When we first published that series of historians' critiques of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism at HNN last week, the official word was that Goldberg had declined to respond, though we had notified him ahead of time that the essays were coming.

Well, it seems he changed his mind.

Sort of.

Actually, as you can see, Goldberg really only deigns to respond in any depth to one of his critics -- Robert Paxton, whose essay on Goldberg's scholarly flaws is damning indeed. I'll mostly let Dr. Paxton speak for himself in his own response, except that, as I'll explain, Goldberg's evasive reply is largely in line with the kind of exchange I've previously had with Goldberg.

The rest of us he airily dismisses. Indeed, according to Goldberg, the entire enterprise was tainted by the fact of my participation:

Let me say up front that selecting David Neiwert to "introduce" the discussion - without telling me in advance - is pretty strong evidence that this symposium was intended a priori to discredit the book rather than honestly discuss it (usually, introducers at least pretend to be evenhanded). The slanderous and absurd bile in some of these initial responses - comparing my book to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and me to a Nazi propagandist - runs completely counter to the spirit of open debate. I would like to think that HNN didn't know what it was getting into when it started this project.

So forgive me if I take all of this gnashing of teeth and rending of cloth over the polemical - as opposed to scholarly - nature of Liberal Fascism with a grain of salt. Neiwert and Bertlet are deeply invested in their cottage industry of spotting fascism and Nazism in the Republican Party, talk radio and elsewhere. In nearly every respect they are both caricature and embodiment of precisely the mindset I attack in my book (a mindset Professor Paxton claims doesn't exist). Heaven forbid I adopt a Marxist mode of analysis, but it's fair to say that for them to treat Liberal Fascism respectfully would be like a Luddite welcoming the cotton mill. I've dealt with Neiwert's arguments before, so I won't waste more time on him here.

Well, it's true that I previously had a brief running exchange with Goldberg, largely in response to my review for The American Prospect. What you might miss from Jonah's link, though, is the the way Goldberg abruptly ended the discussion by dismissing me as no longer worth his time:

Here's my grand theory about this guy. He's made his career hyping the terrible threat from the Posse Comitatus, Aryan Nations and American Nazi Party and so like the bureaucrats in Office Space who think TPS reports are the most important thing in the world, he can't seem to grasp that they're pretty trivial.

In other words, he came to his understanding of fascism by following bands of racist white losers in the Idaho woods while using some Marxist tract or other as a field guide to identify the various species he encountered. In other words, he's internalized every cliché and propagandandistic talking point I set out to demolish in my book. Moreover, his career depends on maintaining his version of the fascist peril. So, he's banging his spoon on his highchair a lot because my book undercuts his whole reason for being.

... So, you want my short answer to why I don't discuss, say, the Posse Comitatus? Okay here it is: Who gives a rat's ass about the Posse Comitatus?

I'm sure Neirwert's gorillas-in-the-mist reportage on these guys is top notch, and I'll take his word for it their bad guys. But being bad guys alone doesn't in and of itself make them fascists. Indeed, from my limited understanding of what these guys believe, they are radical localists , who don't believe any government above the county level is legitimate. Do I really have to spell out why that's not exactly in keeping with hyper-statist ideology of Nazis and Italian Fascists? "Everything in Hazard County, nothing outside Hazard County," has a nice ring to it, but the Hegelian God-State it is not.

Ah, yes. The My Superior Mind Is Grappling With Great Metaphysical Questions While You Are Merely Wallowing In Insignificant Details dismissal.

Of course, I shortly responded in some detail. Judge for yourselves, but I believe I pretty thoroughly demolished Goldberg's "Grand Theory" about me (he had nearly every detail wrong).

All for naught, of course; I had already been summarily dismissed by his Superior Mind:

After today, I doubt I will deal with Neiwert again -- at least not at any length -- for one simple reason. Virtually every rebuttal to what he's said about my book can be found in my book. He simply doesn't care what I say, he only cares about discrediting me at all costs. There's no percentage in debating such people.

Besides leaving unanswered the specific responses to his counterclaims, Goldberg most of all refused to confront one of my ongoing and major points:

[L]et me first point out the fundamental dishonesty of this kind of argumentation: I in fact provided a long list of clearly fascist American organizations -- only one of which was the Posse Comitatus -- who represent a very real manifestation of actual fascism, not simply because they're racist (as I said, that's not necessarily any kind of definitive trait of fascism anyway), but because they fully fit the description, both academic and real-life.

So yes, one might easily dismiss the Posse Comitatus, by any accounts a relatively small organization with a relatively limited immediate reach. But one cannot so easily dispense with the entire American far right -- the bulk of which in fact is identifiably fascist or proto-fascist -- quite so readily. The Posse Comitatus is just a small, though important, part of this continuum -- it was founded by one of Gerald L.K. Smith's disciples, William Potter Gale; and it in turn became a significant cornerstone of the Patriot/militia movement of the 1990s, perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing; who in turn gave birth to the Minutemen so fondly back-slapped by right-wing pundits like Jonah Goldberg.

I'm not complaining that Jonah missed discussing the Posse Comitatus per se; I'm complaining that he completely elides any kind of serious or thoughtful discussion of American fascists as we've known them historically. Of course, any such discussion would probably have to include the Posse, but that's beside the point.

Tracking the activities of these groups has consumed a sizable chunk of my journalistic career, but Goldberg, rather than respecting that on-the-ground experience, dismisses it in a cloud of amusing innuendo ...

No, Jonah, being bad guys alone doesn't make them fascists. But holding swastika and Dixie banners aloft, shouting "Sieg Heil," and ranting ad nauseam about how bestial colored people and queers and the Jewish media are destroying the country, and demanding that we start shooting Mexican border crossers -- well, that pretty clearly marks them as fascist, dontcha think?

Of course, all this was before two Posse-style "sovereign citizens" -- Scott Roeder of Kansas and James Von Brunn of Washington, D.C., made national headlines by committing violent acts of domestic terrorism -- walking into a church and shooting a prominent abortion provider in the head, and walking into the Holocaust Museum and gunning down a security guard, respectively.

Of course, when that happened, Goldberg not only declined to discuss the Posse connection, but actually argued, alongside Glenn Beck, that these men were not right-wing extremists at all, but merely lone nutcases.

All this inspired Charles Pierce to observe at Altercation:

Pretty trivial, indeed.

I swear, if he were more of a tool, you could use him to spread mulch.

Since then, Goldberg has continued to pretend that he fully responded to my arguments, when in fact he only indulged in selective attacks on a handful of dubious points (note especially his continuing insistence that the Klan was nothing more than out-of-hand film cult) and completely ignored the central arguments, particularly the overwhelming historical evidence that contradicts his central thesis, to wit, that "properly understood," fascism is "a phenomenon of the left" and not the right.

Indeed, he continues to do the same in his response to Paxton. Note especially that among all the words Goldberg expends on minor details (without a hint of irony, I might add) he utterly fails to properly confront this this passage from Paxton:

Goldberg simply omits those parts of fascist history that fit badly with his demonstration. His method is to examine fascist rhetoric, but to ignore how fascist movements functioned in practice. Since the Nazis recruited their first mass following among the economic and social losers of Weimar Germany, they could sound anti-capitalist at the beginning. Goldberg makes a big thing of the early programs of the Nazi and Italian Fascist Parties, and publishes the Nazi Twenty-five Points as an appendix. A closer look would show that the Nazis' anti-capitalism was a selective affair, opposed to international capital and finance capital, department stores and Jewish businesses, but nowhere opposed to private property per se or favorable to a transfer of all the means of production to public ownership.

A still closer look at how the fascist parties obtained power and then exercised power would show how little these early programs corresponded to fascist practice. Mussolini acquired powerful backing by hiring his black-shirted squadristi out to property owners for the destruction of socialist and Communist unions and parties. They destroyed the farm workers' organizations in the Po Valley in 1921-1922 by violent nightly raids that made them the de facto government of northeastern Italy. Hitler's brownshirts fought Communists for control of the streets of Berlin, and claimed to be Germany's best bulwark against the revolutionary threat that still appeared to be growing in 1932. Goldberg prefers the abstractions of rhetoric to all this history, noting only that fascism and Communism were "rivals." So his readers will not learn anything about how the Nazis and Italian Fascists got into power or exercised it.

The two fascist chiefs obtained power not by election nor by coup but by invitation from German President Hindenberg and his advisors, and Italian King Victor Emanuel III and his advisors (not a leftist among them). The two heads of state wanted to harness the fascists' numbers and energy to their own project of blocking the Marxists, if possible with broad popular support. This does not mean that fascism and conservatism are identical (they are not), but they have historically found essential interests in common.

Once in power, the two fascist chieftains worked out a fruitful if sometimes contentious relationship with business. German business had been, as Goldberg correctly notes, distrustful of the early Hitler's populist rhetoric. Hitler was certainly not their first choice as head of state, and many of them preferred a trading economy to an autarkic one. Given their real-life options in 1933, however, the Nazi regulated economy seemed a lesser evil than the economic depression and worker intransigence they had known under Weimar. They were delighted with Hitler's abolition of independent labor unions and the right to strike (unmentioned by Goldberg), and profited greatly from his rearmament drive. All of them would have found ludicrous the notion that the Nazis, once in power, were on the left. So would the socialist and communist leaders who were the first inhabitants of the Nazi concentration camps (unmentioned by Goldberg).

Paxton has in these brief paragraphs utterly demolished Goldberg's thesis (and believe me, he is only briefly summarizing the mountain of concurring evidence in this matter).

What does Goldberg have to say? Very little: He excerpts only the portion pertaining to labor unions, and then claims that he's already rebutted this:

I find this argument bizarre. First of all, how did independent labor unions do under Stalin? Under Castro? Under Mao? Are those regimes not left-wing? Hitler sent Communists and rival socialists to concentration camps. This was evil, to be sure, but how was it right-wing? Stalin liquidated the Trotskyites (and 31 other flavors of socialists) too. Why is killing rival Communists and socialists right-wing when Hitler does it and not when Stalin does it? If your answer is that Stalin was somehow "right-wing" when he did these things, then your definition of right-wing is simply "evil"--and that validates a big chunk of my book.

But in fact the matter of fascist attacks on unions extends well beyond the actions took after fascists obtained power: These attacks were a fundamental aspect of the early rise of fascism as a movement, and clearly delineated that fascism was occupying political space on the right.

Indeed, Goldberg has continued to claim that his thesis remains intact:

By any remotely similar definition, fascism belongs on the left - and to date, not a single critic of the book has even come close to rebutting this basic point.

Translation: "Lalalalalalala I can't hear you!"

I think it's safe to predict that eventually, Goldberg will haughtily dismiss even Dr. Paxton as somehow not worthy of the expenditure of effort from his Superior Mind. Already, he's dismissed not just myself, but Roger Griffin, Matthew Feldman and Chip Berlet. (Feldman has responded here.) On what basis? Apparently, we're just too nasty. Gearing up for the predictable kissoff, he says he was disappointed in Paxton's response, but adds:

Still he stands head-and-shoulders above some of the spittle-flecked ranters.

Indeed, his cohort Michael Ledeen -- who penned his own semi-admiring contribution for HNN, largely in tune with the admiring blurb he wrote for the book's cover -- similarly complained that we were nothing more than a partisan "mob" intent on destroying Goldberg:

When asked to participate, I hoped that maybe finally it was time for a serious debate on the nature of fascism, which has been impossible for more than half a century, mostly because of the Left's refusal to look reality in the face. Jonah's crime was to look at it and say, as others (myself included) had said before him, that fascism came at least in part from a leftist revolutionary tradition.

Now, there are several deep ironies in this: First, all four of the essays in fact discussed the fact that fascism came at least in part from a leftist revolutionary tradition. And all four of them explained from various perspectives why this ultimately was a nonsequitur.

The second big irony is this: In 1972, Micheal Ledeen published a book titled Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, a book built around interviews with Italian historian Renzo de Felice, whose thesis, as American Conservative magazine detailed a few years back, was that "Italian fascism was both right-wing and revolutionary".

Indeed, as the AC piece explores in some detail, the idea of a revolutionary right embodied in a "universal fascism" was a fetish of Ledeen's for some years. And as far as I can determine, Ledeen has never disclaimed or explained this work in light of his more recent preoccupation with "Islamofascism" -- not to mention his current endorsement of Goldberg's thesis.

Goldberg and Ledeen are rather transparently hiding behind the claim that somehow his critics are a spittle-flecked mob that unfairly misunderstands his Superior Mind and Great Metapolitical Thesis, and instead is merely intent on burning him at the stake.

Nevermind that, when it comes to flecks of spittle, Goldberg was entirely unconcerned about Glenn Beck's frothing "documentary" calling the progressive movement a "cancer" and a "virus" responsible for most of the past century's great genocides. Indeed, not only was Beck's entire thesis derived from Liberal Fascism, Goldberg played a prominent role as an interview subject for the "documentary," and actively promoted it beforehand.

In contrast, Goldberg spends much of his time in his response whining that the mean historians misconstrue his intent -- really, he's not trying to argue that liberals are taking us down the road to genocide. He cites the text of the book itself:

Now, I am not saying that all liberals are fascists. Nor am I saying that to believe in socialized medicine or smoking bans is evidence that you are a crypto-Nazi. What I am mainly trying to do is to dismantle the granitelike assumption in our political culture that American conservatism is an offshoot or cousin of fascism. Rather, as I will try to show, many of the ideas and impulses that inform what we call liberalism come to us through an intellectual tradition that led directly to fascism. These ideas were embraced by fascism, and remain in important respects fascistic.

Well, if this is so, why does Goldberg participate in, and avidly promote, a fake "documentary" by Glenn Beck claiming that indeed liberals -- or more properly, progressives -- are the same thing as fascists; and that believing in socialized medicine is part of path toward genocide, as he did just last week? (See the video above.)

Terry Welch raised this issue in the comments to Goldberg's reply:

Goldberg seems to be saying that all those darn liberals are simply getting him wrong: He never intended to suggest that American liberals are the equivalent of Nazis and to say he did is just being stupid.

So why is it that he ONLY argues this when liberals read his argument this way? Many right wing nutjobs believe that his books thesis is "liberals=Nazis" (just look at the many, many signs to that effect at the tea parties or the Glenn Beck "documentary" in which Goldberg himself took part) and yet Goldberg seems content with their use of his oh-so-scholarly work.

If Goldberg only answers one more question -- and that's doubtful, considering that we have already cost him more effort from his Superior Mind than he would like -- I would like to see him answer that one.

This Friday marks the 99th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth. You're going to be hearing a lot about the Gipper this week, and you're going to be hearing a lot about him for the next 12 months. Already, a Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission -- signed into law by President Obama last June, at a ceremony attended by Nancy Reagan -- is busy planning a slew of Feb. 6, 2011, events that may take the nation one step closer toward Reagan's political canonization. Meanwhile, day in and day out, the legacy of the 40th president still looms large over the national conversation, some 21 years after he left the Oval Office and nearly six years after his death -- thanks in part to a deliberate campaign of distortion by modern conservatives, a Reagan myth has been used to justify disastrous spending policies at home and disastrous militarism abroad .

This week also marks the new paperback release of my book, now slightly retitled: "Tear Down This Myth: The Right Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy." When I was working on the book in 2008 in preparation for the original hardcover version, I did worry somewhat whether the likely election of a center-left Democratic president would render as moot the power of the Reagan myth. As it turned out, the inauguration of Barack Obama and the arrival of a large Democratic majority in Congress instead showed the limits of government in the face of this powerful philosophy that is loosely based on Reagan's 1980s presidency but distorts or exaggerates the reality of much of what happened in those years.

The Reagan banner as carried by today's conservatives involves deep and unrelenting mistrust of the government to solve any problems, even as crises from joblessness and unsound fiscal policies and a lack of a serious approach to energy and global warming fester from a lack of... problem solving. Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter, captured the White House in the election after Watergate by promising "a government as good as the people," but when Carter stumbled for a host of reasons, Reagan was elected with a much different message. In his 1981 inauguration, he said: "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems -- government is the problem."

Little remembered is that in the same speech, Reagan also said: "Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work--work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back." But is the first message -- that there is no government solution to any problem, no matter how complex -- that has been hammered home by the powerful right-wing infrastructure, most notably talk radio and now the highly rated Fox News Channel on TV, that has endured and grown since Reagan's tenure in office.

In this present crisis -- the one with deep roots in the catastrophic eight-year reign of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney -- the Obama administration has been unable to do what Reagan ultimately suggested in 1981: Make government work better. Obama mistakenly believed that his election had at least dented the Reagan myth; in a December 2008 interview with political journalists Haynes Johnson and Dan Balz, the incoming president acknowledged the Gipper-powered skepticism toward government but also predicted America was witnessing "an end to the knee-jerk reaction toward the New Deal and big government."

No one ever said Barack Obama was good at predictions. Although he did win passage of an economic stimulus package -- the time-tested solution for digging a national economy out of a near-depression -- he bowed to Reagan-myth-inspired GOP opposition to make the roughly $800 billion package still too small to stop rising unemployment, still weighted too heavily to tax cuts less likely to create jobs. A health-care package that -- while certainly imperfect -- would have been the first steps toward curbing medical costs, reducing the federal deficit and eliminating bankruptcies and even unnecessary deaths -- is foundering in the face of an opposition whipped into a frenzy by the radio and TV hosts who also ask nightly, "What would Reagan do."

This Reagan legacy that continues to prevent action on jobs, on health care, and on alternative energy (it was Reagan, after all, who tore down the solar panels that Carter had installed on the White House roof) is no accident. As laid out in "Tear Down This Myth," it is the result of a deliberate campaign -- led by Grover Norquist's Ronald Reagan Legacy Project -- to name roads and schools and erect bronze statues of the 40th president. The result is that a president who was divisive and had average approval numbers during his actual presidency is now widely admired by a churning population that increasingly remembers the myth better than the man. Even though there's a lot about the real Reagan record to knock (the creation of a debt-powered consumer economy, heartless responses to AIDS, homelessness and urban decay, trading arms for hostages in the Middle East), progressives can't win their case in 2010 with a direct assault on Reagan.

But they don't have to. Here are three ways that progressives can take back the political debate by turning the Reagan legacy on its head:

1) Reagan had a big-spending economic stimulus plan. It's true. As noted in the book, the economic turnaround of the 1980s had little or nothing to do with Reagan's income tax cut that was heavily weighted to the rich but was instead the result of other factors, including the tight money policies of then-Fed chairman Paul Volcker (now an Obama adviser) and a global collapse of oil prices. But there was something else: Reagan also created thousands upon thousands of new jobs across America with a spending program that caused the federal deficit to skyrocket. It was called the Reagan defense buildup.

In the part of America where I lived in the 1980s, Long Island, N.Y., the economy was booming, in part because of the government dollars thrown at the then-Grumman Corp. to build new jet fighters. Now, government has a chance to do the same thing that Reagan achieved -- but not by building machines of death but creating jobs for things that will improve life, like solar power and high-speed rail.

2) Reagan would not have allowed many of the terror tactics started by Bush and Cheney and continued in the face of pressure by the Obama administration. Don't believe it? -- let me count the ways:

A) Reagan was a staunch opponent of torture by Americans, signing in 1988 the International Convention Against Torture, which said "[n]o exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

B) The official policy of the Reagan administration was civilian trials for terrorists, as elaborated in a speech by the official overseeing the policy, Paul Bremer (yes, THAT Paul Bremer) who said in 1987 "a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are -- criminals -- and to use democracy's most potent tool, the rule of law against them."

C) Reagan would not have approved of drone-fired missile attacks aimed at killing terrorists; as president he several times rejected anti-terrorism operations for the sole reason that civilians would have been killed by collateral damage. In 1985, he surprised aides such as Pat Buchanan by ruling out a military response to a Beirut hijacking for fear of civilian casualties; Lou Cannon reported then in the Washington Post that Reagan said "retaliation in which innocent civilians are killed is 'itself a terrorist act.'"

3) Obama can best honor Ronald Reagan in this centennial year not by another statue, but by continuing to work toward the grand goal that the 40th president and the 44th president both share: Ridding the world of nuclear weapons. As I note in a new introduction to "Tear Down This Myth":

It was in 1983 that President Ronald Reagan privately screened the anti-nuclear movie "The Day After" in Camp David and wrote in his diary of his resolve "to see there is never a nuclear war" - the ambition that fueled his remarkable series of summits with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. That very same year Barack Obama was just an undergraduate in his senior year at New York's Columbia University, still very uncertain of his place in the world, when he publicly voiced the idea that Reagan shared but kept secret, an ambition of eliminating all nuclear warheads. As reported by the New York Times, the young Obama wrote an article for a campus magazine that was entitled "Breaking the War Mentality." In it, he railed against "billion-dollar erector sets" and what he called "the twisted logic" of a winnable nuclear war. Little did the then-22-year-old Obama imagine that it would be Reagan who would start the job of reducing the world's nuclear stockpiles or that he himself would be the president in a position to carry that mission forward in the 21st Century.

Although it's rarely portrayed this way, nuclear-arms reduction was the great progressive cause and the great progressive achievement of Ronald Reagan, and it can be so for Barack Obama as well. We've just seen in 2009 that it is impossible to fight an entrenched myth on its own terms. Let's hope that Obama and all of us who believe in more just and a more progressive society can instead harness the Reagan myth in 2010 and beyond, and steer America in the right direction again.

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com.

Sometimes it pays to read a news story to the last paragraph where a reporter can slip in that little gem for the news jockeys, or maybe just for the hell of it.  You know, the irresistible bit that doesn’t fit comfortably into the larger news frame, but that can be packed away in the place most of your readers will never get near, where your editor is likely to give you a free pass. 

So it was, undoubtedly, with New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, who accompanied Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as he stumbled through a challenge-filled, error-prone two-day trip to Pakistan.  Gates must have felt a little like a punching bag by the time he boarded his plane for home having, as Juan Cole pointed out, managed to signal “that the U.S. is now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated… and that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had admitted it. In baseball terms, Gates struck out.”

In any case, here are the last two paragraphs of Bumiller’s parting January 23^rd piece on the trip: 

Mr. Gates, who repeatedly told the Pakistanis that he regretted their country’s ‘trust deficit’ with the United States and that Americans had made a grave mistake in abandoning Pakistan after the Russians left Afghanistan, promised the military officers that the United States would do better.

His final message delivered, he relaxed on the 14-hour trip home by watching ‘Seven Days in May,’ the cold war-era film about an attempted military coup in the United States.”

Just in case you’ve forgotten, three major cautionary political films came out in the anxiety-ridden year of 1964, not so long after the Cuban Missile crisis -- of which only Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s classic vision of the end of the world, American-style, is much remembered today.  (“I don’t say we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than ten to twenty million people killed.”) 

All three concerned nuclear politics, “oops” moments, and Washington.  The second was Fail Safe, in which a computerized nuclear response system too fast for human intervention malfunctions and fails to stop an erroneous nuclear attack on Moscow, forcing an American president to save the world by nuking New York City.  It was basically Dr. Strangelove done straight (though it’s worth pointing out that Americans loved to stomp New York City in their fantasies long before 9/11). 

The third was the Secretary of Defense’s top pick, Seven Days in May, which came with this tagline: “You are soon to be shaken by the most awesome seven days in your life!”  In it, a right-wing four-star general linked to an incipient fascist movement attempts to carry out a coup d’état against a dovish president who has just signed a nuclear disarmament pact with the Soviet Union.  The plot is uncovered and defused by a Marine colonel played by Kirk Douglas.  ("I'm suggesting, Mr. President, there's a military plot to take over the government, and it may occur sometime this coming Sunday...")

These were, of course, the liberal worries of a long-gone time.  Now, one of the films is iconic and the other two clunky hoots.  All three would make a perfect film festival for a Secretary of Defense with 14 hours to spare.  Just the sort of retro fantasy stuff you could kick back and enjoy after a couple of rocky days on the road, especially if you were headed for a “homeland” where no one had a bad, or even a challenging, thing to say about you.  After all, in the last two decades our fantasies about nuclear apocalypse have shrunk to a far more localized scale, and a military plot to take over the government is entertainingly outré exactly because, in the Washington of 2010, such a thought is ludicrous.  After all, every week in Washington is now the twenty-first century equivalent of Seven Days in May come true. 

Think of the week after the Secretary of Defense flew home, for instance, as Seven Days in January. 

After all, if Gates was blindsided in Pakistan, he already knew that a $626 billion Pentagon budget, including more than $128 billion in war-fighting funds, had passed Congress in December and that his next budget for fiscal year 2011 (soon to be submitted) might well cross the $700 billion mark.  He probably also knew that, in the upcoming State of the Union Address, President Obama was going to announce a three-year freeze on discretionary domestic spending starting in 2011, but leave national security expenditures of any sort distinctly unfrozen.  He undoubtedly knew as well that, in the week after his return, news would come out that the president was going to ask Congress for $14.2 billion extra, most for 2011, to train and massively bulk up the Afghan security forces, more than doubling the funds already approved by Congress for 2010.    

Or consider that only days after his plane landed, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its latest “budget outlook” indicating that the Iraq and Afghan Wars had already cost the American taxpayer more than $1 trillion in Congressionally-approved dollars, with no end in sight.  Just as the non-freeze on defense spending in the State of the Union Address caused next to no mainstream comment, so there would be no significant media response to this (and these costs didn’t even include the massive projected societal price of the two wars, including future care for wounded soldiers and the replacement of worn out or destroyed equipment, which will run so much higher). 

Each of these announcements could be considered another little coup for the Pentagon and the U.S. military to count.  Each was part of Pentagon blank-check-ism in Washington.  Each represented a national security establishment ascendant in a way that the makers of Seven Days in May might have found hard to grasp.    

To put just the president’s domestic cost-cutting plan in a Pentagon context:  If his freeze on domestic programs were to go through Congress intact (an unlikely possibility), it would still be chicken-feed in the cost-cutting sweepstakes.  The president’s team estimates savings of $250 billion over 10 years.  On the other hand, the National Priorities Project has done some sober figuring, based on projections from the Office of Management and Budget, and finds that, over the same decade, the total increase in the Pentagon budget should come to $522 billion.  (And keep in mind that that figure doesn’t include possible increases in the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, non-military intelligence agencies, or even any future war-fighting supplemental funds appropriated by Congress.)  That $250 billion in cuts, then, would be but a small brake on the guaranteed further rise of national-security spending.  American life, in other words, is being sacrificed to the very infrastructure meant to provide this country’s citizens with “safety.”  That’s what seven days in January really means.

Or consider that $14.2 billion meant for the Afghan military and police.  Forget, for a moment, all the obvious doubts about training, by 2014, up to 400,000 Afghans for a force bleeding deserters and evidently whipping future Taliban fighters into shape, or the fact that impoverished Afghanistan will never be able to afford such a vast security apparatus (which means it’s ours to fund into the distant future), or even that many of those training dollars may go to Xe Services (formerly Blackwater) or other mercenary private contracting companies.  Just think for a minute, instead, about the fact that the State of the Union Address offered not a hint that a single further dollar would go to train an adult American, especially an out-of-work one, in anything whatsoever. 

Hollywood loves remakes, but a word of advice to those who admire the Secretary of Defense’s movie tastes:  do as he did and get the old Seven Days in May from Netflix.  Unlike Star Trek, James Bond, Bewitched, and other sixties “classics,” Seven Days isn’t likely to come back, not even if Matt Damon were available to play the Marine colonel who saves the country from a military takeover, because these days there’s little left to save -- and every week is the Pentagon’s week in Washington.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

[Note:  My thanks to Chris Hellman, director of research for the National Priorities Project, and Jo Comerford, its executive director, for checking on, and crunching, some Pentagon numbers for me.  A small bow as well to TomDispatch regular William Astore for first bringing up the issue of military coups at this site in mid-January and beating the Secretary of Defense to the punch with this sentence:  “Don’t expect a Seven Days in May scenario.”]

Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt

Kobe Bryant did not leave anything in the chamber against the Celtics today. Trailing by one point with less than ten seconds left in regulation, Bryant nailed a jumper to put the Lakers on top for good.

The loss marked yet another blow for the Celtics, who have lost six of their past eight games. Scroll down for video of Bryant's game-winner.

WATCH:

This is the second of a six-part weekly series excerpted from chapter 11 of my book Social Change 2.0: A Blueprint for Reinventing Our World. This series is an attempt to build new momentum for a climate change movement that has lost some of its mojo because of the failure of Copenhagen and the forces lined up against bold and timely national legislation in the U.S. While government has a very important role to play in setting the rules, the transformative and rapid change needed to address this issue is a lot to ask of a legislative system purposefully designed for incremental and slow-moving change. Or what I call social change 1.0. But we are justified in placing our hope in bottom-up change--social change 2.0--as this is how all major change in history has occurred.

In case you missed Part One of this series here's the link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-gershon/empowering-a-climate-chan_b_434874.html

Along with the immense gratitude so many people felt toward Al Gore for raising our collective consciousness about the threat of global warming through his movie An Inconvenient Truth, came some criticism that he did not spend enough time helping people understand their unique contribution as individuals and what they could do to mitigate it; the problem came across as out of our control. While this may be fair criticism, it was not his primary aim to tell us precisely how to solve this problem. That is a tall order. His job was to tell us, the blissfully unaware passengers on the Titanic, that we are about to hit an iceberg and sink unless we dramatically change course.

Many have taken heed of his warning and are developing ways to help humanity make the necessary course correction as rapidly as possible. Al Gore is among the most prominent of these, advising the Obama administration on how America can take a leadership role on global warming and advocating for a shift to a 100 percent renewal energy system. But one of his less visible roles is as a thought leader shaping a strategic way of thinking about the process of change around this issue. It is in this role that he provides an answer to the question posed to him about what we can do as individuals, and as Americans. He offers a strategy that both empowers and holds us accountable as individuals.

"When people take personal action on global warming," Gore explains, "it leads inevitably to their desire to have changes in policies. They begin communicating with their representatives at the local, state, and national level. They say 'Look, I've made these changes in my life and I want you to work for changes in policy.' They are linked together. And when enough American citizens become part of this new critical mass and the U.S. changes policy, then it becomes much more likely that China will make the changes it has to make. We're all in this together." What I like about his thinking from a social change point of view is that it is a whole-system approach and therefore capable of generating the synergy we need to accelerate transformative change within the limited time available to us.

What I find unusual and noteworthy coming from a person who has spent his career as a policymaker is his understanding of personal action as a strategic lever that can work both the demand and the supply side of the equation. Many people who spend their time formulating public policy tend to undervalue the importance of personal action--the demand side of the equation. This is mostly because they are not familiar with how to build demand for change of this nature and scale up personal action; and so, rather than trying to crack that nut, which is a hard nut to crack indeed, they stick with what they know. In this context, that would be passing climate change legislation that provides subsidies and tax incentives to homeowners for taking actions like putting solar panels on their roofs, insulating their homes better, or buying new energy-efficient automobiles. But people need to be motivated to want to make these purchases and to adopt low carbon lifestyle practices. As the old maxim goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. A supply of policy solutions without demand for them will not get us across the finish line.

But Gore goes further than just encouraging personal action; he recognizes that people who are invested in this issue as individuals, when mobilized, can be remarkably effective advocates for supply side solutions. They know exactly what policies will help them lead a low carbon lifestyle. Carbon-literate and committed citizens become a true force for policy change when they can say to a political leader, "I am doing my part, but need your help to go further. These are the specific things that will help me. And by the way, most of the people in my neighborhood have made similar behavior changes and are also very eager to see these policies adopted." What political leader would not be motivated to vote for a more aggressive climate change policy knowing that they will be rewarded by their constituents?

The wider and deeper the constituencies of people who have taken personal action, the stronger the impetus available for policy change. As Gore noted, "They are linked together." When EcoTeam members from our sustainable lifestyle campaign advocated for environmental policy change in conservative Kansas City, Missouri, after having taken personal action, and made it clear that there were many more people like them, they encouraged conservative city council members to vote for policies they might not have otherwise.

To help further this personal action and policy advocacy strategy Al Gore created The Climate Project and personally trained 1,000 community leaders from all across America to present his slide show. In return for the training, each agreed to make at least ten community presentations. This is where Low Carbon Diet came in. He gave the book to his trainees so that they would have a resource for the personal action part of his strategy, and invited me to offer a webinar for those who wished to apply it in their communities.

To take full advantage of this webinar I realized that participants would need more than the book and some tips on how to organize their communities; they would also need the community-organizing tools we had developed over the past two decades. This was clearly a teachable moment in America for these empowerment tools, so we posted them on our web site as an open source social technology and encouraged people to use and modify them as they wished.

This webinar attracted the early-adopter grassroots organizers within his cadre of trainees and they spread the Low Carbon Diet and these community empowerment tools far and wide. When the full story of Al Gore's many contributions to helping get America on a low carbon path is told, one of the important credits he deserves is helping spawn this community empowerment movement committed to furthering personal action. I am very grateful for his leadership and the opportunity he provided me to share our work with his community.

Empowering a Movement

I posted the times I would be leading this free webinar on our web site and requested that Al Gore's trainees register so we knew how many to expect and who was on the call. Because we were posting this in a public space, it would be awkward to say this was only for The Climate Project trainees, so we allowed anyone who might come across this posting to attend. Since the only advertising was by The Climate Project to their trainees, we didn't really expect anyone else. That proved to be an erroneous assumption. News of this free training for community organizers and other individuals wishing to address climate change spread rapidly among the many grassroots networks around the country. There was such a paucity of resources other than carbon calculators and checklists on web sites, and such a pent-up demand for taking action stimulated by An Inconvenient Truth, that when a proven approach to household behavior change and community organizing became available, we found ourselves inundated with interest.

As of this writing I have given this webinar twenty-two times and trained more than 600 individuals from environmental, faith-based and community groups, local governments, and large and small businesses; university and high school student environmental leaders and unaffiliated citizen activists have participated as well. People have come from thirty-six states and over three hundred cities and towns across America. The largest interest has come from California with forty-eight cities participating, followed by New York with forty-two, Massachusetts with thirty-nine, Washington with thirteen and Oregon with ten. There have also been participants from Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan.

The webinar format consists of people introducing themselves and their community and briefly describing how they wish to apply the program. This introduction process allows these change agents, who are often working in isolation, to experience the wide diversity of committed people like themselves who are part of this climate change movement. To further enhance this connection, we send everyone a list of all the attendees on the call, their community-organizing background (which they send us when they register) and e-mail addresses. This allows them to get a better sense of one another and follow up to exchange ideas with those applying the program in similar venues.

After this introduction I present what I call the Cool Community slide show. This is posted on our web site and participants view it as I go through each of the slides. It begins by making the case for the need to achieve rapid carbon reduction based on the urgency communicated by climate scientists. I then explain how conservation at the household level is the low hanging fruit, makes up half of America's footprint, and buys us time for the longer-term solutions to kick in. I briefly talk about the five Social Change 2.0 design principles so that they have an understanding of the operating system embedded in the tools and can make future adaptations in their organizing strategy based on them. I then describe our behavior-change and community-organizing research with the sustainable lifestyle campaigns to build their knowledge of and confidence in the model they are about to use. Finally, I explain the design of the Low Carbon Diet, and the tools and strategy for taking it to scale.

I tell participants that this slide presentation is itself one of the community-organizing tools in that it allows them to make the case for an effective residential carbon reduction program to key community stakeholders, and they should feel free to customize it as they see fit for such presentations. I then take questions, which vary from requesting more technical knowledge on how to implement one or more of the tools, to asking for additional strategies for getting started.

I conclude with an exercise, in which I offer consultation on the community-organizing plans of three represented cities based on a template we provide in advance of the call and which they subsequently submit to us. The template asks participants to answer seven questions:

1. Who is your target population?
2. How will you engage them in the program?
3. What is your carbon reduction goal through engaging this population?
4. By when do you wish to achieve this carbon reduction goal?
5. What do you see as your greatest challenges in implementing this program and how are you addressing them?
6. What questions would you like to have answered to help you implement your strategy?
7. What is your next step in implementing your strategy?

This is when the webinar comes alive for people because we have real people with real strategies in real communities with real problems to solve. Based on the slide presentation, we also have a community-organizing framework on which to build. These interactions provide me an opportunity to share some of the experience we have acquired over these many years and help both the person I am speaking to and the others on the call to see how all this works on the ground. Based on the feedback we get from people, they leave this training inspired by one another, hopeful that there is a practical and immediate way to begin addressing global warming, and empowered with concrete tools and a strategy for taking action in their communities.

On a personal level it is very gratifying to share the fruits of all these years of trial and error with such receptive people from all over the country and world. What a difference it makes when an idea's time has come. Although pushing a boulder up a mountain is a good upper-body workout, it certainly is more fun when it is poised to go down the other side on its own momentum. While we are not at that point yet, it seems to me, based on the large number of competent and committed people attending these webinars, that we are edging ever so close.

To be continued... Part Three of this six-part weekly series, "Instead of Cursing the Dark, Light a Candle - One Person Making a Difference" will appear in the Huffington Post Green Section on Monday, February 8.

David Gershon, founder and CEO of Empowerment Institute, is a leading authority on behavior-change and large-system transformation. He applies his expertise to issues requiring community, organizational, and societal change, from low carbon lifestyles, livable neighborhoods, and sustainable communities to organizational talent development, corporate social engagement, and cultural transformation. Gershon is the author of eleven books, including his recently published Social Change 2.0: A Blueprint for Reinventing Our World, winner of the 2009 National Best Book Award and Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5,000 Pounds. He co-directs Empowerment Institute's School for Transformative Social Change and consults with communities wishing to develop Cool Community initiatives. To learn more about Cool Communities or register for the next free webinar, March 11, on how to implement one in your city or town visit www.empowermentinstitute.net/lcd.

Previous posts by David Gershon on this topic:

"Empowering a Climate Change Movement -- Part One: Low Carbon Diet and the Cool Community" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-gershon/empowering-a-climate-chan_b_434874.html

"Hope for a Climate Change Solution in the Wake of Copenhagen: If Governments Can't People Can" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-gershon/hope-for-a-climate-change_b_401298.html

"Stepping Up to Save the Planet: From Corporate Social Responsibility to Corporate Social Engagement" Stepping http://csrwiretalkback.tumblr.com/post/341862628/stepping-up-to-save-the-planet-beyond-corporate-social

In the past several decades, the way we pay for things has made plastic, not cash, king. The rise of plastic began with credit cards which for years have attracted consumers despite high interest rates and constantly changing fine print. The new Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act, which takes full effect on February 22, promises to give consumers much-needed relief by keeping more of the hard-earned money in the pockets of the people who earned it.

This sweeping legislation cracks down on rate increases, eliminates certain tricky practices, improves transparency and protects arguably the most vulnerable among us - young consumers. Anxious to make their way in the world and not always aware of the long-term financial consequences of their actions, anyone under the age of 21 will be much more protected from the dangers of credit cards. However, there are consequences they may not like.

They will be required to get a cosigner before being extended credit, forced to better document how they'll be paying any balance, and they'll be taxed with having their cosigner approve any credit line increases. Even if a young person has clearly shown the ability to make timely payments and demonstrated they are more than capable of informed use of their account, they will still be required to keep a cosigner involved in the ongoing management of their finances.

The net result of the above is that millions of young Americans simply won't be able to get a credit card at all because of the new restrictions. That's a problem in a country where electronic payments are ubiquitous, touches every part of our lives and is even mandatory for participation in the fastest growing area of retailing - online shopping.

The fact is that consumers just cannot buy merchandise and services online from Web sites without some type of payment card, but even in-store purchases are much more convenient with plastic payments. Although bank debit cards will fill that void for some, many consumers have already started turning to reloadable prepaid cards because they do not require a bank account as do bank debit cards and you can not overdraw a reloadable prepaid card. The cards function the same as other plastic options and can be used by anyone, regardless of their credit history.

Even before the recession, general purpose reloadable prepaid cards were already used by many of the more than 73 million unbanked and under banked consumers in this country as a low-cost alternative to a traditional bank account. Dwindling credit card limits have led millions more to use reloadable prepaid cards as consumers continue to scramble for alternatives. The new credit restrictions on young people will help significantly increase the number of those who make prepaid their No. 1 option to fill the burgeoning "plastic gap." In 2008, transactions on reloadable prepaid cards totaled more than $4 billion, and forecasts show that number will increase to $12 billion in 2010.

In this great country of ours, we have become prolific consumers partly on the backs of credit cards. However, our youngest consumers deserve the opportunity to be protected from financial missteps that can blossom into long-term problems. The new credit card legislation will certainly change the rules of the game but reloadable prepaid cards are ready to step up and fill the "plastic gap".

25 Minnesotans for Peace (including myself) recently traveled to Washington DC to give a message to our elected representatives before the President's "State of the Union". We were able to read the names of the 77 young people from Minnesota who have been killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars in front of the White House. We then "threw our shoes at the occupation" after reading the messages and questions about the endless wars that we had inscribed on our "peace shoes" for later mailing to the White House. Finally some in our group committed an act of conscience by simply laying down on the sidewalk symbolizing the ongoing, enormous tragedy of the millions of civilian and soldier deaths. The mostly elderly participants were subsequently arrested and forced to spend 28 hours in the harsh conditions of the "DC lockup".

The next evening we heard the President give another good speech emphasizing his wonderful vision for the future of our country through new job creation, improving educational opportunity, investment in America's infrastructure, balancing the budget and a return to economic prosperity. The President only spoke of the costly wars and military build-up that he has chosen to escalate (against the advice of his own Ambassador Eikenberry) to Afghanistan towards the end of his "State of the Union" report.

But does not the tail wag the dog?

Obama's speech left us baffled as it does not appear to us that the lives lost and trillions of dollars that have been poured into these counterproductive wars over the last eight years (and counting) have won any hearts or minds in the Mid-east nor have they succeeded in reducing the threat of international terrorism. So we asked a lot of questions.

Our peace delegation was able to meet with many of our Minnesota Congresspersons and/or their staffs (including Klobuchar, Franken, Kline, Oberstar and Ellison). However nobody on Capitol Hill was able to explain how it is possible to "win" or even what future benchmarks Congress could use to evaluate whether progress is being made toward that goal. The last time our government published any information quantifying international terrorism was in 2004 (less than 3 years into the wars) and, at that time, the level had increased exponentially. The State Department's annual terrorism report was immediately discontinued. Over eight years after instituting the "war on terror", the government must still want to keep the bad news a secret, even from Congress. If there is no way to even find out this basic information, how can Congress assess if the Af-Pak escalation is "working"? We were met with blank stares.

We then asked whether changes in the level of American casualties could be used to measure the progress. We mentioned General (ret'd) Barry McCaffrey's dire prediction: "What I want to do is signal that this thing (Af-Pak escalation) is going to be $5 billion to $10 billion a month and 300 to 500 killed and wounded a month by next summer. That's what we probably should expect. And that's light casualties." One young congressional staffer who has studied foreign policy and military affairs (but without any military experience of his own) told us that increased American deaths would not be relevant or helpful in determining the war's effectiveness. I asked to know the number of funerals my Congressman Kline had been to for the soldiers in our district who had so far been killed in the wars or who had committed suicide as a result of the wars.

The last difficult question we posed to our elected Minnesota representatives was how can the reckless spending be brought under control and the national debt be reduced when an unprecedented $741 billion is to be spent on the military and wars this next year. (That's the projected minimum. Many experts expect supplemental spending will push the 2010 total amount to $1 trillion.) A staffer told us that Congress raised the debt ceiling last month to an unfathomable $12 trillion! That debt figure is more than double the $5.6 trillion the Bush Administration had when it started the wars. The national debt reportedly comes to $100,000 for each American family! How can fiscal conservatives not question the trillions being wasted this way? How can President Obama's hopes for economic prosperity be realized with a debt burden this high? Why are US military contractors allowed to gain huge war profits at the same time as saddling our children and grandchildren with crushing interest payments on this debt?

Our last terrible question was when will the other shoe fall? Our visit to DC happened to coincide with C-SPAN's airing of former Senator Pete Domenici's presentation to the members of a new bi-partisan, private sector debt commission being assigned to deal with the catastrophic rising debt. The elderly Domenici was practically in tears and hyperventilating as he pointed the press to a chart showing the United States' steeply climbing debt burden as he announced in a trembling voice that all government programs and "entitlements" (except for the military) but obviously including social security, Medicare and Medicaid would be on the cutting block.

One has to wonder if the line on Domenici's chart showing US debt going steeply up would mirror the one we are not allowed to know about the increase in international terrorism, as a consequence of U.S. pre-emptive wars, kidnapings, torture, etc.

In the end, our group had to leave Washington DC without the answers. But we do not intend to wait in silence for the politicians to respond. Since our current President and Congress do not appear capable of pulling the country out of the "war on terror" begun by the Bush Administration, it will, of necessity, fall to the common American people like ourselves to exercise our constitutional rights as well as our consciences to push for a peace process to end the bloody and costly quagmire.

The Obama administration is not backing down from the president's criticism of the Supreme Court during the State of the Union address this past week.

Asked on Sunday whether Obama was right to rebuke the justices to their face (with millions watching) over the Court's decision to allow corporations to spend freely on election campaigns, White House senior adviser David Axelrod called the episode "totally appropriate."

From Axelrod's appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press", hosted by David Gregory:

GREGORY: During the State of the Union, there -- there was a moment that got a lot of attention. I want to show it to you here, where the president was critical of the Supreme Court decision about campaign finance reform. And in the audience -- Justice Alito -- had what seemed to be a pretty critical response, as the line was said, he's shaking his head there. And then as it gets closer, looks like he's saying, "That's not true." Was it appropriate for the president to criticize the Supreme Court during the State of the Union? And do you consider Justice Alito's response to be appropriate or inappropriate?

AXELROD: Well, I certainly think it was appropriate for the president to talk about the threat that this decision brings to our democracy. Basically, it's gonna be open season for special interests groups and big corporations to participate in our elections with all their might and all their money.

GREGORY: You still haven't answered whether you think it was an appropriate thing, criticism--

DAVID AXELROD: I think it was totally appropriate

Watch Alito shake his head in response to Obama's comments at the State of the Union:

For 19 years, oddball Austrian billionaire Richard Lugner has paid for nights with beautiful B-list bombshells. He pays them about $150,000 and, in exchange, they sign autographs at one of his shopping malls and then accompany him to Austria's premier social event, the Vienna Opera Ball.

The 77-year-old, four-times-divorced father of three gets a kick out of the attention -- and sometimes outrage -- that his buxom rent-a-dates stir up. But none have been so demanding as this year's date -- Lindsay Lohan.

SNL took on the State of the Union last night, cutting together clips of Fred Armisen as Obama with actual shots of displeased Republicans and ecstatic Democrats.

Armisen opened the speech taking shots at Martha Coakley. "Our nominee Martha Coakley was single most incompetent candidate ever to seek public office in this nation's history," he announced to rousing applause from both the crowd and Joe Biden (Jason Sudeikis), adding, "Martha Coakley, you are a disgrace. You couldn't beat Dick Cheney for mayor of Berkeley."

The speech then moved on to address the problems that inherited from the Bush administration upon moving into the White House:

"Dishes piled high in the sink, sheets that hadn't been washed in months - perhaps years, floors littered with candy wrappers and dust bunnies, and a fridge filled with food long past its expiration date. "

Mocking the actual response to the speech, the sketch repeatedly cut to Democrats wildly applauding, then juxtaposed them with stone-faced Republicans. But a surprise attendee, Brendan Fraser, was won over, as he reacted with his signature clap.

Armisen closed by addressing health care reform: "To be honest, I could either way on that. If you want it, pass it. Whatever, I'll sign it. It's your call. I really don't care anymore."


WATCH: