Now that Mitt Romney is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, the media is already handicapping the presidential election big time, and the neck-and-neck opinion polls are pouring in. But whether President Obama gets his second term or Romney enters the Oval Office, there’s a third candidate no one’s paying much attention to, and that candidate is guaranteed to be the one clear winner of election 2012: the U.S. military and our ever-surging national security state.

The reasons are easy enough to explain. Despite his record as a “warrior-president,” despite the breathless “Obama got Osama” campaign boosterism, common inside-the-Beltway wisdom has it that the president has backed himself into a national security corner. He must continue to appear strong and uncompromising on defense or else he’ll get the usual Democrat-as-war-wimp label tattooed on his arm by the Republicans.

Similarly, to have a realistic chance of defeating him — so goes American political thinking — candidate Romney must be seen as even stronger and more uncompromising, a hawk among hawks. Whatever military spending Obama calls for, however much he caters to neo-conservative agendas, however often he confesses his undying love for and extols the virtues of our troops, Romney will surpass him with promises of even more military spending, an even more muscular and interventionist foreign policy, and an even deeper love of our troops.

Indeed, with respect to the national security complex, candidate Romney already comes across like Edward G. Robinson’s Johnny Rocco in the classic film Key Largo: he knows he wants one thing, and that thing is more. More ships for the Navy. More planes for the Air Force. More troops in general — perhaps 100,000 more. And much more spending on national defense.

Clearly, come November, whoever wins or loses, the national security state will be the true victor in the presidential sweepstakes.

Of course, the election cycle alone is hardly responsible for our national love of weaponry and war. Even in today’s straitened fiscal climate, with all the talk of government austerity, Congress feels obliged to trump an already generous president by adding yet more money for military appropriations. Ever since the attacks of 9/11, surging defense budgets, forever war, and fear-mongering have become omnipresent features of our national landscape, together with pro-military celebrations that elevate our warriors and warfighters to hero status. In fact, the uneasier Americans grow when it comes to the economy and signs of national decline, the more breathlessly we praise our military and its image of overwhelming power. Neither Obama nor Romney show any sign of challenging this celebratory global “lock and load” mentality.

To explain why, one must consider not only the pro-military positions of each candidate, but their vulnerabilities — real or perceived — on military issues. Mitt Romney is the easier to handicap. As a Mormon missionary in France and later as the beneficiary of a high draft lottery number, Romney avoided military service during the Vietnam War. Perhaps because he lacks military experience, he has already gone on record (during the Republican presidential debates) as deferring to military commanders on decisions such as whether we should bomb Iran. A President Romney, it seems, would be more implementer-in-chief than civilian commander-in-chief.

Romney’s métier at Bain Capital was competence in the limited sense of buying low and selling high, along with a certain calculated ruthlessness in dividing companies and discarding people to manufacture profit. These skills, such as they are, earn him little respect in military circles. Compare him to Harry Truman or Teddy Roosevelt, both take-charge leaders with solid military credentials. Rather than a Trumanesque “the buck stops here,” Romney is more about “make a buck here.” Rather than Teddy Roosevelt’s bloodied but unbowed “man in the arena,” Romney is more bloodless equity capitalist circling high above the fray in a fancy suit.

Consider as well Romney’s five telegenic sons. It’s hard to square Mitt’s professions of love for our military with his sons’ lack of interest in military service. Indeed, when asked about their lack of enthusiasm for joining the armed forces during the surge in Iraq in 2007, Mitt off-handedly replied that his sons were already performing an invaluable national service by helping him get elected.

An old American upper class sense of noblesse oblige, of sons of privilege like George H.W. Bush or John F. Kennedy volunteering for national service in wartime, has been dead for decades in our otherwise military-happy country. When it comes to sending American sons (and increasingly daughters) into harm’s way, for President Romney it’ll be another case of chickenhawk guts and working-class blood.

For election 2012, however, the main point is that the Romney family’s collective lack of service makes him vulnerable on national defense, a weakness that has already led Mitt and his campaign to overcompensate with ever more pro-military policy pronouncements supplemented with the usual bellicose rhetoric of all Republicans (Ron Paul excepted). As a result, President-elect Romney will ultimately find himself confined, cowed, and controlled by the national security complex — and he’ll have only himself (and Barack Obama) to blame.

Obama, by way of contrast, has already shown a passion for military force that in saner times would make him invulnerable to charges of being “weak” on defense. Fond of dressing up in military flight jackets and praising the troops to the rafters, Obama has substance to go with his style. He’s made some tough calls like sending SEAL Team 6 into Pakistan to kill Osama Bin Laden; using NATO airpower to take down Qaddafi in Libya; expanding special ops and drone warfare in Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere, including the assassination of U.S. citizens without judicial process. America’s Nobel Peace Prize winner of 2009 has become a devotee of special forces, kill teams, and high-tech drones that challenge the very reality of national sovereignty. Surely such a man can’t be accused of being weak on defense.

The political reality, of course, is different. Despite his record, the Republican Party is forever at pains to portray Obama as suspect (that middle name Hussein!), divided in his loyalties (that Kenyan connection!), and not slavish enough in his devotion to “underdog” Israel. (Could he be a crypto-Muslim?)

The president and his campaign staff are no fools. Since any sign of “weakness” vis-à-vis Iran and similar enemies du jour or any expression of less than boundless admiration for our military will be exploited ruthlessly by Romney et al., Obama will continue to tack rightwards on military issues and national defense. As a result, once elected he, too, will be a prisoner of the Complex. In this process, the only surefire winner and all-time champ: once again, the national security state.

So what can we expect on the campaign trail this summer and fall? Certainly not prospective civilian commanders-in-chief confident in the vitally important role of restraining or even reversing the worst excesses of an imperial state. Rather, we’ll witness two men vying to be cheerleader-in-chief for continued U.S. imperial dominance achieved at nearly any price.

Election 2012 will be all about preserving the imperial status quo, only more so. Come January 2013, regardless of which man takes the oath of office, we’ll remain a country with a manic enthusiasm for the military. Rather than a president who urges us to abhor endless war, we’ll be led by a man intent on keeping us oblivious to the way we’re squandering our nation’s future in fruitless conflicts that ultimately compromise our core constitutional principles.

For all the suspense the media will gin up in the coming months, the ballots are already in and the real winner of election 2012 will be the national security state. Unless you’re a denizen of that special interest state, we know the loser, too. It’s you.

Click here to read Tom’s response.

It’s happening in Buenos Aires. It’s happening in Paris and in Athens. It’s even happening at the World Bank headquarters.

The global economy is finally shifting away from the model that prevailed for the last three decades. Europeans are rejecting austerity. Latin Americans are nationalizing enterprises. The next head of the World Bank has actually done effective development work.

Maybe that long-heralded “end of the Washington consensus” is finally upon us.

After the near-collapse of the global financial system four years ago, obituary writers rushed to proclaim the death of the prevailing economic philosophy known as neo-liberalism. “Wall Street’s financial meltdown marks the end of an era, “wrote Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers in Counterpunch at the end of 2008. “What has ended is the credibility of the Washington Consensus – open markets to foreign investors and tight money austerity programs (high interest rates and credit cutbacks) to ‘cure’ balance-of-payments deficits, domestic budget deficits and price inflation.

It was a tempting conclusion. Putting Wall Street and financial speculators at the center of the universe had generated an economic supernova, and everyone seemed to get the message. Everyone except Big Money, which never received the obituary notice. After some minor tweaking of Wall Street practices, some bailouts of enterprises deemed too big to fail, and the injection of some stimulus spending to arrest the free fall, Washington continued with business as usual. The Obama administration, like the Clinton administration before it, discovered the immense power of the bond market. The IMF and the World Bank, meanwhile, didn’t fundamentally change their policies. And the European Union, led by tight-fisted Germany, continued to back austerity. All the major economic actors held to the old orthodoxy even though it flew in the face of common sense and common decency (though not in the face of the bottom line).

Wall Street’s continued irrational exuberance, its lavishing of bonuses on its elite, and its pushback against even the most modest of regulations all suggest that the old Ptolemaic system – with Wall Street and the Washington Consensus still at the center of the universe – had not yet given way to a Copernican revolution that displaces these powerful institutions from their privileged position. Such revolutions, of course, are not made in a day. Remember: Ptolemy’s system, with the earth at the center of all things, reigned for 1,300 years even as it grew inordinately complex to explain new astronomical observations. A century after the publication of the great Pole’s theory of heliocentrism, Galileo still ran afoul of church authorities for his Copernican leanings. Orthodoxy dies hard.

As a first sally against the prevailing orthodoxy of neo-liberalism, today’s economic Copernicans have taken aim at austerity. It’s a fat target: belt-tightening, after all, is not only unpopular but unsound. Paul Krugman marshals the economic evidence in the latest New York Review of Books, concluding that the “chances of a real turn in policy, away from the austerity mania of the last few years and toward a renewed focus on job creation, are much better than conventional wisdom would have you believe.”

Nowhere is that clearer than in Europe. There, the case for austerity, explains Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, “was that once governments began slashing their spending and deficits, markets would reward them by investing in their presumably more productive economies. But the reverse has happened. As Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain have cut their budgets, investors have grown less willing to buy their bonds. By plunging themselves deeper into recession, these nations have convinced investors not that they’re fiscally virtuous but that they won’t become economically viable for many more years.”

French and Greek voters rejected austerity in the elections this weekend not because, as the U.S. media coverage implies, they are unruly children who refuse to swallow their medicine. Rather, they realize that austerity economics at this delicate moment could very well precipitate a double-dip recession (i.e.: a lot more pain). Moreover, they want the pain – and everyone knows that there will be pain – to be fairly shouldered. Francois Hollande, the new Socialist president in France, has called for a 75-percent tax rate on all earnings over $1.3 million. Now that’s a Buffet tax!

Don’t expect Hollande to appoint Occupy protestors to his cabinet. He “may not have a radical economic program sufficient to the task of reforming the French and European financial systems,” writes Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Jeanne Kay in The End of Austerity in Europe, “but he diverges from Sarkozy in one key aspect: government spending. Against Sarkozy’s line of austerity, Hollande proposes a more Keynesian plan of job creation in the public sector, indexing the minimum wage to GDP growth rather than just inflation, and public investment.”

The left has woken from its collective stupor just in time, for Europe at the moment is very much up for grabs. The far right has also rejected austerity, and it has a much simpler platform: blame the immigrants. The National Front in France has injected its xenophobic virus into the very heart of France’s center-right Union for a Popular Movement; the street thugs of Golden Dawn in Greece will enter parliament for the first time; Geert Wilders and his anti-Islamic chest-thumpers brought down the government in the Netherlands last month. Where the left has failed to provide a convincing alternative to austerity, the right has prospered.

Much rests on the shoulders of Hollande and the French Socialists. To them falls the responsibility of rebuilding a European left that returns the EU to its roots – a socialist market economy that grows together and preserves unity in diversity. To pull France out of its own doldrums, Hollande can’t think small. He must go big and, through persuasion and arm-twisting, rewrite the rules of European economic revival. Rejecting austerity is only a first step.

The Europeans could learn something here from Latin America, particularly Argentina. In the late 1990s, having racked up a huge debt, Argentina faced the typical recommendations from the international financial institutions: cut the budget, privatize government firms, and remove barriers to outside investment. But Buenos Aires said no. It defaulted on $100 billion-plus in loans.

According to the rules of the game, Argentina should have been thrown out on its ear and forever banned from playing in the global casino. But that didn’t happen. Most creditors – 93 percent – eventually accepted the 35 cents on the dollar haircut that the government offered. Foreign investors, particularly from Brazil, continued to supply capital. Bargain-hungry tourists flocked to the country. Workers banded together to take over enterprises that owners had given up on (such as the Bauen Hotel in downtown Buenos Aires).

With a bit of luck – particularly the rise in price of soybeans, a key Argentine export — the country clawed its way back to economic health. Unemployment dropped from 25 percent in 2001 to below 8 percent in 2010. Social programs reduced the percentage of the population living beneath the poverty line from 51 to 13 percent (though it went up again in 2010). The recovery, like all recoveries, is tenuous, for it depends a good deal on the price of the commodities Argentina exports.

Which is why Argentina is going one step further to exert some control over the process. The government of Cristina Kirchner has Airlines as well as pension funds, and it has also instituted measures to slow capital flight from the country. Most recently, it nationalized a key oil company, YPF, taking back control of the firm from a Spanish company that had a majority stake. “A poll conducted by Poliarguia Consultores published in the Argentine newspaper LA Nacion,” writes FPIF contributor Melissa Moskowitz in Annotate This: EU Response to Argentina’s Nationalization, “indicated that 62 percent of Argentines support President Cristina Kirchner’s plans to nationalize YPF. President Kirchner’s decision to promote and defend nationalization reflects growing opinion that the company has ‘not invested enough’ in Argentina ‘to cope with growing international demand.’”

Argentina is by no means the only country in the region to roll back the privatization mania. The Brazilian government increased its control over the oil company Petrobras a couple years ago. In Bolivia, the government of Evo Morales recently renationalized the electricity grid, which had also been in Spanish hands. This move comes after the nationalization of hydroelectric facilities and telecommunications. Venezuela, under Hugo Chavez, has made enlarging the state sector a populist rallying cry. And Ecuador has followed suit with laws to allow the government to seize oil and gas companies that don’t comply with national regulations.

Despite this new trend in Latin America, foreign investors have been flocking to the region. In 2011, the region saw a 31-percent increase in foreign capital. But here’s the underlying reason for the nationalizations. According to a recent UN report, “FDI revenue transferred back to the countries of origin has increased from US$20 billion per year between 1998 and 2003 to US$84 billion between 2008 and 2010 per year.” Sound familiar? Back in 1973, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano wrote, “Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything, from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European – or later United States – capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centers of power.” Latin American leaders are, with these nationalizations, attempting to stem the blood loss.

Perhaps they will get some help from an unusual quarter – the World Bank. The new head Jim Yong Kim is a health professional, not a free trader like Robert Zoellick or a neocon like Paul Wolfowitz. One person can’t change an institution. But there are plenty of people at the World Bank who are waiting for this new kind of leadership. The 2000/2001 World Development Report, prepared by a team led by Ravi Kanbur and Nora Lustig, was an extraordinary effort based on interviews with more than 60,000 poor people in 60 countries. Alas, the Bank subsequently returned to its more traditional top-down approach. But Jim Kim’s is much more grassroots-oriented. Perhaps the World Bank under his leadership can help shift the locus of attention from facilitating financial speculation to empowering the poor.

A backlash against austerity in Europe, a move toward greater state control in Latin America, a change in leadership at the World Bank: this might seem slender evidence for a Copernican revolution in economics. The evidence for overturning orthodoxy might even have seemed stronger in 1999, when the Asian financial crisis prompted New Perspectives Quarterly to ask economists Laura Tyson, Jeffrey Sachs, and others whether the Washington consensus was truly at an end (they saw greater “market pluralism” emerging). Moreover, a number of leaders like Barack Obama are styling themselves as Tyco Brahe, the Danish astronomer who attempted to combine both Ptolemy and Copernicus into an untenable geo-heliocentric system. These modern-day Brahes want to preserve the Washington consensus with only a few modifications.

As the world lurches from one economic crisis to another, and with the even larger crisis of global warming looming above it all, one thing is certain: there is no longer any consensus in Washington over what to do. Neo-liberalism survives, but more out of inertia than conviction. Meanwhile, out there in the world, the economic Copernicans are busy reconstructing the order of things.

Ed Gillespie, senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, told Chuck Todd on MSNBC’s Daily Rundown that the campaign would make President Obama’s support for marriage equality an issue this November and that Romney will actively push for a constitutional amendment to take away the right of states to voluntarily extend marriage equality to same-sex couples.

Gillespie told Todd that same-sex marriage “will be another bright-line difference in this campaign.” He added that the GOP intends to campaign on the issue:

TODD: Will you guys campaign on this, campaign on this issue of marriage?

GILLESPIE: Sure. I think it’s an important issue for people and it engenders strong feelings on both sides. I think it’s important to be respectful in how we talk about our differences, but the fact is that’s a significant difference in November.

Later, Gillespie added that Romney believes a federal marriage constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage “should be enacted.” Watch the video:

Gillespie is no stranger to using same-sex couples as a wedge issue; he served as President George W. Bush’s Republican National Committee Chairman during the 2004 campaign. During that campaign, Republicans pushed for anti-LGBT state constitutional amendments to get out the conservative vote. They also wrote the following into the Party’s official platform: “We strongly support President Bush’s call for a Constitutional amendment that fully protects marriage, and we believe that neither federal nor state judges nor bureaucrats should force states to recognize other living arrangements as equivalent to marriage.”

Popular support for marriage has soared since then — most Americans now support same-sex marriage. The fact that a number of states enacted constitutional amendments back in 2004 has little bearing eight years later.

Romney has played up his pro-discrimination stand throughout this presidential campaign, boasting that he’d fought to take away marriage equality from same-sex couples and that he’d dug up an an obscure 1913 law (originally intended to limit interracial marriage) to keep out-of-state couples from marrying in Massachusetts. “On my watch, we fought hard and prevented Massachusetts from becoming the Las Vegas of gay marriage,” Romney told a CPAC Convention in February.