Violent Change Period Cycle

This is the age of violent change and wars; between just around the peak of the economic change cycle (2006) and just after the peak of the national wealth cycle (2021).  The following method was used on 1000 years of war cycle history; my 300 years in Roman times, the last 500 years in Europe according to Joshua Goldstein, and my 200 years of American wars.  I used the top two wars in each cycle, with 10 points to the top war and 5 points to the second largest death total war, all posted to the current cycle.  In the 27 year half cycle period of 2004 to 2031 comes 93% of this major war activity, with 7% in the 27 year peace cycle.  So we are currently in the middle of the war cycle that began one year early with the Iraq war in 2003.  This compares to the immediate prior war period of 1950 to 1977 that started with Korea in 1950.  The previous period can help us suggest the patterns of the current period and upcoming period.  Civil rights and wars dominated the last period as well as the current period.

Economic Growth

The wellspring of all these things, wars, tensions, terror, and domestic struggles is the fact that economic growth changes our ways of thinking and allows us to think new possibilities of all kinds.  Revolutions do not occur in bad economic times so much as after things start to get better.  The boundaries between justice and war get blurred.  So an act of war can be terror, and justice struggles often come with violence.  So when Churchill gives his “Iron Curtain” speech is that the beginning of the Cold War or the beginning of a justice movement in Eastern European countries occupied by the Soviet Union?  History now tells us that both views had a little truth in them.

War and Terror Patterns

The current terror in France, Charlie Hebdo in January and Friday the Thirteenth in November 2015, relate to events of 54 years ago in 1961.  Then we had the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall and the next year the Cuban Missile Crisis. Likewise, a few years prior, we had 2011, a lot like the year 1956 fifty-five years before.  In 2011 we had the Arab Spring, in 1956 we had the Hungarian revolt. Both Egypt and Hungary ended up in the hands of the military.  In 1956 the British French and Israel took back the Suez Canal, until the US made them back down.  In 2011 Khadafi and Assad started murdering their people to stay in power, the US intervened to liberate Libya but left Syria alone leading to the ISIS terror attacks in Paris in 2015.

Civil Rights Patterns

The mid century civil rights struggle began in earnest with the Brown v Board of Education desegregation decision in 1954, then elected the first black president 54 years later in 2008.  Hollywood blacklisted many people thanks to Wisconsin US Senator Joe McCarthy who overstepped in 1957 then died in office that year.  The Montgomery Bus Boycott success in 1957 began the career of Martin Luther King, Jr.  54 years later, Scott Walker Governor of Wisconsin began the labor rights reversal trend of the Tea Party when he overcame the Wisconsin Uprising of 500,000 in the streets over four weeks against him. Thanks to massive protests in Saint Louis, New York, and Baltimore in 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement against police shooting to death unarmed young black men developed into the Chicago march on Black Friday November 2015, 52 years after the “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.  The backlash in 1964 turned the Solid Democratic South into the Solid Republican South of today.  The election of the first black president lead to the Tea Party takeover of congress beginning with the 2010 election that gave Republicans complete control of 26 States, with labor rollbacks in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan.  Gerrymandering has virtually assured a Republican congress for the decade after 2010.

Other Consequences 

The US closed its embassy in Cuba in 1961, only to re-open it 54 years later in 2015.  A major war like a new Vietnam or worse is likely historically in the year 2025 give or take a year or two or more.  In the previous cycle, police were more like social workers, today they are more like soldiers.  Even so, the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 will long be remembered for the police riot against antiwar demonstrators.  But they used billy clubs then, now they are trained to shoot first and ask questions later with unarmed young blacks.  Now there are six times the black men in prison compared to 1980 when Jimmy Carter was president.

Here are 56 examples of major events of the 54 year cycle over the last two centuries:

https://www.academia.edu/4101856/EVENTS_Weather_Economy_War_List56_54yearCycle

Hint: to read this paper for free, you must click on the tiny word “read” in the middle of the bottom of the screen after you go to the above link on academia.edu.

Professor Robert Reuschlein, Dr. Peace,

Real Economy Institute, Madison,Wisconsin

CONTACT: bobreuschlein@gmail.com

INFO: http://www.realeconomy.com

MESSAGE: 608-230-6640

National Security State

The national security state operates in its own interest primarily and gives lip service to the national interest when appropriate.  Since World War II the Secretary of State has been the hawkish voice and the Secretary of Defense the dovish voice in internal debates.  This is because the army is a tool of the diplomat, while the leader of the armed forces is protective of the troops.  After the decision is made, then the armed forces pursue their mission and the diplomats start looking forward to the end of the conflict.  The only exception to this pattern was Colin Powell as Secretary of State, but with deep roots in the army, while a former chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, led the military.  So this is the exception that proves the rule.

American Military Tradition

James Madison feared the loss of civil liberties that always came historically with high levels of military spending.  So he fought the War of 1812 on the cheap.  The White House burned, but otherwise it worked.  George Washington warned us about keeping a standing army and excessive foreign entanglements in his farewell address.  For 150 years we heeded that advice and developed our military traditions around a small army between wars and volunteers to fill out the army when a war came along.  Then that all changed in 1947 with the passage of the National Security Act.  Truman took the Secretary of State’s side in the argument, as did Eisenhower.  The opposition was led by the Department of War and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who favored the George Washington tradition of a small peacetime army.  But the Cold War was on, with the help of Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech given in Truman’s home state of Missouri, a former slave state with strong ties to the South.

National Security Act 

The National Security Act changed the name of the Department of War to the Orwellian name of the Department of Defense.  So when George Orwell wrote his famous book 1984 the next year, 1948, precedent for newspeak was already set, where black was white, and white was black, and war was peace.  Later in 1984 I reread that book and sure enough it predicted the language of the presidential election of that year with so-called peacekeeper missiles in Western Europe.  A missile defense program had been launched ostensibly to keep Russian missiles at bay, but in fact to enable a first strike capability where we could attack without worry of retaliation.  In other words, offense was sold under the name of defense.  The act also changed the OSS into the CIA, where covert operations and infiltration of the American press by Operation Mockingbird allowed the US to meddle with and change other countries governments, just the kind of excessive foreign entanglement Washington warned us about.

Other Consequences  

So instead of the traditional 1% of the economy for the military in peacetime, Truman kept the military at five times that rate, 5% of the economy, and later Eisenhower doubled down on that with 10% to the military in the fifties peacetime, the highest peacetime rate of the entire Cold War.

Loss of the free press in national security matters was the first casualty of the 1947 National Security Act with Operation Mockingbird.  Soon we had leading men of the press like Walter Cronkite of the OSS in the so-called Greatest Generation war, and Bob Woodward and Ted Koppel of Naval Intelligence.  And the CIA was made operational for the Cold War by letting the Nazi spy network in the Soviet Union join them.  Not a good influence.  Soon we had the whole world mad at us by deposing Baktiar in Iran to install the hated Shah, and Allende in Chile to install the hated Pinochet, and various other outrages.  Some might think the purpose of the CIA covert operations was to keep the permanent war economy going by supplying an endless number of foreign outrages guaranteed to generate blowback wars sooner or later, here or there. In the seventy years of empire since World War II we have seen the 4^th Amendment right to privacy systematically eliminated, most recently with the Edward Snowden revelations of mass surveillance without a search warrant since about 2006.  The constitutional protection of requiring congress to declare a war has similarly been eviscerated by the imperial presidency, not unlike when the Senate run republic of Rome was replaced by the Emperor system.

Kennedy

President Kennedy was appalled by how far our country had moved from traditional American ideals of fair play.  He infuriated the CIA at the Bay of Pigs.  He infuriated the Military in the Cuban Missile Crisis.  He infuriated the FBI director by his brother going after the Mafia.  He infuriated Lyndon constantly humiliating him.  He infuriated the mob going after their women. He infuriated the banks and the fed printing silver certificates.  He planned to eliminate covert operations and negotiate reduced arms with the Soviets in his second term.  No wonder many believe all combined to make Lyndon president instead.  Just like what happened to Julius Caesar.

 

Here are the stages of empire to take a long term look at what has happened:

https://www.academia.edu/5415354/STAGES_of_EMPIRE_Twelve._15_ppt._3_p._2007

Hint: to read this paper for free, you must click on the tiny word “read” in the middle of the bottom of the screen after you go to the above link on academia.edu.

 

Professor Robert Reuschlein, Dr. Peace,

Real Economy Institute, Madison,Wisconsin

CONTACT: bobreuschlein@gmail.com

INFO: http://www.realeconomy.com

MESSAGE: 608-230-6640

Peace Is Very Hard To Sell

Often when I talk about Peace Economics to a conservative it gets translated into “Why are you against the military?  Don’t you want to defend our nation?”  So many people have friends and family in the military that any mention at all threatens them or their friends and family.  Opinion polls reflect this, with the military and the clergy at about 60% approval while press, congress and used car salespersons are in the bottom under 40%.

Avoid Politicizing

One of the main reasons I call my website realeconomy.com rather than peace economics is to try to avoid the knee jerk reaction that comes with the term “peace.”  Even though soldiers or future soldiers often get interested in peace studies, because we all say we want peace, using the term peace often leads to a verbal war breaking out.  Once I got a long way down the road explaining my work when all of a sudden the other person sensed a political agenda, asked a loaded question and abruptly stopped listening and walked away after a few choice words.  Sometimes reason takes you a long way down the path until such a moment occurs.  Working on my dissertation, one peace studies director told me he got along just fine in a bar talking about Irish History, but usually was ostracized when he said he teaches peace studies.

Selling Peace

Many academics react negatively to the idea of selling or marketing peace.  This is strange when teaching social movements is not a problem to them, but even hint at business or politics and watch them run for the hills.  All campaigns, issue, politics, or business, involve branding or slogans to get their ideas across.  Yet I am often chastised for using the concept “Dr. Peace.”  Academics and activists often go together in a field like peace and justice studies.  Very few peace studies programs are in departments of their own, most are interdisciplinary programs.  Sometimes publishing in peer reviewed peace journals can be excluded for use for tenure by department chairs from other disciplines. My dissertation showed that most schools have an average of ten interdisciplinary programs with the tenure problem, yet silos are often the rule, unless a college adopts special procedures to make sure interdisciplinary professors don’t get left behind.  One school put all there interdisciplinary programs into one department, greatly improving the tenure situation.

Business and Peace

Unfortunately I didn’t survey for it directly in my dissertation, but I found that programs that got along well with the business school generally faired much better than those that had hostile relations with the business school.  As one director put it, conflict resolution is a useful class in both peace studies and business, and can be useful to bring students from both programs in contact with each other.  One program that got a start from two business professors later excluded those business professors from the program.

Academics and Peace

The antipathy towards marketing is often selective; some freely hawk their new books and or speaking tours, while others are castigated for being too self promotional.  I guess a little activism on the side is okay, but someone with too much political or business background is open season to discriminate against.

Economics and Peace                                                                                   

Economics is a dirty word to many people.  Many think of an emphasis on economics as an emphasis on depersonalized treatment of people.  So when I propose a presentation on a hundred year history of military spending it is reject by the Peace History Society and accepted by the Business and Economic History Society.  And after my presentation to the Business and Economic History Society, they have twice requested that I submit a paper to their journal.  Once again the humanities and business gap in academia rears its ugly head.  In my dissertation study of 32 Midwest peace studies programs, none of them were directed by an economist at the time of the survey.

Interdisciplinary and Peace

Peace Studies is rightly proud of its interdisciplinary approach.  Yet is the interdisciplinary approach limited to social sciences and humanities?  All 32 director responses fit one of those two categories.  Political Science had nine for the social sciences, while theology religion and philosophy had nine for the humanities.  Nothing from math, science, military science, engineering, business, accounting, peace economics, or global warming.  That seems to me to be eight very big omissions.  That eliminates eight of the nine fields I found essential to my understanding of peace economics, with politics the only overlapping category.

Here are the “nine areas of mastery” (on the front page of my resume) I found necessary to understand and create peace economics:

https://www.academia.edu/15878982/Resume

Hint: to read this paper for free, you must click on the tiny word “read” in the middle of the bottom of the screen after you go to the above link on academia.edu.

Professor Robert Reuschlein, Dr. Peace,

Real Economy Institute, Madison,Wisconsin

CONTACT: bobreuschlein@gmail.com

INFO: http://www.realeconomy.com

MESSAGE: 608-230-6640