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    The Emergency State: America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs
    The Emergency State: America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs
    The Emergency State: America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs
    Audiobook12 hours

    The Emergency State: America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs

    Written by David C. Unger

    Narrated by Michael Prichard

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In The Emergency State, leading global affairs commentator David C. Unger reveals the hidden costs of America's obsessive pursuit of absolute national security. In the decades since World War II, presidents from both parties have assumed broad war-making powers never intended by the Constitution and intervened abroad to preserve our credibility rather than our security, while trillions of tax dollars have been diverted from essential domestic needs to the Pentagon. Yet ironically, this pursuit has not just damaged our democracy and undermined our economic strength-it has also failed to make us safer.In a penetrating work of historical analysis, Unger explains how this narrow-minded emphasis on security came to distort our political life and shows how we can change course. As Unger reminds us, in the first 150 years of the American republic, the United States valued limited military intervention abroad and the checks and balances put in place by the founding fathers. Yet American history took a sharp turn during World War II, when we began to build a vast and cumbersome complex of national security institutions, reflexes, and beliefs. Originally designed to wage hot war against Germany and cold war against the Soviet Union, our security bureaucracy is no longer effective at confronting the elusive, non-state-supported threats we now face.The Emergency State traces a series of missed opportunities-from the so-called Year of Intelligence in 1975 to the end of the cold war to 9/11-when we could have paused to rethink our defense strategy and didn't. We have ultimately failed to dismantle our outdated national security state, Unger argues, because both parties are equally responsible for its expansion. While countless books have exposed the damage wrought by George W. Bush's war on terror, Unger shows it was only the natural culmination of decades of bipartisan emergency state logic-and argues that Obama, along with many previous Democratic presidents, has failed to shift course in any meaningful way.In this provocative and incisive book, Unger proposes a radically different paradigm that would better address our security needs while also working to reverse the damage done to our democratic institutions and economic vitality.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateFeb 16, 2012
    ISBN9781452675848
    The Emergency State: America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs

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    • 4/5
      The author shows the United States to be a captive of its Golden Age, and what an age it was. 1950's America was the world's military and industrial leader, the dollar was the de facto world currency, Detroit was generating a new middle class and America's European and Asian competitors were recovering from wartime destruction with no immediate possibility of challenging American supremacy. Unger considers that this overwhelmingly powerful narrative has governed American policy ever since with only a few moments of self doubt (e.g. the Oil Price Shock of the 1970's and the Vietnam War), and he suggests that it accounts for the increasing separation from reality of the American government and the public from the 1970's onwards. The unwelcome reality is that free trade benefits the lowest cost and highest quality industrial manufacturers and the US loses out on both counts to China and Japan/Germany respectively, plus combine this with an extreme free market ideology that unequivocally puts outsourcing corporate profits ahead of any national interest and you have a magical increase in unemployment and budget/trade deficits. Add in extreme Congressional special interest pork barreling and the US simply looks wasteful, inefficient and broke.The author's emphasis is on the military-industrial complex that has done so much wasteful spending and which is so central to the "America First" narrative. The book documents the marginal threats faced by the U.S. following the fall of Soviet Communism and the way that these have been ridiculously inflated into a permanent "War on Terror" that somehow needs more nuclear aircraft carriers or stealth bombers at the unbelievable price of $ 3.2 billion each.The author considers that the United States had a chance to change direction under the Carter administration, with Carter speaking frankly about the challenges facing the U.S. and the need for a forward looking policy and national sacrifice. However, this was predictably seen as weak and wimpy and buried by the Reagan's "Bring back the 1950's" Stand Tall rhetoric with the party moving on to giant deficit financing with minimal government oversight. It's a very good book but in my opinion it has some major faults. One is that a government can't engage in large scale deficit financing if no one will lend it the money, Unger says that, "..... thanks to the dollar's special reserve role as an international reserve currency and America's sterling reputation for political and financial stability, foreign savings and surpluses kept flowing inwards to pay the bills for America's government and private consumption." when the real reason is probably that Americas's asian creditors recycled their dollars into American assets (bonds) to keep their currencies at an artificially low rate against the dollar in support of their export industries (i.e. they were cheating) and had no particular respect for the US financial system.A second is the single favourable paragraph he gives to U.S. multiculturalism despite the obvious harm to society of identity politics and "Culture Wars" . He doesn't seem to see any problem in the every man/ company/ethnic group for itself idea and the destruction of the "General Interest" concept. He could for example have asked whether Rubin, Summers and Greenspan (while simultaneously Secretary of the Treasury, Deputy Secretary and Chairman of the Federal Reserve under Clinton) had a greater loyalty on ethnic, financial and social grounds to Wall St. investment bankers than the American public that they were hired to represent (and so obviously failed to protect).Equally, the book would have been improved if he had clearly said that Jewish activists in and around the government provided critical support for the WMD, and Al Qaeda bases in Iraq stories and made a major efforts to enable the invasion and sideline Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. This was pure ethnic special interest action designed to benefit the Israeli right wing and had nothing to do with any "Building Democracy" argument or the interests of the United States ( see Sniegoski's, "The Transparent Cabal" for a detailed account.)