At the time (March 24, 2008), Merrill stock was selling for $46.85. Before the year's end, the stock was worthless and Merrill was swallowed by Bank of America. Washington Mutual, the nation's largest savings bank, saw its stock, selling at $11.70, go to zero as it was absorbed by JPMorgan Chase in September 2008. Citigroup was selling at $22.50 per share. Now, it has climbed just above $3 per share, and Citigroup narrowly avoided bankruptcy due to a huge federal bailout.

Leafing through Barron's pages of that week of March 24, 2008, I read a prediction by James Finucane—who is described as a "talented strategist—that the Dow would reach 20,000 within a year. A year later in late March 2009, the Dow was below 8000. Even James Glassman, who loudly predicted in 1999 that the Dow would go to 36,000 by 2005, has been mercifully quiet.

Unlike sloppy plumbers and carpenters who pay a price for their mistakes, Wall Street forecasters seem to be paid very well despite being chronically wrong.

A few Barron's pages later, columnist Eric J. Savitz was writing that worries about NVIDIA were overblown. The computer chip company stock having peaked in October 2007 at just under $40 a share, was selling for $18.52 when Mr. Savitz was touting its prospects. On August 4, 2009, NVIDIA closed at $13.37 per share.

And so it goes week after week in the financial world of pundits. Do you know of any other profession that can be so wrong so often and be rewarded so well again and again? On their behalf, they say that they cannot guarantee against risk and that they rely on cues from the watchdogs.

The first defense is unrebuttable because it shifts all risk away from the purportedly knowledgeable minds and onto market imponderables. Then why be so cocksure of what you urge investors to buy?

Second, they know that the watchdogs are paid to look the other way and let avarice and deception prevail. These "watchdogs" include the boards of directors, the large law firms, the major accounting firms, and the ratings companies like Moody's and Standard and Poor's.

Looking the other way also pays for most state and federal legislators and the regulators. The former solicit campaign contributions and the latter are looking forward to cushy positions in the industries they failed to regulate as government servants.

The forecasters' excuse is that the watchdogs weren't barking to alert them. Come on! These forecasters weren't born yesterday.

Barron's veteran columnist Alan Abelson is a sharp pen hedger who calls his weekly commentary "Up and Down Wall Street". Abelson is a wry, irreverent free-thinker on the conservative side, but he sometimes offers useful insights. Maybe he can break his remaining taboo and apply his mordant, satirical style to review a year of Barron's recommendations and see whether short sellers made more money than investors did who bought on the suspect advice.

It could be that the fog at Barron's is lifting; it just recently offered a year's subscription for $52, a sharp discount from its $260 yearly newsstand cost of $5 per copy. Now that's a realistic price worth paying at least if you like comedic doses of illusion and the fullest stock tables on paper west of the Pecos.

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Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book is The Seventeen Traditions.

US Economic Myths Bite the Dust

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Mark Weisbrot
August 14, 2009 - The Guardian/UK

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The Great Recession is allowing some widely held beliefs about the US economy – which were the source of much evangelism over the last few decades – to run up against a reality check. This is to be expected, since the United States has been the epicentre of the storm of policy blunders that caused the world recession.
This month my CEPR colleagues John Schmitt and Nathan Lane showed that the United States is not the nation of small businesses that it is regularly dressed up to be for electoral campaign speeches and editorials. If we look at what percentage of our overall labour force is self-employed, or what percentage of manufacturing workers or high-tech workers are employed in small businesses – well, the US ranks at or near the bottom among high-income countries.

As economist Paul Krugman noted after reading the study: "One more American myth bites the dust." Indeed it has. And as both the authors of the paper and Krugman note, there is a plausible explanation for the US's low score in the small business contest: our lack of national health insurance. There are enough risks associated with choosing to start a business over being an employee, but the Europeans don't have to worry that they will go bankrupt for lack of health insurance.

A number of other alleged advantages of America's "economic dynamism" are also mythical. Most people think that there is more economic mobility in America than in Europe. Guess again. We're also near the bottom of rich countries in this category, for example as measured by the percentage of low-income households that escape from this status each year.

The idea that the US is more "internationally competitive" has been without economic foundation for decades, as measured by the most obvious indicator: our trade deficit, which peaked at 6% of GDP in 2006. (It has fallen sharply from its peak during this recession but will rebound strongly when the economy recovers).

And of course the idea that our less regulated, more "market-friendly" financial system was more innovative and efficient – widely held by our leading experts and policy-makers such as Alan Greenspan, until recently – collapsed along with our $8tn housing bubble.

On the other hand, most Americans pay a high price for the institutional arrangements that bring us these mythical successes. We have the dubious honour of being the only "no-vacation nation", ie no legally required paid time off and of course some weeks fewer actual days off per year than our European counterparts enjoy. We have a broken healthcare system that costs about twice as much per capita as that of our peer nations and delivers worse outcomes, as measured by life expectancy and infant mortality. We are near the top in terms of inequality among high-income countries and at the bottom for parental leave policies and paid sick days. The list is a long one.

Yet it was just two years ago that Nicholas Sarkozy successfully won the presidency of France by arguing that the French could not afford their welfare state and had to adopt a series of reforms that would make the French economy more "dynamic" like that of the US. These included tax cuts for the rich and labour law changes that would make it easier for employers to fire people.

Many French are now sorry they voted for this guy and very glad that they have more protection than most Americans have from the ravages of the recession. Of course they could also use a larger economic stimulus, but the fact that they don't have one is due to the neoliberal policies of their own government and those of the European Union, especially the European Central Bank.

There is another area where the comparison between the American and European model has serious implications for the future of the planet: climate change. "Old Europe" uses about half as much energy per capita as the US does. A big part of this difference is because Europeans, in recent decades, have taken much more of their productivity gains in the form of increased leisure time, rather than working the same (or longer) hours in order to consume more.

We estimated that the US would consume about 20% less energy if it had the work hours of the EU-15. This would have a significant impact on world carbon emissions. Furthermore, when the world economy recovers, there are a number of middle-income countries that will approach high-income status in the not-too-distant future (South Korea and Taiwan are already there). Whether they choose the American or the European model will have an even bigger impact on global climate change.

The major media in both Europe and the United States have played an important role, for decades, in helping politicians capitalise on economic mythology to push policy in economic and socially destructive directions on both sides of the Atlantic. It remains to be seen how much the Great Recession will influence the thinking and reporting of these influential institutions.

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Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, DC

My 1933 Nightmare

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David Michael Green
August 11, 2009 - CommonDreams.org

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The events of recent decades have been ominous.

The events of recent weeks more so.

It's not so much, I guess, the visage of obese, over-fifty, white men angrily wrecking even the tattered remnants of the democratic process in this country that is most disturbing. We've seen that before.

I think it's the willful ignorance translated into incoherent, and in fact ironically self-defeating, rage that I find most discouraging. Can we really live in a country populated by so many fools, people who can so readily, proudly and belligerently be made into tools of their own destruction? Can the greatest political, economic, cultural and military power on the world's stage possibly be so incredibly backward at its core?

Consider this passage: "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."

These words were written by a person who might well now be vice-president of the United States, had the economic crash of our time come a few months later. And who, had that in fact transpired, and had one old man named McCain sometime later then met his actuarially not-improbable death, could have become the American president and leader of the free world.

So, okay, maybe that horror scenario is not so novel. After all, Nixon was in the White House for six years. And what was George W. Bush, really, other than Sarah Palin in trousers?

But what seems to me new about this moment is the political road rage, the thuggishness of masses of Americans who not only are venting about insane nonsense, not only are undermining their own interests acting as marionettes of laughing corporate predators, and not only are taking down democracy around themselves in order to do so, but are in fact also destroying the entire Enlightenment project of rationality-based management of public affairs as well. The single most frightening characteristic of this movement, to my mind, is that fact that no amount of evidence or logic could persuade these folks to abandon the lies they've attached themselves to, like a pit bull clamped to the leg of some poor SOB's pants.

What does it take to get someone to the point that they believe that the US Congress is passing a healthcare reform bill that will allow the government to exterminate seniors? What does it take for them to impute that motive to a president from the feeble Democratic Party? And, at that, one of the most Milquetoastian creatures to hit Washington since Hubert Humphrey ran for president acting like he was a guy named Hubert Humphrey? From Minnesota, no less.

What do you have to do to humans to get them so stupefied that they believe Obama's Hawaiian birth was some sort of conspiracy, replete with fake 1961 newspaper announcements? What sort of powerful drugs does one have to be on to make the argument that this rather considerably conservative president is a socialist? And then to call him a fascist in your next breath, blissfully unaware that the chasm separating the two ideologies not only makes them wholly different, but, indeed, oppositional. (You know, like in World War II. Maybe they've even heard of that.)

In fact, this is not a matter of stupidity, though there's loads of that to go around. But I bet that when it comes to finding arcane deductions to insert into their tax forms, these folks are actually quite clever. I bet a lot of them could reel off sports statistics or bible verses that would put your head in a fog. No, it's not stupidity. Something else is going on here.

It's certainly not a matter of factuality, either. It's astonishing to imagine that anyone might perceive the hopelessly flimsy Obama administration – even if it wasn't directly following the folks who brought you the Dick Cheney vision of executive power – as some sort of dictatorial Bonapartist project. Are we even talking about the same human being here? Do they really mean the Obama who keeps trying to be bipartisan while Republicans trash him viciously at every juncture (including even members of Congress questioning the legitimacy of his American birth)? Do they really mean the guy who continually defers to Congress to shape the major legislative initiatives he claims to be in favor of? Are talking about the dude who lets a handful of Blue Dog Democrats roll him at every turn? This, even after eight years of Bush, we're supposed to believe is some sort of totalitarian imperial president hell-bent on bringing fascism to America???

No, this isn't about lack of intellect or the remotest correspondence to reality. It seems pretty clear to me that this is almost entirely about fear. This is the empire crashing, and the former master class within it crashing as well. Both are falling to ordinariness and worse. They always were ordinary, of course, and always tools for exploitation by economic predators, but at least back in the day it wasn't such a struggle to be middle class. And, most importantly, they could always feel good by telling each other that at least they were better than the hated bitches, darkies and fags. Oh, and Arabs. Beating them up, literally and figuratively, was (and remains) a good way to remind yourself of that superiority.

But now even that small bit of compensation is gone. Your country can't win a war against a bunch of third world ragheads. Your boss is cutting your salary again. The womenfolk have their own source of income now, and no longer have to put up with your blundering sexual advances to keep a roof over their heads. Perverts are marrying each other left and right. And now – WTF? – there's some Harvard-educated spade in the White House, along with, even worse, his uppity-looking Harvard-educated all-superior-like even spadier woman.

Of course, this has been going on since the 1970s, as America's post-war hegemony began to erode internationally, and within the country white males were being challenged for their domestic dominance as well. These "Reagan Democrats" – i.e., consummately selfish pricks who were happy to take government largesse when it was helping to bring them into the middle class, but then immediately pulled the ladder up behind themselves afterwards, demanding tax cuts – began to lash out politically, responding to any line of crap that would harmonize with their embarrassing victimization trope by promising a feel-good response offering the muscular bludgeoning of women and dark people, both at home and abroad. In reality, of course, they were voting for a political movement that was talking tough-guy nationalism and scapegoating gays and other out-groups, but purely as a mask for further savaging the prosperity of these very idiot voters supporting their own
undoing. In exchange for some cheap rhetoric and the occasional third-world war, they lost their unions, they lost their good jobs to cheap overseas (and, of course, violently non-organized) labor, they lost government benefits like inexpensive higher education, and they lost a society where the gap between the middle class and economic elites wasn't on the order of a standard-issue banana republic.

So what's different today? I think there are big differences – at least of degree – on six fronts.

First, there is a marriage of convenience today between the economic oligarchy and regressive politicians which makes the era of Dwight Eisenhower look like Sweden by comparison. I would say the single most fundamental fact of American politics in our time is that economic elites have walked away from the long-standing grand bargain of the 1930s through the 1970s. They are, simply put, no longer satisfied to be ridiculously wealthy, and now demand to be obscenely so. Instead of looking at the middle class as a source of national pride, it is for them an irritant to see even that small pittance of money in other people's hands. And, thus, they are trying (and succeeding) at reversing the basic deal that brought so much prosperity to so many American families in the mid-twentieth century, seeking a return to the good old days of Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge. Today's Republican Party has become simply an instrument of that process – all the rest is
window-dressing for marketing purposes. Perhaps the best exemplar of this imperative was the (so far) unsuccessful play at privatizing Social Security. Wall Street looks at that sitting mountain range of money – within view, but just beyond reach – in sheer ball-busting frustration. It is one of the few government activities (as opposed to healthcare, military hardware, prisons, etc. etc.) that the overclass hasn't yet been able to profitize. Why should seniors have that money, they growl over brandy and cigars, when billionaires could instead? In short, the whole purpose of the political right has shifted dramatically in the past three decades. Now, it's entirely about the money.

Second, the level of deceit has grown exponentially. Americans are now being told lies of astonishing proportions, as both the 'birther' and 'deather' movements of recent weeks make plain. Before those it was Obama the socialist, Obama the fascist, Obama the sell-out apologist for America, Obama the secret Muslim, Obama the underminer of national security, Obama the pal of terrorists, and so on, and so on. It's to the point now that I feel sorry for satirists (including me). What can you possibly make up to top these amazing idiocies? Obama the Martian imposter of a homo sapien? Obama the JFK assassin? Obama the twentieth 9/11 hijacker? (Who secretly parachuted out at the last moment, and was picked up in the Hudson by a nuclear-powered speedboat driven by Saddam, and then transferred onto a black helicopter that landed minutes later on the roof of the UN!)

Third, the sophistication of presentation has grown dramatically. The right has really learned how to market its nonsense in a barrage that only enhances credibility from repetition. You get it on the radio, on TV, from politicians, at church, on your computer and cell phone, in your mailbox and at the school board meeting. This is a full-court press by clever people who know how to market soap flakes and the human kind as well. There are many examples of this, but one of the most clever has been the defining of wholly corporate center-right political figures like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama as extreme leftists, and the defining of the mainstream media as hopelessly biased toward liberalism. Perhaps as much as any other factors, these moves have employed framing and intimidation to effectively eliminate any real progressive ideas from the national political discourse. Bravo, boys. If it all wasn't so sickeningly pernicious, I'd have to give them a
standing ovation for cleverness and, sadly, success.

Fourth, the level of credulity is breathtaking. In the past, you could understand why a few crackers in 'Bama, third-grade education and all, could be seduced into blamin' the niggrahs for their lousy low-rent lives and joining up with the KKK. But look at the audiences today for Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and the rest of the scary monsters all over television and radio. These are giant crowds of tens of millions, especially collectively counted, and I don't think these people are watching and listening just to laugh at the bozos on the air.

Speaking of whom, what in the world are these freaks doing on the air? What in the world happened to this country such that, fifth, all this massive deceit has gone mainstream in the media and the Republi-con Party? It's astonishing today, from the perspective of prior decades, what comes out of the mouths even of leadership figures in one of America's two major political parties, and what goes unchallenged as conventional wisdom. There have always been regressive predators about in American politics, to be sure. But in years past they would have been identified as such and marginalized accordingly. Today, they are more likely to become president or Speaker of the House, and a slavishly obedient media dares not correct even the most obscene lies having the most dangerous consequences (can you say "Iraq"?).

Finally, unlike prior decades, the progressive counter-narrative has all but vanished from the mainstream. The Democratic Party is nothing more than the sorta not-Republican Party, and stands for nothing other than a quieter and more slowly-unfolding version of the GOP's crimes. Nobody ever votes Democratic anymore. They vote against the Republicans when they rise to their very most noxious worst behavior. We have a president who is supposed to be a radical leftist, and says almost nothing to combat the fascist tide of thuggery now threatening the country. Instead, he continues to seek approval from Republicans who never give it to him, game him at every turn, and repay his conciliatory efforts by asking for investigations into his birth certificate. Senator Chris Dodd responded to last week's Reichstag-burning events with this helpful bromide: "It's a challenge, no question about it, and you've got to get out there and make the case. This is not the
time for the faint-hearted." After which he continued to lead the very faintest-of-heart in their deafening silence. Even supposedly liberal activist groups don't demand very much anymore, other than the protection of the status quo. For example, there is pretty much no serious player in or out of government right now talking about a single-payer system at this once-per-century occasion of momentous potential change in the American healthcare system.

The upshot of all this is a predatory-when-not-defunct political system going so far off the rails that it is now migrating from insanity to violent insanity. Just ask your (former?) local abortion provider. Just ask your congressional representative, if you can penetrate the police escort now necessary to keep these people from becoming the victims of mob rule.

This should not be taken lightly. There is huge anger out there, being stoked incessantly by those who profit from it, in one way or another. Most frightening of all, it is, as far as I can see, completely impervious to rational discourse. Suppose you could put a mountain of indisputable evidence in front of the eyes of those who believe Obama is seeking to murder seniors. Does anyone think any of these folks could actually be persuaded to abandon that shockingly absurd fallacy?

And this is, at the end of the day, the scariest aspect of all concerning the current political moment. America now possesses a massive cohort of people who have simply transcended rational discourse – the sine qua non of democracy, and the real deity worshiped by Enlightenment figures like those who founded the country. Two-and-a-half centuries later, and we're moving rapidly backwards, toward the seventeenth century, and away from democracy, rule of law and the marketplace of ideas, debated and thoughtfully considered.

Everybody talks about fascism nowadays, not least those on the right who remarkably manage to call Barack Obama a fascist in the same breath as they label him a socialist. The term has been beaten into near meaninglessness from ubiquitousness of application. (Could this be another extremely clever semantics ploy of the right-wing marketing machine, taking the term out of use now that it is legitimately applicable, by over- and ab-using it? Damn, these guys are good.)

Still, I've seen the video clips from the congressional constituent meetings last week. I saw the ones from the Sarah Palin rallies in 2008. I remember the 2000 Brooks Brothers riot, one of the most despicable acts in American history, which resulted – because of one of the most cowardly acts in American history – in shutting down vote-counting in Miami. I saw at least two purple-hearted American war heros turned into national security threats by a team of cowards who avoided war when it was their turn. None of the rabble on the right could make the Grand Canyon size leap to see that for what it plainly was. Today I see the incoherent rage, the senseless foaming at the mouth that not only doesn't fit reality, but in fact runs completely contrary to it. I see the current attempts to intimidate the government and to shut down the discussion of issues.

And I have to ask, do those people not resemble Brown Shirts more than anything else one can bring to mind?

And is our current political moment not beginning to stink of Berlin, 1933?

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David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.