I am in the throes of finishing a book on the upheaval
represented by the Trump candidacy and movement. It is an exploration of how 30
years of Bubble Finance policies at the Fed, feckless interventions abroad and
mushrooming Big government and debt at home have brought America to its
current ruinous condition.
It also delves into the good and bad of the Trump campaign and
platform and outlines a more consistent way forward based on free markets,
fiscal rectitude, sound money, constitutional liberty, non-intervention abroad,
minimalist government at home and decentralized political rule.
In order to complete the manuscript on a timely basis, I will
not be doing daily posts for the next week or two. Instead, I will post
excerpts from the book that crystallize its key themes and which also
relate to the on-going gong show in the presidential campaigns and in
the financial and economic arenas. The third of these
is included below.
I am also working with my partners at Agora Financial on a new
version of Contra Corner. More information on that will be coming early next
month.
TRUMPED! A NATION ON THE BRINK OF RUIN…..AND HOW
TO BRING IT BACK
By
David A. Stockman
Hillary Clinton: Class President of A Failed Generation:
Hillary Clinton has always
been at the head of her class. That includes being among the leading edge of
the 80-million strong baby boom generation that first started arriving in
1946-1947.
She did everything they did:
Got out for Barry Goldwater in high school; got upwardly mobile to Wellesley
and social liberation during college; got “Clean for Gene” and manned the
anti-war barricades in the late 1960s; got to Washington to uplift the world in
the 1970s; got down to the pursuit of power and position in the 1980s; joined
the ruling class in the 1990’s; and has helped make a stupendous mess of things
ever since.
The baby boom generation which started with so much promise when it
came of age in the 1960s has ended up a colossal failure. It has turned America
into a bloody imperial hegemon aboard and a bankrupt Spy State at home where
financialization and the 1% thrive, half the population lives off the state and
real main street prosperity has virtually disappeared from the land.
Quite a deplorable legacy, that. And all the while Hillary has been
our class president. God help the world if she becomes our nation’s President.
She has betrayed all that was right about the baby boomers in the
1960s and has embraced all the wrong they did during their subsequent
years in power.
It starts during our defining moment when peace finally had a
chance in the spring of 1968. We drove a sitting President from office, and, at
that, one whose megalomaniacal will-to-power was terrifying.
We called bull on the cold war hysteria that had once put us
under our desks at school and now claimed that peasants in far off rice paddies
threatened our security. We stopped the Vietnam War cold, dented the Cold War
deep and put the whole Warfare State apparatus on the run—–the Pentagon, CIA,
the generals and admirals, the military-industrial complex. Within a few years,
the warfare state budget was down by 40% in constant dollars.
So it was an epochal chance to break the deadly cycle of war
that had started a half-century earlier in the bloody trenches of northern
France during the Great War; that had been rebooted for a future reprise in the
vengeful folly of Versailles; that had been made inexorable by the rise of
nationalism, statism, autarky and militarism during the 1930s; and that had
been unnecessarily and dangerously extended by the clash of military machines
that both victors refused to demobilize after they won the peace in 1945,
supplanting the silence of the German and Japanese war guns with the nuclear
nightmare of the Cold War.
True enough, the defeat and retreat of the American Imperium by
the idealism and defiance of the baby boomers was interrupted by the Reagan
defense and Cold War revival. But that historical error is what makes the
Clintons all the more culpable…..
It was their job as the first baby boom co-Presidents to finish
the work of 1968, and by the time they entered the White House it was a lay-up.
The Soviet Union was no more and Mr. Deng had just declared that to get rich is
glorious.
The Clintons’ job in 1993 was to have at least the
vision of Warren G. Harding. After all, he did demobilize the
US war machine completely, eschewed the imperial pretensions of Woodrow Wilson
and actually launched a disarmament movement which resulted in the melting down
of the world’s navies and the Kellogg-Briand treaty to outlaw war.
Yet the opportunity at the Cold War’s end was even more compelling.
There was absolutely no military threat to American security anywhere in the
world. The Clintons could have drastically reduced the defense budget by
mothballing much of the navy and air force and demobilizing the army.
They should have canceled all new weapons programs and
dismantled the military-industrial complex. They could have declared “mission
accomplished” with respect to NATO and made good on Bush’s pledge to Gorbachev
to not expand it “by an inch” by actually disbanding it. And, as legatees of
1968, they were positioned to lead a global disarmament movement and to end the
arms export trade once and for all.
That was their job—-the unfinished business of peace. But they
blew it in the name of political opportunism and failure to recognize that the
American public was ready to end the century of war, too.
And you can’t let Hillary off the hook on the grounds that she had
the health care file and Bill the bombs and planes. On becoming Senator, she
did not miss a stride betraying the opening for peace that had first broken
through in 1968.
She embraced Bush’s “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq and was
thereby complicit in destroying the artificial nation created by Sykes-Picot in
1916. So doing, Clinton helped unleash the furies of Islamic sectarian conflict
that eventually led to the mayhem and brutality of the Shiite militias and the
rise of the ISIS butchers on the backs of the dispossessed Sunni tribes and the
demobilized officer corps of Saddam.
Tellingly, Hillary Clinton made a beeline for the Senate Armed
Services Committee, the domain of the Jackson war democrats, not the Foreign
Affairs Committee, where Frank Church had exposed the folly of Vietnam and the
treacherous deeds of the CIA. Undoubtedly, this was to burnish her
commander-in-chief credentials, but it spoke volumes.
By the time Hillary got to the seat of power, the idealism and
defiance of the warfare state that had animated her and the baby boomers of
1968 had dissipated entirety. For her and most of them, it was now all and only
about getting and keeping power. In that respect, Hillary’s term at the State
Department was a downright betrayal.
Whether by accident or not, Obama had actually been elected as
the “peace candidate” by echoing the rhetoric of 1968 that he had apparently read
in a book but had been too young to actually hear. What this untutored and
inexperienced idealist needed to hear from his Secretary of State was a way
forward for peace and the dismantlement of a war machine that had rained havoc
on the world, left behind 4 million damaged and disabled veterans who had
sacrificed for no good reason and a multi-trillion dollar war tab that had
bloated the national debt.
What he got was Hillary The Hawk. When
Obama took Bush’s already bloated $650 billion war budget (2005$) to a level
that was almost 2Xthe level
Eisenhower thought adequate at the peak of the cold war and upon his parting
speech warning of the military-industrial complex, Hillary was completely on
board. When Obama was bamboozled into a “surge” of forces in the godforsaken
expanse of the Hindu Kush, Hillary busied herself rounding up NATO support.
When her neocon and R2P (responsibility to protect) advisers and
Administration compatriots urged making peace by starting wars in Syria, Libya,
and the Ukraine, Hillary lead the charge. All of them have been disasters for
their citizens and a stain on America’s standing in the world.
When the Deep State began lining up the next enemy, Hillary
joined the gumming brigade, warning about the China threat. My god, were the
red capitalists of Beijing to actually bomb 4,000 Wal-Marts in America their
system would collapse in six months and their heads would be hung from the
rafters in the nearest empty Foxcon/Apple factory.
Here’s the thing. Hillary
Clinton’s sell-out to the Warfare State is not just about war and peace—-even
as it fosters the former and precludes the latter. It’s also about the nation’s
busted fiscal accounts, its languishing main street economy and the runaway
gambling den that has taken over Wall Street……
After all this time, however,
Hillary doesn’t get any of this. She thinks war is peace; deficits don’t
matter; the baby boom is entitled to the social insurance they didn’t earn; and
that the Fed’s serial bubble machine is leading the nation back to prosperity.
Actually, it’s leading to the
greatest financial bubble in human history. After 90 months of ZIRP and a
decade of Wall Street coddling and subsidization by the Fed, the windfalls to
the 1% have become unspeakable in their magnitude and illegitimacy.
Soon 10,000 people will own a
preponderant share of the wealth; 10 million people will live grandly off the
droppings; 150 million will live off the state; and the rest of America will be
left high and dry waiting for the house of cards to collapse.
Hillary rose to fame delivering an idealistic commencement
address at Wellesley at the beginning of her career. But like the
generation she represents, she has betrayed those grand ideals over a lifetime
of compromise, expediency, self-promotion and complacent acquisition of power,
wealth and fame.
She doesn’t deserve another stint at the podium—-let alone the
bully pulpit.