I think it is important to tie together a number of threads joe shikspack included in his
The Evening Blues a couple of nights ago. Joe pointed to a new policy think tank that has been co-founded by Democratic Party elites and Republican neo-conservatives. I am frankly surprised that this has not generated a lot of discussion here. Over at TOP, this latest milestone of bipartisan war mongering was posted, but largely ignored and dismissed, by wheeling out and dumping steaming piles of the usual bullshit: "Why are you attacking Democrats instead of focusing on those horrible other guys?"

Much further down, joe shikspack linked to Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals, which includes this precise summary of where we are:

The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last forty years, against the possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it. The political project of neoliberalism, brought to ascendance by Thatcher and Reagan, has pursued two principal objectives. The first has been to dismantle any barriers to the exercise of unaccountable private power. The second had been to erect them to the exercise of any democratic public will.

Now, please stop and think about this. It is popular on the left to assert that the U.S. Constitution established a capitalist system to protect and perpetuate the exclusive wealth and power of a white ruling class. There is certainly enough evidence to make the argument plausible. But if that interpretation is the whole truth and nothing but the truth, then why has there been "an ideological war, waged over the last forty years, against the possibility of collective action"?

Yes, it is plainly fact that today we have an capitalist economic system. But I think it is crucial to understand that the political system has been debased and corrupted to serve that capitalist economic system. That has been the purpose of the "ideological war, waged over the last forty years."

The United States was not designed as a capitalist economic system. strollingone had a very useful post on July 16, which begins:

The concept of a “capitalist” first appeared in Holland in the early 1600’s, was developed in France during the 1700’s, and appeared in England in 1792. The first use of the term “capitalism” was by Louis Blanc in 1850, by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861, and established by Karl Marx in 1867.

Since the United States Constitution was deliberated, framed, debated, and ratified September 1787 through June 1788, it should be obvious, given the above chronology, that the establishment of a capitalist system was not an object or intent. And, indeed, if you today go to a website that includes both the full text of the Constitution and a search function, you will find that the words "capitalist" and "capitalism" are actually not in the Constitution. Find a website with a searchable full text of The Federalist Papers, and you will get the same remarkable result.

So, what was the USA actually founded as?

In my Introduction to my abridged and annotated Kindle edition of the 1937 book, The Power to Govern: The Constitution -- Then and Now, I wrote:

By specifying in the Constitution that government powers are used to promote a state’s economic powers in promotion of the general welfare, the American republic made a sharp break from European mercantilism, in which the welfare of a sole monarch or small group of oligarchs was often conflated with the general welfare of a state or nation.

And if you look at the actual history of American economic development--not the hagiographies of "great captains of industry"; certainly not the big financiers like Gould or Morgan or Goldman Sachs; not even the histories of the struggles of working people to form unions and protect their dignity as well as their earnings--you see that collective action in the form of government involvement has directed over every major technological and economic advance: the building of roads and canals; the removal of hazards to river and maritime navigation; the design and building of railroads; the promotion of steam power; the development of the telegraph; the development of electricity, radio, electronics, computers, and the internet; the introduction and development of new cultivars of fruits, vegetables, and grains; the development of frozen foods; ; the development of aviation; even the development of the internal combustion engine. Do a search for "HAWB How America Was Built" and you will find my posts on some of the specific government programs. One post I will try to put up by the end of this summer is how the city of New York owes its emergence as a major world entrepot and population center to the U.S. Coast Survey discovery of the Gedney Channel in 1837. Here is the Introduction to my HAWB series, with a long list of some, not all, of the government projects and programs I can write about.

Much of this history is about explorers and engineers, geographers and geometers, mapmakers mathematicians, and machinists, scientists and surveyors, and it does not lend itself to a framing of capitalist exploitation. Rather, it is the story of scientific inquiry and endeavor, undertaken not so much for personal gain (though that was doubtless present, some, if not all, of the time) as for genuine personal desire to serve the public interest by advancing humanity's knowledge of the universe, and consequently humanity's ability to steer what it could of nature's power and bounty to sustain and nurture human life. It is the story of the political and scientific Enlightenment becoming realized as a living, breathing, nation state, dedicated to the ideal of self government. Its is not a perfect story--there are certainly much to be ashamed of, such a slavery and the extermination of native peoples--but that is the general outline. That is why I write so much about republicanism, civic virtue, the General Welfare, and figures such as Alexander Hamilton and Henry C. Carey. I believe that here is found the true intent of the Constitution. It is no coincidence that so many of the founders and framers were scientists or associated with scientists.

These concepts of republicanism, civic virtue, and the General Welfare, which formed the basis of the creation of the American republic, are what have been the targets of the "ideological war, waged over the last forty years, against the possibility of collective action." In the case of the General Welfare, conservatives and libertarians have been explicit in their attacks, framing concern for the General Welfare as a slippery slope to statist totalitarianism. Or as Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek entitled his 1943 book, The Road to Serfdom. It is not rare to see these ideologues using the term "collectivist" in a very pejorative sense.

What about the neoliberals? They do not attack the General Welfare openly the way conservatives and libertarians do. But, neoliberals do not defend the concept, either. Because they have accepted the basic tenets of the conservatives and libertarians: that collective action by governments is usually "the problem" as Ronald Reagan said, and most problems are most cheaply and effectively solved by "the free market." This is why we find the spectacle of Democratic Party elites joining with the neoconservatives who manipulated us into the Iraq War and the abridgment of Constitutional rights in response to the attacks of 9-11 and jihadist terrorism.

There is an intellectual and moral impoverishment that inevitably results from abandoning or forgetting the concepts of republicanism, civic virtue, and the General Welfare. If you are not being guided by these concepts, then what are your thoughts and actions being guided by? This is why Democratic Party elites have been unable to conceive of and offer a popular, positive alternative to the Republican Party, and the rise of Trump and proto-fascist populism. And it is also why most leftists, particularly those of a Marxist or anarchist bent, have been so unsuccessful in building a popular alternative to the whole catastrophic shit storm.

These concepts will soon become centers of public controversy if the "ideological war, waged over the last forty years, against the possibility of collective action" succeeds in calling and holding a new Constitutional Convention in the United States. The conservatives and libertarians are carefully maintaining the facade that a new Constitutional Convention will be directed toward enactment of a "balanced budget amendment," but the real goal will be to simply prohibit collective action by governments and any consideration of the General Welfare. Take that concept out of the Constitution--which is what the Confederacy of slave-holder did in February 1861, applauded by libertarians a century and a quarter later--and suddenly Social Security, Medicare, the EPA, the Food and Drug Administration, the whole regulatory apparatus of government, is rendered unconstitutional and illegal. Democrats, liberals and leftist Democrats won't know what hit them. And they are pretty much defenseless right now, because they have no historical understanding of the United States as a republic, and no appreciation of the importance of the concept of the General Welfare. In fact, that is something of an understatement, because there are some of them who believe and argue that the Constitution itself is a problem and always has been. So, again, I ask, why has there been "an ideological war, waged over the last forty years, against the possibility of collective action"? What was the point of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the rich and the corporatists to create and sustain the modern conservative, libertarian, and neoliberal movements? What was their target?

Our horrible reality is even more jarring when one considers that there is a very important, very powerful, positive alternative. The world needs at least $100 trillion in new investment to build the clean, non-fossil fuel, electricity generating capacity and transportation infrastructure to stop climate change. The world needs over $50 trillion more for repairing and building new basic infrastructure, according to a McKinsey report a few years ago. These needs are a MASSIVE opportunity to reorient the world economy away from an international trading system based on finding the cheapest possible production of largely useless consumer goods and the most "profitable" gimmick of financial speculation, to a world trading system based on high paying jobs building a future our children and grandchildren will thank us for.

China has already proposed a $50 trillion program of building solar energy systems in equatorial areas, and distribution systems to deliver the electricity to population centers north and south. China is also moving forward on the New Silk Road projects to link China with Europe with overland high speed rail, while developing the countries of Central Asia.

The opportunity here is just staggering. Just one example: look at the room your in; look out the windows; look at the buildings in your locale; look at the windows of all the buildings surrounding you. Every single one of those windows must be taken out, disassembled, the glass melted down and repoured, and replaced with new, high-thermal efficiency windows. Every window. Every house and building in the world. You don't need college graduates or umemployed workers who have been "taught new skills" to do most of the work involved. You do need millions, more like tens of millions, of construction workers and assistants. And delivery drivers, and glass production technicians, and so on. And this for only one little part of what needs to be done to rebuild the entire world economy.

What you do need is to stop the five to seven trillions of dollars of financial turnover every day in the world's financial markets and to force into the open the estimated 30 to 50 trillions of dollars hiding in hot money centers and tax evasion havens--most of which, note carefully, are in jurisdictions of the British Commonwealth.

Rather than welcoming these opportunities to direct the worlds' energies and resources in a positive direction, US policy elites are apparently so beholden to military contractors, oil companies, and Wall Street, that they are unable to conceive of anything other than a renewed neoconservative drive for "war preparedness." Rather than joining and cooperating with Russia, and China, and India, and the whole community of nations, to create a wonderful prosperous future by rebuilding the entire world's economy on a sustainable basis over the next two to three decades, we have the policy elites of the Democratic Party joining with those of the Republican Party to form a new alliance dedicated to the tired but still frighteningly lethal shibboleth of "security."

Truly, as the Almighty Architect of the universe warns in the Bible: where there is no vision, the people perish.