The Great Transformation: From the Welfare State to the Imperial Police State
First published on July 14, 2012.
What Prof. James Petras described nine years ago
as a “highly intrusive and deeply entrenched police state” is unfolding
(at a global level) under the corona crisis with the lockdown policies,
the digital vaccine passport coupled with the militarization of law
enforcement and the repeal of civil liberties.
***
Introduction
The United States has experienced the biggest political upheaval in
its recent history: the transformation of a burgeoning welfare state
into a rapidly expanding, highly intrusive and deeply entrenched police
state, linked to the most developed technological innovations.
The ‘Great Transformation’ occurred exclusively from above, organized
by the upper echelons of the civil and military bureaucracy under the
direction of the Executive and his National Security Council. The ‘Great
Transformation’ was not a single event but a process of the
accumulation of powers, via executive fiats, supported and approved by
compliant Congressional leaders. At no time in the recent and distant
past has this nation witnessed the growth of such repressive powers and
the proliferation of so many policing agencies engaged in so many areas
of life over such a prolonged period of time (a time of virtually no
internal mass dissent). Never has the executive branch of government
secured so many powers to detain, interrogate, kidnap and assassinate
its own citizens without judicial restraint.
Police state dominance is evident in the enormous growth of the
domestic security and military budget, the vast recruitment of security
and military personnel, the accumulation of authoritarian powers
curtailing individual and collective freedoms and the permeation of
national cultural and civic life with the almost religious glorification
of the agents and agencies of militarism and the police state as
evidenced at mass sporting and entertainment events.
The drying up of resources for public welfare and services is a
direct result of the dynamic growth of the police state apparatus and
military empire. This could only take place through a sustained direct
attack against the welfare state – in particular against public funding
for programs and agencies promoting the health, education, pensions,
income and housing for the middle and working class.
The Ascendancy of the Police State
Central to the rise of the police state and the consequent decline of
the welfare state have been the series of imperial wars, especially in
the Middle East , launched by every President from Bush (father),
Clinton, Bush (son) and Obama. These wars, aimed exclusively against
Muslim countries, were accompanied by a wave of repressive
‘anti-terrorist’ laws and implemented through the rapid build-up of the
massive police state apparatus, known as ‘Homeland Security’.
The leading advocates and propagandists of overseas militarism
against countries with large Muslim populations and the imposition of a
domestic police-state have been dedicated Zionists promoting wars
designed to enhance Israel ’s overwhelming power in the Middle East .
These American Zionists (including dual US-Israeli citizens) secured
strategic positions within the US police state apparatus in order to
terrify and repress activists, especially American Muslims and
immigrants critical of the state of Israel .
The events of 9/11//01 served as the detonator for the biggest global
military launch since WWII, and the most pervasive expansion of police
state powers in the history of the United States . The bloody terror of
9/11/2001 was manipulated to institute a pre-planned agenda –
transforming the US into a police state while launching a decade- long
series of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen
and, now, Syria as well as covert proxy wars against Iran and Lebanon.
The military budget exploded and government deficits ballooned while
social programs and welfare were denigrated and dismantled as the
‘Global War on Terror’ swung into full gear. Programs, designed to
maintain or raise living standards for millions and increase access to
services for the poor and working class, fell victim to ‘9/11’.
As the wars in the Middle East took center-stage, the US economy
tanked. On the domestic front vital public investment in education,
infrastructure, industry and civilian innovations were slashed. Hundreds
of billions of tax payer dollars flowed into the war zones, paying
mercenaries (private contractors), buying off corrupt puppet regimes and
providing a golden opportunity for military procurement officers and
their private contractor-cronies to run up (and pocket) huge billion
dollar cost overruns.
As a result, US military policy vis a vis the Middle East, military
policy, which at one time had been designed to promote American imperial
economic interests, now took on a life of its own: wars and sanctions
against Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya had undermined profitable oil
contracts negotiated by US multi-nationals while enhancing militarism.
Indeed, the Zionist-Israeli power configuration in the United States has
become far more influential in directing US Middle East military policy
than any combination of Big Oil – and all to the benefit of Israeli
regional power.
Imperial Wars and the Demise of the Welfare State
From the end of World War II to the end of the 1970’s, the US managed
to successfully combine overseas imperial wars with an expanding
welfare state at home. In fact, the last major pieces of welfare
legislation took place during the bloody, costly US-Indo-Chinese war,
under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The economic basis of
welfare-militarism was the powerful industrial-technological
foundations of the US war-machine and its dominance over world markets.
Subsequently, the declining competitive position of the US in the
world-economy and the massive relocation of US-MNC (and their jobs)
overseas strained the ‘marriage’ of domestic welfare and militarism to
the breaking point. Fiscal and trade deficits loomed even as the demands
for welfare and unemployment payments grew in part because of the shift
from stable well-paid manufacturing jobs to low paid-service work.
While the global US economic position declined, its global military
expansion accelerated as a result of the demise of the Communist regimes
in the USSR and Eastern Europe and the incorporation of the new regimes
of the former Eastern bloc into the US-dominated NATO military
alliance.
The demise of the Communist states led to the end of competing global
welfare systems and allowed capitalists and the imperial state to slash
welfare to fund their massive global military expansion. There was
virtually no opposition from labor: the gradual conversion of Western
trade unions into highly authoritarian organizations run by
self-perpetuating millionaire ‘leaders’ and the reduction of trade union
membership from 30% of the work force in 1950 to less than 11% by 2012
(with over 91% of private sector workers without any representation)
meant that American workers have been powerless to organize strikes to
protect their jobs, let alone apply political pressure in defense of
public programs and welfare.
Militarism was on the ascendency when President Jimmy Carter launched
his multi-billion dollar ‘secret war’ against the pro-Soviet regime in
Afghanistan and President Ronald Reagan initiated a series of ‘proxy
wars’ throughout Central America and Southern Africa and sent the US
Marines into the tiny island of Grenada. Reagan oversaw the escalation
of military spending boasting that he would ‘bankrupt’ the Soviet Union
with a new ‘arms race’. President George Bush, Sr. invaded Panama and
then Iraq , the first of many US invasions in the Middle East .
President Bill Clinton accelerated the military thrust, along the way
slashing public welfare in favor of ‘private workfare’, bombing and
destroying Yugoslavia, bombing and starving Iraq while establishing
colonial enclaves in Northern Iraq and expanding the US military
presence in Somalia and the Persian Gulf.
The constraints on US militarism imposed by the massive popular
anti-Vietnam War movement and the US military defeat by the Vietnamese
Communists, were gradually eroded, as successful short term wars (like
Grenada and Panama ) undermined the Vietnam Syndrome –public opposition
to militarism. This prepared the American public for incremental
militarism while chipping away at the welfare system.
If Reagan and Bush built the foundation for the new militarism, Bill
Clinton provided three decisive elements: together with Vice-President
Al Gore, Clinton legitimized the war on welfarism, stigmatizing public
assistance and mobilized support from religious and political leaders in
the black community and the AFL-CIO. Secondly, Clinton was key to the
‘financialization’ of the US economy, by de-regulating the financial
system (repealing the Glass-Steagal Act of 1933) and appointing Wall
Street financiers at the helm of national economic policy. Thirdly,
Clinton appointed leading Zionists to the key foreign policy positions
related to the Middle East, allowing them to insert Israel ’s military
view of reality into strategic decision-making in Washington . Clinton
put in place the first series of repressive police state
‘anti-terrorist’ legislation and expanded the national prison system. In
sum, Bill Clinton’s Middle East war policies, his ‘financialization’ of
the US economy, his ‘war on terror’, his Zionist orientation towards
the Arab world and, above all, his own ideological anti-welfarism led
directly to Bush Junior’s full scale conversion of the welfare state
into the police state .
Exploiting the trauma of 9/11, the Bush and later the Obama regimes
nearly tripled the military budget and launched serial wars against Arab
states. The military budget rose from $359 billion in 2000, to $544
billion in 2004 and escalated to $903 billion in 2012. Military
expenditures financed major foreign military occupations and colonial
administrations in Iraq and Afghanistan , border wars in Pakistan and US
Special Forces covert operations (including kidnappings and
assassinations) in Yemen , Somalia , Iran and seventy-five other
countries world-wide.
Meanwhile financial speculation ran rampant, budget deficits
ballooned, living standards plunged, international trade deficits
reached record levels and public debt doubled in fewer than eight years.
Multiple imperial wars dragged on without end; the costs of these wars
multiplied while the financial bubble burst. The contradiction between
domestic welfare and militarism exploded. Finally, the massive roll back
of basic social programs for all American topped the Presidential and
legislative agenda.
Previous ‘untouchable programs’ like Social Security, Medicare, the
US Post Office, public sector employment, services to the poor, elderly
and handicapped and food stamps were all put on the butcher’s block. At
the same time the federal government increased its funding of private
military and police contractors (mercenaries) overseas and extended the
scope and depth of US Special Forces clandestine operations. Bush-Obama
vastly increased spending for the military and espionage agents in
support of wildly unpopular, brutal collaborator regimes in Pakistan and
Yemen . They funded and armed foreign mercenaries in Libya , Syria ,
Iran , and Somalia . By the first decade of the new century it had
become clear that imperial militarism and domestic welfarism were in a
zero sum game: as imperial wars multiplied, domestic programs were
slashed.
The severity and depth of the cuts to popular domestic welfare
programs were only in part the result of imperial wars; equally
important was the huge increase in the funding for personnel and
surveillance technology for the burgeoning police state at home.
The Origins of the Conversion of the Welfare State to the Police State
The precipitous decline of the welfare state and the dismantling of
social services, public education and access to affordable health care
for the working and middle classes cannot be explained by the demise of
organized labor, nor is it due to the ‘right-turn’ of the Democratic
Party. Two other deep structural changes loom large as fundamental to
the proces: the transformation of the US economy from a competitive
manufacturing economy into a ‘FIRE’ (finance, insurance and real estate)
economy; and secondly, the rise of a vast police
legal-political-administrative state apparatus engaged in permanent
‘internal warfare’ at home, designed to sustain and complement permanent
imperial warfare abroad.
Agencies and personnel of the police state expanded dramatically
during the first decade of the new century. The police state penetrated
telecommunications systems, patrolled and controlled transport outlets;
dominated judicial procedures and oversaw the major ‘news outlets’,
academic and professional associations. The expanded police state
covertly and overtly entered the private lives of tens of millions of
Americans.
The loss to taxpayers in terms of citizen rights and the welfare state has been staggering.
As the biggest and most intrusive component of the police state
apparatus, christened ‘Homeland Security’, grew exponentially, the
budget and agencies providing welfare and public services, health,
education and unemployment shrank. Tens of thousands of domestic spies
have been hired and costly intrusive spyware has been purchased with
tax-payer money, while hundreds of thousands of teachers and public
health and social welfare professionals have lost their jobs.
The Department of Homeland Security (as of the end of 2011) is
composed of approximately 388,000 employees, including both federal and
contracted agents. Between 2011-2013 the DHS budget of $173 billion has
faced no serious cuts. Homeland Security’s rapid expansion occurred at
the expense of Health and Human Services, education and the Social
Security Administration, which currently face large scale
‘retrenchment’.
Among the top officials, appointed by the Bush, Jr. Administration to
key positions in the police state apparatus, there are two who have
been the most influential in setting policy: Michael Chertoff and
Michael Mukasey.
Michael Chertoff headed the Criminal Division of the Justice
Department (from 2001 – 2003). During that time he was responsible for
the arbitrary arrest of thousands of US citizens and immigrants of
Muslim and South Asian heritage, who were held incommunicado without
charge and subject to physical and psychological abuse – without a
single resident alien or Muslim US citizen linked to 9/11. In contrast,
Chertoff quickly intervened to free scores of Israeli spy suspects and 5
Israeli Mossad agents who had been witnessed filming and celebrating
the destruction of the World Trade Center and were under active
investigation by the FBI. More than any other official, Michael Chertoff
has been the chief architect of the ‘Global War on Terror’ – co-author
of the notorious ‘Patriot Act’ which trashed habeas corpus and other
essential components of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. As
Secretary of Homeland Security from 2005-2009, Chertoff promoted
‘military tribunals’ and organized the vast internal spy network, which
now preys on private US citizens.
Michael Mukasey, the Bush-appointed US Attorney General, was an
enthusiastic defender of the Patriot Act, supporting military tribunals,
torture and overseas assassinations of individual suspected of what he
called ‘Islamic terrorism’ without trial.
Both Chertoff and Mukasey are zealous Zionists with longstanding ties
to Israel . Michael Chertoff was believed to hold dual US-Israeli
citizenship as he launched the Administration domestic war on US
citizens.
A cursory review of the origins and direction of the police-state
apparatus and the top echelons of the global war on ‘Islamic terrorism’ –
code languages for military imperialism – reveals a disproportionate
number of Israel-Firsters, who placed greater importance on persecuting
potential US critics of the Middle East wars for Israel than in
upholding Constitutional guarantees and the Bill of Rights.
Back in ‘civilian’ life, Michael Chertoff profited greatly from the
bogus ‘War on Terror’ promoting radioactive and degrading body scanning
technology in airports throughout the US and Europe.He established his
own security consulting firm Chertoff Groups (2009) to represent the
manufacturers of surveillance body scanners. Americans can thank Michael
Chertoff every time they pass through the humiliation of an airport
body scan.
The fusion of the police state apparatus with the industrial-security
complex and its prominent overseas links with its corporate security
counterparts in the state of Israel , underscores the imperial state’s
ties to the Israeli military establishment.
As the police state has grown it has created a powerful lobby of high
tech surveillance industry backers and beneficiaries who push federal
and state ‘security’ spending at the expense welfare programs.
The police state’s squeeze on social programs, education and welfare
has a powerful ally on Wall Street, which emerged as the dominant sector
of US capital in terms of access to and influence over US Treasury and
its budgetary allocations.
Unlike the manufacturing sector, financial capital does not need a
population of educated, healthy and productive workers. Its own ‘labor
force’ is composed of a small educated elite of speculators, analysts,
traders and brokers at the top and middle levels and a small army of
‘contract’ office sweepers, secretaries and menial workers at the
bottom. They have their own ‘invisible’ army of domestic servants,
cooks, caterers, gardeners and nannies devoid of any ‘Social Security’,
health coverage and pension plans. And the financial sector has its own
private networks of doctors and clinics, schools, communications systems
and messengers, estates and clubs, and security agencies and body
guards; it needs not an educated, skilled public sector; and it
certainly does not want national wealth to support high quality public
health and educational systems. It has no interest in supporting this
mass of public institutions which it views as an obstacle to ‘freeing
up’ vast amounts of public wealth for speculation. In other words, the
dominant sector of capital has no objection to ‘Homeland Security’;
indeed it shares many sentiments with the proponents of the police state
and supports the shrinking the welfare state. It is concerned about
lowering taxes on finance capital and increasing Federal bail-out funds
for Wall Street while controlling the impoverished citizenry.
Conclusion
The conversion of a welfare state to a police state is the result of
militarized imperialism abroad and the ascendancy of finance capital at
home, as well as the proliferation of security state agencies and
related private industries and the strategic role of rightwing Zionists
in top positions of the police state apparatus.
This convergence of international and domestic structural changes
took hold during the 1980’s and 1990’s and then accelerated during the
first decade of the 21st century. The downgrading of the vast public
services of the welfare state was covered up by a massive government
propaganda campaign to promote the ‘global war on terror’ together with a
fabricated widespread domestic ‘terrorist threat’ involving the most
hapless of suspects (including oddball Haitian millenarianists entrapped
by FBI agents). The supporters and beneficiaries of the welfare state
found themselves on the margins of any national debate. The mass
media/regime propaganda campaign demanded and successfully secured
massive increases in centralized powers of domestic policing,
surveillance, provocations, disappearances and arrests. Throughout the
past decade what the welfare state lost in support and funding, the
police state gained. The rise of financial capital and the deregulation
of the financial system crowded out any public subsidies to promote and
sustain the competitiveness of the US manufacturing sector. This has led
to a major break in the links between industry, labor and the welfare
state. Huge tax write-offs to big business, combined with the growth in
expenditures for a non-productive police state bureaucracy and the
series of costly overseas wars, has caused unsustainable budget and
trade deficits, which then became the pretext to further savage the
welfare state.
Significant political, cultural and ideological shifts have aided the
rise of the police state over the public welfare state. The success of
prominent American Zionists in securing power within key media
propaganda mills and obtaining appointments to critical position in the
top echelons of the police state apparatus, judiciary and in the
imperial state bureaucracy (Treasury and State Department) has put
Israel’s colonial interests and its own police-state apparatus at the
center of US politics. The US police state has adopted Israeli-styled
repression targeting US citizens and residents.
US society is now split into two sectors: the ‘winners’ linked to the
expanding and lucrative financial – security complex embedded in the
police state while the ‘losers’, tied to the manufacturing – welfare
sector, are relegated to an increasingly marginalized ‘civil society’.
The police state purges dissidents who question the ‘Israel-First
doctrine’ of the US security-military apparatus. The financial sector,
embedded in its own luxurious ‘cocoon’ of private services, demands the
total gutting of public services directed toward the poor, working and
middle classes. The public treasury has been taken over in order to
finance bank bailouts, imperial wars and police state agencies while
paying the bondholders of US debt.
Social Security is on target to be privatized. Pensions are to be
reduced, delayed and self-financed. Food stamps, access to affordable
health care and unemployment support will be slashed. The police state
cannot pay for glitzy new repressive technologies, greater policing,
more intrusive surveillance, arrests and prisons while financing the
existing welfare state with its vast educational, health and human
services and pension benefits.
In sum, there is no future for social welfare in the United States
within its powerful financial-imperial-police state system. Both major
political parties nurture this system, support serial wars, appeal to
the financial elites and debate over the size, scope and timing for
further cuts in social welfare.
The American social welfare system was a product of an earlier phase
of US capitalism where US global industrial supremacy allowed for both
military spending and welfare support and where US military spending was
constrained by the demands of the domestic socio-economic sectors of
manufacturing capital and ‘labor’. In an earlier phase Zionist influence
was based on wealthy individuals and their congressional ‘lobby’ — they
did not occupy key Federal policymaking positions setting the agendas
for war in the Middle East and domestic police state.
Times have changed for the worse: a police state, linked to
militarism and perpetual imperial wars in the Middle East has gained
ascendancy and now impacts our everyday life. Underlying both the growth
of the police state and the erosion of the welfare state is the rise of
an inter-locking ‘financial-security power elite’, held together by a
common ideology, unprecedented private wealth and the relentless drive
to monopolize the public treasury to the detriment of the vast majority
of Americans. A confrontation and full exposure of all the self-serving
propaganda, which undergirds the power elite is an essential first step.
The enormous budgets for imperial wars are the greatest threat to US
welfare. The police state erodes real public services and undermines
social movements. Finance capital pillages the public treasury demanding
bailouts and subsidies for the banks. Israeli Firsters, in key
decision-making positions, serve the interests of a foreign police state
against the interests of the American people. The state of Israel is
the mirror opposite of what we Americans want for ourselves and our
children: a free and independent secular republic without colonial
settlements, clerical racism, and destructive self-serving militarism.
Today the fight to restore the advances in citizens’ welfare
established through public programs of the recent past requires that we
transform an entire structure of power: true welfare reform requires a
revolutionary strategy and, above all, a grass-roots mass movement
breaking with the entrenched ‘two party’ regime tied to the financial-
imperial- internal security system.
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The original source of this article is Global Research
