This diary will make analogies between the U.S. political/economic system and cancer processes. To appreciate those analogies, you need to read my previous diary We are Winning the War on Cancer. That diary details what we know today about the cellular mechanisms of cancer.
This diary makes an analogy between those details and the current political/ economic situation in the U.S. It describes an economy that exists only to serve a cancerous, financialized economy (a Warburg economy). It describes a middle-class country that is dying due to being looted of its cash (cash-exia) by a financial/military elite. My outline for this diary is to describe political/economic events that parallel the cellular progression of cancer narrated in my previous diary.
1. INTRODUCTION
To anyone who lived in the 1950s or 60s, today's America is an emaciated, deranged ghost of a once-powerful country. It is quite clear that the financial/insurance industry is a parasite that is siphoning off vast amounts of money. When 25-40% of corporate profits go to the non-productive paper-shuffling of Wall St, and when our health care costs are twice that of other first-world countries, its clear that our economy is no longer about creating value, but only about extracting wealth - from the corpse of the middle class. It is also clear that the military-intelligence-police-prison system is another bloodsucker, whose costs are completely out of proportion to the "value" they provide. Locking up millions of pot smokers and chasing a few hundred "terrorists" with nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers is the cover story; the reality is the creation of empires and mercenary armies abroad and paramilitary police forces and domestic spies at home - answerable only to corporate warlords.
When 20% of GNP ($1 Trillion per year for each of Wall St, health insurance, and the military) is being skimmed off to fund these parasites, while our infrastructure rots, unemployment soars, and classic job creation measures (as opposed to shoveling more money to the rich) are ignored, it is fair to say that the U.S. economy has entered the equivalent of cachexia - the terminal wasting away of the patient in order to feed the cancer.
Cachexia (pronounced kəˈkɛksiə, from Greek kakos and hexia: bad condition) or wasting syndrome is loss of weight, muscle atrophy, fatigue, weakness and significant loss of appetite in someone who is not actively trying to lose weight. Cachexia is seen in patients with cancer, AIDS...
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
2. DIAGNOSIS
IMHO, the US currently has at least two kinds of cancer: military and financial. They are related insofar as financial powers have historically used military force to impose unfair trade rules onto colonial subjects. Given that our military cancer started at the height of genuine democracy (circa 1947, with the passage of the National Security Act), one can only deduce that the U.S. political/economic system has some kind of "oncogene" that pre-disposes it to military cancer. (As is demonstrated by our demolishing anyone whoever got in our way in this hemisphere - Indians, Mexicans, slave-ocrats, Spain in Cuba, Chilean Marxists - for over two hundred years.)
Neither would anyone with any historical awareness doubt that America has an oncogene that pre-disposes it to financial swindles and fraud - that is the basic character of the country since it was founded.
In the medical literature, scientists refer to a "genetic predisposition" and an "environmental insult" to describe how inherent properties of a body interact with its environment to produce disease. The goal of the next section of this diary is to understand what initiated the US's cancers. Given the importance scientists now attach to the genetic makeup of both host and tumor for the treatment process, this investigation is not an idle exercise.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I am going to ground this analogy (society/cancer) on the baseline of the middle-class democracy and regulated capitalist economy created by FDR. The rest of this essay pretends that America began with the political and economic equilibrium of 1945. It would be another entire diary to discuss the true, sad history of the U.S. as a corrupt oligarchy - before and after the 50 years of New Deal democracy. Howard Zinn already wrote that book.
3. Phony "Wounds" and cancer stem cells
Communism/socialism is the ur "phony wound" that the cancer of unregulated, Friedmanite/Hayekian Pentagon capitalism has set out to "heal" - no matter what the cost. Reactionary businessmen have been using communism as a bogeyman for over 150 years. They have been especially incensed about the overwhelming success and popularity of the New Deal and that "traitor to his class", FDR. This is hilariously ironic, since these same businessmen literally created the Chinese COMMUNIST neoliberal command economy that is currently devouring Western capitalism.
The political DNA of the U.S. ruling class is also pre-disposed to the inflammation of Red-baiting hysteria: the Palmer Raids of the 1920s, the Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s (which gave us McCarthy, Nixon, the John Birch Society, and a host of delusional reactionaries), and the militant pro-active rightwing counter-revolutions of the 1980s Reaganites (managed by William Casey, Ollie North, and George H.W. Bush - M.I.C. spooks one and all). To declare someone or some program to be "communist" or "socialist" is to activate a vast, well-funded, well-connected, right-wing hate machine that will inflame the issue at hand out of all proportion.
The reason that there is a pre-disposal to such inflammation is that the media (long before it was consolidated and outright taken over by a handful of rightwing corporations) had long been dominated by reactionary publishers like Hearst and McCormick; later it was heavily infiltrated by intelligence agencies (the Mighty Wurlitzer). There were always publishers ready (and more than willing - can you say "Henry Luce"?) to smear anyone who crossed the right wing. So, in the end the reaction to a political "wound" (just as the body's reaction to a physical wound) depends upon who controls the definition of wound; and in the U.S., that would be the national security apparatus, and the CIA in particular.
The CIA is an outgrowth of the WW2 OSS - an organization of amateur spies drawn from the ranks of the Ivy League rich. The CIA is a stem cell of the reactionary rich that has become cancerous (i.e., a cancer stem cell). The rich want to re-enact the early-industrial-revolution, buccaneer capitalism of massive growth with massive inequality and environmental destruction. The rich are always present; but under regulated capitalism, their extreme-growth ideology was channeled (by tax codes and regulations) into constructive "expanded reproduction" (to use the term of David Harvey).
But, the mutated descendants of the NSA of 1947 - the CIA and other "intelligence" agencies - have proven to be a cancer on the body politic of democracy. They cut their teeth overthrowing legitimate democracies (Iran and Guatamala in 1954) and installing business-friendly authoritarian governments, under the pretext of anti-communism. Eventually, they morphed into a consultancy, hired by the GOP to destroy democracy in the U.S. by the same means used abroad.
Throughout all their agitprop, the reactionary right knew that the facts contradicted their inflammatory hysteria. There are many examples. After WW2, Russia was weak. There was no "missile gap" by 1960. Kennedy tried to de-escalate the Cold War, earning the emnity of the CIA and the military. The Viet Nam "war" was started by the US (by its refusal to abide by 1954 Geneva Accords, and by its manufacture of the phony Gulf of Tonkin incident). The "Committee on the Present Danger" massively inflated the Russian threat in the 1970s. The CIA managed to miss predicting the collapse of the moribund Soviet Union in the 1980s. None of these facts got much air time from the Mighty Wurlitzer.
All along the way, this anti-democracy cabal hid behind "state security" as it worked to cut the military industrial complex free of any democratic oversight. The proliferation of security classifications, the vast budgets of military corporations funneled to compliant lawmakers who appointed like-minded judges, and regulators - all of this worked to co-opt the regulatory apparatus that had been erected to prevent breakaway military elements from taking the law into their own hands. Co-optation of the overseers gave the MIC the same kind of metastatic capability that tumor-associated macrophages give to tumors.
To summarize, anti-communist hysteria has been the root inflammation used by reactionary monied interests to neutralize legitimate oversight and regulation of right wing schemes to loot the public purse and destroy government oversight of business and of the military.
Big money and the MIC have succeeded in escaping civilian control. The police are heavily militarized and often beyond local control (case in point, Joe Arpaio.). The military is semi-privatized and increasingly conducting its own foreign policy. The CIA has prisons all over the world, where torture is practiced. The "black budget" for intelligence stands at $80 Billion per year; and the voters haven't got a clue what is done with it.
4. The growth stages of military/financial cancer in the US
Most everyone over the age of 50 understands that things really went bad with the election of Ronald Reagan. Reagan was a senile figurehead, groomed for thirty years by General Electric (one of the most reactionary U.S. corporations and defense contractors). Behind that figurehead, George Bush and William Casey ran an aggressive, militarized foreign policy, while Friedmanite economic fundamentalists started to destroy both the government budget (by massive tax cuts to the rich) and government regulation of business - especially financial oversight.
4A. Financial Cancer
By the end of the Reagan-Bush era, we had witnessed the Savings and Loan scandal and the 1987 stock market crash (and the first bailout by Alan Greenspan - who kept the point spread on bank interest high until the banks were solvent again). It is no accident that the S&L scandal revolved around bad mortgages, just as the current financial crisis does. Real estate scams are the lifeblood of financial cancer. They have been around forever in America. Florida land booms, racist "block busting", suburban sprawl, edge cities. Real estate is the easiest business to turn into a Ponzi scheme. In some ways, the inability to shut down real estate scams in a timely fashion is a genetic weakness of the United States regulatory system.
Places like Florida and Arizona are visible manifestations of financial cancer. Wretched sprawls of unplanned, under-zoned, totally inefficient growth with deranged, reactionary politics. They usually occur in under-developed red states, full of military bases; and they are subsidized by blue state taxpayers.
"Between 1950 and 2009, Phoenix swelled from 105,000 people to 1.5 million, making it the fifth largest city in the United States...The engine of economic growth in Arizona was growth itself - real estate in particular, but also a host of related industries: construction, hauling, landscaping, roofing, painting, remodeling, swimming pool maintenance, architecture, plumbing, and on and on.
- Ken Silverstein, "Tea Party in the Sonora", Harpers, July, 2010.
The recent governors of Arizona have been corrupt car-dealers, anti-politicians, con-men. The recent governors of Florida have been Bush Crime Family scions, and now rabid right-wing Cuban-Americans. These kinds of places have the "growth" of real estate development as the main "industry". But, as we off-shored our manufacturing base, so that the profits of this "growth" went to China, real estate development became a Ponzi scheme, i.e. a financial cancer. The real estate Ponzi scheme collapsed in 2007-8, with dire consequences for America and for any fool stupid enough to invest in this massive fraud.
4B. Military Cancer
At the same time the real estate/stock market Ponzi scheme was soaking up the proceeds of the Reagan tax cuts to the super-rich, the military/intelligence apparatus was excessively built up, despite the declining Soviet threat. That was because many members of the intelligence apparatus, angered by the Carter/Stansfield Turner attempt to reign in the rogue operatives, simply sold their services to the right wing. In the 1980s, we had the self-funding Iran-Contra scandal and its corrupt funding apparatus, BCCI. If ever there were evidence that the CIA had become an out-of-control cancer on the American body politic, Iran-Contra/BCCI was that evidence. On another intelligence front, we had Ted Shackley, the blond ghost raising money for Afghanistan from Christian fundamentalists.
Simultaneously, the appropriation of funds for scientifically-bankrupt schemes, like the "Star Wars" missile defense, demonstrated that the military was never going to permit a decrease in funding. Twenty-five years on, we still are working on missile defense, without the slightest success. Fraudulent tests, with seekers in the targets, are still the norm.
When the Soviet threat disintegrated, in 1989, we spent a decade casting around for a substitute bogey-man to justify continuing our massive levels of military/internal security spending. After 911, we finally settled upon Islamic terrorism as the answer - not pausing to notice the irony that we had created this problem ourselves by bankrolling Islamic fundamentalism to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The U.S. military budget now exceeds that of the rest of the world combined. We have over 700 overseas military bases. The Bush/Rumsfeld privatization of the military has created massive mercenary armies, paid for at inflated rates by the American taxpayer. Truly, the military has become a life-threatening cancer upon the American body politic. That cancer also includes the pseudo-fascist Homeland Security operation, the total failure called the "War on Drugs", and the world's largest prison system - again partially privatized to suck even more money from the taxpayers pockets.
5. What are the signaling breakdowns that gave rise to these societal cancers?
Neoliberalism, as promulgated by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economics, is the fundamental bad signal that has generated the world's financial cancer. The idea that rich people must be incentivized by tax breaks in order for the economy to prosper (along with the corollary that government is always the problem, never the solution) is the signal (to coin a term, the "oncomeme") that has destroyed the legitimate and necessary regulation (i.e., cancer suppressor genes) by government of business excess and the unrestrained political power of the financial elites.
Unrelenting anti-communist hysteria is another bad signal. Oncomemes like "freeing the entreprenuer" and "the nanny state" have played a strong role in the anti-communist jihad that has been manipulated to demonize any non-military governmental activity as "socialism". Once again, the hysteria is proven by the important "clues" that it deliberately ignored. Over the last two decades, the agitprop apparatus has failed to mention either that China is a communist country, or that the rightwing media assault on democracy is a classic propaganda fifth column - homage to Goebbels and the KGB.
The politics of fear and hatred were two more oncomemes that destroyed democracy, reducing it, again, by evolutionary steps, to a police state. Fear and hatred give rise to the suspension of civil rights and to police state tactics. These oncomemes reduce legitimate government action to nothing but "wars" on everything that is "other" - drugs, terrorists, immigrants. These wars have replaced the defunct "war on communism", although "communist" and "socialist" are still reliable terms to elicit hatred and fear.
As with cancer, America's descent to corporate neo-feudalism did not happen overnight. It took thirty years of reactionary manipulation to get to this point. Like cancer, there were stages of evolution. First we allowed rich people to subsidize their own political campaigns without limit (Buckley vs Valleo, 1976). Those politicians then agitated to cut taxes on the rich. Next, we allowed the government (Reagan vs air traffic controllers) and corporations to bust unions and break contracts. Then we subsidized the off-shoring of American jobs and know-how. Finally, we simply allowed the lobbyists to buy the Congress, leading to the mass exodus of honest politicians in 1992-4. Twenty years of spineless deference by Democrats allowed the GOP to pack the Federal courts with religious, legal, and financial fundamentalists who metastasized all these cancerous ideas throughout the society with their massively activist rulings. Finally, the corrupted SCOTUS fully endorsed the corporate cancer with "Citizens United". Our democratic body politic is now dead. It is a corpse, replaced by a cancerous financial/military corporate state.
6. What is the abnormal economic metabolism of our financial cancer?
"Trickle-down economics" is the Warburg metabolism of the financial cancer that is destroying America. Tax cuts for the wealthy in the name of "growth" have been shown, time and again, to be the LEAST efficient way of stimulating the economy. The racket of the rich is the same as the racket of cancer cells in its constant demand for inefficient, inappropriate, unregulated growth. I call the trickle-down economy "the Warburg Economy" for its inefficiency, its lack of regulation, and its escalating theft of resources. Refusing to spend government revenues to maintain existing infrastructure and social cohesion and to develop infrastructure based on emerging technologies has meant that America has become a backward country, with third-world level outcomes in healthcare and education. The oncomeme of "creative destruction" has been used to paper over the hollowing out of our economy.
As a result of trickle-down and deregulation, our cell-phone and internet infrastructure lags behind the rest of the world in both data rate and coverage. All of this is the result of our abnormal financial metabolism which dishes out government subsidies to corporations without oversight. That's how the phone companies took tax breaks for "network improvements" and then paid the money out in executive compensation, instead of actually building the network. The deregulation of corporations is, in effect, the replacement of our regulated national "body" by a pullulating blob of corporate neoplasm. Our body is being eaten alive by corporate entities who will throw us away after they have sucked us dry - which will be any day now.
The other obvious economic abnormality of our country is the excessive profits of the financial sector - which produces nothing of tangible value. The inflation of the financial sector is a result of handing all the money to the rich via trickle-down. The rich have no need for the additional money (as has been pointed out many times since the crash of 2008); and being risk-averse, they turn to short-term speculation in financial markets. The massive flows of real-world resources into the corrupt, inefficient, bloated nexus of parasites and criminals called Wall St. looks exactly like a tumor sucking the life out of a body. Above, we learned the definition of "cachexia". I call the final stages of the financial looting of America to feed Wall Street "cash-exia". They are the same process.
As cancer suppressor genes are shut down by the hostile takeover of our democracy, the corporate cancer is also freed to devour the little that is left of our democratic body politic. Corporations have become immortal "cells" that live forever, no matter what crime or fraud they commit. Corporations have "vascularized" themselves by buying politicians to send subsidies (corporate welfare) their way. Corporations are free tp ignore regulations and buy the regulatory apparatus, the same way cancer cells ignore signals and corrupt and fool the immune system.
Financial and military corporations are now metastatically spreading to other parts of the body politic, where they have absolutely no legitimate business. Hedge fund managers and the "billionaire boy's club" (Broad, Gates, and the Waltons) are buying out the public education system with their massive campaign to replace public schools and teachers with charter schools. Security companies are lobbying state governments for more private prisons (Arizona's anti-immigrant law is a case in point of such corrupt practices.) States and cities are privatizing highways, parking meters, and any other revenue base still remaining. As someone said, this is like paying the mortgage by selling the furniture. Its a sign of desperation; and it can't go on for long.
7. What solutions to our political/economic nightmare does the cancer analogy suggest?
If we want to cure our cancer, we need to attack its causes. Based on Robert Weinberg's Hallmarks of Cancer, we need to:
- Stop the cancer signals. That means to regain control over our media environment. To stop the hate speech, and the constant excuses for corporate crime and political corruption. To report the truth, the facts, and the context.
- Shrink the tumors. We need to end the corporate immunity to prosecution and break-up by regaining control over the governmental regulatory apparatus. Any too-big-to-fail corporation MUST be broken up.
- Cut out the tumors that are pressing upon vital organs. We need to stop the unregulated growth of the financial system and the military-industrial complex. They are literally starving the country to death.
Well, that's some list. Any volunteers? I just do analogies.
Sorry. I don't mean to be flippant; but the more I worked on this analogy, the more convinced I became that the First American Republic is doomed. All avenues of recourse have been blocked off by the financial/military/corporate cancer that is devouring us. The resources and tools needed to reverse our decline have already been stolen, wasted, or deployed against the people. The country, as it is currently constituted as a political and economic entity, is already dead from this cancer - its just on life support (running the printing presses) that will soon be unplugged. Then it will be obvious we have been propping up a corpse since the bailouts of 2008.
The only question is what kind of country or countries or marauding gangs or corporate warlords will replace it. Any leftist with a brain will be arming himself to the teeth against the coming chaos and/or crackdown; the right already has. We have the marvelous example of Iraq, where everyone seems to own an AK-47, to guide our evolution as a "democracy" under the "protection" of the American military.