The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [48]
The duopoly also applies to foreign policy. Both parties view the Middle East and its greater neighborhood (stretching from the Horn of Africa and Yemen in the west to Afghanistan in the east) as the core theater of U.S. foreign policy, with the primary concern the continued flow of Middle East oil to the world economy. Carter enunciated a military doctrine that any threat to the flow of Middle East oil would be viewed as a security threat to the United States. There have been marginal differences in military proclivities between the two parties, with Bush Jr. being the most trigger-happy of recent presidents, but the differences should not be exaggerated. Obama not only retained Bush’s secretary of defense but also expanded the war in Afghanistan while drawing down troops in Iraq. As the author and former army colonel Andrew Bacevich makes clear, the core U.S. military doctrine—based on the global projection of force—has remained constant on a bipartisan basis for more than forty years.9
The final feature of the two-party duopoly during the past three decades has been the willful neglect of longer-term thinking in government. The only place where even a modicum of long-term budgeting takes place is the Congressional Budget Office, which provides a nonpartisan budget “score” of legislative proposals, usually on a ten-year time horizon, though occasionally longer. But this budget score is a far cry from systematic thinking about long-term issues: infrastructure, budget balance, education, energy policy, and climate change. It is hard to think of a single recent case in which the U.S. government, led by either party, has produced a quantitative assessment of any long-term challenge and then followed through with a considered policy reform based on that assessment. For decades, Washington has been improvising through the repeated alternations of power.
The Four Big Lobbies
The corporatocracy is a quintessential example of a feedback loop. Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying, and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry; and political power translates into further wealth through tax cuts, deregulation, and sweetheart contracts between government and industry. Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth.
Four key sectors of the American economy exemplify this feedback loop. The military-industrial complex is perhaps the most notorious example. As Eisenhower famously warned in his farewell address in January 1961, the linkage of the military and private industry created a political power so pervasive that America has been condemned to militarization, useless wars, and fiscal waste on a scale of many tens of trillions of dollars since then.10
The second powerful lobby is the Wall Street–Washington complex, which has steered the financial system toward control by a few politically powerful Wall Street firms, notably Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and a handful of other financial firms. The close ties of finance and Washington paved the way for the 2008 financial crisis and the megabailouts that followed, through reckless deregulation followed by an almost complete lack of oversight by government. Wall Street firms have provided the top economic policy makers in Washington during several administrations, including the likes of Donald Regan (Merrill Lynch) under Reagan, Robert Rubin (Goldman Sachs) under Clinton, Hank Paulson (Goldman Sachs) under Bush Jr., and several Wall Street–connected senior officials under Obama (including William Daley, Larry Summers, Gene Sperling, and Jack Lew).
The third sector is the Big Oil–transport–military complex that has put the United States on the trajectory of heavy oil import dependence and a deepening military trap in the Middle East. Since the days of John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust a century ago, Big Oil has loomed large in American