Fighting the Military Industrial Complex against heavy resistance:

Short history of the struggle to present Peace Economics to the world:

My life changed forever in March 1983 in my second Oregon State legislative session when I discovered that military spending does not stimulate economic growth like I had been taught in school, it depletes manufacturing instead.  Presidents and many mainstream economists and academics still believe and teach classic Keynesian Economics (1936).  Two years later I saw the graph that had inspired and motivated me in my files after my third and final Oregon legislative session in August 1985.  An avaricious newspaper reader at the time, I was struck by the absence in news of ANY stories that confirmed my finding.  This is still largely true today.  So the engineer in me decided to test the bar chart out for accuracy.  After six long months of filling thick spiral notebooks full of multi-year averagings and other techniques for looking for patterns in a century of annual statistics, I built a sixty-year model of economic growth with an astounding 99.9% accuracy.  But the world did not beat a path to my door, so I wrote it up in Peace Economics (1986) as a powerful political friend offered to submit my name to the Pulitzer Prize committee.

Wargaming 1964-1974

Gary Gygax, the leader of all wargamers in the sixties asked me to join the new International Federation of Wargaming (IFW).  While Gary was the most prolific writer in the wargaming journals of the time, I walloped him in a play by mail game of "Battle of the Bulge" in 1966, our only direct game together.  His son says he talked about me all the time.  Then I beat the editor of the Avalon Hill General (to his disgust) in a game of "Waterloo" to win the first wargaming tournament at GenCon VI in 1973.  As Coordinator of Wargaming, I had a player rating twice as high above the average as the second ranked person and was unbeaten for all but one time.  The point of this paragraph is that we all joked we must have had FBI records for our activity, my first inkling of the dark side of this "The US Empire Strikes Back" paper.  Gary Gygax went on to invent "Dungeons and Dragons" in 1974 with fame and fortune to follow.  I moved to Oregon in 1974, the last time I saw him. I had my friend Gary sell almost all my games at GenCon in 1974 as I moved on from my high school college years with wargaming and eventually got into politics in 1978.

CIA Application

In 1976 with an MBA degree and an engineering undergraduate degree, I applied for a CIA job.  I thought it would be interesting and challenging work.  But I freaked out when the interview was moved off campus to a local diner.  I never showed up as it dawned on me that spy work could be very dangerous.

Trouble In River City

Peace activists and the Jesse Jackson campaign (1987) loved my work and spread copies of my work around to institutions and politicians like Ted Kennedy.  Then a famous peace activist exploded in one of my three lecture workshops in a January 1990 "Peace Economy Conference" workshop in Miami, Florida.  24 books were bought out of 72 participants.  That famous activist explosion workshop only sold three copies. This example shows how sensitive even peace movement people are about military spending.  In January 1986 someone at the Progressive Magazine threw me out of his office, citing the New York Times as his source for not believing me.  Alexander Cockburn, leftist writer, wrote a column contradicting Peace Economics, after I gave him a copy of my book after he spoke at the University of Oregon in the late 1980s.  Thanks to the military Keynesianism of Larry Summers, Barack Obama took troops out of Iraq and tripled troops in Afghanistan falsely expecting stimulus that never came.  This stunt stalled the economic recovery after the 2009 recession for a couple of years.  Plenty of examples exist that show the lack of understanding that military spending reduces manufacturing job growth, contrary to the Keynesian presumption.  Only Joseph Stiglitz, Clinton's economist, of all the famous modern economists, has seen the truth that lower military spending (after the Cold War ended) produced the economic growth surge of the 1990s.  Even Robert Pollin, famous URPE economist, did not understand Peace Economics or the nineties surge and post 9-11-01 slump despite three times scheduling me to speak at URPE conferences in Cape Cod in the 1987-1989 period.  When the Cold War ended producing the peace dividend of high economic growth in the 1990s, even local former "red mayor" peace activist of Madison Wisconsin Paul Soglin denied the existence of a peace dividend after the Cold War in a speech in front of me in the 1990s.  Peace Economics fell out of favor in the 1990s without the Cold War threat.  So I earned a doctorate in 2009 to establish academic credibility.  But my economist doctorate major advisor on my dissertation limited me to a survey only approach to Peace Economics to avoid facing the main issues.

The Empire Strikes Back

After being a big hit at Youngstown State and the World Futures Society in 2013, Mitchell Davis of Washington DC accepted me at expertclick.com starting in October 2013.  That same month the pentagon noticed my climate cycle theory and the CIA noticed my military spending theory.  Then a leader in the peace and justice studies association from Georgetown, the leading school of CIA graduates, criticized me while others love my work.  Leading world federalist Lucy Webster, Planethood author Ken Keyes, and a top War Resisters League person supported me and my work.  This is my 255^th press release on expertclick.com. as my reputation is steadily growing.  Gandhi says first they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win.  Here I come in this 35^th anniversary year of Peace Economics as I complete my anniversary book right now looking for reviewers this month or next.  Hoping Ralph Nader will move to reviewer.  In 1987 I answered the why question directed at Seymour Melman in an Oregon State conference because I knew he did not have a clue.  Peace people are either anti-interventionists or anti-nukes, that's why peace economics has few friends among them.  World Federalists, where I made five presentations in fall conferences 1998-2002, are much more practical and accepting of my ideas (example famous Lucy Webster who attended my workshop at the 1999 Hague Peace Conference hundredth anniversary).  My invention of the term Peace Economics was to avoid the awful term "economic conversion" because nobody wants a religious conversion on their doorstep.

Transition

Moving from politics in Eugene Oregon to a CPA job in Madison Wisconsin in May 1993, I gave up local popularity for relative obscurity to concentrate on promoting my scientific findings rather than my political career.  I had been warned by an Oregon legislator in 1989 about "watch your back challenging the military industrial complex."  Later a Democratic Party opponent had placed a spy on my team when I ran for legislator in 1992.  I had divisive opponents in the Party when I left Eugene, so I hoped to avoid divisiveness by channeling my energy to the activist community in Madison.  I was kept off the board of Midge Miller's Madison Institute because I shared her doubts about the CIA whitewash of the JFK assassination.  Still I had six presentations at the Madison Institute and six services at Prairie Unitarian Universalist Society.  Who is Midge Miller?  She was the woman who recruited Gene McCarthy to be the peace candidate for president in 1968 and ran against President Johnson and the Vietnam War.  I gave her a last hug before cancer took her in 2008 just after the election of Obama.  We had met on the floor of the 1984 Democratic Convention as delegates from the two different states of Oregon (me) and Wisconsin (her).

Latest Deep State Assault

I appeared on a WORT radio show 3-12-2020 and gave the final presentation of the Peregrine Forum the next night.  A mysterious man listened to me who was later identified as a Madison "red squad" policeman.  Then two months later a 23-year-old rookie mailman began a yearlong campaign of bullying and intimidating my partner and me before taking our mail for the second time in six months in violation of postal regulations.  Then using all the Trump tactics of the big lie, the probable Marine brat mailman who was probably, given his name, a member of a pro-Trump fundamentalist church, and probably beaten growing up (common in conservative households) by his father who flies a Marine flag in front of the house he still lived at.  Well, well, well.  There is a good chance I had been targeted for this abuse as two police, two postal managers, and the city attorney all lied to me and ridiculed me.  The city attorney would be disbarred if she lied to court like she lied to me, and the two police lied on the police report about the fake mail truck incident Joshua lied about.  They mocked me over the use of the word "steal" rather than investigate the inappropriate nature of the mail taking by the mailman.  For six months my partner was bullied to keep the mailbox empty, one slip up led to the incident.  This police report was full of seven major lies by the mailman.  Later the 911 call notes came out with several more lies and a phony hide in the garage story.  Finally released two months later, just before scheduled trial, came out a complete video which exonerated me, showing that honking and cutting his mail truck in traffic were completely made-up stories.  The Marine brat abused his power taking our mail, arranged for two others to call police before he did and arranged to block my access to his direct supervisor.  The mail counter people sympathized with me while higher ups lied to protect the abusive mailman.  Truth was the first casualty in this war against me, as first they laugh, then attack, then I will someday win.  Mail management was compromised with a strange national assignment to police social media (under Trump appointee DeJoy), much like Kennedy's Peace Corps volunteers being used over the years by the CIA.  Militarization everywhere.  I would like to get affidavits on all these co-conspirators to deprive me of my constitutional right to petition my government over grievances.  Weaponizing with false disorderly conduct charges turned an obvious mediation situation sour not unlike the "red squad" monitoring of peaceful protestors and activists.  Taking on the military empire state is a constant challenge promoting Peace Economics for thirty-five years.  Yet my math is conclusive as is the evidence for my proposition.

Short but comprehensive Booklet of half size pages about Peace Economics:

https://www.academia.edu/4108656/BOOKLET_for_Peace_Economics_11_charts_24p_2011                

Please cite this work as follows:  Reuschlein, Robert. (2021, June 18), "The US Empire Strikes Back" Madison, WI, Real Economy Institute.  Retrieved from:  https://www.expertclick.com/NewsRelease/The-US-Empire-Strikes-Back,2021257570.aspx

Dr. Peace, Professor Robert Reuschlein, Real Economy Institute, Nobel Peace Prize nominee 2016-2021 with accelerating interest from the deciding Norwegians.  A consistently growing pattern shows intense interest in my work on my expertclick.com website; daily "hard looks" per year have gone from 2 to 3 to 48 to 128 to 200 to double last year's pace (221/115) so far, these 252 days since the last Peace award.

Contact: bobreuschlein@gmail.com  Info: www.realeconomy.com