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Speaking of * [0 - 9]

Sunday, May 22, 2022

No desire, or even special reason, for doing this again this week, but Sunday afternoon I decided to jot down a somewhat humorous link (I think it was the Nia Prater, below), and it just snowballed from there. I may have been predisposed to work on this, because I work up with the thought that if Zelensky is Churchill, would there be a Clement Attlee coming around to put Ukraine back together again -- assuming there's ever an end to the war, which doesn't seem to be on Zelensky's agenda (or Biden's, or Putin's). Actually, Attlee was part of Churchill's coalition government during WWII, and probably had more to do with holding the country together than Churchill's big speeches. When forced to choose between leaders in 1945, they overwhelmingly picked Attlee, and that's how they got the welfare state that Thatcher worked so hard to destroy.

I also woke up with some thoughts on inflation, but didn't find a framework to elaborate them. (I considered Robert Shapiro's The Truth About Inflation, and wanted to work in something Paul Krugman said dismissing the impact of monopolies -- I think the point went something like: if companies really had monopoly pricing power, they would have already used it, so that can't be causing new inflation; but isn't exploiting your pricing power to its limit inherently risky, given that customers will push back even if they don't have good alternatives? On the other hand, if everyone else is raising prices, monopolies get some camouflage, and therefore less blame.

[PS: Added a couple items after initially posting. In particular, I wanted to respond to Mitt Romney's apocalyptic op-ed piece.]

Chas Danner: [05-22] Welcome to the Next COVID Wave. For more stats, look here. New case counts have risen steadily since dropping under 30,000 on March 21. Two months later, they're up to 108,610 (+54% 14-day). The hospitalized count is +34% (to 24,681). Deaths are still down (-15% to 312), but the total US death count topped 1,000,000 a couple days ago (and as they note, "many cases go uncounted in official reports, the true toll is likely even higher than these figures suggest"). Danner also notes: "But this wave of new infections is also significantly larger than official case counts suggest, since many cases are either being detected using at-home tests that are never reported, or are asymptomatic and not being detected at all." Also on COVID-19:

• Natasha Ishak: [05-22] Stronger public health systems and uniform messaging are critical to fight Covid-19. Not to mention whatever else is coming at us. A very disturbing trend in Republican politics has been the effort not just to declare the Covid-19 pandemic over but to prevent public health agencies from ever again responding effectively to a pandemic (not that they did such a great job this time).

Liza Featherstone: [05-21] There Was a Lot of Good News in This Week's Primaries. No mention of the Republican primaries that totally dominated national news.

Chip Gibbons: [05-21] It's Always the Right Time to Call George W Bush a War Criminal. Well, even he's doing it.

Paul Glastris: [05-13] Memo to Democrats: Bust the Credit Card Cartel. Visa and Mastercard control over 80% of the market. Limiting their "spiraling fees" is presented as a win for small merchants, and that's who the big winners would be, but the effects could trickle down. Democrats might also take a look at usury laws (if they can find any). It's easy to figure out that payment systems (and for that matter all forms of retail banking) can be made a lot less expensive than they currently are. The only loser would be the big bank monopolies, which sounds to me like a plus. As I recall, the most intensely lobbied bill in ages was one between banks and retailers over ATM purchase fees. Billions of dollars rode on that law, and none of it was offered to customers.

Ed Kilgore: [05-19] Oklahoma Outdoes Itself in Race to Wipe Out Abortion Rights: You can check the article for the details. The one point I want to add is that this shows what can and will happen if/when Republicans are allowed to govern/rule without checks and balances. I used to think that the only thing that kept Reagan popular was that when he said popular-but-stupid things (which he did all the time) was that they had no immediate impact, so seemed harmless at the time. (We are still paying for many things the Reagan administration did, from undermining labor unions to ending the "fairness doctrine" to subsidizing jihadis in Afghanistan. The seeds of today's inflation crisis were planted by Reagan and the early-1980s Fed.) Republicans are very adept at telling [some] people what they want to hear, but are clueless about the disastrous consequences of turning their rants and cant into policy. (At least one assumes ignorance, since the only alternative explanation is misanthropy.)

Anne Kim: [05-20] Don't Laugh Off Rick Scott's Nutty Plan for America. The Florida Senator is in charge of the GOP's Senate campaign slush fund, so he wrote up a manifesto on what a Republican majority would like to do to America -- he called it his "11 point plan to rescue America." I wrote about this at some length here, a piece worth reviewing, especially if you still think that Donald Trump (or Ron DeSantis or Matt Gaetz) is the most deranged Republican in Florida. The point most folk have seized on is Scott's proposal to raise income taxes on everyone below the current income threshold, to make sure they "have some skin in the game." Of course, nearly all of those people already pay payroll taxes (a form of income tax the rich are exempt from), but even those who don't, who merely live here, have plenty of bare skin exposed to the malfeasances of the state.

Ian Millhiser: [05-19] A wild new court decision would blow up much of the government's ability to operate: "The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit's decision in Jarkesy v. SEC would dismantle much of the system the federal government uses to enforce longstanding laws." As it happens, I spent a lot of time last week complaining about government not doing more to confront the rising tide of fraud[*] in America -- ranging from the constant harassment of unsolicited phone calls to friends who got scammed out of most of their retirement savings and virtually everything involving cryptocurrency. This ruling basically says the government can't do anything pro-active to stop fraud. Robert Kuttner also wrote about this ruling [05-20]: Another Sweeping Far-Right Court Ruling.

[*] I've been complaining about this since the Reagan 1980s, when I identified fraud as America's only boom industry.

Alex Pareene: [05-16] The Disastrous Legacy of the New Democrats: "Clintonites taught their party how to talk about helping people without actually doing it." Review of Lily Geismer's Left Behind: The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality. This is more up-to-date, but Thomas Frank hit most of the points in his 2016 book, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People. Unfortunately, Frank's timing was off: appearing when it did, the book helped paint Hillary as crooked without considering the alternative. Frank's 2004 book (What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America) also backfired: he made a big deal about how Republicans talked up culture war issues but in the end only passed tax cuts and deregulation bills; the effect was that the culture war hawks started holding Republicans responsible for delivering, and they have (e.g., on abortion and guns).

We can now see that the New Democrats were intellectual captives of the Reagan right. They echoed the same free market/small government, which helped make them seem more sensible than they were. What Clinton, Gore, et al. thought they could do was run government in such a way that it would be more profitable for business, raising donations from the rich while making it seem benign enough they wouldn't lose too many of the people they depended on for votes. In many ways, what they did worked out exactly as planned. Economic growth was much stronger in the Clinton and Obama years than under any Republican president, and somewhat more widely distributed, but the rich did so well that inequality continued to spread. And Clinton and Obama managed to lose Congress after two years (while getting re-elected to a second term without regaining Congress), so they had excuses not to pass much-needed programs. And Republicans kept moving ever further right, not just economically but more ominously adopting culture war reaction, which helped to scare the Democratic base into staying loyal. Biden won the 2020 nomination on a tsunami of anti-Trump fear, but also because he was rooted in the Old Democrats, his flexibility made him acceptable beyond the still-powerful New Democrat elites.

Catherine Porter/Constant Méheut/Matt Apuzzo/Salam Gebrekidan: [05-21] The Ransom: The Roots of Haiti's Misery: Reparations to Enslavers: This goes some way to explaining why Haiti has remained one of the world's poorest countries.

Memorable tweets:

• ryan cooper: Republicans keep getting more and more deranged and Democrats keep thinking that if they hide under the bed it will all go away.
• Matt Blair: The funniest thing about Ted Cruz yelling "Do you know who I am?" at the airport is the very idea that the average person would treat him better after learning that he is Ted Cruz.

The week's top story remains the war in Ukraine:

[03-18] Zack Beauchamp: Is Russia losing? The maps have been relatively stable for a couple weeks, even as the amount of rubble (and dead bodies) around the stalled lines has grown steadily. Beauchamp talks to Olga Oliker about morale, which seems to be very low on the Russian side, and impressive on the Ukrainian.

[03-20] Eric Levitz: The Left Has Half-Baked Answers on Ukraine: This occurred the same day as a Jonathan Chait rant about the Left's views on education, so I wonder what was in the coffee that morning. As I've pointed out many times, the left-right divide is over the question of equality, which mostly means politics but isn't far removed from economics, and doesn't include any number of other issues, which don't cleanly divide along left-right lines. So I'm a little chafed at arbitrarily singling out "the Left" for views that are more blurred. Then there's the added innuendo of "Many on the American left were ideologically unprepared for Putin's invasion," and "When reality turned against left-wing orthodoxy, some leftists turned against reality." I would grant that leftists have certain precepts that help frame our understanding of events, but "ideology" is a straitjacket, and "orthodoxy" is quite explicitly a right-wing concept, while "many" and "some" are weasel words. Same could be said about the right, or any other segment you might are to carve out. (Try replacing "Left" in those subheds with "Trump" or "Tucker Carlson.") On the other hand, anti-war people (both on the left and on the libertarian right) have been quick to identify how US indifference to Russia during the "shock treatment" phase, NATO expansion, the proliferation of sanctions, and the new arms race have contributed to conditions where Putin has acted out so badly. The real test has never been whether you're up to fight when someone gives you no choice, but whether you could have found a way to avoid that fight ever coming. PS: For a response to Levitz, see Branko Marcetic: What the Left's Critics Ignore About Military Solutions to Ukraine.

[03-20] Masha Gessen: The Russians fleeing Putin's wartime crackdown. I'm not sure they count as refugees, but most wars are fought on two fronts: one abroad against supposed enemies, and one at home against dissenters. Putin is struggling in Ukraine, but he still seems to have the upper hand against his own people. Fleeing is one form of resistance, especially where there are few alternatives.

[03-21] William J Astore: Russia invasion is a boon for the post-GWOT war machine. One of those stories that's so obvious it hardly needs mentioning, but so important it cannot be ignored. Donald Trump only understood one thing about NATO: it's basically an arms buying club, where the prime arms merchant is the US. (He didn't buy into the ostensible excuse, that it provides collective defense against Russia, because he regarded Russia not as a threat but as a handful of rich suckers willing to buy into his real estate scam.) So he tried to do the arms industry a solid and shake down Europe to buy more fear, and he did a really lousy job of it (not unlike he does a really lousy job of everything). However, Putin's invasion is driving the rest of Europe into buying American -- even Germany is promising 2% of GDP for "defense." This may seem to make sense given the fear and outrage most of us feel over Putin's attack on Ukraine, but in the long run it is likely to do more harm than good. Weapons and armies legitimize themselves, leading to arms races, and eventually to use. One of the founding lies of the post-WWII era is the notion that strength is necessary to preserve peace. What we need after the war is the realization that war was horrible for all sides, and that the only future lies in incremental disarmament, normalization of relations, and respect for other nations' wishes. Eventually that means no NATO, and no sanctions. Because after this war no one can honestly say that they kept us safe.

[03-24] Day 5, Day 9, Day 16: Responses to the Invasion of Ukraine: Various comments by London Review of Books writers. Pankaj Mishra isn't one to mince words:

As Russian troops attacked a nuclear reactor, George Packer wrote in the Atlantic that 'for the first time in decades, an American president is showing that he, and only he, can lead the free world.' The New York Times exulted over the new-found resolve of the free world: 'Nato has been revitalised, the United States has reclaimed a mantle of leadership that some feared had vanished in Iraq and Afghanistan.' Boris Johnson claimed that he had never seen such a stark 'dividing line between right and wrong.' More remarkably, Hillary Clinton called on MSNBC for a rerun in Ukraine of the 'very motivated' and 'armed insurgency' that 'basically drove the Russians out of Afghanistan.'

[03-24] Sean Illing: How Putin became the victim of his own lies: Interview with Brian Klaas, a University College London professor and author of Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us. I wasn't going to bother with this standard critique of the tendency of autocrats to surround themselves with "yes men" (he calls it "the dictator trap," but the same affliction is common regardless of how one rose to power, or whatever checks and balances constrain it). But the pull quotes are worth noting: "The longer people are in positions of power, the more they start to believe that they can control outcomes that they can't actually control." I think it's more like they lose their fear of things they poorly understand. The other one: "When a significant chunk of people in your society no longer inhabit reality, you're in trouble." Not sure why he switched to "society" here, but it rings all the more true about America.

[03-24] Sophie Pinkham/Nick Mulder: Why Did Putin Decide to Invade Ukraine? Fairly long and wide-ranging interview -- Pinkham wrote Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine, and Mulder wrote The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War -- not that it answers the title question definitively.

[03-25] Patrick Cockburn: Ukraine Could Turn Into Another Endless War, Especially if NATO Decides More Than Just Peace Is Needed. I think most people assume that the war must end soon, because the consequences and risks are already so severe it's hard to contemplate what more might happen. On the other hand, it's not unusual for recent wars to slog on, especially where decisions are being made far from the conflict. Moscow and Washington may well decide that suffering in Ukraine is a tolerable price compared to backing away from their symbolic game (the biggest beneficiary so far is NATO and its arms cartel). Before the war, Zelensky was becoming more ambitious at recovering Donbas and even Crimea, and is likely feeling an adrenaline rush over inflicting surprising losses on Russia, which could encourage him to hold out. Meanwhile the country is being destroyed, and millions of refugees have fled. At some point, one would expect concern over the long-term business losses, which are likely to be huge on both sides, would overcome the interests of the short-term winners (mostly arms merchants and oil companies thus far), and start to pressure both sides to compromise -- but the short-termers have the inside political track. On negotiation considerations, consider [03-25] Matthew Stevenson: Putin Is Not Dealin', which also offers some insight into why Biden and Zelinsky aren't dealin' either.

[03-25] Benjamin Wallace-Wells: The Biden official who pierced Putin's "sanction-proof" economy: The maps and damage surveys make it relatively easy to assess Russia's invasion, although the human suffering is hard to quantify, and what few stats are available are far from reliable. But the effect of the economic war is even harder to get a handle on. (Sure, there are lots of press releases, but what do they really mean?) This article helps a bit in explaining how the sanctions are designed, and what their intended targets are. Still, they're likely to play out slowly, and the lack of good metrics means they could miss their target entirely. We're running an experiment here, one that has almost never worked in the past, hoping once more that louder will make the difference.

[03-26] Michael D Shear/Zolan Kanno-Youngs: Biden denounces Russian invasion, casting it as part of a decades-long attempt to crush democracies: On Biden's big speech in Warsaw, an ideal stage for political posturing and a little sabre-rattling. One thing we cannot credit Biden with is a historically nuanced understanding of the complexities of international relations. His slip-up assertion that Putin cannot remain in power got walked back quick enough: one should understand that it's only Russia's business who their leaders are, and that it's wholly improper for Biden (or any prominent American leader) to interject an opinion (which could easily be misconstrued as a threat, or even an ultimatum -- as Obama did regarding Assad in Syria, one of his biggest blunders as president). I even think that the whole portrayal of Putin as the nemesis of democracy is overwrought. He clearly isn't a big believer, least of all for his own people, but it's hard to see his foreign policy as directed at opposing an idea (or ideal) -- as Bush, for instance, took aim at "terror." On the other hand, as Democrats have been backed into a corner where they're our only hope of defending democracy at home, maybe they're entitled to pose as defenders of democracy abroad.

[03-27] Greg Jaffe/Dan Lamothe: Russia's failures in Ukraine imbue Pentagon with newfound confidence: More evidence that we're unlikely to learn anything from Russia's debacle in Ukraine. "One month into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, senior Pentagon officials are brimming with newfound confidence in American power, spurred by the surprising effectiveness of US-backed Ukrainian forces, Russia's heavy battlefield losses and the cautionary lessons they believe China is taking from the war." So they think US backing makes the difference? Have they already forgotten that the US, with all of its advantages in tech and logistics and morale (at least compared to Russia), wasn't able to hold Afghanistan (or Vietnam). Maybe, as Jonathan Schell put it, the world has become unconquerable? One hopes Russia will learn that lesson. One doubts the US, with its narcissistic doctrine of exceptionalism, ever will.

Other stories of note:

[03-14] Jill Lepore: Why the school wars still rage: "From evolution to anti-racism, parents and progressives have clashed for a century over who gets to tell our origin stories." Starts with the Scopes Trial, which I most likely learned about in Robert Wine's 8th Grade American History class: seems like I learned everything there, as he was one of the very few teachers I had who made learning fun, and was so successful at it (his secret was open-book tests where 3-4 students could share resources) that nearly everyone got an A. His kind of teaching was rare in Wichita (or anywhere else) in the 1960s (or any other time), but then was a time when the Scopes Trial was remembered as a case where reason triumphed over dogma, one small step toward becoming a more enlightened and progressive nation. We seem to have lost ground since then, although there have always been people who saw schooling as useful for indoctrinating children in conservative virtues, and they've often had the upper hand. Much of the Republican campaign agenda is devoted to thought control, of all ages but especially of children, while even many Democrats take a narrowly instrumentalist view of education as a pat.

[03-18] Dean Baker: We Don't Need a Cold War With China: Unlike Bush when he launched his War on Terror, Biden hasn't tried to crack down on neutral countries by insisting that "either you're with us or you're against us." China is the obvious case in point, although there is a fair list of abstainers from the UN condemnation of Russia, including India and Israel (our closest ally, some would sometimes have you believe). Baker explains some of the problems with trying to push China around.

[03-20] Natasha Ishak: State-level Republicans are going all in on extreme anti-trans, anti-abortion laws.

[03-21] Jonathan Chait: Democrats Must Defeat the Left's War on Educational Achievement: "School closing are over, but the fight over learning loss isn't." I don't begin to understand why Chait has a bug up his ass on this issue, if indeed it really is one. He includes a link in his line: "The progressive attack on academic achievement is a small but potent movement that has gained a foothold on the left and poses a serious threat to both American public education and the Democratic Party." The link is to his own piece from March 2021, "Just Reopen the Schools Now," but the article doesn't mention "the left" at all. Rather, he asserts: "It is entirely possible that when we look back at the coronavirus pandemic decades from now, we may see the gravest catastrophe as a generation of schoolchildren whose formative years were irrevocably stunted." Looking at his pieces and cited sources, I think he's confusing a number of issues, and don't have time or patience to try to unravel them. One thing I will say is that I think people on the left need to try to generate questions and ideas that need not be constrained to what is politically possible, so I see diverging ideas as being healthy. I don't, for example, think Democrats (even progressives) need to accept something like "defund the police" or "end borders," although proposals like that suggest concerns we should entertain. I personally had a horrific experience with public school, so I have some very idiosyncratic views about education, but at least I'm not under the assumption that my experiences are typical. (The only stunting I'm aware of was from the time I attended school, but fortunately for me that time was brief enough I could recover -- not without scars, but enough to become a functional member of society.)

[03-22] Ian Millhiser: The GOP's attacks on Ketanji Brown Jackson are nasty even by Republican standards: "Republicans turned the hearing into a blizzard of misleading attacks, many of which seem designed to appeal to QAnon supporters." Public hearings encourages politicians to "play to the crowds," which for Republicans means feeding "red meat" to Fox News in hopes of getting air time. And given that crowd, the nastier you appear, the more "authentic" you'll seem. And for good measure, they're still playing up the victimhood of Brett Kavanaugh for having to face serious questions about his character. As hearings continue, more on this:

• [03-20] Li Zhou: Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation hearing will be a forum for political attacks.
• [03-21] Li Zhou: Republicans made Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation hearing about Brett Kavanaugh.
• [03-23] Ed Kilgore: Ted Cruz Outdid Himself in the Jerkiness Department.
• [03-24] Amy Davidson Sorkin: The Republicans' wild attacks at Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation hearing.
• [03-25] Timothy Noah: Marsha Blackburn Never Leaves a Culture-War Hot Button Unpressed.
• [03-25] Kathleen Parker: This isn't the US Senate. It's more like day care. Normally, I wouldn't bother citing her, but that even she is offended by the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee speaks volumes.

[03-22] Jacob S Hacker/Amy Kapczynski: The Great Disconnect: "Why are Americans so unhappy about the economy?" Best advice here is: "Democrats should continue to say that the status quo is unacceptable and that effective responses exist." Obama's big mistake was buying into the idea that projecting confidence in the economy would help fix it. It was not just a bad idea, it was one that let Republicans blame him for an economy that had collapsed on their own watch, largely as result of their promotion of banking fraud and credit instead of real gains in income. It's tempting for Democrats to point to a few key figures and brag about how well we're doing, but inequality is baked so deeply into the mix that few people actually benefit from those numbers.

[03-23] David Atkins: Refusing to Prosecute Trump Is a Political Act: It certainly is. And if Trump didn't have the political standing he has, prosecution would have been likely. But it's less clear to me that the politics of not prosecuting Trump is bad politics. It's not clear that he's likely to be convicted, while it's a given that vast numbers of his fans will him as a victim for purely political purposes, and the nature of his crimes isn't likely to move many people from their preconceptions. Nor does letting him off the hook add much to the general sense that justice in America is seriously flawed.

[03-24] Aviva Chomsky: The United States Is Exceptional: "Just Not in the Way Any of Us Should Want."

[03-24] Daniel Larison: How Albright's 'Munich mindset' turned into uninhibited interventionism: Madeline Albright, Bill Clinton's first-term UN Ambassador and second-term Secretary of State, died on Wednesday, at 84. She was born in Prague (Jana Marie Korbelova), the daughter of a high-ranking Czech diplomat, who continued to work for "the government in exile" after Germany invaded in 1938. The family returned after WWII, only to flee again after the Communist coup in 1948, this time to the US. She married "media scion" Joseph Albright, and they moved to DC in 1962, where she got graduate degrees in Political Science and Russian, and studied under Zbigniew Brzezinski, who later hired her for Jimmy Carter's National Security Council. She was, by birth and grooming, an inveterate Cold Warrior, and she never lost her taste for violence, or her callousness. I don't know whether she was involved in Brzezinski's campaign to bankroll a jihadist uprising against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, but that was perfectly in keeping with her projects from 1993 on. She famously defended sanctions against Iraq as worth the price of starving Iraqi children. She taunted the military to act more aggressively, asking "what's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Thus urged on, Clinton used it to bomb Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and most of all in the former Yugoslavia. She went on to lay the foundation for future wars, especially in her expansion of NATO beyond the old borders of the Soviet Union, all the way to an increasingly marginalized and ostracized Russia. Her warmongering was coincident with the single-superpower theories of PNAC (the ad hoc, mostly Republican "defense intelligentsia" group, stands for Project for a New American Century), including most of the neocons who rose to power in the GW Bush Administration, where they "took the gloves off" and launched their "Global War on Terror," while plotting further salvos against Iran and North Korea, and ultimately Russia and China. After leaving office, she combined academia with a consulting business, continuing to advise belligerent Democrats, most prominently Hillary Clinton in 2016. Her death comes at the best and worst of times, with Russia finally boxed in so severely Putin chose to lash out with a risky invasion of Ukraine -- in essence, the showdown Albright has spent her entire life plotting. Perhaps it ends in further disgrace for Russia, or perhaps in WWIII. Either way, we no longer have her around to reassure us that it's worth the cost.

Larison brings up another famous Albright quote (from 1998, by way of rationalizing yet another bombing of Iraq): "But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us." Yet Americans have proved incapable of seeing the future, because such hubris keeps us from seeing ourselves as we really are. So we wind up bumbling from one crisis to another, understanding little and learning nothing.

[03-25] Jeffrey St Clair: Roaming Charges: Both Ends Burning: Leads off with Madeline Albright and, well, he's not a fan. "But her policy of 'hands-off' killing through sanctions continues to function as the most lethal weapon in the US arsenal. Look no further than Afghanistan, where upwards of 175 newborns are dying every day as a consequence of crippling sanctions." He also acknowledged her pathbreaking role as the first female US Secretary of State: "In our identity-obsessed political culture, Madeline Albright finally proved that American woman (the Israelis and Brits had demonstrated this quality decades earlier) are fully capable of supervising mass death without flinching or showing the tiniest twinge of regret or remose." Much more, of course, including the collapse of the entire Conger Ice Shelf in Antarctica, and 175 wildfires in Texas burning more than 100,000 acres, Arctic land loss, gas leaks, oil spills, micro-plastics, famines, drought, deforestation. Also a link to a video of "Both Sides Burning."

[03-25] Nick Cleveland-Stout/Taylor Giorno/Hayden Schmidt: Saudi bombs drop on Yemen, DC lobbyists whitewash the damage: "The Kingdom has spent $100 million dollars over the course of the 7-year war to make you think they are all about 'peace.'" When Putin invaded Ukraine, I saw a number of "what about" complaints about ignoring Saudi Arabia's relentless bombing of Yemen. I've been aware of the war in Yemen since its inception, and while I have no particular fondness for any local faction(s), it's been clear all along that Saudi Arabia and UAE have been engaged in a campaign of random punishment with no constructive aims. Perhaps there is something to the notion that Yemen is some kind of proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, but even if that is the conflict, why is it so hard to negotiate some form of peaceful coexistence? Even knowing about this, the opening paragraph is sobering: "March 26 marks the seventh anniversary of the disastrous war in Yemen, which has resulted in almost half a million dead." While we're already weary of three weeks of war in Ukraine, which has been marked by an unprecedented worldwide effort to counter Putin's aggression with small arms and massive economic sanctions, the world response on Yemen has been moot -- mostly, one suspects, because the war there has been profitable for the US arms cartel, and that seems to be all Americans care about (as long as the right palms are greased).

[03-25] Jane Mayer: Legal scholars are shocked by Ginni Thomas's "stop the steal" texts: Asks whether Clarence Thomas will recuse himself in Jan. 6 cases. More:

• [03-25] Alex Shephard: The Media Has Yet to Grasp the Full Enormity of Ginni Thomas's Text Messages.
• [03-26] Ankush Khardori: Ginni Thomas and the Conservative Rot at the Supreme Court: "Her texts don't just sput ethical and legal questions, but reflect much larger problems."

[03-26] Andrew Cockburn: 'The worst' defense program of all. And it's not the F-35: It's the KC-46 tanker program, which just from a political standpoint is called "the dirtiest deal ever." I've been following the "tanker deal" since its inception, when it was originally planned not to meet any Air Force need (the KC-135 tankers were old on paper, but had been refurbished regularly -- my father spent much of his 38 years at Boeing working on them and the similarly refurbished B-52s the Air Force still uses when they want to deliver bombs indiscriminately over long distances), but to extend the life of the 767 production line, and was originally packaged with a very shady private-public financing scheme. Todd Tiahrt, a Kansas congressman wholly owned by Boeing, was so obsessed with the deal that GW Bush nicknamed him Tanker Todd. We were repeated promised thousands of jobs, then a thousand, then Boeing shut down their Wichita plant because it became too unionized. There's lots more on the graft side of the equation (including a Boeing VP who went to jail), but there's also good reason to ask what tankers are actually good for. The short answer is global reach: the fighters and bombers that lead the assault on distant targets can't make it on their own gas tanks, so need periodic refueling. On the other hand, tankers can't be used in a contested air space, where they'd be sitting ducks (and bright, shiny new ones make no difference whatsoever). Tankers were necessary to implement the "no-fly" zones over Iraq and Libya, but the US doesn't have (and realistically cannot create) that kind of dominance over Ukraine, so the idea of a "no-fly" zone there is pure fantasy (even if there were no risk of trying to establish one escalating the war, which of course it would).

[03-26] David Owen: A Freelancer's Forty-Three Years in the American Health Care System: A long-time New Yorker staff writer, which is a plum job for a freelancer but not exactly real employment, Owen's written several books I've enjoyed (mostly on old houses), and others I probably would could I ever find the time. He finally made it to Medicare age, but not without a few tough spots along the way.

[03-26] Nick Cleveland-Stout/Taylor Giorno/William Hartung: Washington should think twice before launching a new cold war: I would have used past tense in the headline, because the New Cold War can actually be seen to have been started in the late 1990s, with the expansion of NATO and its first-ever action in Yugoslavia, especially in the bombing campaign against Serbia over Kosovo. It's true that it took Russia a few years to recognize the American threat, but they finally got the point, especially after the effort to flip Ukraine out of the Russian orbit succeeded in 2014. The article, however, focuses on the Old Cold War: lots there everyone should know, even if it's not immediately relevant -- except to raise questions about the geniuses in Washington who dictate American foreign policy.

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Thursday, March 17, 2022

In started to do a "Speaking of Which" back on March 6 (or a bit earlier), so that provides the first pieces below. I picked it up again on Tuesday, March 15. As I was trying to wrap it up on Thursday, March 17, I noticed a new piece by Eric Levitz: The Emerging Path to Peace in Ukraine. Levitz has provided some of the most useful reporting on the conflict, so I've cited him below, and in previous pieces. His comments on a possible security agreement are closely aligned with what Phyllis Bennis has discussed (also see Fred Kaplan, below). Disappointing to me is the seeming Ukraine intransigence on parting with Donbas and even Crimea. I'm convinced that Ukraine would be better off disowning them. (A more proper decision would be to allow them to vote, which would almost certainly give Crimea to Russia, but it's harder to be sure about Donbas -- which certainly leaned Russian up to 2014, but haven't fared so well since.)

The following are some pieces that I read on Ukraine and care to note and/or comment on. I'm providing the dates because events are changing fast, although my selection of the piece implies continuing relevance.

[02-28] Ted Galen Carpenter: Many Predicted NATO Expansion Would Lead to War. Those Warnings Were Ignored: Collects the more famous quotes, like Strobe Talbott ("Many Russians see Nato as a vestige of the cold war, inherently directed against their country") and George Kennan ("it is the beginning of a new cold war . . . Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake"). Carpenter concludes: "History will show that Washington's treatment of Russia in the decades following the demise of the Soviet Union was a policy blunder of epic proportions."

[02-28] Fred Kaplan: No, You're Not Imagining It: Russia's Army Is Inept. I'm not seeing much detailed reporting on the actual fighting, and don't really have the perverse interest anyway, but links to and sums up a fair amount. What is clear from looking at the maps almost daily over three weeks is that the Russian offensive stalled at the big cities of Kharkiv and Kyiv (and even bypassed the much smaller Chernihiv), which probably reflects a fear of getting stuck in an urban guerrilla trap. You may recall that the US sent heavily armored convoys into Baghdad to gauge the resistance before they claimed the city. Russia hasn't got that close yet. Kaplan also speculates that as its ineptitude sinks in, Russia will try to compensate by increased bombing "for destruction's sake," as Russia did in Chechnya "when its officers feel frustrated." That we've seen. Kaplan has continued to report and offer thoughtful comments:

• [03-01] Here Are the Scenarios Where Putin Might Actually Use a Nuke. Anyone with a modicum of sanity has pondered this prospect, but Kaplan has thought about it enough to have written a book: The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War.
• [03-03] Nobody Owes Mitt Romney an Apology: "Mitt Romney deserved to be mocked in 2012 when he said Russia was America's top geopolitical foe."
• [03-07] How on Earth Is Anybody Still Talking About a No-Fly Zone Over Ukraine.
• [03-09] How to End the War in Ukraine: This all sounds pretty good to me. I would also hold a plebiscite in Crimea, which I'd expect Russia to win (even now). I might be more anxious to push Donbas out to Russia. I'd look beyond the immediate war to trying to undo previous sanctions (which would involve settling some older disputes), and trying to negotiate arms reduction treaties, which could start by moving offensive weapons away from both sides of the border, but that's the sort of thing that would have to be done later.
• [03-14] Russia Is Committing War Crimes. Could Putin Ever Be Prosecuted? No, not unless his own people throw him under (as the Serbs did Milosevic).
• [03-16] The Clever Way Zelensky Changed His Message to America.

[03-02] Moustafa Bayoumi: They are 'civilised' and 'look like us': the racist coverage of Ukraine: I can't deny that racial prejudice has an effect on how Europeans and Americans respond to the atrocities of war, but the main reason the US and EU are responding so attentively to Ukraine is that Russian aggression fits our preferred political narrative, one that is readily and happily repeated by our political and military figures. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was very similar to Russia in Ukraine now, yet there was little outpouring of support for Iraqi refugees, let alone efforts to financially cripple the US war machine. The one place where race may be having a big impact is that far-right parties haven't yet rallied to exclude Ukrainian refugees, despite directing a great deal of bigotry against East Europeans in the past.

[03-02] John Feffer: No Pasaran: Ukraine 2022: I've resisted linking to Feffer, less because I disagree than because he seems so predictable. Still, I found this analogy amusing: "Vladimir Putin is the Franco of today, and Ukraine must become the graveyard of Putinism." Sure, it's cliché, but he makes a fairly good case for Putin as "the contemporary face of fascism," and for you "antifa" types Ukraine offers a venue to get your feet wet and your hands bloody, without much more than the usual risk. And while I don't regard Putin as anywhere near the threat that Hitler was -- if you want an apples-to-apples comparison, compare the two invasions of Ukraine -- no doubt Putin's a bad dude who deserves to be taken down a notch or two. Still, I don't see his call for a "new internationalism" working elsewhere. Feffer also wrote [03-09]: Why Ukraine Matters.

[03-02] Eric Levitz: The War in Ukraine Looks Unwinnable (for Everyone). I didn't ever think it looked winnable. Russia can wreak a lot of destruction, but doing so only drives most Ukrainians more implacably against them. At most they can conquer a wasteland, at immeasurable cost not just to Ukraine but to their own souls. Why Putin ever thought otherwise is hard to grasp. It may just be that he had been lucky in war before (in Chechnya, in Georgia, in Syria) so he figured his run will last. As Napoleon and Hitler can attest, luck lasts only until it runs out. And surely Putin knows enough Russian history to realize that those defeats weren't because Russian were inherently superior fighters, but because they were defending their home turf. Putin's not doing that in Ukraine (even if he's trying to convince himself otherwise).

The bigger problem is likely to be that once Russia withdraws and Putin is humiliated, the assholes in and around NATO that did so much to pave the way for this war will start taking victory laps, claiming credit for the people who suffered and resisted this madness -- the very people they so callously put in harm's way. And as they do so, they'll make sure we forget the true lessons of this war -- as they have done in all the other wars (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq) they've botched and left as open sores. Levitz returned to this in [03-04]: Putin's War Looks Increasingly Insane. I wouldn't put much stock in the armchair psychiatry, but the piece recaps the list of Putin's previous military "successes" and how they fall short here.

[03-02] Ezra Klein: Biden Has the Right Idea, but the Wrong Words: On the State of the Union speech, with his resolution to fight (up to a point) for Ukraine.

[03-03] Eric Levitz: Is America to Blame for Russia's War in Ukraine? Yes, in three ways. The first is that after 1945 the US developed an arrogant conceit that this was "our century" and that as the biggest economy and richest nation in the world were were entitled to set the rules by which everyone else would have to live. This conceit was relatively tolerable back when we were a progressive, relatively equitable and generous country, but that image became increasingly tarnished over the years. Still, with the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, America's ego got a shot of adrenaline that made us increasingly insufferable (for examples, see Global War on Terrorism). Second, we made no effort to ameliorate the immense suffering caused by economic collapse as Russia and its former clients attempted to transition to capitalist economies. This was largely because we had forgotten the great truth learned so hard from the Great Depression: that capitalism only works within regulation by a state that has the public welfare in mind. Third, instead of developing international institutions that could be used to build broad consensus on problems like arms and climate, the US only went with organizations that it could run to its own taste, like NATO -- organizations that were design to divide and exclude parts of the world beyond our control. Still, it took about 20 years before NATO and Russia were irreconciliably at loggerheads, and the US made scant effort to repair the damage. None of this excuses Putin from the specific decision to send troops into Ukraine. While it's not clear how Putin could have changed the historical context, he certainly could have opted for some other diplomatic approach, and claimed some measure of moral high ground in doing so. So, yeah, he is the culpable party. But we shouldn't allow his guilt to distract from the deeper critique.

[03-03] Sarah Jones: Russia Tests the American Left. "What's so hard about condemning Vladimir Putin?" Nothing, really. Even leftists who still feel a strong sense of international solidarity (which certainly isn't as prevalent as it used to be) will, if they know anything but US propaganda attacks on Putin, recognize him as a nationalist, right-wing foe, not just of America but of the working class in Russia and around the world. What is hard is backing down from a principled critique of US foreign policy which has only been proven more prescient by recent events. Expansion of NATO and the increasing sanction of Russia, both of the state and of its prominent (and presumably influential) oligarchs, must be regarded as proximate causes of the crisis that led to the invasion. Same for the propaganda war and the often clandestine efforts by any number of western parties to realign Ukraine against Russia's economic interests. On the other hand, Russia did make its own clandestine moves to foment civil war in Ukraine, leading to the annexation of Crimea and the "illegal" but de facto separation of the Donbas region -- which have done as much or more than western entreaties to drive a wedge between Russia and Ukraine. And most importantly, Russia did invade, a decision that is impossible to defend, or even rationalize. And in invading, Putin has done something that US propaganda has never been able to do, which is to grant NATO a justification, one that we will be stuck with well into the future. Still, the left's anti-NATO stance was never predicated on allowing Russia to build up arms and threaten and subvert others. It was always tied to multilateral disarmament and the development of international institutions and laws that would peaceably resolve conflicts. Once this crisis abates, that we'll need to recognize that left critique as the path forward.

[03-03] Ben Jacobs: Was Ted Cruz Right About Russia? "He spent years fighting Putin's prized pipeline." Let's face it, Ted Cruz is never right about anything. He's been a loyal servant of the Texas oil industry, which is all you need to know about his efforts to exclude Russian gas from European markets, securing more profits for his sponsors. I doing so, all he has done is increase Russia's paranoia about American intentions, while preventing an economic trade bond that might have helped integrate Russia more peaceably into the world trade system.

[03-04] Jeffrey St. Clair: Roaming Charges: Hate and War, It's the Currency: Cue Clash video for the title. Usual set of ramblings, some memorable:

• At some point, our oligarchs & their oligarchs are going to decide that sanctions on oligarchs are "counterproductive" and return to tried-and-true sanctions on the poor, the sick, the old, and the young.
• [Richard] Engel and [Rachel] Maddow wanted the US to go to war over RussiaGate, a non-scandal their network pushed more aggressively than William Randolph Hearst did the Spanish American War.

[03-04] Jack Watling: Russia's callousness towards its own soldiers is undermining its combat power. I'm not sure this is right. Stalin's callousness was off the charts, yet Russians fought bravely and tenaciously against Nazi Germany, even though they suffered immensely. On the other hand, they had reason to fight, whereas Russian soldiers in Afghanistan and Chechnya (at least in the First Chechen War) found little reason to risk their lives. The US gave up on trying to field a conscript army after Vietnam, but Russia still has a lot of conscripts in Ukraine.

[03-04] Masha Gessen: The War That Russians Do Not See: As is usually the case, Putin is fighting his war on two fronts: in Ukraine, as you know, and at home, for the support of his own people. State-controlled media is key to that effort.

[03-04] Glenn S Gerstell: I've Dealt With Foreign Cyberattacks. America Isn't Ready for What's Coming. I'm not sure I'm right on this, but two weeks later we don't seem to have seen much cyberwarfare, on either side, so maybe there is a sense of deterrence, or maybe the stakes just aren't all that promising. For an update, see [03-14] Matt Stieb: Why Have Russian Hackers Been So Quiet?

[03-05] Ellen Ioanes: Russia is deploying brutal siege tactics in Ukraine: I'm not sure the narrow definition of siege applies here: back in the Middle Ages and before, cities were often fortified, and sieges aimed at breaking down those fortifications, so the attacking army could invade cities and take over. At least that's what I think of when I hear the word, and Russia isn't doing that. I suspect that the reason is that the psychological plus of capturing a city isn't worth the risk of getting stuck in a hostile confinement. On the other hand, I've used a broader definition of siege myself; e.g., to describe Israel's wanton shelling and bombing of Gaza. I suppose the fact that Gaza is surrounded by walls legitimizes the word, but the walls of Gaza weren't meant to defend against invasion. They were built by Israel to keep the Gazans penned in. The only real historical precedent for this is the Warsaw Ghetto, constructed by Nazi Germany in 1939 to detain Jews until the Nazis got around to slaughtering them later. What Russia is doing is different, but not much: they're camping outside of cities, then shelling and bombing them. Unclear whether they mean to kill them all, drive most away, or just see it as sport. Any way you slice it, the "brutal" is an understatement.

[03-07] Branko Marcetic: The Orwellian Attacks on Critics of NATO Policy Must Stop. Every time someone gins up a war, their first target isn't the other party; it's dissenters at home. Many people would like to think that war is above politics, but there's very little about war that isn't political -- perhaps the distribution of pain and tragedy. Marcetic recalls the days after 9/11, as do I. If I'm less bothered now, it's probably because the history of NATO provocation seems to be better understood than the "chickens come home to roost" critique of US's Cold War sponsorship of Al-Qaeda and other mujaheddin. But also, we all take heart in Russia's fledgling antiwar movement. Moreover, if you look at serious proposals for a negotiated end to the war -- and given Russia's nuclear depth that's the only thinkable option (note word choice) -- they all start with an understanding of how this all started with NATO expansion (e.g., see Kaplan, below, and Lieven, op. cit.). So while the kneejerk option is to double down on NATO, we need to resist that temptation. A good start would be to tamper down on the crazy talk. Putin is way too crazy already.

[03-09] Phyllis Bennis: Diplomacy, not war, is the way to help.

[03-09] Ben Walsh: The unprecedented American sanctions on Russia, explained: One estimate here is that "Russia's economy will shrink 35 percent in the second quarter of 2022 and 7 percent for the entire year." You can view that as a lot, or as not so much. My takeaway from this is that sanctions, even if imposed urgently, work slowly and gradually, which gives target countries time and reason to adjust. The track record of sanctions in past conflicts is decidedly mixed, and only rarely effective. (Perhaps the worst case example so far is the US ban on oil and metal sales to Japan, which the Japanese responded to at Pearl Harbor.) Also see: [03-07] Robin Wright: Why Sanctions Too Often Fail.

[03-11] Keith Gessen: Was it inevitable? A Short history of Russia's war on Ukraine. Pretty good background piece on the conflict.

[03-11] Alec MacGillis: How Putin's Invasion of Ukraine Upended Germany: "In the wake of Russia's attack, Germany has reoriented its energy policy and committed to dramatic military expansion for the first time since the Cold War." I'm old enough that any hint of German re-armament brings a twinge, but I suspect their pledge to spend an extra 100 billion Euros is mostly their way of saluting the Americans and NATO, in a way that doesn't really hurt all that much. And if they spend much of that, as promised, on the F-35 albatross, they will have made friends with Lockheed without really threatening anyone. The bigger issue is what to do about losing access to Russian gas. It probably means they will stick with nuclear longer than they wanted to.

[03-13] Ellen Ioanes: Why the US scrapped Polish plans to give Ukraine fighter jets.

[03-13] Zack Beauchamp: Could Putin actually fall? A lot of poorly grounded speculation here, largely based on mere wishes, like this from David Rothkopf: "Vladimir Putin's attack on Ukraine will result in the downfall of him and his friends." If history is just, of course, but how can you count on that? Worse still is when the wish turns into a threat, as when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says: "The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out." Almost makes you think he doesn't want it to end. The problem with this kind of thinking is that it's about a million times easier to get Putin to agree to a deal that leaves Putin in power without further disgrace than it is to insist that Russia also give us his head on a platter. That's why I worry when Americans try to paint him as a fount of evil. It's not because it might hurt his feelings (for all I know, he might take it as a compliment). It's because those terms lock us into a mindset that makes it harder to find compromises and seal the deal. As for speculating about odds, Graham's plea to the military to act is almost certain not to work. Much more likely is that Kremlin insiders will quietly usher him into retirement, as he did Yeltsin. They may even let him serve out his term, and thank him for his service. One thing we should know by now is that totalitarianism is never as total as it's cracked up to be. A "strong man" like Putin needs a lot of hench men and cronies, and when he fucks up, as Putin has done, he starts to lose that aura of invincibility. But that's longer term. Right now, you need to cut a deal with him.

[03-13] Stephen Kinzer: Assassinating Putin Won't Work. It Never Has for America. Includes the line before the Lindsey Graham line I made fund of above, and it's even more insane: "Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?" Kinzer has written about these plots in the past, and includes a few here I was unfamiliar with, as well as many I've heard about. Some (not many) hit their target. None accomplished their erstwhile goal.

[03-14] Kevin T Dugan: Goldman Sachs CEO Says Ostracizing Russia Isn't the Finance Industry's Job: There's a guy who puts his mouth where his money is. Dana Milbank has a list of companies that are dragging their feet on disengaging from Russia: Zelensky says 'peace is more important than profit.' Koch Industries disagrees.

[03-15] Ariel Petrovics: NATO's restraint has made things worse for Russia in Ukraine: "The absence of US and allied forces in the conflict has highlighted that Putin is his own worst enemy."

[03-15] Patrick Cockburn: Demonizing Russia Risks Making Compromise Impossible, and Prolonging the War: Same thing can be said for demonizing Putin, which is the more prominent focus at the moment. "The problem is that the hatreds generated by war gain momentum during the conflict and do not have a reverse emotional gear." Cockburn also wrote [03-14]: Putin Has Grossly Overplayed His HAnd, but NATO Could Be Making the Same Mistake as It Senses It's Winning.

[03-15] David Ignatius: The best peace plan for Ukraine is military support: Link above is to Paul Woodward's Attention to the Unseen, which includes links to a couple more pieces. Besides, Ignatius is one of the geniuses who brought you the War on Terror. I don't know why anyone invites him to write in public anymore, but here he is, eager as ever to defend freedom by fighting to the last dead Ukrainian (or Iraqi or Afghan or fill in the blank). AJ Muste is still right that the way to peace is peace. The notion that peace comes from strength, that we have to always stand our gound and never show compassion or anything that could be interpreted as weakness, that mindset is a big part of why we find ourselves in this predicament. That said, if Americans want to send anti-tank, anti-aircraft, and small arms to Ukraine -- weapons that can be used to make Putin's troops feel some of the pain they're inflicting -- that's far from the worst thing they could do. Maybe it even nudges Putin a bit toward a settlement, but the only viable ending will come not from who holds the upper hand on the battlefield, but when both sides give up their fantasies and try to agree on the right thing. There's scant evidence of that realization in Ignatius or the others here. Their preferred scenario is to fuel a long-term guerrilla war against Russian occupation. They'd be quite happy to turn Ukraine into a multi-generational wasteland, like they did to Afghanistan.

By the way, Ignatius's [03-17] piece suggests that he's beginning to get cold feet: Watching Russia's military failures is exhilarating. But a cornered Putin is dangerous. One thing he finally realizes is that no matter how much he enjoys kicking Putin when he's down, "Zelensky's allies should also be thinking about how to put the pieces back together when this war ends." I'll add that while the US did a half way decent job of rehabilitating Germany and Japan after WWII, the US has an absolutely dismal record of addressing postwar reconciliation ever since. (Two more recent examples: the US claimed most Afghan foreign reserves for possible payout to 9/11 victims; Afghanistan is being forced to close its US embassy and consulates, for lack of expense money. Nobody's saying we have to like the Taliban, but we do owe the Afghan people a certain measure of respect, and to do that you have to go through their de facto leaders.)

[03-15] Anatol Lieven: What Zelensky will say to Congress and how the US should respond: The Ukraine president is schedule to address Congress on Wednesday. Presumably he'll say much of what he's been saying in public over the last 2-3 weeks, ranging from "give us more arms" to "impose a no-fly zone." Congress, as usual, will be sympathetically hawkish, so he'll get a lot of applause. Or maybe he'll trim his message back a bit to stay within Biden's guildelines (yes on some weapons, but no on others, including that no-fly zone). Just because Netanyahu can speak to Congress over and against the President doesn't mean it's a good idea. The article makes a reference to "a shameful history going back to Georgia in 2008 of Americans making quasi-promises of military aid that they had no real intention of ever fulfilling," which feels tacked on but was scooped up for the subhed. It really needs to be qualified carefully, because the implication here is to turn it into a Munich appeasement lesson. The underlying dynamic is similar -- Russia encouraging former SSRs to break up into smaller ethnic enclaves, some of which would turn to Russia for help -- but the conflicts themselves are vastly different. In 2008, Russia intervened in Georgia to stop a Georgian military operation to take back two breakaway provinces. Russia stopped the advance, then withdrew, leaving Abkhazia and South Ossetia quasi-independent. The Russian invasion of Ukraine also involves breakaway provinces (Donetsk and Luhansk, and one might add Crimea), but the focus of the Russian invasion is the rest of Ukraine. Lieven has generally been a good, level-headed reporter, but I'm confused here. Some other recent pieces:

• [03-07] Biden is right to rule out a 'no-fly zone' in Ukraine.
• [03-03] How to get to a place of peace for Ukraine.

[03-16] Benjamin Hart: Zelenskyy Invokes Pearl Harbor and 9/11 in Impassioned Speech to Congress. Much as he parrotted Churchill in his address to the UK Parliament, you gotta admit he knows how to read a room, and play into its prejudices. He repeated his plea for a "no-fly zone," which he knew Biden and the rest of NATO had pointedly ruled out, but how better to fish for other concessions? The US response was: Pentagon dials up size, scope of Ukrainian military aid. Now, the Washington Post is marveling: Outmatched in military might, Ukraine has excelled in the information war.

[03-16] Barbara Garson: Volodymyr Zelensky Is Not a Comedian -- and That's No Joke: A "belated review" of his TV show, Servant of the People. Life may imitate art, but it was funnier when it was just art.

Some other pieces of interest, way short of a systematic survey:

[01-31] John McPhee: Tabula Rasa: Volume Three: working toward a book on the books he never got around to writing.

[02-24] Jane Mayer: Why Does New York's Criminal Investigation of Donald Trump Appear All but Over? Two prosecutors resigned when not allowed to proceed further. On the other hand, others are more convinced than ever that a case should go forward: [03-16] Laurence H Tribe/Dennis Aftergut: The evidence is clear: it's time to prosecute Donald Trump.

[02-28] David Dayen: Larry Summers Shares the Blame for Inflation: And not for "warning that government spending could increase inflation" (which is a standard bugaboo against all spending you don't like; funny how stuff you want, like a war or a Wall Street bailout, never raises any red flags).

[03-08] James North: What the New Democrats' Mistakes Taught Us About Fighting Inequality: Review of Lily Geismer's book Left Behind: The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality. I noticed this book in my recent trawling, and thought: "what attempt?" So now I know a bit more, especially about the Clintons' fascination with "microfinance" -- you may recall that Muhammad Yunus won a Nobel Prize for his work on this in Bangladesh. Not so much that it was a bad idea, but it never raised enough money to work, and the pilot projects got wiped out in the recession that followed Clinton's repeal of Carter-Glass. Some other stories here were also attempt to use market dynamics for the public good: charter schools, public/private partnerships, welfare "reform." On the other hand, Clinton's schemes to help make the rich worked fabulously. The result was a huge inequality.

[03-09] Zach Montellaro: GOP pushes for an 'earthquake in American electoral power': "Conservatives are promoting the "independent legislature" theory, which would hand vast election powers to GOP legislators in battleground states."

[03-09] Jessica J Lee: Hawkish Yoon wins in Seoul, posing challenges for Taiwan, North Korea policy. Always bad news when a country shifts politically to the right, although this piece doesn't bother explaining why. We had an opportunity to finally end the Korean War with Moon Jae-in in office, but it was wasted by saboteurs John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, while a befuddled Donald Trump looked on.

[03-10] Peter Beinart: The US supports illegal annexations by Israel and Morocco. Why the hypocrisy? Pace the subhed, America has long felt free to "pick and choose when to follow international law." The recent resolution calling on the ICC -- an organization the US has pointed refused to join and has repeatedly condemned for investigating Israel -- to investigate Russian war crimes couldn't be clearer on that point. Double standards are the prerogative of the self-anointed "essential nation" (you know, "the last best hope"). Beinart also notes: Russia dehumanizes Ukrainians in strikingly similar ways that Israel dehumanizes Palestinians.

[03-10] Eli Clifton: Mike Pence flies to Israel on Miriam Adelson's private jet. Sheldon Adelson's widow continues her late husband's role as a major financial kingpin in the Republican and Likud parties, a game Pence is only too willing to play.

[03-12] Nathan J Robinson: The Great American World War II Story: One of the great tragedies of American history is that, after struggling through the Great Depression, most Americans came out of WWII feeling really good about the war and themselves. Sure, mostly those were Americans who never got close to the front lines (which was true of most Americans), but it left the country with an overweening sense of its own superiority. And thanks to the gift of selective memory, that sense only grew over the next half-century, peaking with Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation in 1998. When Bush was plotting the invasion of Iraq in 2003, pundits fell all over themselves to make analogies not to Vietnam (a people who fought to free itself from the empires of France and Japan, then America) but to the war we won, WWII. (John Dower's dissent from back then is still worth reading: Occupations and Empires: Why Iraq Is Not Japan.) Robinson's piece offers a tour of the US National WWII Museum, but speaks more about how our selective memory of past wars condemns us to repeat them.

[03-13] Teresa Ghilarducci: Inflation Stings Most If You Earn Less Than $300K. Here's How to Deal. Today's prize for the most gallingly obvious headline. Goes on: "Coping with inflation could mean drastic actions or small ones." Points out that those making $19K or less spend 15% of their income on food, a share which drops significantly with increasing income.

[03-13] Eric Levitz: Here's How Biden Can Lower Gas Prices. Fairly good explanation of how the Ukraine war is driving oil prices up (although I wouldn't be surprised to find that financial speculation is playing a much larger role). Ideas to bring prices down seem reasonable, although they don't include the obvious one of allowing Iranian and Venezuelan oil back on the world market -- something I approve of not so much because I'm all that keen on lowering prices as because doing so would correct some major problems with US foreign policy. By the way, explaining gas prices, here's Paul Krugman: Lies, Damned Lies and Gasoline Prices. [PS: Also see the chart accompanying this tweet, which shows gas prices rising with the price of crude oil, then staying high as crude oil prices have since dropped. With the war in the news every day, people think gas is in short supply, and the oil companies are taking advantage of that.]

[03-13] Ed Kilgore: Tom Cotton's Idea of Law and Order: Andrew Jackson Massacring Fugitive Slaves. A prime example of how Republicans abuse history to reinforce their own myths, rather than trying to understand what actually happened. By the way, I also don't care for how some people, concerned with the need to oppose racism, try to dishonor and reject Jackson and Jefferson, while lionizing elitists like the Adamses and a martinet like Hamilton, just because they held less embarrassing views of slavery. I've found that looking for saints in history is a fool's mission. But there's no reason you can't acknowledge a good idea or a noble sentiment when you find one, even in an unexpected place.

[03-14] Stephanie McCrummen: 'Gutted': What happened when a Georgia elections office was targeted for takeover by those who claim the 2020 election was a fraud.

[03-14] Jason Ditz: 49 Republican Senators Will Oppose Iran Nuclear Deal: This came shortly after Russia blocked the JCPOA, which had been reported as close to settled, by insisting on exemptions from sanctions. (See [03-11] Trita Parsi: Already fragile JCPOA talks 'paused' over Russian demands.) More recent news reports are unclear on the prospects. Israel, of course, is opposed to the any, which is good enough for Republicans (who don't dare criticize their "ally" for abstaining from condemning the Russian invasion at the UN). You may recall that the deal was negotiated by Obama after years of Israel hysterically complaining about the threat of Iran developing nuclear weapons (complete with 20 years of 5-to-1 year schedule predictions). Obama realized that the only way to actually keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons (assuming they wanted to) was to get an agreement that would put inspectors on site, which is what he did. Israel, in turn, opposed the deal: not clear what they did want, but they certainly weren't worried about Iranian nuclear weapons.

[03-15] Nitish Pahwa: Why Absolutely Nothing Republicans Are Saying About Gas Prices Makes Sense: That's a section head, catchier than the "Joe Biden Didn't Do This" title. Next section: "Oil Companies Are Actually Just Trying to Pad Their Profits." At this point I'm more suspicious of financial speculators, who jumped out ahead of whatever shortages may be coming.

[03-15] David Dayen: A Windfall Profits Tax Would Be an Inflation Rebate: When the global price of oil increases, those people already pumping and selling oil get the extra profit of the price rise, with no additional work or value added. We recognized this in the oil crunch of 1973, and passed a windfall tax. Why not now?

[03-15] Ian Millhiser: The constitutional problem with Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill. Looks to me like there are several. One has to do with vagueness, which forces teachers to guess what wording is and is not allowed. Another has to do with allowing parents to enforce it through civil suits (an approach pioneered by the recent Texas anti-abortion bill). This deputizes the "most prudish parents" (also the craziest), virtually guaranteeing a tsunami of frivolous lawsuits teachers and school boards will have to defend against. This law is typical of the thought control planks in Rick Scott's campaign platform, showing how they are meant to terrify teachers. A Supreme Court that respected basic constitutional rights would never let this law stand, but a 6-3 majority of Federalist Society hacks just might.

[03-15] Jane Mayer: Sarah Bloom Raskin Withdraws Her Nomination to the Federal Reserve Board: Score one for the oil, gas, and coal industries, with their magic bullet, Joe Manchin. I don't know that she's any good (she "had wide support from the banking industry"), or what she might have been able to do at the Fed, but this does show you who has power. Mayer previously wrote: [03-02] How Fossil-Fuel Companies Are Stonewalling Sarah Bloom Raskin's Nomination to the Fed. Also see: Kate Aronoff: Why Joe Manchin Sank Sarah Bloom Raskin's Nomination.

[03-15] Bess Levin: Idaho's Uniquely Evil Abortion Bill Gives Rapists Families a Say.

[03-15] Third Way: The Red State Murder Problem: What do you suppose could account for "Trump-voting states account for 8 out of the 10 highest murder rates in 2020"? Guns? Poverty? Kulturkampf assholes?

[03-15] Eric Levitz: Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think: "Three asset managers [BlackRock, Vanguard Group, and State Street] now collectively own a big chunk of nearly every corporation. As a result, capitalism no longer works as advertised." This leads to several points:

1. Market competition is becoming impossible under capitalism -- or else increasingly plausible under socialism.
2. There may now actually be a "committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."
3. The dominant theory of corporate governance no longer makes sense.
4. Wall Street and organized labor are now aligned on monetary policy. I.e., they both want low interest rates, albeit for different reasons.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, March 13, 2022

Florida Senator Rick Scott is chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. A couple weeks ago he released a manifesto -- a policy agenda and an ideological justification -- defining what Republicans want to accomplish if they can win control of the Senate in 2022. Of perhaps I should say what they'd do if they had the power to do it, which will take more than a mere Senate majority. You can read about it here. (The full plan is here, hyperbolically titled An 11 Point Plan to Rescue America: What Americans Must Do to Save This Country.) I'm especially struck by the deep paranoia in the preamble:

The militant left now controls the entire federal government, the news media, academia, Hollywood, and most corporate boardrooms -- but they want more. They are redefining America and silencing their opponents.

Among the things they plan to change or destroy are: American history, patriotism, border security, the nuclear family, gender, traditional morality, capitalism, fiscal responsibility, opportunity, rugged individualism, Judeo-Christian values, dissent, free speech, color blindness, law enforcement, religious liberty, parental involvement in public schools, and private ownership of firearms.

Let's start by returning to basics. The political terms Left and Right came from the early days of the French Revolution. In the assembly, supporters of the monarchy and aristocracy sat on the right, while opponents -- the people who coined the slogan "liberty, equality, fraternity" -- sat on the left. Those labels stuck with us, because while titled aristocracy is pretty much a relic of the past, the right has adapted to defend hierarchy in whatever form (usually wealth), while the left, having liberated us from many forms of hierarchy (aristocracy, slavery, and to a large extent discrimination based on sex and/or race) continues to champion greater equality.

Left and right is one of many axes that can be used to plot political tendencies, but it is especially important in times of great inequality, like ours. Politics is, after all, the practice of power, and power tends to follow (and in the hands of the right reinforce) inequities in wealth. There is some disagreement as to what equality means to the left: most agree on equal rights and treatment under laws that are decided in a democracy where every person has an equal vote, but not everyone would extend democracy to the workplace (aside from certain rights, like a minimum wage, and a right to join unions). And while most on the left support progressive taxation, only a few think it's possible to level incomes and savings.

However, those differences rarely matter to those on the right, who see any limits on wealth or the prerogatives of the rich as an attack on all they hold dear (i.e., their perch in the hierarchy). And when you're as far to the right as Scott is, that puts most of America on the left. And while Scott is an outlier by historical standards, it should be recognized that he speaks for the majority of Senate Republicans, and as such for the majority of the Party.

Sure, Scott makes a further qualification when he charges "the militant left," but that's an oxymoron -- in America at least, the left is profoundly anti-violence, action limited to dissenting speech, the occasional demonstration, and campaigning for votes -- using a term that is most often used posthumously to describe people killed by occupying forces (e.g., in Israel/Palestine, or by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan; I expect the Russians to follow suite in Ukraine).

Scott's trying to add an air of menace to "the left," but his examples only show how far out he's perched on the right. Most corporations are well to the right of center -- they do, after all, control most of the nation's wealth. Sure, some marketers try to present themselves as anti-racist, which drives far-right culture warriors (like Scott) crazy -- cf. Vivek Ramaswamy's recent book, Woke, Inc., or Glenn Beck's hysterical The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of Twenty-First Century Fascism (sure, pun intended). And news media and Hollywood are companies too, their owners well up the wealth hierarchy. Academia is nominally non-profit, but easily swayed by rich donors, as is a government which reports more to donors and lobbyists than to the public.

Also note that those supposedly left-controlled institutions all have pockets that are totally aligned with the far right, like Fox News, the Koch Network academies and "think tanks," the Federalist Society-selected 6-3 Supreme Court majority. But it's never enough, because the more they get, the more extreme they become.

How extreme is indicated by the list of things they claim the left wants to "change or destroy" -- the implication is always destroy, as they dogmatically insist that any change is intent on destruction. As someone who's pretty far out on the left -- for a crude estimate of how far, I voted for Nader in 2000, so if the left is all D+G voters, I am at least in the leftmost 4.7%; I voted for Kerry over Nader (and several other leftist candidates) in 2004, so I'm not in the leftmost 1.0%; I explained that decision here -- I thought I'd go down this laundry list and see how menacing my own views are:

• American history: It is what it is, and no one can change or destroy it -- although the right (not the left) wants to sanitize it so Americans can feel better about themselves, and especially not notice the disgraceful history of conservatism, especially on race.

• Patriotism: Let me start by noting that the people who opposed to aristocracy in and after 1776 (at least through the writing of the US Constitution, which banned issuing titles) were the same ones who called themselves patriots. They were the original American left, and were opposed to the right, which called themselves "loyalists" out of deference to the British crown. The left has held closer to the nation's founding ideals than the right ever has, and the left has demonstrated more concern for and solidarity with the majority of the US population than the right ever has. On the other hand, the right has appropriated the symbols and jargon of patriotism so crassly and jingoistically, often in the celebration of militarism and the pursuit of imperial adventures abroad, that many leftists naturally recoil from their posturing. So, sure, let's change patriotism back to its original ideal, extended to support equal rights for all.

• Border security: As a leftist, I can imagine national solidarity extending to international, but I also recognize that each nation has its own laws, which are delimited by borders, which therefore need to be secure. So there seems to be no disagreement, but for years nativists (mostly Republicans, therefore often but not necessarily on the right) have used "border security" as a code word for railing against immigration, often in bad-faith negotiations which never delivered on promised reforms. (The most important is that the US has several million undocumented immigrants, a situation that needs to be cleared up in order to restore due process.) I don't particularly care about immigration as an issue, so wouldn't mind expanding or contracting legal immigration. The points I would insist on are: that the "undocumented" problem be cleared up, with due respect to the immigrants; that future policies be flexible enough to minimize additional "undocumented" immigrants; that immigrants have rights and protection to keep businesses from taking advantage of them; and that the cruelty and lack of due process evident in recent "border control" end. It's worth noting that some leftists are much more pro-immigration than I am. Also, that I put a lot more emphasis on improving standards of living elsewhere, mostly by supporting progressive democratic governments elsewhere and not rigging the world economic system against them, so people have less incentive to emigrate. Also, put an end to the wars that produce so many refugees.

• The nuclear family: I have no problem with the nuclear family. Unfortunately, some people have trouble, and they may need help and understanding. However, policies cannot provide people with a nuclear family. The best we can do is to remove or limit some of the obstacles in the way. Doing so will only increase the strength of nuclear families. I don't see why this is a left-right issue. However, as with patriotism, the right has sought to anoint itself as the protector of "family values," eventually coming to believe its own delusions of grandeur.

• Gender: Another non-issue, except when politicians (almost always on the right) attempt to legislate discrimination. Can they possibly believe that if we aren't cruel enough to LGBTs all children will want to grow up that way?

• Traditional morality: Is usually the right morality, and is generally a good guide to living one's life, as it has been for hundreds or thousands of years. Except that we live in a world where many people have divergent views on personal morality, in which case law should only enforce moral views where acts impinge on others' rights. We have many cases where prohibitions were justified by a reading of "traditional morality," and those prohibitions have turned out to be cruel and unnecessary. Again, this is not strictly a left-right issue, but it is most often the right that wants to divide people up and persecute or discriminate against those they disapprove of. Leftists tend to be more wary of power, and more respectful of diversity.

• Capitalism: Is a system that allows individuals (and groups) to take independent initiative and produce goods and services that ultimately benefit society. That is a laudable endeavor, one we should broadly support. However, it is a process which is fundamentally flawed, but the flaws are such that they can be mitigated with fairly painless regulation and tax and public spending policies which solve most of the attendant problems. It would take a huge book to detail all of these, but for present purposes let's note simply that the right chafes at any regulations or policies not strictly in favor of business, and assumes that any limits imposed on business are aimed at destroying all business. (Unlike right-wing ideologues, actual businesses often lobby for regulations, especially to guarantee minimal quality standards and eliminate unscrupulous competitors. And while no business likes to pay taxes, they do want to have a viable government to protect property rights, enforce contracts, and provide sound money.) One problem is that as right-wingers have increasingly swallowed their own propaganda, they've lost grip on reality, including any sense of their own very real flaws.

• Fiscal responsibility: I accept that government has a responsibility to provide sound money, and that doing so imposes fiscal restraints on government. The Keynesian maxim that government should spend more than it takes in during recessions and run a modest surplus during boom times seems like a fair starting point -- and was practiced in the US between WWII and the Vietnam War. However, starting with Reagan in 1981, Republicans have repeatedly run up record deficits while in power, while turning into deficit scolds when Clinton and Obama were in office -- both sacrificed programs to reduce deficits, with Clinton turning the only surpluses since 1969. This shouldn't be a left-right issue, but Republican deficits go to tax breaks for the rich, increasing inequality, and to build up the military (an important profits program for their donors). All Scott's plank proves is that Republicans expect to never get called out for their hypocrisy.

• Opportunity: Big difference here. The left supports free public education, allowing people to develop their skills as far as they can go. The right wants to make education rare and expensive, a rung in their hierarchy reserved for their own kind. America was once touted as a land of equal opportunity, but with Republican hegemony over the last 40 years has become one of the world's most inequal societies, and opportunities for all but the rich have suffered. Education is not the only factor here. Unions are also important. So is finance that all people can use, to buy homes and start businesses. These aren't novel ideas. They were (far from perfectly) incorporated into the GI Bill, which led to 20+ years of record economic growth. Since the Republican-driven turn to predatory finance and "winner-take-all" oligarchy, with virtually all productivity gains claimed by the rich, opportunity and hope have suffered. Republicans like Scott only offer more stagnation and decay.

• Rugged individualism: A queer, macho-infused term, meant to celebrate the rare few who beat the odds as opportunity for most people diminishes, while denying the fundamental truth that nearly all significant developments are group efforts, facilitated by a society and culture that encourages initiative. The more opportunity, the more people will turn into self-styled "rugged individuals," so I don't see how the left can be accused of wanting to destroy them. Taming them, maybe. After all, what good does it do to for someone to achieve great success only to turn into a flaming asshole?

• Judeo-Christian values: Not a left-right issue, although both sides can easily pick values they approve of. Like "traditional morality," most such values have stood the test of time, and few are uniquely Judeo and/or Christian. By the way, I always trip over that phrase, knowing that it is almost always used by Christians who know naught about Jews and care even less for Judaism, but somehow like the ecumenical ring of it (without going overboard and acknowledging related religions like Islam and Baha'i). I often hear people saying that we could solve all our problems if only people would "open their hearts" and turn to God and/or Jesus. I appreciate the sentiment, but have no idea what they are talking about, let alone how it would work. Turning politically to the left, on the other hand, would express the values that matter, in a program that is sensible here and now, with no divine intervention required).

• Dissent: This one is pretty rich. Sometimes I think the only thing the left has ever been able to do is to dissent. Sometimes dissent triggers a conscience in people with more power, and that leads to change -- as when civil rights were restored in the 1960s -- but that always starts with a minority expressing dissent. You know who doesn't like dissent? The right. They're the ones passing "gag rules" and bans, and threatening demonstrators. Sometimes -- not often in the US recently, but famously elsewhere -- they form goon squads to attack demonstrators. Often they let the state do their dirty work for them. The left will never take away your right to dissent, because we recognize that dissent is a necessary check against abuse of power -- even, if we ever get any, our own.

• Free speech: See "dissent," which I read as extending to the right to assembly and petition, but really starts here. I will add one thing: the right to free speech has been extended by the right-wing-dominated Supreme Court to apply to corporations, and that money they expend on political campaigns is protected as free speech. This in effect legalizes bribery, making it an assault on the integrity of democracy. Money has many pernicious effects on speech. It amplifies some speech at the loss to other, giving more power to influence to those willing to spend the most (you can see why the right likes the idea). Advertising is perhaps the least free speech of all. It would be in the public interest to curtail it as much as possible: not to prevent the flow of the ideas expressed, but to limit the distortions introduced by money.

  While most efforts to ban free speech come from the right, the left is often charged with one of its own, against "hate speech." It seems to me that one should be able to oppose something without passing laws against it and prosecuting offenders -- an instinct that strikes me as much more prevalent on the right. Analogously, one shouldn't assume that legalizing something (drugs is a major example) implies endorsement.

• Color blindness: This is a recent complaint from the right, a weird one given their long support for racial (and many other forms of) discrimination. The logic is fair, and in the long run the point is well taken: if we don't officially recognize race, it should cease to matter, and the scourge of racism will have left us. However, there are several problems with this, starting with the bad faith of the people on the right pushing this line. On the one hand, they seem to want to sweep all evidence of the legacy of racial discrimination, which was mandated by law over 350 years and in many cases continued less formally over the last 50 years. On the other, the complaint about tracking people by race often comes from people who are complaining about discrimination against white people, something they wish to prohibit. This is just one of many categories where the right's capacity to imagine themselves as victims of discrimination and injustice they regularly practice on others is simply galling.

• Law enforcement: We all agree that we need just and reasonable laws, and we need them enforced, simply and fairly. But we have difficulty doing this: some laws are bad (especially against drugs), and enforcement is often arbitrary and capricious, with some people largely exempt from scrutiny, while others are singled out for attention, sometimes to the point of harassment. The task is greatly complicated by the millions of guns in civilian hands, and that increases the likelihood of police using their own guns: one result of this is that over 1,000 Americans are killed by police each year. The criminal justice system has problems beyond police: the courts are slow and often prejudiced; the quality of legal defense is ridiculously variable; the prisons are badly run, and there is little effort made to equip convicts for their return to society. And all this takes place in a broader context that often includes poverty, miseducation, lack of housing and public health, and much more. The right has this psychology that insists that crime can be fixed by passing harsher laws, hiring more police, and allowing them to act more impulsively, especially because they are unwilling to consider any of the other aspects of the problem (especially inequality, lack of social services, and guns). Given their repeated failures, some people on the left suggested that instead we might redirect some of the money going to police to other social services that might be more effective. They came up with a slogan ("defund the police"), and Republicans seized on that as a threat to terrify their base. It's highly unlikely that anyone is going to cut police funding anytime soon. Indeed, it's likely that the reforms needed to improve policing will take more money, not less. But the real problem is much more systemic, and that's where we need to turn left for answers. What the right's been doing just doesn't work.

• Religious liberty: Another quaint turn of phrase, one that sounds like something no one objects to -- freedom of religion, which for many of us means freedom from religion -- yet means something very different. Republicans have lately been pushing a line that if someone can claim that their objections to a law are rooted in their religion, they shouldn't have to follow the law. Moreover, if one owns a business, one's religious exemption can be used to set policy that governs employee benefits (e.g., a Catholic business owner opposed to birth control can deny employees health insurance which pays for birth control, even though the federal government requires that all insurance policies provide that benefit). In practice, so far at least, this "religious liberty" doctrine has mostly been used to permit certain people to act as bigots, which is a big part of why Republicans are so enthusiastic about this novel form of legal reasoning.

• Parental involvement in public schools: Another piece of weasel wording, inoffensive on its surface but designed to allow a few politically-active right-wing parents to harangue school boards and educators over policies like masks and banning books and other matter that for whatever reason offends them. Such people have always been around, but they've become even more of a plague recently, as Trump and Fox have riled up the would-be culture warriors to an ever higher sense of righteousness and persecution, while the right's estimation of education has shifted from suspicious to downright bothered. In theory, politically-active left-wing parents could do the same thing, but they generally have too much respect for education and knowledge and understanding to stoop so low. (I use "they" instead of "we" because I've never been a parent. Besides, I still bear scars from my own horrifying experience of school, which I understand is the exception rather than the rule for people on the left.)

• Private ownership of firearms: Not an issue I care much about: I think guns are dangerous, wasteful, and stupid, and I think they cause more problems than they solve, but I'm not keen on prohibiting things that people crave (e.g., drugs). That said, the right's obsession with guns is unhealthy, bordering on insanity. Their paranoia about regulation ensures that many guns will wind up in the hands of criminals, incompetents, and the mentally ill. Their "stand your ground" laws turn a reasonable argument for self-defense into a license to kill. Their embrace of assault weapons makes mass shootings much more likely. The flood of guns threatens police, and makes them more likely to shoot unnecessarily. It's only a matter of time before their rhetoric inspires right-wing militias and "lone wolves" to attack their imagined enemies. (Oh yeah, that's already happened, but could get much worse.) And they've made it hard to do any sort of research on the actual impact of guns in America, so it's hard to rationally debate even modest reforms.

It bears repeating that Scott's list consists of a bunch of buzz phrases that have been tuned to elicit emotional responses from their followers, and possibly befuddlement from anyone not in on their jargon. Most are so anodyne you might think we have more common ground than is commonly supposed. On the other hand, Scott omits a long list of things we do want to change (or even, rarely, destroy -- one I can think of is the patent system, but most Democrats haven't figured that out yet, as they look for band-aid solutions to exorbitant drug prices). I wouldn't trust him to list them anyway, as he clearly has no grasp of who we are or what we believe.

The introduction is followed by a page of bullet points meant to illustrate the dire threats facing America. They're short enough I can quote them (in bold, followed by my notes -- if missing, just assume I'm laughing, or aghast):

• Our government has created the highest debt in human history

• Americans are afraid to speak their minds for fear of being silenced and canceled by the woke elitists -- which is why folks on the right are so timid and circumspect.

• Our children are being poisoned by a false political agenda in their schools

• Inflation is a tax placed on us by politicians who waste our money -- this shows zero understanding of inflation, or of tax.

• Our inept withdrawal from Afghanistan dishonored the sacrifices of thousands of Americans and encouraged our enemies -- so we should sacrifice more, to deny our folly further?

• Our porous southern border is a national crisis

• Our cities are overrun by theft, violence, and a 30% increase in murder

• Our government is making us less energy independent and killing jobs -- and that's why we blocked the Green New Deal?

• American war fighters are being indoctrinated with left-wing woke foolishness and kicked out of the military because of the 'Big Brother' vax mandate

• Our government is eroding our work ethic by paying people not to work

• We are allowing biological males to destroy women's sports

• Our kids are taught to hate America and divide each other by skin color

• The FBI is spying on concerned parents who speak out at school board meetings

• Washington's economy is growing, America's economy is shrinking

• Lethal drugs are pouring into our country from China and our southern border

Remember, this is a list of what Republicans regard as the worst problems facing America: nothing about inequality, climate disasters, a globe-straddling military that constantly sucks us into wars and other conflicts, environmental degradation, predatory and monopolistic businesses, loss of labor rights, loss of privacy (including the right to make reproductive decisions), mass incarceration, racism (except as affects white people), inadequate health care, rising personal debt (mostly due to shortchanging education and health care), the growing assault on public health laws and workers, declining life expectancy.

But if it sounds like all Scott is doing is complaining, read on to the "11 Points": Republicans have bad ideas too (some staggeringly so). In the following, the bold is quoted from the top-line summary, followed by brief comments, usually referring to the following details.

1. Our kids will say the pledge of allegiance, salute the Flag, learn that America is a great country, and choose the school that best fits them. Public schools will be required to indoctrinate students in the core pieties of Republicans. Teachers can be fired if they fail to tow the line. Given this degree of thought control, one wonders why they'll continue to tout private schools, but they help divert resources and political support from public schools, and further their stock line that government is bad and business is good.

2. Government will never again ask American citizens to disclose their race, ethnicity, or skin color on any government forms. Two lines later they have the chutzpah to quote MLK (you know which quote), but don't dare attribute it (lest you credit an authority who had less pleasant things to say about America and race). I suppose it's a measure of progress that they're ducking the issue, but you still know what they mean.

3. The soft-on-crime days of coddling criminal behavior will end. We will re-fund and respect the police because they, not the criminals, are the good guys. They want to rub salt into the wounds caused by police abuse of power, giving police more immunity, encouraging police to clamp down on "mostly peaceful protests," and directing prosecutors to prosecute more cases (except "based on political ideology," which almost certainly means their supporters can't be charged. They're not yet running on pardons for Jan. 6 insurrectionists, but that's where they're heading.

4. We will secure our border, finish building the wall, and name it after President Donald Trump. This is their anti-immigration plank. Enforcement will be more draconian than ever, including using the military. Reform will never happen. Dissent will be quelled by "strip[ping] all federal funding from 'sanctuary cities' and prosecut[ing] any elected officials who flour our immigration laws."

5. We will grow America's economy, starve Washington's economy, and stop Socialism. Their plan to "stop Socialism" is to simply outlaw it. ("Socialism will be treated as a foreign combatant which aims to destroy our prosperity and freedom.") The Washington/America dichotomy is pure fantasy, but serves their purposes: slash government, push functions down to the states, or (better still) privatize them). This is also the place where they promise to force everyone to pay at least some income tax, regardless of how little income they make, so they will "have some skin in the game" -- a tax increase on the poor that I've seen estimated up to $1 trillion over 10 years. They also want a prohibition on debt ceiling increases ("absent a declaration of war"), to force balanced budgets on pain of destroying the federal credit -- something which has never been in doubt despite the record deficits Republicans have routinely run up.

6. We will eliminate all federal programs that can be done locally, and enact term limits for federal bureaucrats and Congress. This expands on their desire to inhibit and eviscerate federal government. They present a number of bizarre planks. The worst is probably their extension of the 12-year term limits nostrum to government civil service employees, making it more difficult to hire and retain knowledgeable workers. (They make an exception "for national security reasons," possibly a sign that they realize the CIA and the military doesn't do anything useful.) Or maybe the most bizarre is "sell off all non-essential government assets, buildings, and land, and use the proceeds to pay down our national debt." There's also an only slightly veiled threat against Social Security and Medicare, which they assume will go bankrupt. And these are people who are asking voters to entrust the everyday workings of the federal government?

7. We will protect the integrity of American Democracy and stop left-wing efforts to rig elections. After all, rigging elections is their job. Still, they're kind of cagey on how they do it.

8. We will protect, defend, and promote the American Family at all costs. This includes most of their planks on abortion ("a tragedy") but they talk much more about adoption, including promises that the crop of unwanted babies will be trafficked through "faith-based groups." They're also against porn and "deadbeat dads," and want effective federal laws against obscenity.

9. Men are men, women are women, and unborn babies are babies. They continue, "to say otherwise is to deny science," although this seems to be the only place where they claim science supports their bigotry.

10. Americans will be free to welcome God into all aspects of our lives, and we will stop all government efforts to deny our religious freedom and freedom of speech. The operative word here is "our"; yours may be treated differently. A clue on how to tell the difference is "No tax dollars will be used to pay for any diversity training or other woke indoctrination that is hostile to faith." You see here how what they like about religion isn't the "golden rule" or commandments on forgiveness and charity, but how convenient it is as a justification for bigotry and cruelty. They throw in a few planks on social media, like "all social media platforms that censor speech and cancel people will be treated like publishers and subject to legal action." Unclear how they square this with federal laws against obscenity and their plan to treat socialists as "enemy combatants."

11. We are Americans, not globalists. A set of insane foreign policy planks, starting with "A world without American leadership would be a very dark world," illustrated by the complete abdication of American leadership that follows: withdrawal from the UN, extortion against allies that "don't pay their fair share for their own defense," a "New Monroe Doctrine" which lays claim to all of the Western Hemisphere, threats against Russia and China, a promise of punishing wars followed by no help rebuilding, a vow to "end all imports from Communist China until a new regime honors basic human rights and freedoms," a return to autarky, and total supplication to Israel (ironically, the one "ally" that doesn't begin to "pay its fair share"). Also a plank about taking "climate change seriously, but not hysterically," adding "we will not adopt nutty policies that harm our economy or our jobs."

The preamble to the U.S. Constitution starts with a number of good reasons why the Founders felt that we needed a strong and honest federal government:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Given the vagaries of politics, that promise hasn't always been realized, but we have never before seen as systematic an assault on the founding principles of this nation as we see in Scott's 11 Steps. They're seeking to impose a thought control regime, from pre-school on, including the explicit banning of anything socialist or "woke." This will be enforced by police, who will not be held to account for any abuses of power or even lapses of judgment. They will undermine the ability of the government to regulate business and markets, destabilizing an economy that will shrink substantially as they eviscerate government, which will be hampered by shrinking trade, and which will likely collapse completely when the government is forced to default on its debts. The foreign policy planks are likely to plunge the US into further wars abroad, and while having a nation of morons armed to the gills may deter anyone else from invading here, it's likely to deteriorate into an even more gruesome civil war. And in all this "doom and gloom" I'm sure I'm skipping over other calamities (e.g., natural and manmade disasters caused by neglect to critical infrastructure and the hubristic ignorance over climate change). And somehow Scott thinks his plan is what it takes to "rescue America." More like finish it off.

I used to joke that Newt Gingrich's famous 1994 publicist stunt should have been called "The Contract on America." But what Gingrich aimed for was pretty placid compared to the wrath and fury Scott seeks to unleash. And it's not that the Republican Party is all that much crazier now than it was back then. It's sobering to read how deranged its leading "thinkers" were in 1994, or even in 1980 when Reagan ran, or even in 1964 when Goldwater was nominated. What's changed isn't so much the Republicans as the ability of the nation to keep chugging along as they did their worst. That's harder to do now because the wounds and scars are mounting up. Yet somehow, Republicans seem to be able to escape scrutiny, let alone blame, for their many mistakes over the last 40+ years, and having gotten away with their act so far, they see no reason to change. They claim to have exclusive claim to patriotism and religion, even though there is no lack of Democrats with equal claims. They claim to represent business, even though business invariably grows more under Democrats. They claim to represent aggrieved workers, even though most of the problems workers have were brought on by Republicans. They talk about things like deficits and energy independence, even though the numbers are strictly opposed. They claim to be "color blind," but where's the evidence for that? They lie, they cheat, and they steal, yet the monied media never holds them accountable. So what's to stop them from doubling down and doing even worse? At least back when GW Bush was president (and Karl Rove was his "brain"), they tried to disguise their sinister plots (remember Healthy Forests?).

Yet during the 40-year era from Reagan to Trump, they managed to change America a lot, in ways almost always for the worse, but in ways they wanted. Inequality is greater now than ever before. In the world, America is more loathed but also more feared than ever before. And even when they crashed the economy, it bounced back more profitable than ever for the very rich. And even when they blew trillions on wars that accomplished nothing, they kept building back their arsenal. So why are soldiers like Scott so miserable? Why do they sound so desperate? Won't they ever be satisfied? It seems: no. They're in it for the fight, so they're going to keep kicking no matter how badly they got you down. Like the scorpion, it's their nature. Reminds me of an old Mort Sahl joke. He explained that Charlton Heston once said he hopes that his children will some day live in a fascist America. Sahl added: "if he were more perceptive, he'd be a happy man."

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Saturday, February 26, 2022

[PS: Added some further thoughts on sanctions to the Bennis comment.]

A couple days ago I thought I had figured a way out of the Ukraine crisis that should satisfy all but a handful of inveterate hawks and neo-nazis. The solution was so obvious I was wondering how I could get a prestige op-ed slot to change the course of history. Of course, it's practically impossible for someone with no credentials and barely 500 Twitter followers to get an airing. But without the benefit of my idea, history shifted the opposite direction, as Russia attacked Ukraine, transforming a threat of war into a cold fact. Or did it? All sides are so preoccupied with propagating their political stances that it's hard to find credible reports of what's actually happening. Nonetheless, while even limited war leaves wounds that are more anguishing and scars that linger longer than mere threats, short of total annihilation the only way this ends is in some sort of agreement. And while war may alter "facts on the ground," the only possible viable solutions are ones that are rooted in justice, and that hasn't changed.

For what it's worth, I didn't see Putin's recognition of the breakaway Ukraine oblasts of Donetsk and Lughansk as much of a problem. All that move did was signal that revival of the 2015 Minsk II Agreement, which neither side had implemented to the other's satisfaction, was not going to work. The idea behind Minsk was troublesome in the first place: the Donbas would in theory remain part of Ukraine but "autonomous," giving Russia a potentially subversive base inside Ukraine. A much simpler and cleaner solution would be to cut Donbas and Crimea free of Ukraine, and accept their annexation by Russia. That would leave Ukraine free both of Russian claims and of a substantial Russophile political base, allowing the rest of the country to align itself with Europe -- presumably what the rest of the country wants.

Of course, one shouldn't simply hand over territory because an aggressive neighboring regime demands it. That would justify charges of appeasement, and encourage further encroachments. However, the principle should be respect for self-determination: the people in a contested area should have the right to decide which nation to align with, or independence, by a fair and internationally supervised election. Moreover, people on the losing side of any such ballot should be able to move, on relatively favorable terms. Such disputes happen often enough that this mechanism should be established as a basic principle of international law, where nations which respect these procedures are recognized as law-abiding, and those who do not should be subject to sanctions.

Russia's motivation for acceding to such procedures would include the expectation that US-imposed sanctions would be lifted. It seems very likely that such a vote in Crimea and Donbass would favor annexation by Russia, while similar votes in other parts of Ukraine would not. It should be hard for anyone to argue against such an expression of popular will. Beyond that, the US, Russia, NATO, and Ukraine need to meet and work toward reducing threats, including nuclear and cyber. The US, as by far the world's most exorbitantly armed nation, has a lot to offer in terms of threat reduction, and all people and nations would benefit from such diplomacy. Of course, such talks should extend to other sectors, including US-China, India-Pakistan, Israel-Iran, Korea, etc., but substantial progress can be made in regional agreements. One can, for example, imagine NATO freezing its membership, unwinding deployments, and reducing exercises in tandem with Russia reducing its threats.

The principle of self-determination can be applied elsewhere: Georgia also has Russian-backed breakaway provinces; the former Yugoslavia still has issues over Kosovo and the Bosnian Serb enclave; Northern Ireland might wish to join Ireland to undo the effects of Brexit. The most dangerous territorial dispute is probably China's claim to Taiwan. This would give China a non-violent way of pursuing reunification, encouraging it to make itself more appealing, rather than more threatening.

Admittedly, all along I assumed that Putin was a rational leader pursuing limited goals in the face of increasingly virulent hostility from the US, whose foreign policy is largely driven by a huge arms industry and monstrous ideological conceits -- most conspicuously a desire to indulge Israel's settler-colonial project, with its roots resonating with America's own 19th century project. While I still reject blanket statements that Putin is evil, that he's engaged in a crusade to destroy democracy, and that he has designs on restoring and extending Russia's empire of yore, I must admit that he has some glaring flaws and blind spots, which have led him to overestimate the value of force and fail to appreciate how badly his use of force makes him look.

I've been critical of the Biden administration in the run up here: their unwillingness to consider limiting NATO and pressing Ukraine on Minsk II implementation, their use of scare tactics to rally public opinion (in Ukraine, Europe, and US), especially their "intelligence" leaks predicting imminent invasion that sounded more like taunts, their use of character assassination making eventual settlement even harder to achieve. Smart negotiators leave one with an honorable exit path, but they've boxed Putin into a corner where he had no choice but to strike back or admit defeat, so they've effectively provoked his bad behavior. On the other hand, the fault is ultimately his, and I suspect it will eventually topple him from power. I don't see that as a plus -- "the devil you know" and all that -- but I also don't see it as tragic either. Putin has done terrible things as leader of Russia, which is a big part of why he's gotten into this mess. The real question is whether the US can come out of this with a generous, constructive approach to world order -- something far removed from the arrogance that developed after the Cold War, that drove us into the manifest failures of the Global War on Terror. Looking around Washington it's hard to identify anyone with the good sense to change direction.

[Note that the area held by separatists is only about half of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, although it does contain the main cities. Delineating areas for such elections is bound to remain controversial.]

The following are some Ukraine links (note dates, as events move fast and people have a hard time separating fact from fiction from pure fantasy).

[2/14] David K Shipler: How America's Broken Promises May Lead to a New Cold War: What's with the future tense? It now appears that the US never stopped its scheming around the old Cold War: it only briefly shifted tactics to appear less threatening around 1990 when Gorbachev was desperately trying to reform the Soviet Union. The US didn't orchestrate everything that followed, but did repeatedly take advantage of disconnects and mishaps to isolate and impoverish Russia, not least by promoting anti-Russian sentiment in territories that been subservient and still had reason to be friendly. Expansion of NATO was a big part of the schema, not because NATO wanted to take advantage and finish Russia off but because NATO needed an enemy to justify itself (and all those purchases of American arms), and Russia was the easiest enemy to paint. It helps here to realize that NATO is basically a scheme for the US to assume control of Europe's armies (somewhat less than formally). The only way Russia can escape the NATO vise would be to give up its army, which means its independence -- a humiliation no Russian leader could survive. On [2/25], Shipler followed up with: A Russian Tragedy, noting that "Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is also an assault on his own people." Shipler notes how a "sense of persecution echoes into Putin's current remarks." It may be impossible to imagine the world as seen through someone else's eyes, but it might help to try.

[2/15] Masha Gessen: How the Kosovo Air War Foreshadowed the Crisis in Ukraine: Sees 1999 as a turning point in post-Cold War US-Russia relations, one still remembered in Moscow as an affront, as well as a model for how one nation (or coalition, as the bombing was nominally the work of NATO) can terrorize another into submission. As the war started in earnest, Gessen followed up with: The Crushing Loss of Hope in Ukraine [2/23], and also: Russia's Last Independent TV Channel Covers the Invasion of Ukraine.

[2/21] David Remnick: Putin's Preparations for Ukraine: "The autocrat has been trying for decades to end what he sees as a prolonged period of Russian humiliation." Follows up Gessen's note on Belgrade, 1999, with a broader historical accounting. Putin's original motive may indeed have been the humiliation Russia faced following the breakup of the Soviet Union, but note how US politicians and media have striven to humiliate Putin personally, under Obama since 2009, and both for and against Trump since 2016. On [2/26] Remnick also published the more polemical Putin's Bloody Folly in Ukraine.

[2/21] Nonzero Newsletter: Why Biden didn't negotiate seriously with Putin. This is a good idea for an article, and his two major points are reasonable, but I think he messes up on some details. First is the Munich "appeasement" charge. It's been used hundreds of times since 1938 to derail negotiations, without examining what actually happened then and why, let alone what else could have been done about it. The author offers two differences between 1938 and now, which may be true but aren't the ones that matter (that Hitler was crazy but Putin is not, and that Hitler's demand was territorial, but Putin was more concerned with Ukraine's possible NATO membership). The more important difference is that in 1938 the world was dominated by global empires (which the UK, France, and effectively the US, had, with Japan gaining ground, and Germany shut out), whereas today such empires are politically and economically untenable. The consequence of that was that Hitler didn't just want the Sudetenland, he wanted a whole domino chain of additional territories. Sure, maybe Putin wants more than just the Donbas, but his appetite is necessarily limited in ways that Hitler's wasn't. Just because "appeasing" Hitler didn't work doesn't mean that a similar concession to Putin would only make him more voracious. It might not only have avoided this week's war, it would have given the world time to work on reducing the humiliation Russia has been subjected to since the end of the Soviet Union (a defeat in some minds as serious as Germany's war-and-empire loss). The counterfactual also fails: had Chamberlain held firm, would Hitler not have invaded Czechoslovakia? Or Poland? Or Russia? The UK had no troops that could defend Eastern Europe from Hitler. All they could have done was threatened to declare war, which in fact Chamberlain did after Poland. The only effect that declaration had was to move France up Hitler's checklist, force the evacuation of British forces at Dunkirk, and open Britain up to bombing. Yet, somehow the myth of Munich persists: that all it takes to stop an aggressor is a resolute show of strength. Thus the US showed its mettle by refusing to concede anything in negotiations, daring Putin to put his own strength on display. The second reason for not negotiating seriously is the "Putin can't be reasoned with" meme. Some people have psychological theories to support this, while others just rely on facile analogies (like Putin = Hitler, or Putin = Evil). But more likely is the arrogant notion that the US holds all the trump cards, so the only thing Russia can do is back down. After all, they've backed down at each NATO expansion. They've demurred at not implementing the Minsk II agreement. They've watched as the US has wooed Zelensky into becoming a puppet. And if ever they do object, just slap more sanctions on them, and they'll come begging for mercy. Diplomacy may be a lost art, but who needs it when you can get away with extortionate demands? Besides, isn't it comforting to know that when appeasement or its opposite doesn't work, it will be someone else suffering the costs?

[2/22] Patrick Cockburn: Russia-Ukraine is an Information War, So Government Intelligence Needs More Scrutiny Than Ever: More lessons from Iraq than current reporting on Ukraine, but lessons are advised -- and the full extent of deceits from all sides over Ukraine will take some time to work out. Another lesson from Iraq: Putin's Advance Into Ukraine Compares with Saddam Hussein's Invasion of Kuwait . . . a Disaster for Russia. This is a point I sympathize with, but needs to be taken with a couple caveats. First, Saddam was able to put down both popular uprisings and internal division to keep control over Iraq, and there is no reason to think that Putin is less skilled or ruthless in his exercise of power. Second, Saddam ultimately succumbed to a much greater foreign threat, but not even the US is at all ready to invade and occupy (or just blow to kingdom come) Russia. One more Cockburn piece: Russophobia Leads Us to Assume the Worst of Russians -- and Assuming They're Demonic Could be Dangerous.

[2/22] John Judis: A Dissenting View on US Policy toward Russia: He was right to worry that Ukraine "could signal the beginning of a Cold War II," but it would be more accurate to say that Cold War II brought us to the war in Ukraine, a pretty vivid reminder of why such Cold Wars should be avoided as assiduously as hot wars. Even during Cold War I, the Soviet Union sent troops into Hungary and Czechoslovakia to quash rebellion and shore up their control over their frontier provinces. What's different here is that it took Putin eight years to conclude that he had to act, making the final decision more unexpected. But after decades of painting him as an unreformed KGB agent, as a ruthless political dictator who kills his opponents, is it really so surprising that he would rise to the part?

[2/23] Ken Klippenstein: Saudi-Russia Collusion is driving up gas prices -- and worsening Ukraine crisis. Russia and Saudi Arabia are two of the world's three largest oil and gas producers, and unlike the US (the other one), their finances are strictly dependent on keeping prices high. So while the US has been cranking up anti-Russian propaganda, Russia has been ingratiating itself to the oil barons of the Persian Gulf. While Europe as fallen in line behind the US on Ukraine, support has been less forthcoming from supposed allies in the Middle East: see, [2/25] Matthew Petti: US-backed Middle East states cozy up to Russia during Ukraine invasion. Nor is it just the Saudis looking for a windfall. See Kate Aronoff: Vultures Are Circling the Ukraine Crisis.

[2/23] Eric Levitz: Which Russia-Ukraine Take Is Right for You?:] Useful primariy as a compendium of many of the dumb things people are saying as they try to fit events into their preconceived agendas. Note that none of these positions match mine, although I'm not so far from the "anti-war realist" position represented by Anatol Lieven (see articles below). He also refers to what he calls a "far left yet objectively pro-imperial oligarchy" position, and links to a 2014 piece on something called World Socialist Web Site which, well, I don't know who the hell they are, but it should be possible to be very critical of US/NATO foreign policy without supporting or defending Russia. For example, see [2/25] David Broder: Stop Pretending the Left Is on Putin's Side. Also [2/23] Branko Mercetic: With Putin's Ukraine Incursion, Hawks in Washington Got Exactly What They Wanted. Levitz has more on Trumpy-Right posturing, but also see Alex Shephard: Trump and His Putin Apologists Blame "Woke" Democrats for Invasion of Ukraine.

It wouldn't actually be hard for the right to construct a critique of how Biden's handling of Ukraine and Russia has cornered Russia into lashing out irrationally -- especially to link the conflict back to Obama's (and Hillary Clinton's) pivot against Russia, especially to the Democrats' anti-Russia scapegoating for the 2016 election and their subsequent impeachment of Trump. They could even try to argue that Trump tried to restore an element of respect and balance to the relationship, but that he was heckled at every turn by warmongering Democrats and their media allies. But that would require a modicum of critical thought, but their brain rot (and their reflexive demonology) prevents them from even approximating coherence.

[2/24] Zack Beauchamp: Putin's "Nazi" rhetoric reveals his terrifying war aims in Ukraine: As you know, Nazis are pure evil, so we can't have any of that. -- even though of late the term gets bandied about so often, over such trivial concerns as mask mandates, that it's on the verge of losing all meaning. But students of Ukraine recall that there were once real Nazis there -- at least, Ukrainian who hated Russians (and Jews) enough to collaborate with German invaders. One can't say how many Ukrainian nationalists are neo-Nazis these days, but it's an easy charge to hurl, and one invading Russians are likely to apply indiscriminately. Worse, it implies that they have designs not just on the rulers of Ukraine but on the people. Beauchamp also wrote [2/25]: Why the US won't send troops to Ukraine. Something about nuclear weapons, but one could also argue that US troops are incapable of not making any situation worse, even without resorting to WMD.

[2/24] Jen Kirby/Jonathan Guyer: Putin's invasion of Ukraine, explained. Not every point I would make, but a good general backgrounder, noting the confusion sowed by breakup of the Soviet Union, the renascent Cold War driven largely by the expansion of NATO, and the eight years of tensions following the anti-Russian coup in Ukraine and the subsequent pro-Russian revolt. Kirby also wrote [2/25]: US sanctions will squeeze Russia -- but they're unlikely to stop war in Ukraine. As many people have pointed out, Russia has considerable experience with US sanctions by now, and the new sanctions have been widely broadcast as threats, so they've had time to prepare and plan. Also, while sanctions have a "trickle down" effect hurting everyday lives, states that have largely insulated themselves from democratic control just tend to hunker down and redouble their convictions. In the great wave of anti-communist reform from 1989-91, the only regimes that didn't fall were the ones the the US had fought hot wars with and/or subjected to crippling sanctions and blockades -- something also true of non-communist states that had run afoul of US grudges, like Iraq and Iran. On the other hand, the mere threat of sanctions can unnerve countries with a large, globally-connected private sector, such as Apartheid South Africa. That's also why Israel is so agitated over the BDS movement, even though it has virtually no state support in the US and Europe, and even though it's a much more civil way to oppose the injustices of Israel's Apartheid regime than any others.

Sanctions against Russia right now are certainly preferable to more military options, but the US has a bad track record of understanding both what they are useful for and what their limitations are. One can only hope to achieve limited reforms -- which certainly do not include regime change -- with them, and they only have a chance of working if they can be repealed and lifted. But Americans tend to view them more as a way of expressing disapproval without risking military reprisal, and as such as a safe form of aggression (hence the threat rhetoric well in advance of Russia's "special operations"). And since disapproval is usually located in leaders (like Putin) and political systems, it's hard for Americans to rewind them. Hence they remain irritants, leading to future hostilities.

[2/24] Robin Wright: Putin's Historic Miscalculation May Make Him a War Criminal: Sure, as far as I'm concerned it does. I'd say pretty much every time any national leader starts shooting or bombing across borders they're committing war crimes or some sort. However, wouldn't that also apply to Saudi Arabia (bombing Yemen), the US (Somalia), and Israel (Syria), just to pick examples from the last few days I saw in a meme? But in the real world, nobody gets prosecuted for war crimes, unless they've been totally defeated, in which case the trials are regarded as mere "victor's justice." Even then, it's often more constructive to have some kind of "truth and reconciliation process" than something that simply looks like revenge. And in the case of Putin, it's possible that his own people might sack him, but until then the only way to bring this war to a close is to negotiate with him, and that is hardly helped by calling him names. This article has a bunch of examples, including the inevitable "others compared him to Hitler" -- lead example there is professional anti-Russia agitator Michael McFaul -- and an even more fanciful comparison to Stalin and Mao ("ruthless megalomaniac with a giant imperialist agenda" -- that from Nina Krushcheva, who really should know better).

[2/25] Anatol Lieven: Ukraine: What Russia wants, what the West can do: "For those who understand Moscow's establishment and view of their country's vital interests, none of this should be a surprise." Lieven has written numerous pieces on Russian/Ukraine over the last weeks and months: you can reach many of them through this link (and the "Load More" buttons). As he points out, Putin's appetite only grows with apparent victories on the ground, but prospects for occupying Ukraine beyond the Russian-speaking regions are fraught with danger, and there is little way to maintain a pliant government without enforcing troops. Hence, Ukraine is a trap for Russia, much like Afghanistan and Iraq were traps for the US, so the only way to secure gains is to negotiate for them. I've linked to this before, but Lieven's long paper from Jan. 4 remains immensely useful: Ending the Threat of War in Ukraine: A Negotiated Solution to the Donbass Conflict and the Crimean Dispute. Also see American Prospect's interview with Lieven: Worse Than a Crime; It's a Blunder.

[2/25] Phyllis Bennis: Respond to Putin's Illegal Invasion of Ukraine with Diplomacy, Not War. And remember that sanctions may be war by other means, but are acts of war nonetheless. Still, this is one instance where I don't mind them, and am even a bit hopeful that they might work. They give the US and other concerned nations a means of responding without adding to the conflagration, making matters even worse. I'm also curious to see effective they might be, given the extraordinary globalization of finance in the world. It may even be the case that Russia is especially vulnerable to sanctions on individual oligarchs, precisely because they've exported so much of their wealth. Also note [2/25] Marcus Stanley: Why sanctions on Russia are necessary.

[2/25] Ilya Matveev: The Putin Regime Is Straining Under Its Own Contradictions: Interview by Rafael Khachaturian with the editor of Openleft.ru. Not much on the war per sé, but quite a bit on the economic stagnation that has afflicted Russia since 2010 (after a decade of strong growth under Putin, following the disastrous Yeltsin 1990s). Matveev and Ilya Budraitskis also wrote: Ordinary Russians Don't Want This War.

[2/25] Jeffrey St. Clair: Roaming Charges: Insane in the Ukraine. Usual batch of scattered bullet points, many worth reading, as well as unrelenting scorn for American hypocrisy over other nations bombing and pillaging. He also cautions against reading too much into Putin's vow to "de-Nazify" Ukraine ("after all, he hasn't done much to de-Nazify Russia").

[2/26] Jason Horowitz: Putin's Aggression Leaves His Right-Wing Fan Club Squirming: A quick survey of world luminaries on the far right, folk like Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Jair Bolsonaro, and Silvio Berlusconi, although Donald Trump only appears in a picture with Putin. Reminds you that despite the infantile red-baiting Americans habitually lapse into, Putin's international appeal has always been on the right, both for his "strong man" persona and for his knee-jerk conservatism. Also that when push comes to shove, nationalists tend to drift apart, as they discover that being from different nations matters. This is, by the way, one place where comparisons to Hitler are apt. People forget how widely the right admired Hitler in the first years after seizing power, before he launched the genocidal wars that he's now remembered for.

The New York Times has a piece Maps: Tracking the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. As of 11:55 pm ET, 2/26, Russian forces are shows as pushing close to Kyiv and Kharkiv and not quite in either. Unclear whether this is due to restraint or resistance. Russia appears to have moved faster in their breakout from Crimea, but the largest city they appeared to have captured is Kherson, an Oblast capital with less than 300,000 people. (At least that's the only one I recognized. Melitopol has a population of about 150,000.) There doesn't appear to have been any advance from the breakaway areas of Luhansk and Donetsk, although Russian troops have entered north of Luhansk.

I don't have much to report on antiwar protests within Russia, but there is a Wikipedia page on the subject, with extensive footnotes, and a box there with links to other pages on the conflict and war.

Normally, I'd follow this up with scattered links of interest, but the above has taken quite enough of my time, and the other stories can wait. Needless to say, events here are changing very rapidly. For instance, initial sanctions did not include barring Russia from the SWIFT financial system, but there are now reports of this happening.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Saturday, February 12, 2022

PS: Added a further note on Ukraine, in response to a reader comment. It was written on Sunday, 2/13, and posted on Monday, to continued US hysterical warnings about imminent invasion, Ukrainian please to not panic, and Russian denials that it has any such plans.

I had no desire whatsoever to post anything today, even though my morning perusal of the Wichita Eagle has been a growing source of consternation. I started to write a Notes on Everyday Life piece yesterday on an extremely offensive op-ed from the Heritage Foundation, but stalled after two paragraphs. Today brought several more outrageous pieces, including a strong prediction that this will be the week Russia finally invades Ukraine. Reason and sanity says they won't, but the time framework -- which you may remember simply repeats what they said a week ago -- but it's clearly meant less as prophecy than as a taunt.

But what finally provoked me to start writing was a tweet: possibly the most dishonest and provocative I've ever seen, made worse (and brought to my attention) by being retweeted by a friend who should know better. It is by Michael McFaul, whose credentials I will get to in a minute. Here's what he said:

Completely unprovoked and with no justification, Putin is threatening to launch the largest invasion in Europe since 1939. Please stop treating this moment in history like some Twitter parlor game. If he invades, your snide, snarky tweets will not age well.

McFaul is an academic, a professor at Stanford and a fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Cold War think tank that gave us George Schultz and Condoleezza Rice. He spent 2012-14 as Obama's Ambassador to Russia, and is widely credited as "the architect of the Russia Reset." Which, regardless of intentions, left the relationship much more antagonistic than ever since the Soviet Union ended. In short, no one should know better than to claim that Putin is "completely unprovoked" and "with no justification" behind his threats -- not that he's ever actually said he intends to invade Ukraine.

I'm not saying I agree with Putin's complaints or think he's in any significant way justified, but it's foolish to deny that he has his reasons. It's also disingenuous to pretend that the US and its NATO/EU allies haven't done anything provocative. Admission of that much, and a willingness to acknowledge interests one can compromise on, are key to negotiating a solution, which is the only way this ever ends (with or without bloodletting, which would be far worse). As a diplomat, McFaul must realize that, but here he's clearly decided to be no more than a cheerleader and propagandist.

The "largest invasion in Europe since 1939" line is hyperbole, probably meant to pattern Putin on Hitler, while skipping over the later German invasions of Benelux, France, Norway, and the really big one in 1941, when the Germans marched through Ukraine and deep into Russia. It also skips over details like D-Day, and pertinently the Soviet interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, as well as NATO's various forays into Yugoslavia. But it's also meant to imply that any Russian move into Ukraine will be massive. That's possible, but isn't necessarily true, and hasn't happened. I'm not one to minimize threats, but it would be smarter not to precipitate them.

The rest is psych warfare over Twitter, which should be beneath him. He's already dismissing disagreements as "snide and snarky," and his "may not age well" is a rather strange curse for something as perishable as tweets. As for "parlor games," he's the one trying to play it out on Twitter. What else could he mean?

I'm also disturbed by the stat line: 33.6K likes, 6,833 retreats, 1,177 responses. Those are large numbers I almost never see. Of course, the replies include some people pointing out his arrogance and recklessness and deceit, but they also include many further variations, like: "It's quite terrifying, especially when one considers that the aggressor has vast nuclear powers" (presumably Russia, but you can read it otherwise); and "We need to have the US military use brutal force if the Russian army crosses the border. No appeasement." (Probably means "no mercy," but stuck on one of the propaganda words.)

One story that has been underreported is here: Ben Freeman: Army of Ukraine lobbyists behind unprecedented Washington blitz. Ukrainian agents, some paid by oligarch Victor Pinchuk, have been flooding Washington with money to grease the skids for various deals, mostly involving sending arms to Ukraine. And this doesn't even touch on the money being spent in Europe and in Kyiv, where Zelensky was elected on a reconciliation platform but has since turned into some kind of anti-Russia hard-liner. Of course, no Washington politician is more committed to lobbyist aims than Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), who says: I want all Russians to feel the pain. Perhaps it's deterrence to promise sanctions after a Russian invasion, but Menendez wants to do it now, in a peculiar mixture of provocation and sadism.

Some other Ukraine pieces that are helpful:

• Fred Kaplan: The Quiet Signs That Russia's Elites Are Deeply Divided on Ukraine.
• Jen Kirby/Jonathan Guyer: The Russia-Ukraine crisis, explained.
• Rajan Menon: War with Russia? "The strategic blunder of the 1990s that set the stage for today's Ukrainian crisis."
• Lawrence Wittner: What the Cuban Missile Crisis Can Teach Us About Today's Ukraine Crisis.

Since I'm here, a few more brief links:

Jacqueline Alemany: Some Trump records taken to Mar-a-Lago clearly marked as classified, including documents at 'top secret' level.

Zach Beauchamp: The Canadian trucker convoy is an unpopular uprising. In Canada, anyway, where the obvious involvement of right-wing Americans isn't winning any friends. On the other hand, it's very popular with the American right: Eric Levitz: Why conservatives celebrate the Canadian truckers. Side burn on Fox: "Few willing to recognize the network's bad faith remain unaware of it." Also: Alex Shephard: Fox News Can't Get Enough of Canada's Freedom-Loving Truckers. And then there's: Timothy Bella: Rand Paul urges truckers to disrupt Super Bowl and come to D.C.: 'I hope they clog up cities'. And dozens of them get shot in "road rage" incidents?

Garrett Epps: Donald Trump Promised He Wouldn't Nominate a Black Woman to the Supreme Court: I initially misread the title, as I wanted to note that I thought Biden's campaign promise to nominate a black woman was an unforced tactical mistake. I have no problem with him doing so, and there are clearly some much more qualified than the Federalist Society hacks Trump nominated. But why give Republicans a talking point, as opposed to their usual practice of inventing them from scratch? I'd also note that Republicans are every bit as inclined toward quota systems as Democrats, as was shown by their eagerness to appoint a black man to replace Thurgood Marshall, and a white (but not Jewish) woman to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But evidently the title was right: Trump made his own unforced tactical mistake. But as is so often the case, wasn't called for it.

Michael Hudson: America's Real Adversaries are Its European and Other Allies: "The US aim is to keep them from trading with China and Russia." I could have filed this under Ukraine, as it has a lot to do with the confrontation there. I suspect that China is already a lost cause: if forced to choose between trading with China and the US, a lot of countries would opt for China, and that number is likely to increase. Trade with Russia is much less diverse, but its concentration in oil and arms suggests why the US is agitated. Turkey is considering Russian arms. Germany wants a gas pipeline. Ukraine is a wedge for disrupting deal like that. But the more there are, the harder the bonds will be to break. As readers of Gabriel Kolko will recall, a big driver of the post-1945 Cold War was American desire to supplant British and French colonial regimes. We called them allies, but the main point was that they were under our thumb. Along these lines, see: Eve Ottenberg: Bigotry Unbound: The US Media's Anti-China Propaganda Blitz.

Fred Kaplan: Why Every President Is Terrible at Foreign Policy Now: Explains that foreign affairs have "become too chaotic for any White House to master," but I think the crux of the problem is that the US doesn't have any sense of the need to balance other people's interests, that the US is saddled with a military that is spread all around the world but isn't competent to do anything but blow shit up, and its heads are still stuck in the mindset that says they're "the indispensable nation" -- the one that should be able to tell everyone else what to do. This has produced all sorts of contradictions: e.g., the US is for democracy and human rights, but not when the violators are "allies" like Israel or Saudi Arabia; the US wants to limit climate change, but not at the expense of any profits; the list can go on practically forever.

Eric Levitz: The Democratic Party's "Mask Off" Moment. "The American people are sick of the pandemic and the public-health mandates. Unable to end the former, Democrats are now moving to roll back the latter." I'm not applauding this, but I'm not terribly bothered either. Personally, I'm one of the worst people in the world when it comes to following orders, so I generally hate mandates (though not on masks, and even less so on vaccines, which I've never had a problem with, going all the way back to Salk and Sabine). I suspect one problem with mandates is that they seem to push responsibility for a public crisis back on individuals, which is rarely effective let alone fair. The backlash against mandates is taking aim not just at coercion but at the whole concept of public health, and that's a collateral casualty I don't want to risk. One good thing about this piece is that it mentions a number of public policy changes that could help instead of taking it all out on recalcitrant people. Another problem is political vibes: Democrats are easily associated with an overweening "nanny state" -- a vast generalization on the trope of scolding you for not eating your broccoli. I don't think that's as bad as incarcerating, beating, and/or reducing people to penury, which are approaches Republicans seem inordinately fond of, but I generally don't like it either, and don't expect others to.

Liam Stack: A Jewish Teacher Criticized Israel. She Was Fired.

And here's the Heritage Foundation op-ed I was going to write about:

Kevin Roberts: It's Time to Win the War Against Big Tech: It may seem strange to see America's premier right-wing think tank, that bastion of capitalist cant, attacking America's most profitable business sector, but never underestimate right-winger's ability to get peeved over slights to their political omniscience. They liken the big tech companies to the Chinese Communist Party, repeatedly call them totalitarian, and even offer that antitrust laws should be enforced against them. But when you get down to details, the real rub seems to be:

There is Twitter and Facebook's selective enforcement of "standards" that has censored Republican members of Congress at a rate of 53-to-1 compared to Democrats, and suspended Trump supporters 21 times as often as Clinton supporters.

Those suspensions almost all have to do with disinformation about Covid and vaccines, a form of mental illness that indeed seems to afflict Republicans much more than Democrats. They go on to complain about Amazon banning a book and a video, and add that Spotify and others "have now joined their trillion-dollar industry leaders in discriminating against customers and entrepreneurs who insist on thinking for themselves. Just ask Joe Rogan." I'm not sure which is worst, the suggestion that Rogan "thinks for himself," or the ignorance of not knowing that Spotify is still paying Rogan millions to air his stupidity. Even more priceless is their characterization of their true enemies, the ones who have hoodwinked these companies through their "bullying abuses or totalitarian impulses": "the bigoted, bellicose progressivism now ascendant on the elite left." That's so wrong on so many levels you could emblazon it on a tee-shirt and wear it for a joke. I haven't heard anything so fatuous since Spiro Agnew slunk off in disgrace.

Heritage's solutions start with some reasonable antitrust planks, but don't go far enough, and wander off on tangents. Stripping the Section 230 liability protection would do nothing but allow rich people with political grudges to sue the companies, possibly creating enough of an annoyance to curtail reasonable free speech. What they don't suggest is the obvious real solution, which is to create free software and services for social media, which are prohibited from collecting and profiting from user data, and as such actually serve their users instead of nefarious entrepreneurs. For a while I thought I was the only person thinking along those lines, but such a scheme features in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel, The Ministry for the Future. Another important idea there is the shift to employee-owned companies. It seems like conservatives were right about one thing, anyway: the only solution to the world's major problems is a sharp political move to the left. Of course, they're against that. Much as they're against public health services protecting us from pandemics. When they exclaim "give me liberty or death," they aren't kidding.

PS: Regarding the McFaul tweet in the intro and my following digression, a reader wrote:

First, your 1939 point is silly. Obviously the 1939 invasions that began World War II were the first in a long series that includes those you name. Second, I regard Putin as the single most dangerous human in the world without whose support the almost equally odious but far more inept Trump would never have been elected. There do seem to be second- and third-generation leftists whose soft spot for Russia blinds them to this self-evident fact.

Perhaps my examples of post-1939 invasions were "silly," but we should understand that the only reason McFaul mentioned 1939 was to make Putin look like Hitler, implying that Putin has designs beyond Ukraine, as Hitler did beyond Poland -- and therefore, with Chamberlain's "appeasement" at Munich as the ever-present cautionary lesson, we had better stop him sooner than have no choice later.

The "completely unprovoked and with no justification" line dismisses any other possible interpretation: for instance, that Ukraine's pivot to Europe might hurt Russia's economy (Ukraine has long been a major trading partner, on terms that have tended to favor Russia), or that the increasing imposition of sanctions and trading limits aren't an even greater threat to Russia's security and welfare.

The line also absolves the US, its NATO allies, and various private sector entities engaged in Ukraine from any consideration let alone responsibility. I don't blame Ukrainians for looking to Europe for a more prosperous future, and I don't have a problem with businesses trying to exploit opportunities -- aside from arms industries with their political ties -- but one should consider how this looks to Russia, especially given past antipathy (which has proven remarkably easy for US propagandists to exploit).

I don't disagree with your assessment of Putin, although I have a more nuanced view of how to deal with him. Stalin was one of the worst actors in the 20th century, but Roosevelt managed to keep him happy enough to do most of the heavy lifting in defeating Germany. There's a Henry Stimson quote I'd have to look up about the importance of extending trust, which distinguished him as the wisest of Washington's famous "wise men." Later Americans consistently misunderstood and misjudged Russia, which led to wrecking the careers of reformers (Krushchev and Gorbachev) while, when they finally got the chance, installing a grossly incompetent (Yeltsin), resulting in a horrific decade (among other measures, life expectancy declined 10 years). Putin's main claim to fame was to have stabilized Russia after that debacle, which has included keeping even more reactionary politicians out of power. There are people in Russia who want to restore the borders of the Empire, but Putin is not one. And as right-wing authoritarians go, Putin has managed to keep a formal democracy intact, even though he has jealously guarded his power base, using tactics that I in no way condone much less approve.

What makes Putin dangerous is not his contempt for democracy, or his association with oligarchs, or his alliances with America's outcasts. It's that his rather limited indulgences in military power have thus far been relatively successful, making him all the more likely to bite off more conflict than he can handle. The most despicable thing he did was re-igniting the Chechen War, which was his ticket to power. I suspect that the charges that he was responsible for terrorist attacks on Moscow apartment buildings are credible. He certainly used those attacks as a pretext for going to war, much as McKinley, Wilson, LBJ, and GW Bush seized upon similar events as pretexts for wars they were already leaning into. (The difference being there was no reason to think the Americans had plotted the pretexts, although they often misrepresented them -- the "sinking of the Maine" was a self-inflicted accident, and the Tonkin Gulf "attacks" were nothing such.) After a year, Chechnya was demolished, with 20-0 thousand killed, but reintegrated into Russia.

Putin's interventions in Georgia and Crimea could also be counted as wins. Russia repelled Georgian efforts to re-capture the breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Osetia, but made no further efforts to occupy Georgia, leaving the status quo ante. They did annex Crimea after a local revolt seceded from Ukraine, but they didn't move to annex the breakaway Donbass region. It's not clear whether they simply took advantage of local disruptions or had a hand in orchestrating them, but their efforts in Ukraine have thus far been limited to territories with Russian ethnic majorities. One may question both their motives and scruples in these situations, but Putin's ambitions are limited and circumspect (unlike, say, Stalin's efforts to subdue Finland following the 1939 Pact with Hitler). As Hitler, Saddam Hussein and GW Bush have shown, nothing predicts future war disasters more than believing that past wars have been successful.

Meanwhile, the US and its agents and allies have been relentless with their anti-Putin propaganda, including sanctions mean to incur economic harm, both on select oligarchs and on the Russian people as a whole. This, in turn, has been helpful in expanding the US arms cartel, aka NATO.

Perhaps most disturbing to me has been the explosion of cyberwarfare, which both Russia and the US (and China and Iran and North Korea and Israel and others) seem to regard as carte blanche to fuck with each other -- the only risk seems to be more of the same, which they're already doing anyway. I don't much credit Putin for the US election of Donald Trump, which can be blamed on any number of factors (the dark money of the Koch network and the brazen lies of Fox are the most obvious, although I'm still most critical of the Democratic Party and their poor choice of candidate; what I am disgusted by is the latter's incessant whining, less because it's dishonest and evasive than because it helps the hawks drum up sentiment for more hostilities). As usual, consequences rarely match expectations. Putin got few favors from Trump, and much ill will from across the US political spectrum, which is one reason Democrats (like McFaul and Menendez) are leading the charge. Whether Putin's been chastised by the experience isn't clear, which is one reason he's so dangerous.

On the other hand, he doesn't become less dangerous by repeatedly kicking him and Russia while they're down. The US needs to fundamentally rethink how we do foreign policy. We need to find ways to work constructively with other nations -- in particular on problems like climate change, which we can't solve by partitioning the world -- which means we need to become less confrontational and more respectful.

I don't know of anyone with a soft spot for Putin. I do know people who consider him less of a threat to world peace than the leaders of the country that spends more than 50% of the world's total military expenditures, the country that has troops and 800+ bases scattered around the world, the country that has (or works for people who have) business interests everywhere, a country that does a piss poor job of taking care of its own people and has no conception of the welfare of others, a leadership that so stuck in its own head that it can't tell real threats from imaginary ones, that projects its own most rabid fears onto others and insists on its sole right to dictate terms to the world.

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