Recent Reading

Music Database

Artist Search:

Browse

Website Search

Google:

Weekend Roundup [230 - 239]

Sunday, August 23, 2015

Some scattered links this week:

• Josh Marshall: Breaking: Nuclear Stuff Really Complicated:

  But they've had an extremely difficult time making substantive arguments against the deal because according to almost all technical experts it is about as tight and comprehensive and total a surveillance regime as we've ever seen. Ever. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon under any circumstances for 10 to 20 years. Unless they choose to cheat. And if they do, the U.S. and the international community will almost certainly catch them and catch them before they're able to weaponize. But here's the problem -- that's only the opinion of people who actually know what they're talking about.

  Marshall follows this up with examples of stories based on ignorance and innuendo that supposedly show flaws in the inspections process, and cites the appropriate authorities on why they're false. I don't see any point in going down these various rat holes. The most comprehensive rebuttal I've seen is from Uzi Even, an Israeli physicist who's built nuclear weapons, who studied the deal and concluded: "the deal was written by nuclear experts and blocks every path I know to the bomb." The only exception I would take to Marshall's "nuclear stuff is complicated . . . so it's important to consult the people who know about nuclear stuff, people called scientists" is that the details of the inspection process only really matter if you assume that Iran actually was working on developing nuclear weapons, and that they secretly intend to continue on that path after sanctions are lifted, once Iran opens up to foreign investment and can trade freely with the rest of the world -- in short, starts to become a normal country.

  I think that Ayatollah Khamanei drew a sharp line in the sand with his fatwa declaring nuclear weapons contrary to Islam, so while Iran certainly wanted to show the world its mastery of nuclear technology, including the fuel cycle, and possibly thereby gain some deterrence against the long-present threat of foreign attack, they never had any intention of moving from capability to weaponization. Hence, it makes sense to me that Iran would agree to an inspections process that foreclosed any possibility of doing what they hadn't intended on doing in the first place -- especially in exchange for ending the sanctions, which were extremely offensive to Iran in the first place.

• Dan Simpson: The United States owns part of Europe's migrant problem: If anything, he understates American responsibility. Even though most of the political pressure for intervention in Libya came from Europe, the model (as well as the firepower) came from the US. Nor should one ignore US impacts further south in Africa, especially in countries like Somalia and Mali. (Ironically, Libya used to be able to absorb many migrants from war-torn Africa.)

  The biggest problem of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa at the moment is massive migration.

  It is a result of American direct and indirect war-making in recent years in those regions. Most Americans regard the problem as someone else's. We get away with it because people don't think the matter through.

  The United States is responsible for two aspects of the problem. The first is that we have massively disrupted the societies and economies of the countries that are producing the refugees through war. The second source of our responsibility is that our role in the overthrow of the government in Libya turned that country into a rat's nest of chaos and non-government. The result is that Libya has come to serve as the jumping-off point for the boatloads of African and other refugees jamming their way into Southern Europe and even trying to cross the English Channel.

  A quick glance at the countries of origin of the refugees make America's role clear. They are Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians, nationals of countries where we have tried to determine what government should be in power, including by raining countless bombs and drone-mounted missiles down on them. In each of these countries, America has destroyed order and the economy, making life unbearable and employment unobtainable. Put another way, we have turned Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria into countries that people are desperate to escape, no longer able to imagine their lives there given the dangerous, lawless cauldrons the countries have become.

  But I also blame Europe for not having the smarts and guts to stand up to the American neocons' misguided and mistaken efforts to transform the world through fire. (GW Bush: "Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things." Quoted in Ron Suskind: The One Percent Doctrine.)

• Stephen M Walt: So Wrong for So Long: Why neoconservatives are never right: Well, some of the reasons anyway:

  Getting Iraq wrong wasn't just an unfortunate miscalculation, it happened because [the neocons'] theories of world politics were dubious and their understanding of how the world works was goofy. [ . . . ]

  For starters, neoconservatives think balance-of-power politics doesn't really work in international affairs and that states are strongly inclined to "bandwagon" instead. In other words, they think weaker states are easy to bully and never stand up to powerful adversaries. Their faulty logic follows that other states will do whatever Washington dictates provided we demonstrate how strong and tough we are. This belief led them to conclude that toppling Saddam would send a powerful message and cause other states in the Middle East to kowtow to us. If we kept up the pressure, our vast military power would quickly transform the region into a sea of docile pro-American democracies. [ . . . ]

  Today, of course, opposition to the Iran deal reflects a similar belief that forceful resolve would enable Washington to dictate whatever terms it wants. As I've written before, this idea is the myth of a "better deal." Because neocons assume states are attracted to strength and easy to intimidate, they think rejecting the deal, ratcheting up sanctions, and threatening war will cause Iran's government to finally cave in and dismantle its entire enrichment program. On the contrary, walking away from the deal will stiffen Iran's resolve, strengthen its hard-liners, increase its interest in perhaps actually acquiring a nuclear weapon someday, and cause the other members of the P5+1 to part company with the United States. [ . . . ]

  Fourth, as befits a group of armchair ideologues whose primary goal has been winning power inside the Beltway, neoconservatives are often surprisingly ignorant about the actual conditions of the countries whose politics and society they want to transform. Hardly any neoconservatives knew very much about Iraq before the United States invaded -- if they had, they might have reconsidered the whole scheme -- and their characterizations of Iran today consist of scary caricatures bearing little resemblance to Iran's complicated political and social reality. In addition to flawed theories, in short, the neoconservative worldview also depends on an inaccurate reading of the facts on the ground.

  Walt lists a couple more reasons neocons are always wrong, and misses or only glances on a few more. One is that they're extremely squeamish about dealing with people they perceive as enemies -- i.e., people who don't show the proper submissive repose to the righteousness of their power. Neocons not only can't accept the idea that the US might come to an agreement with Iran; they can't stand that the US would even meet with Iranians in person. In some ways, their insistence on only dealing with the world by projecting force derives from insecurities about personal (they would say moral) hygiene.

  Walt correctly notes that "the neoconservatives' prescriptions for US foreign policy are perennially distorted by a strong attachment to Israel," but doesn't add that the obvious motive behind that attachment is envy: they want the US to confront the whole world with the same arrogance and contempt Israel projects in its neighborhood. One can make a pretty good argument that such policies don't even benefit Israel let alone are scalable worldwide.

  Despite the terminology, there is nothing especially new about neocon-ism. The core idea first emerged following the development of nuclear bombs and the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: that's when the US became the world's sole superpower, a moment of omnipotence the neocons have been yearning to regain ever since (hence all the "end of history" brouhaha after the collapse of the Soviet Union). Aside from the early Bush-Cheney administration, they've rarely been able to dictate American policy, but the delusions of power their ideas spring from has been a driving force behind America's post-WWII war machine -- indeed, they've spun up an entire ideology (calcified into a secular religion) that nearly all American politicians are swamped by. This, despite the fact that every war started with the assumption that American power will prevail, and every fiasco with the notion that nothing unmanageably bad could occur.

  But even before the bomb, neocon-ism rested on a conservative doctrine that goes back millennia: the master-slave relationship, the eternal backbone of American conservatism, and of empires everywhere. Conservatism has always depended on two assumptions so deep you can only accept or reject them: one is that some people are (usually innately) superior to others and therefore should be privileged to rule; the other is that contrary to the first can (meaning should) ever change over time. But critics as far back as Hegel understood that the relationship wasn't timeless: that over time the master engenders opposition that ultimately undoes slavery. By the same measure, the projection of American power creates resistance, something no amount of belief in enduring superiority can overcome. Jonathan Schell called this "the unconquerable world."

• More Iran links:

  • David Bromwich: Playing the Long Game on Iran: Neoconservatives:

    War and the prospect of war have been the source of their undeniable importance. If the Iran nuclear deal attains legitimacy, much of their power will slip through their fingers. The imperialist idealism that drives their ventures from day to day will be cheated of the enemy it cannot live without.

  • Reese Ehrlich: Iran's Jewish community gets behind nuclear deal with the US

  • Akbar Ganji/Richard Falk: Why Congress Must Support the Nuclear Agreement With Iran

  • JJ Goldberg: The Game-Changing Iran Report That Bibi Fears

  • Sayed Hossein Mousavian: If Congress Rejects the Iran Deal, It Would Be a Historic Blunder

Also, a few links for further study:

• Eric Foner: Struggle and Progress: An wide-ranging interview with one of the most important historians working today.

• Reynard Loki: Environmentalists Blast Obama's Decision to Let Shell Drill in Arctic: I recall something about Republican presidential platforms always ticking off the same five or so bullet items, one of which was energy self-sufficiency for the US, generic blather for loosening up environmental regulations and importing a lot more Canadian crude (which in the tar sands tundra is very crude indeed), possibly with something about "clean coal" (the oxymoron to end all oxymorons). I don't expect Obama will ever get any credit for it, but during the time Obama has been president that plank has largely been realized. For one thing, by delaying the Keystone Pipeline he hasn't solved the problem with Canadian imports. Nor has he done it with coal, although you have to give wind and solar some credit there. Actually, it's mostly been North Dakota's Bakken field plus a lot of fracking -- which he hasn't raised a finger to slow down despite environmental concerns. But the one big thing Obama has done to promote the oil industry has been to open up a lot more offshore drilling -- this article reports on Shell's project to drill in the Arctic Ocean. Still, I doubt Obama's offshore license has had much effect yet: just when he was opening up the Atlantic, BP blew a major spill in the Gulf of Mexico and that gummed up the works.

• Aman Sethi: At the Mercy of the Water Mafia: On the edges of Delhi.

  In conversations, Sanghwan is annoyed by concerns about the sustainability of his small empire, about the short-term nature of his profits compared with his work's potentially devastating long-term implications. Such questions, he says, demonize the poor and water providers like him, while letting the rich and the government off the hook. He claims he would welcome efforts to lay a proper pipe network in his neighborhood, but given the government's track record, he isn't holding his breath.

• Chris Sullentrop: The Kansas Experiment: Long article by the nephew of Kansas Republican legislator Gene Sullentrop. Kinship opened a few doors, not that the lowdown on Brownback's dog or his preferred basketball strategies humanizes him, much less renders his obsessions sensible. Still, the nephew provides a fair accounting of the session's fiscal crisis. He does drop in the line about how "the state is a petri dish for movement conservatism, a window into how the national Republican Party might govern if opposition vanished." But he doesn't even mention 80% of the vile insanity that was passed by the legislature in addition to the education cuts and regressive tax increases.

• Steve Weintz: Worst Idea Ever: Dropping Nuclear Bombs During the Vietnam War: As I recall, there was occasional loose talk all during the long American War in Vietnam about using nuclear weapons. At the time the US was putting a lot of effort into reducing the size of nuclear weapons to try to come up with something that could be used for "tactical" strikes as opposed to obliterating entire cities. They even managed to deploy an Atomic Bazooka (1961-68) -- a portable launcher that could shoot a 10-20 kiloton (i.e., Hiroshima/Nagasaki-sized) bomb about three miles. Weintz reports on some recently declassified documents, which show that the possible use of "tactical nukes" in Vietnam was seriously studied, and wasn't rejected for the obvious moral and political reasons -- the Mandarins doing the studying didn't want to look "soft" -- but because they couldn't figure out a way to make them work effectively.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, August 16, 2015

I just saw a tweet by Ben Norton (author of an article linked to below). It consists of two lists: "places bombed by the US" and "places where ISIS is growing." The lists are identical: "Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan." The only chance the US has of breaking that identity would be for the US to bomb more non-Muslim countries.

Some scattered links this week:

• William D Cohan: How Wall Street's Bankers Stayed Out of Jail: "After the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, more than 1,000 bankers were jailed." However, after the much larger 2008 financial crisis? One, even though plenty of wrongdoing was uncovered:

  Since 2009, 49 financial institutions have paid various government entities and private plaintiffs nearly $190 billion in fines and settlements, according to an analysis by the investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. That may seem like a big number, but the money has come from shareholders, not individual bankers. (Settlements were levied on corporations, not specific employees, and paid out as corporate expenses -- in some cases, tax-deductible ones.) In early 2014, just weeks after Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, settled out of court with the Justice Department, the bank's board of directors gave him a 74 percent raise, bringing his salary to $20 million.

  The more meaningful number is how many Wall Street executives have gone to jail for playing a part in the crisis. That number is one. (Kareem Serageldin, a senior trader at Credit Suisse, is serving a 30-month sentence for inflating the value of mortgage bonds in his trading portfolio, allowing them to appear more valuable than they really were.)

  The authors quote several sources arguing that, despite all those fines paid by companies, "the evidence does not show clear misconduct by individuals." What this suggests to me is that we as a country (at least our prosecutors, who are usually pretty vigilant about such things) have radically changed our view of individual responsibility for ethical behavior: either we consider things ethical now that were deemed unethical two decades ago (especially in pursuit of corporate and/or personal profits), or we think that individuals (extending up to corporate CEOs) no longer have sufficient autonomy to be considered responsible for their own actions. I suppose there is a third possibility (or factor), which is that the political system has become so corrupt that it's become all but unthinkable to prosecute the donor class. But no matter how you slice this, it speaks volumes about the moral rot that goes hand-in-hand with a world of increasing inequality and decreasing democracy.

• Conor Friedersdorf: A Letter to Donald Trump Supporters With One Big Question:

  Dear Donald Trump Supporters:

  You're fed up. This much I understand. You're fed up with politicians who say one thing on the campaign trail, like that they're going to stop illegal immigration, and then do another in Washington; you're fed up with insiders who rig the system for their benefit at your expense; and you're fed up with coastal media elites and their insular subculture. [ . . . ]

  What I don't understand is why you think a President Trump would treat us better. If you elect the billionaire, what makes you think that he will use whatever talents that he possesses to address your grievances rather than to benefit himself? After all, he's a man who has zealously pursued his self-interest all his life. [ . . . ]

  Right now, Trump is telling you all the things you want to hear.

  There was a time when his two ex-wives and the many former business partners he has since sued felt the same way. Those relationships didn't work out very well for them.

  Why do you think that you'll fare better?

  "Trump brags about making a lot of money in Atlantic City, then ditching the place as it slid into misery," Michael Brendan Dougherty observed in The Week. "Believing Trump will bring America back is as foolish as believing he would bring Atlantic City back. Unlike Rubio and Bush, he's a free man -- and perfectly willing to walk away and say it was your fault, but that he enjoyed the ride anyway."

  Trump is a billionaire, you say, so he won't need to pander to special interests -- unlike other Republicans, he can ignore the business lobby and stop illegal immigration.

  But that makes no sense. Granted, Trump has all the money he'll ever need, yet that's been true for decades, and he's continued to expend a lot of effort to earn still more money. Like other men with significant, diversified business holdings -- some of them hotels and golf courses, no less! -- a large supply of cheap immigrant labor is in his personal financial interests. If the business elite is for illegal immigration, he is the business elite! And he'll face the exact same political incentives as every other elected Republican from George W. Bush to John McCain. [ . . . ]

  Instead you're just taking him on faith. Why? Does Trump strike you as a person who is unusually inclined to keep his word? Someone who never flip-flops? Come on.

  On the other hand, there's already a Trump Fulfills Campaign Promise article out -- clearly, the bar's so low it doesn't take much.

  Also see Stanley Aronowitz: The Real Reason Donald Trump Embarrasses the GOP:

  At the debate and numerous public appearances, Trump has matter-of-factly stated that he is an equal opportunity donor to Republican and Democratic candidates -- not for the purpose of civic duty or altruism, but in exchange for influence. He has openly deemed his gifts to politicians a business expense. He went so far as to declare, before 24 million viewers at the debate, that he uses his donations to obtain favors from legislators who are all too eager to bow to his requests. He not-so-subtly implies that politicians are bought and paid for by him and other financial moguls. And he expects a fair return for those dollars, measured in policy rewards like zoning adjustments, subsidies for building projects and long-term tax relief.

  In short, he lets the cat out of the bag about something the political system has spent more than a century to disguise.

• Fred Kaplan: Shallow Jeb: Jeb Brush tried to burnish his foreign policy cred with a 40-minute speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Kaplan describes it as "a hodgepodge of revisionist history, shallow analysis, and vague prescriptions." The main revisionist claim is the assertion that the Petraeus "surge" in Iraq was a big success which gave the US a "hard-won victory," which was in turn squandered by Obama's withdrawal of US forces from Iraq in 2011. Every word in that claim is false, but it has already become gospel among Republican presidential aspirants. From such false premises, all sorts of insane inferences can be made.

  Later in Tuesday night's speech, Bush said that the Iraq surge can serve as a model for how "Islamic moderates can be pulled away from extremist forces" in Syria. I doubt that he was proposing to send 100,000 U.S. troops to Syria, as his brother did in Iraq -- an idea that would appeal to almost no American generals or voters. But what he was proposing isn't at all clear. [ . . . ]

  He did say, "In all of this," referring to the fight against jihadists, "the United States must engage with friends and allies, and lead again in that vital region." Which friends and allies does he mean? The Saudis try to rope us into a savage, fruitless war against the Houthi rebels, whom it portrays as Iranian proxies. The Turks lend us an air base to step up strikes against ISIS but then use the moment of goodwill as cover to attack their bigger enemy, the Kurds, who rank as the jihadists' most potent foe (and to whom Bush promised in his speech to send heavy armaments). ISIS derives much of its strength from the deep disunity of its natural foes, some of whom are our allies, some of whom aren't. "Action, coordination and American leadership," the solutions Bush calls for, are more complex than he -- and many other Republicans who have never held national office -- seems to recognize.

  He criticized Obama for drawing a "red line" against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons, then failing to follow through. Many of Obama's defenders have filed the same complaint. But what would Bush do? "Under my strategy," he said, "the aim would be to draw the [Syrian] moderates together and back them up as one force . . . not just in taking the fight to the enemy but in helping them to form a stable moderate government once ISIS is defeated and Assad is gone." How would he do this? By replicating his brother's surge in Iraq. After all, he added with blithe confidence, "the strategic elements in both cases [Iraq circa 2007 and Syria today] are the same" -- thus demonstrating that he and his speechwriters have no understanding of the tangled politics in Syria or of what made the Iraqi surge work to the extent that it did.

  The most malleable concept here is "Islamic moderates" -- the proper definition seems to be "Muslims who are willing to follow the US lead," which actually says less about them than about us. Following the Surge -- which if you recall at the time escalated the violence without any tangible results -- a number Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq made a deal with the US where in exchange for money and protection from Shiite militias and the central Iraqi government they turned against Al-Qaeda in Iraq, thereby becoming "Islamic moderates." When the US left, the deal broke down, and the same tribal leaders discovered they would be better off siding with ISIS than with the Maliki government. Clearly, for them becoming "radicals" or "moderates" is mere tactics.

  I don't think I've mentioned this before, but for some insight into where Bush's money comes from, see Nomi Prins: All In: The Bush Family Goes for Number Three (With the Help of Its Bankers). You don't think he's running for president on brains or looks, now do you?

• Matt Riedl: Kris Kobach comments on how GOP has done on six key issues: Kansas' Secretary of State is probably more wired into ALEC and its push to enact right-wing legislation at the state level, so it's interesting both what he considers the critical issues and how he measures progress. The six: "guns, abortion, elections, illegal immigration, taxation and spending, and courts." He likes what Kansas has done on the first three: "constitutional carry" means criminals as well as citizens don't have to get permits or have any training to carry guns; late-term abortions have been banished in Kansas, though he doesn't mention that the trick there was extralegal: the murder of Dr. George Tiller; and Kobach himself has been empowered to prosecute his imaginary "election fraud" cases. He's had more trouble pushing his anti-immigrant laws (hint: there are business interests in the state that profit from cheap labor). On taxes, he touts the Brownback cuts that have brought disaster, but bemoans this year's regressive tax increase that was needed to keep the state solvent. As for the courts, he complains about "no accountability" and says "we need to have a court that's not activist in striking things down." The main complaint Republicans have with the Kansas Supreme Court is that the Court has ruled that the State Constitution requires adequate funding of local schools, and that messes with their tax/spending cut agenda. But then Kobach has such a peculiar notion of constitutionality that he's constantly running into trouble with the courts.

• Some Iran Deal links:

  • Abbas Milani/Michael McFaul: What the Iran-Deal Debate Is Like in Iran: Long story short, most Iranians -- especially the sort of people who westerners hope will moderate the Revolution -- support the deal, while many of those who are heavily invested in Iran's opposition to the west are opposed to the deal (much like their hawkish counterparts in the US and Israel -- indeed the rationales and tactics are almost equivalent):

    Conservative opponents of the deal tend to emphasize its near-term negative security consequences. They point out that the agreement will roll back Iran's nuclear program, which was intended to deter an American or Israeli attack, and thereby increase Iran's vulnerability. They have denounced the system for inspecting Iranian nuclear facilities as an intelligence bonanza for the CIA. And they have issued blistering attacks on the incompetence of Iran's negotiating team, claiming that negotiators caved on many key issues and were outmaneuvered by more clever and sinister American diplomats.

    And yet such antagonism appears to be about more than the agreement's clauses and annexes. The deal's hardline adversaries also seem concerned about the same longer-term consequences that the moderates embrace. For instance, IRGC leaders must worry that a lifting of sanctions will undermine their business arrangements for contraband trade. In a not-too-discreet reference to these concerns, Rouhani declared them to be "peddlers of sanctions," adding that "they are angry at the agreement" while the people of Iran pay the price for their profiteering. Over time, more exposure to the wider world of commerce is likely to diminish if not destroy the IRGC's lucrative no-bid government contracts for infrastructure and construction projects.

    Perhaps more threatening for this coalition is the loss of America as a scapegoat for all domestic problems. The conservatives need an external enemy to excuse their corrupt, inefficient, and repressive rule. Some have even suggested that the United States is trying to do to Iran what it did to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev foolishly trusted U.S. President Ronald Reagan and sought closer ties with the West. The result was the collapse of the Soviet regime.

    Obviously, some conservatives like Ayatollah Khamanei are not too worried about the deal bringing down the political system, but he probably has a broader view of the system than the Revolutionary Guards do. Conversely, Reagan's opening to Gorbachev was opposed by nearly all of Reagan's cold war advisers, who were convinced to the end that the Evil Empire's reform efforts were just a feint to get the US to lower its guard. Deal critics who keep bringing up Iranian mobs chanting "death to America" are every bit as far estranged from reality.

  • Michael R Gordon: Head of Group Opposing Iran Accord Quits Post, Saying He Backs Deal: The group, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) was founded by Gary Samore several years ago to agitate for harsh sanctions against Iran over its suspected (alleged) nuclear program. However, Samore concluded that the deal does in fact address his concerns, so he's come out in favor of it, saying, "I think President Obama's strategy succeeded. He has created economic leverage and traded it away for Iranian nuclear concessions." UANI, in turn, rejected the deal, nudged him out, and replaced him with a more politically dependable flack, Joe Lieberman (you remember: McCain's favorite "useful idiot"). Samore, by the way, is still very anti-Iran.

    He is also not convinced that Iran will continue to adhere to the accord once economic sanctions are lifted. Even so, he argues, the accord will put the United States in a stronger position to respond than a congressional rejection would.

    "We will have bought a couple of years, and if Iran cheats or reneges we will be in an even better position to double down on sanctions or, if necessary, use military force," Mr. Samore said. "If I knew for certain that in five years they would cheat or renege, I'd still take the deal."

    He'd take the deal because he seems to be one of the few people who was actually worried about Iran's "nuclear program" -- as opposed to the many who have cynically manufactured the spectre of an Iranian bomb to show off their own toughness. Had those people actually been worried, they would have been hard pressed to favor a strategy -- continued sanctions and threats of war -- that would only push Iran's efforts further underground over one that fully discloses whatever Iran is doing.

  • Richard Silverstein: Israeli Ex-Security Chiefs Endorse Iran Nuclear Deal: Thirty-six of them, although some appear more interested in the bonanza of military hardware Obama is offering Israel. The fact is that Israeli opinion at all levels is very divided on the deal, so you'd think that Americans -- especially those whose primary loyalty is to Israel -- would be equally divided. But Netanyahu has made a big deal out of rejecting the deal -- and I suspect this is for pure political reasons, as it benefits him to show his right-wing supporters that he can stand up to America and even kick her around a little -- and AIPAC is less an Israeli front than the Likud's Washington PAC.

  • Mel Levine: On Iran, a regrettable rush to judgment: A former congressman (D-CA 1983-93) and AIPAC board member comes out in favor of the Iran deal, arguing that "my friends in AIPAC and some of my friends in Israel have made a regrettable rush to judgment in immediately opposing the Iran agreement and doing so in ways likely to cause long-term harm to Israel, especially in terms of Israel's vital need for bipartisan support in the United States."

  • Daniel Levy: Israel's Iran Deal Enthusiasts: An authoritative summary of Israeli reaction to the Iran Deal, which roughly breaks down: against are the politicians and pundits, especially Netanyahu; in favor are the security and science czars (Uzi Even, a physics professor and former senior scientist at the Dimona nuclear reactor, concluded "the deal was written by nuclear experts and blocks every path I know to the bomb"). Levy goes on to explain Israel's strategly:

    Israel led the push to isolate Iran via focusing on its nuclear program and the nonproliferation imperative. That took some chutzpah, given that Israel sits on the Middle East's only nuclear weapons stockpile -- but before milk and honey, Israel has always been a land flowing with chutzpah. Israel assumed that either its own Washington lobby could indefinitely hold U.S. negotiators to an unrealistically maximalist negotiating position or that Iran would never offer a pragmatic compromise or both. For as long as the deadlock held, Iran would remain at least a permanently sanctioned pariah; regime change was the preferred alternative, successful diplomacy was never the goal.

    The bet paid off pretty well for the better part of two decades. Despite its size and lack of natural regional allies, Israel has enjoyed a degree of unchallenged regional hegemony, freedom of military action, and diplomatic cover that it is understandably reluctant to concede or even recalibrate. Israel's status has been underwritten by U.S. preeminence in the region, which offered other countries there a binary choice: Either side with the United States and, by extension, go easy on Israel or stand against it and be isolated or worse (see: Iraq).

  • Ben Norton: AIPAC spending estimated $40 million to oppose Iran Deal:

    In the first half of 2015, AIPAC spent approximately $1.7 million lobbying Congress to oppose the deal. Yet this is mere chump change compared to what it has since funneled into advertisements and lobbying.

    AIPAC created a new tax-exempt lobbying group in July called Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran. The sole purpose of the organization is to oppose the Iran deal -- which, in spite of the name of the group, will in fact prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons (weapons the Iranian government denies ever even seeking in the first place, and for which there is not a shred of evidence) in return for an end to Western sanctions on the country.

    Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran is spending up to $40 million to place anti-Iran deal ads in 35 states, according to the Times, up from a previous estimate of $20 million. This figure may increase even more as the 60-day period in which Congress can review the deal draws to a close.

    Part of AIPAC's lobbying effort involves flying members of Congress to Israel for some intensive Hasbara; for instance, see: AIPAC taking all but 3 freshmen Congresspeople to Israel in effort to sabotage Iran deal.

  • Gareth Porter: Don't Expect Much Change in Post-Vienna US Middle East Policy: That's basically because Obama is pushing the deal not as a diplomatic breakthrough which buries past sins and opens up a future of US-Iranian cooperation but as a narrow arrangement which reliably contains Iran's malevolent nuclear ambitions while changing nothing else. (Porter previously complained about this in Obama's Line on the Iran Nuclear Deal: A Second False Narrative. You can get a sense of Porter's take on Iran's nuclear program from his book title, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.)

    There are obviously some differences between the administration and its pro-Israel and Saudi critics regarding Iran's regional role. Otherwise Obama would not even acknowledge the possibility of discussions with Iran in the future. But it would be a mistake to ignore the degree to which Obama's weakness in the face of the lobby's arguments about the regional dimension of the agreement reflects its acceptance of the basic premises of those arguments -- just as it has accepted the lobby's premise that Iran has been trying obtain nuclear weapons.

    Obama and senior administration officials have repeated many times in the past two years the mantra that Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism and that its regional role is destabilizing. Key US national security institutions also continue to reinforce that hoary political line on Iran as well. The well-worn habits of mind of senior officials and institutional interest will certainly continue to impose severe limits on the administration's diplomatic flexibility with regard to both Iran and Saudi Arabia through the end of the Obama administration.

    As you should recall, Netanyahu has been harping about the Iranian threat since day one of the Obama administration. Most likely his real concern was to deflect any desire Obama might have to pressure Israel into a settlement with the Palestinians, but Obama seems to have taken Netanyahu's talk at face value. He then came up with a real solution to the hypothetical problem -- unlike Netanyahu's unilateral bombing fantasies, which would only have made matters worse -- so I suppose it makes sense that he's talking like his real solution addresses a real problem, but it also feeds the opposition's rhetoric. On the other hand, it's hard to believe that any of the deal's opponents ever thought Iran was serious about developing nuclear weapons -- otherwise, they'd embrace the real solution. (Indeed, there are a few such people.) Still, the real payoff of an Iran deal would come if the US and Iran could work together on diplomatic solutions, especially in Syria and Iraq (where both nations oppose ISIS).

• Other Middle East links:

  • Omar Ashour: Rabaa's massacre: The political impact: After Egypt's military coup removed democratically elected president Mohammed Morsi and his government, the regime cracked down violently on protesters, killing at least 600 in one 10 hour stretch in 2013. The author compares this to other notorious government "crimes against humanity."

  • Michael Young: Talks suggest the endgame is afoot in Syrian crisis: Reports on Russian efforts to negotiate some form of resolution on Syria with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the US, aimed at a compromise between the old Syrian regime (with or without Assad) and whatever qualifies as "moderate" opposition -- supposedly Jaysh Al Fatah is involved ("including the Al Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat Al Nusra") but ISIS/ISIL is out. This occurs in the wake of a series of government defeats, weakening Assad's position. It also seems like a sane turn, unlike the US's schizo attacks both on Assad and ISIS, or Turkey's similar attacks both on ISIS and the Kurds.

  • Nancy LeTourneau: "The Obama Method" and Potential Realignment in the Middle East: The interesting news here is that Iran will hold talks with the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) on Syria and Yemen. Iran supports Assad in Syria (GCC members have helped finance oppositions groups, including Salafist Jihadis) and has backed the Houthis in Yemen (Saudi Arabia is bombing the Houthis there), so this is a case where both sides should talk because the shooting has been intolerable. Such talks aren't tied to the US-Iran Deal, but the Deal makes them much more likely to happen, even to be productive.

    Also see the author's President Obama on Finding Openings. Mostly quotes from journalists Obama recently engaged, he talked about how Nixon didn't know how his overture to China might work out at the time, but he saw that as an example of the sort of "openings" he looked to create. LeTourneau adds:

    That is an incredibly wise grasp of how history works -- even for the most powerful person on the planet. It is a striking rebuke of much that we hear from would-be Republican leaders these days who presume that a President of the United States can control world events via military dominance. For those with some knowledge of history, it is especially important given that the discussion is taking place about a country where we tried that back in 1953 and paid the price for it via the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

    She also quotes the rarely lucid Tom Friedman:

    What struck me most was what I'd call an "Obama doctrine" embedded in the president's remarks. It emerged when I asked if there was a common denominator to his decisions to break free from longstanding United States policies isolating Burma, Cuba and now Iran. Obama said his view was that "engagement," combined with meeting core strategic needs, could serve American interests vis-a-vis these three countries far better than endless sanctions and isolation. He added that America, with its overwhelming power, needs to have the self-confidence to take some calculated risks to open important new possibilities -- like trying to forge a diplomatic deal with Iran that, while permitting it to keep some of its nuclear infrastructure, forestalls its ability to build a nuclear bomb for at least a decade, if not longer.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Marshall Ganz: Organizing for Democratic Renewal: Essay written in 2007 (h/t Nancy LeTourneau: Balancing Private Wealth With Public Voice). Ganz starts off by quoting Sidney Verba ("Democracy is based on the promise that equality of voice can balance inequality of resources.") and Alexis de Tocqueville ("In democratic countries, knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others." I think his key insight is:

  But only by joining with others could we come to appreciate the extent to which our fates are linked, gain an understanding of our common interests, and make claims on the political power we needed to act on those interests.

  The notion of a public interest, which in pre-Bowling Alone days was taken for granted, has taken a beating over the last 30-40 years, reducing American democracy into a raw contest between private interests. Still, the public even now gets some lip service, as one politician after another asserts that the private profits they seek will somehow be good for everyone. (My favorite example remains Bush's giveaway to the timber industry, happily named the Healthy Forests Initiative.)

• Christina Larson: The End of Hunting? Essay from 2006, arguing that "only progressive government can save a great American pastime." Good description of Kansas' open access program. (I'm not aware of the state's recent ultra-right turn endangering this program, but it has resulted in steep rises for hunting and fishing licenses. And the Republicans' lust to pre-emptively exterminate the lesser prairie chicken -- lest the species' endangered status cramps local oil interests -- is nothing short of shameful.)

• Rick Perlstein: The New Holy Grail of GOP Primaries: Piece touches on several Republican presidential candidates, their benefactors, and the idiot press. Here's just one story, featuring Ohio Governor John Kasich:

  "Randy Kendrick, a major contributor and the wife of Ken Kendrick, the owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, rose to say she disagreed with Kasich's decision to expand Medicaid coverage, and questioned why he'd said it was 'what God wanted.'" Kasich's "fiery" response: "I don't know about you, lady. But when I get to the pearly gates, I'm going to have to answer what I've done for the poor."

  Other years, before other audiences, such public piety might have sounded banal. This year, it's enough to kill a candidacy:

  "About 20 audience members walked out of the room, and two governors also on the panel, Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, told Kasich they disagreed with him. The Ohio governor has not been invited back to a Koch seminar."

  Which is, of course, astonishing. But even more astonishing was the lesson the Politico drew from it -- one, naturally, about personalities: "Kasich's temper has made it harder to endear himself to the GOP's wealth benefactors." His temper. Not their temper. Not, say, "Kasich's refusal to kowtow before the petulant whims of a couple of dozen greedy nonentities who despise the Gospel of Jesus Christ has foreclosed his access to the backroom cabals without which a Republican presidential candidacy is inconceivable."

  To see how consequential the handing over of this kind of power to nonentities like these is, consider the candidates' liabilities with another constituency once considered relevant in presidential campaigns: voters. Chris Christie's home state approval rating, alongside his opening of a nearly billion-dollar hole in New Jersey's budget, is 35 percent. While Christie has only flirted with federal law enforcement, Rick Perry has been indicted. Scott Walker's approval rating among the people who know him best (besides David Koch) is 41 percent, and only 40 percent of Wisconsinites believe the state is heading in the right direction. Bobby Jindal's latest approval rating in the Pelican State is 27 percent. Senator Lindsey Graham announced his presidency by all but promising he'd take the country to war; Jeb Bush by telling Americans they need to work more. Rick Santorum not so long ago made political history: he lost his Senate seat by 19 points, an unprecedented feat for a two-term incumbent.

• Richard Silverstein: Transforming the US into Clone of Israeli National Security State: Article lists many points where techniques and technologies Israel developed for controlling the Palestinians have been promoted and often applied by the US, both in operations abroad (e.g., targeted assassinations) and at home (often by local police departments). One of the most alarming things about Israel is how eagerly many Americans follow its model for dealing with the world.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

I got an early start this week, writing some of this on Friday, then deciding that was close enough to save up for Sunday. This week's choice links:

• David Atkins: The GOP Isn't Choosing a President. They're Choosing a Rebel Leader. Donald Trump dominated the news cycle last week, not only by dominating polls among Republican presidential contenders but by staying there after kneecapping John McCain, a veritable saint among the Beltway punditocracy. I've looked at a lot of pieces on why this is (or, mostly, why it's awful), but few of them are convincing (or even sensible). For one thing, the widespread assumption that Trump is a fringe candidate is probably untrue. There's very little difference ideological between the declared or likely Republican candidates, and only a handful of issues where there is any practical disagreement. Where exactly Trump stands on issues isn't something I know or care much about, but I doubt he's going to campaign on "phasing out Medicare" like supposedly moderate Jeb Bush, and while he's argued that he could negotiate a better deal with Iran than Obama did, I doubt he sides with the clique that rejects diplomacy in toto, or that thinks bombing first would help (e.g., Rand Paul). True, he has taken a rather brusque nativist stance on immigration reform, but that's not unique in the field, nor far removed from the preferences of the base. The fact is that with so little in the way of practical differences, the primaries will turn on style, projected character, and money. The main doubt about Trump is how quickly he folded (after briefly topping the polls) four years ago. But so far he seems prepared and organized, like he's studied this contest and knows how to play it. He clearly knows how to dominate the media cycle, and it's not just a matter of saying crazy shit. He's campaigning as the guy who won't back down, and what better way to show that than to say crazy shit and stand by it? And it turns out that lots of regular Republicans see McCain as a loser, so maybe Trump's not so crazy after all. Atkins' take on this:

  As Donald Trump has surged to the top of the field, his competitors are resorting to saying ever more outlandish and reprehensible things just to get noticed.

  Witness the spectacle of Mike Huckabee this morning claiming that the negotiated deal with Iran would constitute President Obama marching "Israelis to the door of the oven." Even by modern Republican standards that sort of rhetoric is a bridge too far. But it's the sort of thing a Republican presidential aspirant has to say these days to get attention and support from the Republican base.

  Or consider Rick Perry today, whose brilliant solution to mass shootings is for us to all "take our guns to the movie theaters." As if the proper response to suicidal mass murderers using guns as the easiest, deadliest and most readily available tool to inflict mayhem is to arm every man, woman and child in the hope that the shooter dies slightly more quickly in the crossfire of a dark auditorium. Even as other moviegoers settle their disputes over cell phone texting with deadly gun violence.

  Under normal circumstances these sorts of statements would be a death knell for presidential candidates. But these are not normal times. The Republican Party is locked into an autocatalytic cycle of increasing and self-reinforcing extremism. [ . . . ]

  Unwilling and unable to moderate their positions, the Republican base has assumed a pose of irredentist defiance, an insurgent war against perceived liberal orthodoxy in which the loudest, most aggressive warrior becomes their favorite son. It is this insurgent stance that informs their hardline views on guns: many of them see a day coming when their nativist, secessionist political insurgency may become an active military insurgency, and they intend to be armed to the teeth in the event that they deem it necessary. The GOP electorate isn't choosing a potential president: they're choosing a rebel leader. The Republican base doesn't intend to go down compromising. They intend to go down fighting.

  Well, they intend to win, and hitching themselves to a guy they perceive as a winner is strategic. I'll also add that Trump has one more big advantage in this field: where everyone else is pimping for some billionaire, he's his own billionaire. Maybe he'll adopt Billie Holiday's song as his campaign theme: "God Bless the Child (Who's Got His Own)."

• Zoë Carpenter: Bobby Jindal, Does Louisiana 'Love Us Some Guns' Now?: Last week's gun massacre headliner was in Chattanooga, where a guy with a history of mental problems and a recent DUI arrest killed five soldiers. He happened to have been a Muslim, and former Gen. Wesley Clark went on TV and called for WWII-style internment camps for Muslim Americans who get depressed and radicalized. This week it was Lafayette, LA, where a guy with a history of mental problems and spousal abuse killed two and wounded nine before killing himself. He wasn't a Muslim; just a white guy with a history of praising Hitler on the Internet (see So Why Don't We Stop and Frisk Guys Like This Every Time They Leave the House?). Wesley Clark has yet to comment. (I wrote about Clark's proposal a few days back. Needless to say, it wouldn't have saved the people in Louisiana.) One common denominator is that both shooters had non-pacifist beliefs. Another is that they were nuts. But a third is that they had guns, not least because both lived in states that seem determined to arm as many bigoted nut-cases as possible. For example, the Governor of Louisiana:

  "We love us some guns," Bobby Jindal once said of his fellow Louisianans. Two of them were killed, and nine others wounded, on Thursday night when a man walked into a movie theater in Lafayette, sat for a while, and then fired more than a dozen rounds from a .40 caliber handgun.

  "We never imagined it would happen in Louisiana," Jindal said afterward, though the state has the second-highest rate of gun deaths in the country, more than twice the national average. Louisiana also has some of the laxest firearm regulations, for which Jindal bears much responsibility. During his eight years as governor he's signed at least a dozen gun-related bills, most intended to weaken gun-safety regulation or expand access to firearms. One allowed people to take their guns to church; another, into restaurants that serve alcohol. He broadened Louisiana's Stand Your Ground law, and made it a crime to publish the names of people with concealed carry permits. At the same time Jindal has pushed for cuts to mental health services.

  Jindal treats guns not as weapons but political props. On the presidential campaign trail he's posed repeatedly for photos cradling a firearm in his arms. "My kind of campaign stop," he tweeted earlier this month from an armory in Iowa. After the Charleston massacre, he called President Obama's mild comments about gun violence "completely shameful." The correct response then, according to Jindal, was "hugging these families," and "praying for these families."

  For another reaction to Jindal's call to prayer, see David Atkins: For Gun Victims, the Prayers of Conservative Politicians Are Not Enough:

  Frankly, that reaction is getting more than a little tiresome no matter what one's religious beliefs might be. When terrorists used airplanes as missiles against the United States in 2001, we didn't just pray for the victims: we changed our entire airline security system, spent billions on a new homeland security bureaucracy, and invaded not one but two countries at gigantic cost to life and treasure. When the ebola virus threatened to break out in the United States we didn't pray for deliverance from the plague; we went into a collective public policy and media frenzy to stop it from spreading further. When earthquakes prove our building standards are inadequate to save lives, we don't beg the gods to avert catastrophe and pray for the victims; we spend inordinate amounts of money to retrofit so it doesn't happen again.

  On every major piece of public policy in which lives are taken needlessly, we don't limit ourselves to empty prayers for the victims. We actually do something to stop it from happening again.

  But not when it comes to gun proliferation. On that issue we are told that nothing can be done, and that all we can do is mourn and pray for the murdered and wounded, even as we watch the news every day for our next opportunity to grieve and mourn and pray again -- all while sitting back and watching helplessly.

• Jason Diltz: Sen. Paul Bashes Iran Deal, Says US Must Prepare Military Force: Whoever the Republican presidential nominee in 2016 turns out to be, they should have to wear their opposition to the Iran nuclear deal like one of those gasoline-soaked tires cheerfully referred to as "necklaces." What they are saying is that the US should unilaterally renege on an agreement peaceably, voluntarily agreed to by Iran and all of the world's major powers that guarantees that Iran will never develop nuclear weapons (unlike said major powers); that they prefer the old system where sanctions, sabotage, and threats of war had, by their own fevered assertions, failed to deter Iran, and should escalate from that point and actually start bombing Iran, risking all-out war. Opponents of the deal would be rank fantasists if we had not already put their preferred solution to the test in an almost identical crisis: the fear the Bush Administration ginned up over Iraq's "WMD programs." As you all know, that didn't work out so well, and very clearly a deal like the Iran deal would have been much preferable (and very likely could have been negotiated -- indeed, Saddam Hussein had already given UN inspectors full access even while crippling sanctions were in place). Virtually every Republican presidential candidate now has retreated from the view that invading Iraq in 2003 was a good idea, yet they are all adamant about taking the same attitude against Iran now that Bush and Cheney insisted on viz. Iraq.

  One might have expected Sen. Rand Paul to be an exception -- indeed, his father, former Rep. and presidential candidate Ron Paul, has come out in favor of it -- but the only distance the son has put between himself and the worst hawks is to come off even more befuddled. Diltz writes:

  While Sen. Paul insisted in the comments to Kerry that he supports a nuclear deal in theory, he also declared that "diplomacy doesn't work without military force," and insisted he was ready to endorse a US military attack on Iran to "delay" them from getting nuclear arms.

  Sen. Paul acknowledged that attacking Iran would likely force them to try to get nuclear arms, and would also lead to the expulsion of UN inspectors from the country, but insisted he was still supportive of the idea of an attack even if it ended up with Iran getting a bomb faster because of it.

  I suppose the people who reject the deal, including the ones in Israel, do have one out: they may actually believe that Iran has never been aiming at building an arsenal of nuclear weapons -- as Ayatollah Khamenei has insisted in a fatwa (religious ruling) -- so they figure they've never been running any risk in stirring up this "manufactured crisis" (Gareth Porter's term, and title of his book). They just like touting Iran as an enemy. For Israel, enemies are necessary to justify the extent of their militarism, and Iran is particularly useful because the US never forgave Iran for the 1980 hostage crisis. (Americans, being categorically incapable of admitting past mistakes, have no shame when it comes to foreign policy.)

  I've always been rather sympathetic to libertarianism, mostly because most honest libertarians are opposed to war, the military, and every aspect of police states. On the other hand, they tend to hold extreme laissez-faire economic views that cannot possibly work, and they often reject the notion that collective democratic effort can do anything worthwhile. The latter views make someone like Ron Paul an unattractive presidential candidate, even though he's much more likely to make a much needed break with the foreign policy establishment than mere liberals like Obama or Kerry (let alone Clinton). On the other hand, Rand Paul has made it impossible to find any redeeming merit in his candidacy -- unless you consider occasionally wavering from the usual party talking points to show you don't really understand them some kind of plus.

  Also see No More Mister Nice Blog's review of Wednesday's "Stop Iran Rally Coalition" demo in New York (Let's Meet the Wackos Who Gathered in Times Square Yesterday to Protect the Iran Deal). Only one GOP presidential candidate made it to the rostrum (George Pataki), only one current member of Congress (Trent Franks, R-AZ), but there were several former Reps (like Pete Hoekstra and Allen West) -- in fact, about half the speakers list was identified as "former" (like James Woolsey, Robert Morgenthau, and a bunch of ex-military brass), with most of the rest being Israel flacks (Alan Dershowitz, Caroline Glick). Their message: Give War a Chance.

• Jason Diltz: Defense Secretary: Kurdish Peshmerga a 'Model' for ISIS War Across Region: More of what passes for deep thinking at the Pentagon:

  Visiting Arbil today on his second day in Iraq, US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter praised the Peshmerga, the paramilitary forces of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), as a model for the entire nation and indeed entire region in the war against ISIS.

  "We are trying to build a force throughout the territory of Iraq, and someday in Syria, that can do what the peshmerga does," Carter said following his meeting with Kurdish President Massoud Barzani. [ . . . ]

  How the US could even theoretically copy this model elsewhere isn't clear either. The Peshmerga of Iraqi Kurdistan dates back generations, and doesn't have analogous factions across the rest of Iraq and Syria. Creating myriad new military forces in the model of them across different cultures in multiple countries is no small ambition, and with the US efforts to create a new faction in Syria yielding no more than a few dozen fighters, it's unclear how they could manage it.

  Actually, there are other sectarian militias in Iraq and Syria -- they're just not fighting for the US. To describe the Kurds as a model for bringing order to two nations where they are small minorities (about 20% in Iraq, less than 10% in Syria) is evidence of how clueless the US military efforts against ISIS (and/or Syria) are.

  Also note that Turkey launches massive attack against ISIS's most effective opponent, the PPK, which is to say the Kurds, Carter's model ally against ISIS. Turkey has also allowed the US to use Turkish air bases for bombing strikes against ISIS, so "the US responds by confirming Turkey's right to defend itself while affirming the PKK's status as a terrorist organization." So Turkey appears to be almost as confused about who its allies and enemies and enemies-of-enemies are as the US is.

• Tierney Sneed: Jeb Bush Wants to 'Figure Out a Way to Phase Out' Medicare: Here's another example of a Republican politician making his own campaign more difficult by insisting on a position that can't be sold to the voters and can't possibly work even if they bought it. The fact is you can't get rid of medicare without getting rid of health care for people over 65 -- which would mostly work by getting rid of people over 65, but then who would be left to vote for the Republicans?

  As MSNBC reported, the GOP 2016er was speaking at an Americans for Prosperity event in New Hampshire, where he brought up a TV ad in which a Paul Ryan-look-a-like "was pushing an elderly person off the cliff in a wheelchair." The ad was knocking Ryan's Medicare-related budget proposals.

  "I think we need to be vigilant about this and persuade people that our, when your volunteers go door to door, and they talk to people, people understand this. They know, and I think a lot of people recognize that we need to make sure we fulfill the commitment to people that have already received the benefits, that are receiving the benefits," Bush said. "But that we need to figure out a way to phase out this program for others and move to a new system that allows them to have something -- because they're not going to have anything."

  The key in all this is "Americans for Prosperity" -- nothing like telling the Kochs what they want to hear. Still, Bush obviously realizes that taking Medicare away from the elderly would be painful, so he's not doing that. On the other hand, why does he think the system cannot last? And what does he want to replace it with? The Republicans have thus far only come up with two ideas: one is tax-exempt savings accounts, so everyone can plan for their future health care expenses, except that hardly anyone can afford that, and fewer still can be sure that they've saved enough; the other is to buy insurance from the private sector -- something they've already tried as Medicare Advantage and which has proven to be more expensive and less beneficial than regular Medicare. They've also pushed ideas like raising the eligibility age, which would dump more high-risk people into less efficient private markets. Of course, some such scheme could be means-tested and subsidized, but then you're just replacing Medicare (which everyone likes) with Obamacare (which Republicans despise), so how does that solve anything?

  As with Social Security, there is no way to transition from a pay-as-you-go (where present workers pay for present retirees) to a save-and-hope-for-the-best system without effectively doubling the tax burden on the people you're screwing. So even if the demographics trend unfavorably -- fewer present workers having to support more present retirees -- you're stuck with that. At most you can trim back the benefit levels, but productivity gains also help (sure, they're presently all being captured by the rich, but only the Republicans think that makes them untaxable). So why do Republicans (at least when they're talking to the Kochs) keep insisting on doing something impossible to achieve something undesirable? The options seem to be malice and stupidity, not that those are mutually exclusive.

  Part of the problem here is the ever-growing fundamentalism (a specific form of extremism) of the Republican Party. Going way back, Republicans have generally believed that business pursuing private interests with relatively light government regulation build up the national wealth to the benefit of all, but lately this belief has become much more rigid. In the past, Republicans supported tariffs to limit free markets; they supported public investments; they enacted antitrust laws to limit excessive concentration and increase competition; and they've generally drawn a line against fraud and unscrupulous profiteering. But that's nearly all gone by the wayside now. Republicans (like the Kochs) now tend to believe that any and every pursuit of private advantage should be supported by public policy, and that whoever gets rich as a result should be able to keep the maximum possible portion of their gains. In the case of health care, they believe that hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical and equipment companies, labs, and insurance companies should be able to extract as much profit as the market will bear -- which given that all economists agree markets don't function at all efficiently for health care has resulted in an immense increase in the cost of living for everyone. (Their pricing strategy boils down to "your money or your life," and few if any of us are in a position to argue.)

  The great irony of their attitude is that by defending the unlimited ability of the health care industry to pillage, they are objectively undermining every other business they purport to support, and nearly every person they expect to get a vote from. Conservative parties in nearly every other country in the world realize that health care is different from most business: that it is a necessary service that has to be financed and regulated by the government, and that the more it is organized along non-profit lines, the more efficient it runs. There's no debate about this, except in the US where private interests buy politicians and fill the media with FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) to maintain a system which takes two to three times the slice of GDP health care costs elsewhere. Of course, both parties are on the industry's payroll -- that is, after all, where Obamacare came from -- but only the Republicans have raised their greed-is-good mantra to the level of a religious totem. And that's what Bush is bowing to, even though he has no idea how to deliver on his promises.

  If the Republicans were smart, they'd be the ones pushing for a universal non-profit health care system, something that would go beyond the Democrats' dream of "Medicare for all." But they're not.

  Another comment on Bush's talk is Paul Krugman: Fire Phasers. I was thinking of something much better than present Medicare, but there should be no doubt that lesser reforms are possible and worthwhile -- and indeed have happened under the ACA. Krugman writes:

  What's interesting, in a way, is the persistence of conservative belief that one must destroy Medicare in order to save it. The original idea behind voucherization was that Medicare as we know it, a single-payer system of government insurance, simply could not act to control costs -- that giving people vouchers to buy private insurance was the only way to limit spending. There was much sneering and scoffing at the approach embodied in the Affordable Care Act, which sought to pursue cost-saving measures within a Medicare program that retained its guarantee of essential care.

  But we're now five years into the attempt to control costs that way -- and what we've seen is a spectacular slowdown in the growth of health costs, with the historical upward trend in Medicare costs, in particular, brought to a complete standstill. How much credit should go to the ACA? Nobody really knows. But the whole premise behind voucherization has never looked worse, and the case that universal health insurance is affordable has never looked better.

  It's amazing, isn't it? Who could have imagined that conservatives would keep proposing the exact same policy despite strong evidence that they were wrong about the facts? Oh, wait.

  Krugman has a chart which shows how Medicare spending plateaued since 2009 under ACA and how it had grown under the system that the Republicans wanted so much to continue. The spurt in 2005 is probably due to Medicare D, Bush's giant gift to Big Pharma:

  

  Also see Krugman's A Note on Medicare Costs, which shows (chart below) that costs for private insurance have consistently exceeded Medicare: hence, shifting people from Medicare to private insurance (as happened with Medicare Advantage, or would happen with raising the eligibility age) increases costs. (Conversely, moving people from private insurance to Medicare should manage costs better. The only exception to this data was 1993-97, when there was a big push for HMOs, and the insurance industry was on its best behavior, at least until Clinton's proposals were defeated).

  

• Israel links:

  • Raphael Ahren: World Jewry ever more uneasy with Israel, major study finds:

    Diaspora Jews are not convinced that Israel is doing enough to prevent military conflicts and are troubled by the number of civilian casualties they often produce, though they generally blame Israel's enemies for the bloodshed. The accusation of the use of "disproportionate force" makes it difficult for these Jews to defend Israeli actions. Somewhat paradoxically, however, Jews in the Diaspora are disappointed that Israel doesn't manage to end its wars with decisive victories.

    "Many Jews doubt that Israel truly wishes to reach a peace settlement with the Palestinians, and few believe it is making the necessary effort to achieve one," according to the study's author, Shmuel Rosner.

  • Daniella Cheslow: Israeli think tank with GOP ties at center of Iran deal opposition: The "think tank" is Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Its sugar daddy is Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire whose money comes from casinos -- a business that before he came around with his political connections was traditionally run by gangsters, making him a fine example of how business morals have eroded, and how they've bought a prime place in the Republican Party (he spent $465,000 on Republicans in the 2014 election cycle).

    One annoying thing about this piece is how a quote from "senior analyst" Michael Segall is featured: "This nuclear deal, which preserves all Iranian nuclear capability, will make them more resolute to export their revolution to the Middle East." That's pure opinion with neither fact nor logic behind it. Revolutions face competing desires to extend themselves and to establish a new stability, and those elements were present at the beginning in Iran. One of the first things Khomeini did was to challenge Saudi Arabia for leadership among Islamic nations. However, it soon became clear that Iran wouldn't overcome the Sunni/Shiite divide, so they wound up settling for building minor alliances among Shiite groups, primarily in Lebanon. The only significant inroads they eventually made was in Iraq, but that was almost entirely engineered by the Americans. Meanwhile, Iran became very isolated and defensive. (Indeed, a nuclear capability only makes sense as a defensive posture: an attempt to deter attacks from Iran's numerous enemies. Only the US has ever used nuclear weapons offensively, and then only against a foe that had no ability to counterattack.) What the deal shows is that Iran is now willing to exchange one defensive posture (the threat that it could develop nuclear weapons) for another (threat reduction that comes from ending sanctions and forced isolation). So why would Iran risk its hard-earned stability by trying to recreate the early zeal of a revolution now 35 years old? That doesn't make sense, and even if they did would only result in renewed sanctions and isolation -- exactly what they are attempting to avoid.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Hugh Roberts: The Hijackers: Review of several books about Syria and ISIS, including Patrick Cockburn's The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution. Provides a great deal of background about Syria, especially from Sykes-Picot to the Arab Spring, continuing with the various groups and factions fighting in Syria and how they fit in with various foreign interests. Much to learn here, and much I could quote. For instance, about Geneva II, where Lakhdar Brahimi was unable to bring about any agreement:

  The point here is not that one side was slightly more or slightly less intransigent, but that by making the future of Assad the central question, and insisting on his departure, the Western powers, in conjunction with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan -- not one of which is a democracy -- as well as Turkey, which under Erdogan has slid a long way towards authoritarian rule, made it impossible for a political solution to be found that would at least end the violence. It is in ways like this that the Arab uprisings were really hijacked.

  The Tunisian revolution was a real revolution not because it toppled Ben Ali, but because it went on to establish a new form of government with real political representation and the rule of law. The hijacking of the Arab uprisings by the Western powers has been effected by their success in substituting for profound change a purely superficial "regime change" that merely means the ejection of a ruler they have never liked (Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad) or have no further use for (Mubarak), and his replacement by someone they approve of. In seeking this change in their own interests, they have repeatedly shown a reckless disregard for the consequences of their policies, from Iraq to Egypt to Libya to Syria.

  Also:

  Brahimi told Der Spiegel that he feared Syria would become "another Somalia" . . . a failed state with warlords all over the place." What is taking at least partial shape in Syria -- unless the country is partitioned, which is also on the cards -- is another Afghanistan.

  When the Afghan jihadis -- backed, like their Syrian successors today, by the Gulf states and Anglo-America -- finally overthrew the secular-modernist Najibullah regime, they immediately fell out among themselves and Afghanistan collapsed into violent warlordism. But, unlike Somalia, Afghanistan was rescued by a dynamic movement that suddenly appeared on its southern marches and swept all before it, crushing the warlords and finally establishing a new state. In the aftermath of the jihad our governments had sponsored and our media had enthusiastically reported, secular modernism was no longer on offer: militantly retrograde Islamism was the only political discourse around and it was inevitably the most fundamentalist brand that won.

  And:

  I don't pretend to know what the truth is. But there is no need to prove malign intent on the part of the Western powers. The most charitable theory available, "the eternally recurring colossal cock-up" theory of history, will do well enough. If a more sophisticated theory is required, I suggest we recall the assessment of C. Wright Mills when he spoke of US policy being made by "crackpot realists," people who were entirely realistic about how to promote their careers inside the Beltway, and incorrigible crackpots when it came to formulating foreign policy. [ . . . ]

  Western policy has been a disgrace and Britain's contribution to it should be a matter of national shame. Whatever has motivated it, it has been a disaster for Iraq, Libya and now Syria, and the fallout is killing Americans, French people and now British tourists, in addition to its uncounted victims in the Middle East. The case for changing this policy, at least where Syria is concerned, is overwhelming. Can Washington, London and Paris be persuaded of this? Cockburn quotes a former Syrian minister's pessimistic assessment that "they climbed too far up the tree claiming Assad has to be replaced to reverse their policy now."

• Kathryn Schulz: The Really Big One: Despite the presence of a string of volcanos along the spine of the Cascades, from Mt. Baker down to Mt. Lassen, there has been little seismic activity in Oregon and Washington since Lewis & Clark explored the area two centuries ago. We now know that the volcanoes occur where the Juan de Fuca oceanic plate bends down under the North American plate far enough to melt and send magma upwards. We also know that the seismic quiescence is temporary and misleading: that a massive earthquake occurred along the whole plate front -- from northern California to Victoria Island in Canada -- in 1700, and we can date it precisely because it lines up with a tsunami that hit Japan a few hours later. We also know that there is evidence of such earthquakes occurring every 250 years for the last 10,000, so . . . if anything, we're overdue for a very big one. Schulz details the likely consequences here, and they will be more devastating than any disaster in American history. Interesting science, and one more reason to keep the Bushes away from FEMA.

  This problem is bidirectional. The Cascadia subduction zone remained hidden from us for so long because we could not see deep enough into the past. It poses a danger to us today because we have not thought deeply enough about the future. That is no longer a problem of information; we now understand very well what the Cascadia fault line will someday do. Nor is it a problem of imagination. If you are so inclined, you can watch an earthquake destroy much of the West Coast this summer in Brad Peyton's San Andreas, while, in neighboring theatres, the world threatens to succumb to Armageddon by other means: viruses, robots, resource scarcity, zombies, aliens, plague. As those movies attest, we excel at imagining future scenarios, including awful ones. But such apocalyptic visions are a form of escapism, not a moral summons, and still less a plan of action. Where we stumble is in conjuring up grim futures in a way that helps to avert them.

  That problem is not specific to earthquakes, of course. The Cascadia situation, a calamity in its own right, is also a parable for this age of ecological reckoning, and the questions it raises are ones that we all now face. How should a society respond to a looming crisis of uncertain timing but of catastrophic proportions? How can it begin to right itself when its entire infrastructure and culture developed in a way that leaves it profoundly vulnerable to natural disaster?

  That comment is equally applicable to climate change. (I was going to make some disclaimer that earthquakes at least are not anthropogenic, but the recent dramatic increase of them in Oklahoma and Kansas are quite clearly the results of human activity, specifically the oil and gas industry.) Worth noting this latest confirmation of the threat -- not the sudden sea rise of a tsunami but the slightly more gradual one of sea level rising due to melting ice sheets: Elizabeth Kolbert: A New Climate-Change Danger Zone? Again, if political solutions are inconceivable due to the ideological chokehold of vested interests (see "guns" above) and because we don't seem to be able to distinguish between those private interests and public ones (see "health care" above), the critical battleground will be over the remedial efforts of disaster control (e.g., FEMA).

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Another week with the usual scattered links:

• Robert Parry: US/Israeli/Saudi 'Behavior' Problems: Much of the opposition to the US+5/Iran deal is based on an assumption that Iran cannot be trusted -- a naive and rather ironic posture given how the US and its allies have repeatedly meddled in the region's affairs.

  In this American land of make-believe, Iran is assailed as the chief instigator of instability in the Middle East. Yet, any sane and informed person would dispute that assessment, noting the far greater contributions made by Israel, Saudi Arabia and, indeed, the United States.

  Israel's belligerence, including frequently attacking its Arab neighbors and brutally repressing the Palestinians, has roiled the region for almost 70 years. Not to mention that Israel is a rogue nuclear state that has been hiding a sophisticated atomic-bomb arsenal.

  An objective observer also would note that Saudi Arabia has been investing its oil wealth for generations to advance the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, which has inspired terrorist groups from Al Qaeda to the Islamic State. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were identified as Saudis and the U.S. government is still concealing those 28 pages of the congressional 9/11 inquiry regarding Saudi financing of Al Qaeda terrorists.

  The Saudis also have participated directly and indirectly in regional wars, including encouragement of Iraq's invasion of Iran in 1980, support for Al Qaeda-affiliate Nusra Front's subversion of Syria, and the current Saudi bombardment of Yemen, killing hundreds of civilians, touching off a humanitarian crisis and helping Al Qaeda's Yemeni affiliate expand its territory.

  The US list is even longer, with the CIA's 1953 coup against Iran, the US alliance with the hated Shah, and US support of Iraq in its 1980s war against Iran looming especially large, although most Americans remain remarkably blind to their nation's past errors and offenses, even when they plainly blow back. It's no surprise that the people most critical of the agreement with Iran are the ones most blind to the disasters US intervention has caused in the region.

  More pieces on the Iran agreement:

  • Gareth Porter: How a weaker Iran got the hegemon to lift sanctions: One journalist who has understood all along that Iran's "nuclear ambitions" had nothing to do with creating a nuclear arsenal, much less launching a colossal suicide bomb attack against Israel -- his book on the subject was titled Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. Rather, he argues that Iran's nuclear program was a chit for negotiating the end of US sanctions against Iran which have been in place since 1979. Israel, by the way, was instrumental in making this deal happen: had Netanyahu not whined so much about Iran the US would have had no compelling reason to reëxamine its reflexive prejudice against Iran. On the other hand, Israel's preferred solution would have plunged the US into a war even more hopeless than the Afghanistan and Iraq fiascos. That Obama chose to negotiate is a rare victory for sanity, suggesting that he at least has learned something from Iraq. The deal preserves order and responsibility in Iran, so the various restrictions and inspections will be honored. But more importantly, by dropping the sanctions, the US will stop poisoning the ground, forcing an antipathy that often needn't happen. (In fact, the US and Iran have often found themselves with similar interests but unable to work together.)

  • Fred Kaplan: Why Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Neocons Hate the Iran Deal: Well, you know the answer:

    The most diehard opponents -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi King Salman, and a boatload of neocons led by the perennial naysayer John Bolton -- issued their fusillades against the accord ("an historic mistake," "diplomatic Waterloo," to say nothing of the standard charges of "appeasement" from those with no understanding of history) long before they could possibly have browsed its 159 pages of legalese and technical annexes.

    What worries these critics most is not that Iran might enrich its uranium into an A-bomb. (If that were the case, why would they so virulently oppose a deal that put off this prospect by more than a decade?) No, what worries them much more deeply is that Iran might rejoin the community of nations, possibly even as a diplomatic (and eventually trading) partner of the United States and Europe.

    Which is to say that beyond the letter of the agreement, which ensures that Iran will make no advance toward nuclear weapons for at least ten years (recall that Israel started predicting an Iranian bomb in less than five years back in the mid-1990s), might reduce the desire of both nations for conflict. The assumption here is that Iran is more valuable as an enemy than it is risky.

• Rick Perlstein: Down With the Confederate Flag, Up With Donald Trump!: Even though the purpose of the Republicans' big move into the south was to recruit all the racist Dixiecrats, and even though the Republicans have jettisoned virtually every tenet of the GOP's progressive legacy, one suspects they've never been all that enamored of the confederate flag. So when SC Gov. Nikki Haley took the lead, they didn't have much reason not to follow (they are, after all, the sort of people who blindly follow their so-called leaders). Besides, it deflected a repeat of the usual arguments for gun control. And it rather neatly distanced most of the Republican establishment from a nasty racist massacre: could the killer who wrapped himself in the confederate flag have foreseen that that the flag itself would be one of his victims? Perlstein:

  Suddenly, with a single flap of the Angel of History's wings, America has experienced a shuddering change: the American swastika has finally become toxic -- a liberation that last month seemed so impossible that we'd forgotten to bother to think about it.

  One doesn't waste energy worrying over the fact that America controls over 700 military bases in 63 countries and maintains a military presence in 156; or that Israel has staged a civilian-slaughtering war approximately every other year since 2006; or that in America there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to vote or that unregulated pyramid schemes fleece Middle Americans out of $10 to $20 billion a year or that a private organization runs our presidential debates, sponsored by the same corporations that underwrite Democratic conventions . . . on and on and on: permanent annoyances.

  Still, the flag is just an icon, now finally tarnished beyond any hope of mainstream redemption . . . like the swastika, which also had a (much briefer) fashion fling on the American right. Still, while some things change, conservatives don't really. At the same time the "American swastika" was bowing out, Donald Trump was rising to top Republican polls on the basis of blatantly racist blanket statements about Mexicans. Jefferson Davis may be a waning American hero, but James R. Polk is due for a revival. (If now Woodrow Wilson, who holds the record for two wars against Mexico, but nothing resembling Polk's victory.) Perlstein explains:

  This is important: conservatism is like bigotry whack-a-mole. The quantity of hatred, best I can tell from 17 years of close study of 60 years of right-wing history, remains the same. Removing the flag of the Confederacy, raising the flag of immigrant hating: the former doesn't spell some new Jerusalem of tolerance; the latter doesn't mean that conservatism's racism has finally been revealed for all to see. The push-me-pull-me of private sentiment and public profession will always remain in motion, and in tension.

  A few days later, Trump's star started to eclipse, when he suggested that John McCain's heroism in Vietnam was tainted ("a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured"). (See Donald Trump Can't Stop, Won't Stop.) We'll see how that plays out, in particular how well Trump holds up with McCain's fawning admirers gunning for him, but it isn't obvious to me that Trump's stance will lose him the base. After all, McCain is a loser: he lost to Obama in 2008, unleashing this whole national nightmare, and maybe that wasn't such an accident, considering how he lost his plane and spent years on the sidelines in America's loser war, a victimhood he parlayed into a political career that again failed when it mattered most. Thus far, Trump has held back on part of what he must be thinking: that the real American Vietnam War hero was Rambo. Maybe he's reluctant to commit to a fiction, but it's not like reality is holding him back. (Ronald Reagan would certainly go for it.) But maybe he's holding out for himself: Trump, after all, is a winner, and isn't that what America really wants? (Never mind the divorces and bankruptcies and all that, or the fact that he's never been elected anything, or whatever else journalists will dig up real soon: Trump missed out on Chris Lehmann's review of The Candidates (good grief), a roll call meant to document that "Of the dozen or so people who have declared or are thought likely to declare, every one can bedescribed as a full-blown adult failure." His only line on Trump came at the end: "He can make anyone in his general vicinity look good.")

• Andrew O'Hehir: The Republican prison experiment: How the right-wing conquest of the GOP altered political reality: Bemoans the loss of sanity in the Republican party, seeing "the evil zombie sock-puppet condition of the GOP [as] the most gruesome single sympton of our failing democracy."

  I would contend that the Republican Party has been the subject, willing or otherwise, of a version of the Stanford prison experiment, conducted on a grand scale. I wrote about that famous 1971 simulation, now the subject of a new feature film, earlier this week: A group of normal, middle-class California college students eagerly embraced roles as sadistic guards and abused prisoners, submitting almost immediately to the social order of an entirely fictional institution they knew had no real power. Properly understood, the Stanford experiment is not about prisons or schools or other overtly coercive social institutions, although it certainly applies to them. It is about the power of ideology and the power of power, about the fact that if you change people's perception of reality, you have gone most of the way to changing reality itself.

  The Republican Party did not organically evolve into a xenophobic, all-white party of hate that seeks to roll back not just the Civil Rights movement and feminism, but the entire Enlightenment. It did not accidentally become untethered from reality and float off to the moons of Pluto. Those possibilities were already present, but they had to be activated. Partly as a result of its own ideological weakness and internal divisions, the GOP was taken over from within and from above: In the first instance, by a dedicated core of right-wing activists, and in the second by the ultra-rich, super-PAC oligarchy epitomized by the Koch brothers. The two forces sometimes worked separately, but ultimately the first was funded and sponsored by the second. [ . . . ]

  Among other things, the GOP's flight to Crazytown has permitted leaders of the Democratic Party to crawl ever more cozily into the pockets of Wall Street bankers and to become ever more intertwined with the national security state -- while still proclaiming themselves, in all innocence and with considerable plausibility, to be less noxious than the alternative. So we see millions of well-meaning people getting ginned up to vote for Hillary Clinton, despite the nagging sensation that the political universe in which she represents the best available option is a cruel hoax. Pay attention to that feeling! It's the reality we have discarded, banging on the door.

  People forget this, but when Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, his hot button issue wasn't his desire to slash taxes on the rich or open up every bureau of government to corporate lobbyists to loot and plunder. It was to "take back" the Panama Canal, which was "ours" until Jimmy Carter treacherously "gave it away." Speech after speech hammered away on the Canal, but after Reagan was elected he didn't lift a finger to undo Carter's treaty. Even after his VP became president and sent the army into Panama to apprehend a former CIA asset who had gone off the reservation, Bush left the treaty intact. The Canal was never anything but a talking point, recycled over and over because the Republicans thought it made Carter look weak, when in reality it only showed he was sane: losing one of the last vestiges of imperialism was good for the US and for Panama, for everyone. Rhetoric-wise, the Republicans were as removed from reality in 1980 as they are now. Their problem now is that their rhetoric has a track record that shows it only makes matters worse, and they've surrendered so completely to their rhetoric that they're trapped. If their snap judgments on the Iran deal are any indication, the Republican nominee in 2016 -- it doesn't matter who becuase they're all interchangeable clones -- will snort and fume against Iran like Reagan did Panama. Again, the idea is that making a deal with the devil just makes America look weak, and no Republican would do that.

  I wouldn't assume that if elected whoever the Republican is will backtrack, realizing that Obama's deal was the best they'd ever get, even though that would make sense. But I also think it's a losing argument, and the Republicans haven't realized that yet. Arguing against the deal is necessarily arguing for an undetermined, dangerous result, most likely another war in a region where we've repeatedly failed. But then very few of the platform issues the Republicans have locked themselves into are either popular or potentially workable.

• More pieces on Greece:

  • Tariq Ali: Diary: Before Syriza was elected in Greece, the Euro masters focused on providing only what was needed to bail out their own banks. After, the focus became destroying Syriza, which turned out to be easy because Tsipras was more committed to the euro than to the political will of his supporters.

    The EU has now succeeded in crushing the political alternative that Syriza represented. The German attitude to Greece, long before the rise of Syriza, was shaped by the discovery that Athens (helped by Goldman Sachs) had cooked its books in order to get into the Eurozone. This is indisputable. But isn't it dangerous, as well as wrong, to punish the Greek people -- and to carry on doing so even after they have rejected the political parties responsible for the lies? According to Timothy Geithner, the former US treasury secretary, the attitude of the European finance ministers at the start of the crisis was: "We're going to teach the Greeks a lesson. They lied to us, they suck and they were profligate and took advantage of the whole thing and we're going to crush them." Geithner says that in reply he told them, "You can put your foot on the neck of those guys if that's what you want to do," but insisted that investors mustn't be punished, which meant that the Germans had to underwrite a large chunk of the Greek debt. As it happens, French and German banks had the most exposure to Greek debt and their governments acted to protect them. Bailing out the rich became EU policy. Debt restructuring is being discussed now, with the IMF's leaked report, but the Germans are leading the resistance to it. "No guarantees without control": Merkel's response in 2012 remains in force.

  • Barry Eichengreen: Saving Greece, Saving Europe

  • Ashoka Mody: Germany, Not Greece, Should Exit the Euro: After all, if Germany exited, the Euro would depreciate, which would help everyone else, while Germany merely became richer.

  • Jordan Weissmann: Europe's Economic Misery Has Worked Out Pretty Well for Germany: Some more background for the Mody piece above, based on a piece by Ben Bernanke. One chart shows that Germany's unemployment is below 5 percent, while the rest of the Eurozone is above 13%.

    If Germany still had to rely on its own currency, it would be far more expensive than the euro. That would hurt its ability to export Volkswagens, prescription drugs, and Becks around the world. But, instead, it shares a currency with the eurozone's many weaker members. That has two big effects. First, it lets German companies sell their products in countries like France, Italy, and Greece, where otherwise consumers might not be able to afford them. Second, it keeps German wares relatively cheap outside of Europe, most importantly in crucial markets like the United States and China.

    While Germany has reaped the benefits of euro membership, it hasn't returned the favor by buying more goods from, say Southern Europe. Instead, by keeping government spending in its neighbors tight, it has basically put a lid on imports. The end result is a massive trade surplus that has left its economy in decent shape while leaving its eurozone compatriots hanging out to dry. Worse yet, it has demanded harsh austerity measures in return for bailouts, which have murdered domestic demand in countries including Greece, making it difficult for them to recover.

    So Germany has managed to turn the euro into a mechanism for transferring wealth into its own coffers.

  • Cédric Durand: The End of Europe: When the EU and the Eurozone were founded, there was considerable optimism on the left that the new institutions would lead to equalized outcomes across the entire zone, but that didn't happen as the institutions came under the ever tighter control of neoliberal capital.

  • Mark Weisbrot: Why the European authorities refuse to let Greece recover: As Yanis Varoufakis put it, "The complete lack of any democratic scruples, on behalf of the supposed defenders of Europe's democracy."

Also, a few links for further study:

• Max Blumenthal: The Next Gaza War: Since Israel unilaterally withdrew its settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Israel has maintained a blockade on Gaza, bombed or shelled its prisoners numerous times, the intensity rising to the level of war at least once every other year. Blumenthal has a new book, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza (Nation Books) about the July-August 2014 war, which like its 2012 and 2010 predecessors, settled nothing, leaving opportunities open for the next set of Israeli politicians to prove their mettle:

  Among the leaders of Israel's increasingly dominant religious nationalist movement is Naftali Bennett, the 43-year-old head of the pro-settler Jewish Home Party. Bennett spent much of last summer's war railing against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for refusing to order a full reoccupation of Gaza and the violent removal of Hamas -- a potentially catastrophic move that Netanyahu and the Israeli military brass vehemently opposed. While Bennett accused Palestinians of committing "self-genocide," his youthful deputy, Ayelet Shaked, declared that Palestinian civilians "are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads." According to Shaked, the "mothers of the martyrs" should be exterminated, "as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there."

  In the current Israeli governing coalition, Bennett serves as Minister of Education, overseeing the schooling of millions of Jewish Israeli youth. And Shaked has been promoted to Minister of Justice, giving her direct influence over the country's court system. Once one of the young Turks of the right-wing Likud Party, Netanyahu now finds himself at the hollow center of Israeli politics, mediating between factions of hardline ethno-nationalists and outright fascists.

  Where Gaza is concerned, Israel's loyal opposition differs little from the country's far-right rulers. In the days before the January national elections, Tzipi Livni, a leader of the left-of-center Zionist Union, proclaimed, "Hamas is a terrorist organization and there is no hope for peace with it . . . the only way to act against it is with force -- we must use military force against terror . . . and this is instead of [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's policy to come to an agreement with Hamas." Livni's ally, Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog, reinforced her militaristic position by declaring, "There is no compromising with terror." [ . . . ]

  Months after the cessation of hostilities, even as foreign correspondents marvel at the "quiet" that has prevailed along Gaza's borders, the Israeli leadership is ramping up its bloody imprecations. At a conference this May sponsored by Shurat HaDin, a legal organization dedicated to defending Israel from war crimes charges, Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon warned that another crushing assault was inevitable, either in Gaza, southern Lebanon, or both. After threatening to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran, Yaalon pledged that "we are going to hurt Lebanese civilians to include kids of the family. We went through a very long deep discussion . . . we did it then, we did it in [the] Gaza Strip, we are going to do it in any round of hostilities in the future."

  Also see: Bill Berkowitz: Why Is the Mainstream Media Running Away From Max Blumenthal's New Book About Israel?.

• Tim Weiner: The Nixon Legacy: Adapted from Weiner's new book, One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (Henry Holt). Post focuses on Nixon's paranoia as Watergate moved toward resolution, but that madness was hard earned, intrinsic to a politician who made an art of escalating and withdrawing at the same time, of turning defeats into vindictive grudges -- a psyche that the US government has still never managed to free itself from, probably because those who run covert programs there have always had need to cover up what they do. They say power corrupts, but you rarely glimpse how addictive that corruption is until you uncover someone like Nixon.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 14, 2015

We'll start with Richard Crowson's cartoon this week, since we can't seem to escape Brownbackistan. The Kansas state legislature had to go way into overtime to finally come up with a deal to patch up a $400 million shortfall in state tax revenues opened up by Brownback's 2011 income tax cuts (the one which notoriously exempted businessmen from having to pay any state income tax). It's hard to get Republicans to raise any kind of taxes, but some reconciled themselves by coming up with the most regressive tax increases they could find. And some held out to the bitter end, hoping instead to wreck the government and all the evil it stands for. Brownback himself took both positions at one point or another, and reportedly broke down and wept during one of many hopeless meetings with state legislators. The final scheme they came up with satisfied no one, but Brownback did manage to keep some semblance of his signature programs in place (story here). One downside of keeping the legislature in session so long was that they passed even more dumb and vicious bills than they had time for during the regular session -- see the Rosenberg piece below.

Chuck Powell sent in a link to a piece posted on Tyler Cowen's blog (thankfully not written by Cowen), The political economy of Kansas fiscal policy. The post makes a number of reasonable points, such as the split between rural and urban Kansas, and factors which distort both Wichita and Kansas City from urban/suburban norms. Also that "cutting the size of government was never a serious option," mostly because the costs of education and health care -- the two main expenses of state government -- have been rising much faster than inflation and economic growth. At one point the author says, "Republicans should be wise enough to not depend on luck, and they should be wiser predicting how trend lines go." But he doesn't go into why our current generation of Republicans are so bad at those things. For one thing, past generations were a different story -- you could argue that their priorities were wrong, but you rarely doubted their basic competence: something which Brownback and many others make you wonder about daily. One could write a whole post on this one question, but for now I think there are two main reasons: (1) the Republicans have created a very effective grass roots political organization, largely peopled by gun nuts and anti-abortion fanatics, backed by local chambers of commerce and big money, and they have become very effective at scamming the system; one result of this is that Republicans rarely have to worry about losing to Democrats -- their only meaningful debate is among themselves, which makes them increasingly isolated from and ignorant of other people and their problems; (2) in other words, they live in a bubble, and this bubble is increasingly saturated with Fox News and other right-wing media, which mostly just teaches them to scapegoat while making them stupid and mean. The latter, of course, is a problem with Republicans all over the nation. What makes Kansas worse than the rest is how hard it is to beat them at the game they've rigged. In 2014, Republicans ran 5-8% above the best polls all across the ballot, on top of the gerrymander that guaranteed them legislative majorities. I wouldn't rule out fraud and intimidation, but most likely that's their superior get-out-the-vote organization.

Some more scattered links this week:

• Tom Carson: H.W. Brands: Reagan: The Life: Book review of the new H.W. Brands biography of Ronald Reagan, Reagan: The Life, with a look back at Edmund Morris: Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. I've read two previous books by Brands: Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2008) and American Dreams: The United States Since 1945 (2010), and have found him to be a fair and compiler of history, though not much of an interpreter. The limits that Carson notes are plausible -- especially if, as seems to be the case, he feigns admiration for a character I've always regarded as a shill and a fraud, and whose political legacy, both actual and imaginary, has brought us nothing but grief. I've also read Sean Wilentz: The Age of Reagan: A History 1974-2008 which also goes way too far into buying the myth that Reagan was anything more than an aberration. For more sober views, see Will Bunch: Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future (2009), and William Kleinknecht, The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America (2009), or Carson here -- my only real gripe with his review is that he buys into the notion that Reagan deserves some credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union ("something only a churl would deny him any credit for" -- I'll grant that his early sabre-rattling may have resulted in some unforced errors that weakened the Sovier Union, and that later on Reagan swung against the hard core cold warriors giving Gorbachev some breathing room). Carson is right when he writes: "All these years later, it isn't just outrage that keeps his political opponents from managing or even trying to see him in perspective; it's disbelief." The roots of that disbelief are firmly grounded in reality. Unless you're extremely rich, it's impossible to see how anything that Reagan accomplished -- and beyond all the sleight-of-hand horseshit (like the rejuvenation of "morning in America" or his triumph in the cold war and the vanquishing of Communism) he clearly did accomplish a lot -- has in any way made our lives better.

  Many interesting comments here, like this one:

  Brands also doesn't grasp the extent to which industry politics -- that nerve-wracking combo of power, fickle fashionability, ambition as a form of submission, and submission as an expression of ambition -- were Reagan's Harvard and Yale. During much of his showbiz career, his agent and patron -- note that contradiction and you'll understand Hollywood -- was Lew Wasserman, the legendary head of MCA. Because Wasserman's links to the Chicago Mob known as "the Outfit" are what makes a man endow hospital wings to burnish his image, whole books could be written about the dark side of Ron's debt to Lew; indeed, one or two have been. But Wasserman's name shows up in Reagan: The Life's index just once, and the reference turns out to be anodyne.

  Why dwell on what Brands gives short shrift? Because Hollywood stayed Reagan's primary frame of reference even after he found the ultimate golden parachute, that's why. When he was an actor facing the glue factory, he couldn't shut up about politics. Once he was president, he had the definition of a captive audience while blathering away about his life in movies as the phone never rang.

  Up to then, we'd never had a professional fantasist in the White House. Nixon needed to be awfully drunk to think gabbing at portraits on walls was a good idea, but Reagan could do it cold sober. His fabled remoteness was eerie enough to disconcert his own family -- even wife Nancy confessed it sometimes unnerved her -- and his most immovable mental furniture seems to have been fashioned with such disregard for most people's notions of corroborating evidence that he and Michael Jackson, his '80s pop-culture counterpart at flights of Peter Pan fancy, really could have been long-lost twins. But Brands doesn't even quote the most celebrated blooper of his man's career: the farewell speech to the 1988 Republican convention in which John Adams's "Facts are stubborn things" came out as "Facts are stupid things -- stubborn things, I should say."

  Even at the time, I viewed Reagan as primarily a front man, the real power residing in his famous "kitchen cabinet" -- the cabal of rich businessmen who had recruited him and backed his political career from the start. (At the time, I wasn't aware that Reagan's real initiation into politics was as a corporate spokesperson for General Electric, a company whose management still nursed grudges over the New Deal.) His was not the first administration where the president seemed blithely unaware of the rampant corruption within -- Ulysses Grant and William Harding were obvious examples -- but Reagan was way more disconnected: to call him a "fantasist" is rather generous. As I frequently said at the time, under Reagan the only growth industry in America was fraud. The HUD scandal, the Savings and Loan fiasco, Iran/Contra all bore that out, but it was evident even earlier, all the way back to the "voodoo economics" behind Reagan's signature tax cut. Carson notes:

  What you'd hardly guess from reading Reagan: The Life is that the United States went from being the world's No. 1 creditor to its No. 1 debtor nation during his tenure. His zest for replacing red tape with red ink ended any pretense that the GOP was the party of fiscal prudence, but when Brands mentions toward the end that the Reagan era's hemorrhaging deficits had tripled the public debt from $700 billion to $2 trillion by 1988, it's the first time the subject has come up [ . . . ] and it's virtually the last one, too.

The problem with Reagan's deficits isn't that he created them, and certainly not that we enjoy scolding the Republicans for their spendthrift ways (not to mention hypocrisy), but that Americans got so little of real value out of the extravagance: a lot of worthless military hardware -- the Star Wars-marketed anti-missile system still doesn't work, but the stuff that did work and has since been deployed in wars all around the world has been far more damaging -- and a small number of billionaires with their correspondingly inflated egos. Perhaps even worse, that explosion of debt is now commonly seen as crippling our government -- originally conceived of, by, and for the people as a tool for securing the general welfare -- from doing even relatively simple things that need to be done. The single most damaging thing Reagan ever did was to make a joke about "the scariest words in the English language: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." That such a joke can be turned into a full-blown ideology is a testament to a deeper innovation that Reagan wrought: he liberated American conservatism from the bounds of reality, allowing them to focus on imaginary problems, oblivious to whatever consequences their madness may produce. Back in the 1980s he was said to have "Teflon" -- a non-stick coating that protected him from any of his scandals. Looking back, it now seems that the key to his innocence was his very disconnectedness. Maybe someday a biographer will manage to identify the point when his fantasy gave way to Alzheimer's, but for all practical purposes it hardly matters.

• Michael Knights: Doubling Down on a Doubtful Strategy: Subhed: "Why the current US plan to win back Iraq only guarantees the Islamic State won't be defeated." Knights seems to be arguing that the US should take over and greatly escalate the war despite his analysis that what the US is actually doing can't possibly work. Still you have to wonder whether any amount of commitment could overcome the mental blinders the US military brings with it to Iraq:

  Time is decidedly not on the side of the United States. As then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told me in March 2014, the Iraqi government had been requesting U.S. airstrikes and Special Forces assistance against the Islamic State since the end of 2013. The U.S. unwillingness to act then did not save it anything: Its Iraqi ally collapsed, and now it has been forced into another military campaign.

  When U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter opined that Iraqis "showed no will to fight" in Ramadi, he demonstrated a complete lack of empathy for the situation of the Iraqi combat troops on the front lines against the Islamic State.

  America's Iraqi allies are exhausted, and many units are barely hanging on. They've been demonstrating plenty their "will to fight" in the 12 months since Mosul fell, in the 16 months since Fallujah and Ramadi were overrun, and in the decade since Iraqi forces came to outnumber U.S. forces as the main security force in Iraq.

  No U.S. service member serving in Iraq ever had to stay in the combat zone for as long as the Iraqi troops have. Many of these Iraqis have no safe place to go on leave, allowing no respite for years on end. No U.S. unit in recent history has ever had to suffer the chronic lack of supply and near-complete lack of good officers that Iraqi soldiers live with every day.

  If the United States can totally misunderstand the conditions its allies are experiencing, it's fair to ask what else it is getting wrong about how Iraqis are going to behave in the future.

  Knights offers a list of "faulty assumptions" the US has about Iraq, but two of them are just clichés ("The more we do, the less they do" and "We cannot want the stability of Iraq more than Iraqis want it themselves" -- both assume Iraqis want what we want but just don't want it bad enough) and the third is false ("The Islamic State is a terrorist group, not an army" -- ISIS is both and will fight according to its opponent, so the more you Americanize the war, the more ISIS will adapt with techniques proven effective against the US military). Consider Knights' final pitch:

  If America is only in Iraq to kill Islamic State fighters, it is eventually going to face the reality of an unfixable collapsed state that will demand an open-ended counterterrorism campaign. The alternative is that the United States help Iraqis preserve the fabric of their nation to whatever extent is still possible. To do so will require a different outlook and greater decisiveness. Deliberation is understandable, but U.S. policy in Iraq has been verging on paralysis.

  This is not rocket science: The U.S. options are clear. If the Obama administration wants to fully commit to the hard work of rebuilding Iraq, it should commit 3,000 to 5,000 U.S. Special Forces and support elements as combat advisers, so that Iraqi ground forces and coalition airpower can become far more effective. Secondly, it should use this intensified U.S. military commitment as leverage with Baghdad to win more sustained federal Iraqi government engagement of the Sunnis and the Kurds. Finally, it should accelerate the training of Iraqi forces to leave the next president with a better chance of responsibly downscaling the U.S. commitment in Iraq.

  Without these steps, we should not expect to expel the Islamic State from Iraq. In the absence of undeniable U.S. commitment, our Iraqi allies may define victory down into something that looks more like defeat. And that is a risk that neither Iraq, nor the United States, can afford.

  What exactly can we not afford? The worst case scenario is that ISIS occupies about a third of Iraq -- it has no appeal in the Shiite south or in Kurdistan, and Baghdad is effectively Shiite now -- and the rump state in Baghdad concedes those gains, thereby ridding themselves of a lot of people they don't like and who don't want them. That allows ISIS to focus on Syria, where the US has no real interests or concerns. Why can't we afford that? That represents no real US investment or trade, so we have nothing to lose in that regard. We wouldn't be spending anything bombing and killing them, so that would be a gain. US trade with and investment in Iraq and Kurdistan would be more stable with an end to Iraq's civil war. ISIS might eventually threaten Jordan or Saudi Arabia, but those nations would be much easier to defend than Iraq is. ISIS might try to export terrorism, but they'd have much less reason to do so if the US wasn't bombing them. Sure, ISIS rule would be bad for some of the people living under it, but that's true of other nations and is much easier to remedy diplomatically than through war.

  On the other hand, fighting ISIS means we have to somehow reform Iraq's government to make it more amenable to the Sunnis who have deserted it in favor of ISIS. This is something the US has repeatedly proved incapable of doing. It's something the present government of Iraq doesn't want, and that government is backed by a democratic mandate, so who are we to tell its people they didn't make the right choices? It also means coming to a solution in Syria, which either involves some deft diplomacy that the US has repeatedly failed at or a massive ground invasion and occupation, which is what the US tried in Iraq and failed so miserably at. One might fantasize, but really, why should anyone think the US might do a better job there? One obvious downside is that everyone who might conceivably oppose us -- which is to say everyone -- is already armed and fighting. At least with Iraq the US had a grace period until the resistance got up to speed and changed the US mission from "nation building" to force protection. That's the point where we throw all the humanitarian ballast overboard and decide that the war is only about us. That's the point where we're lost, even if we haven't technically lost yet, because if anything has become clear through America's post-WWII wars, it's that we can't look into our own hearts and see the arrogance and contempt that reside there.

  When people like Knights say that the US can't afford to lose in Iraq, what they mean is that the US can't continue if people get the idea that we're not omnipotent. The obvious first riposte is that it's a little late in the day to be worrying about that. The second is that would make us like everyone else, and what's so bad about that? It doesn't mean that desirable outcomes to world problems can't be worked out. It just means that the US would have to work with other countries to reach agreement, on terms that are mutually inoffensive. It means the US would have to learn to respect others, rather than just dictating to them. But it would also steer US foreign policy away from the maxim that power corrupts (and absolute power corrupts absolutely). But even if all we did was curl up into an isolationist ball and mope, that would probably be better for all concerned than bumbling our way into a holy war we don't have the slightest understanding of -- which is pretty much what Knights wants us to do. Perhaps the "paralysis" Knights complains of is really just because there's an irreconcilable division in the foreign policy elite as more and more people sober up and realize the lack of good options. For one example of this shift, see Stephen M Walt: What Should We Do if the Islamic State Wins? His answer: "live with it." Really, you think "die with it" is a better answer? Even Donald Rumsfeld (see George W. Bush Was Wrong About Iraq) is thinking that it would be better to counter ISIS with ideas ("more like the Cold War") rather than bullets. By the way, what Rumsfeld thinks Bush was wrong about wasn't invading Iraq; it was thinking that the US could build "an American-style democracy" there. As a long-time Cold Warrior, Rumsfeld always had a preference for compliant strong men over democracy.

• Heather Digby Parton: The Koch brothers just took a huge step toward a GOP civil war: Having created a system where money is everything, the Republican Party is now turning into a plaything for a handful of billionaires, especially the Kochs, who seem intent to use their deep pockets to launch a hostile takeover of the RNC.

  One of the more enduring metaphors of this political era is bound to be that of the Republican Dr. Frankenstein and his Tea Party monster. What was once a staid, mainstream political party full of Rotary Club businessmen, hard-scrabble farmers and pillars of America's communities has become a boisterous bunch of rebellious revolutionaries. [ . . . ]

  Its ideology became a matter of faith-based adherence to abstract principles about "freedom" and "small government" even as the Republican Party made a devil's bargain with both the religious right, which sought to enforce "family values," and the military industrial complex, which grew to gargantuan proportions under both parties. These alliances were strategic moves by the Party elders seeking a winning governing coalition and it worked beautifully for decades. They formed a strong "conservative" identity out of this coalition, while demonizing the identity of liberalism to such an extent that liberals were forced to abandon it altogether and adopt another name to describe themselves.

  Meanwhile, the party banked on overweening victimization among its mainly white, resentful voters in the wake of the revolution in law and culture that began in the 1960s with civil rights for minorities and the economic and social changes that sent women pouring into the workplace and changing the traditional organization of family and home. This too worked very well for quite some time. Fear, anger and resentment of everything from racial integration to middle class stagnation to imaginary foreign threats became intrinsic to the Republican identity.

  All of this was of great benefit to the Republican party's electoral success and the message discipline within the echo chamber of their partisan media ensured that the ideology among the various strands of the Republican coalition held together in what sounded like a coherent program. But it never really was coherent. [ . . . ]

  But the irony of the Party that fetishizes money now becoming a victim of the 1 percent monster it has coddled, nurtured and enabled is overwhelming. Unfortunately, that particular beast has been unleashed on all of us and it doesn't seem as though anyone knows how to stop it. The Tea Partyers who come together and vote out a stale incumbent they don't like in favor of a right wing zealot is not something that's good for the country, to be sure. But at least it's democratic, however unpleasant the result. The idea that a vastly wealthy pair of right wing fanatics could literally take over one of the two major American political parties is more than a little disturbing. It's downright monstrous.

• Paul Rosenberg: Sam Brownback guts Kansas even more: This is life under America's worst Republican governor: Brownback, then a Senator, ran for President in 2008. He expected to do especially well in Iowa, but got no credit for coming from the corn belt, and lost the holy rollers to Mike Huckabee (a baptist minister, whereas Brownback's a convert to high church catholicism). He was polling about 2% when he dropped out. He then regrouped, giving up his safe Senate seat to run for Governor, with the hope of proving himself such a brilliant state executive that party and nation would have to bow down to his next presidential campaign. He won handily, then proved himself to be, as the headline says, "America's worst Republican governor" (not that several others I can think of, including Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker, have a lot of breathing room). First thing he did was pulling a Reagan and hiring Arthur Laffer to prescribe a round of pro-business income tax cuts, including an exemption for business moguls from all state income taxes. That saved one Republican legislator $60,000 per year (do the math and that means he's raking in about $10 million; he actually proposed reducing the break). That probably saved Charles Koch a lot more. But the economy didn't respond as advertised, and Kansas has been facing budget gaps on the order of $400 million/year, and responding with drastic spending cuts -- which have further tanked the economy -- and increases in regressive sales taxes, "sin" taxes, and local property taxes. Brownback has another signature program where he's promising tax exemptions to out-of-staters to move into depopulating counties in rural Kansas. Presumably the people struggling to hang on in those counties will be happy to pay for their new neighbors schooling and services. That, of course, hasn't cost Kansas much so far, because hardly anyone is desperate enough for a tax break to live in Gove or Hodgeman counties. Indeed, hardly anyone lived there before the breaks (my relatives got out of Hodgeman, where my great-great-grandfather homesteaded in the 1860s). When not appealing to tax cheats, the state legislature has passed an extraordinary number of dumb and/or vicious bills this session. Rosenberg writes about one that allows Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a notorious partisan hack, to prosecute anyone he sees fit for voting fraud. Back in Brownback's first term Kansas passed one of the most restrictive anti-voter registration laws in the country. I'll let Rosenberg describe another law:

  This past week drew national attention to two of those aspects in the form of new laws Brownback signed. The first law would defund the state courts if they rule against a 2014 law which was seen by many as retaliation for the Gannon decision. That law stripped the Supreme Court of supervisory functions established in the state constitution. Hence, Brownback and the legislature are defying the power of the court to decide constitutional law. This is the very opposite of the true meaning of "limited government" -- government limited by the rule of law (as opposed to absolute government, limited by nothing.)

  Another of the new laws in Kansas is one that drops the requirement of a license (and some minimal training) for concealed carry of guns. By contrast, see: Katie McDonough: This is the NRA's worst nightmare: The new gun safety study that gun nuts don't want you to hear about:

  A law requiring people to apply for a permit before buying a handgun helped Connecticut quietly reduce its firearm-related homicide rate by 40 percent, according to a new study out from Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. And this week, announced in conjunction with the research, lawmakers from Connecticut introduced a measure to encourage other states to adopt their own permit programs.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Some scattered links this week:

• Jason Ditz: Senate Votes to Block Pentagon Paying Millions to NFL to 'Honor Troops': You probably thought (if you thought about it at all) that the NFL was just engaging in patriotic showboating, but it turns out they were on the government dole. Precious quote, from Sens. McCain, Flake, and Blumenthal: "the US cannot afford to give 'scarce defense dollars to wealthy sports teams.'" They're talking about $5.4 million, a tiny drop in the trillion or so dollars the US spends on "defense" each year. Indeed, it's probably only a small fraction of what the Defense Dept. spends on PR, the effect of which is to make war more politically acceptable.

• Paul Krugman: Why Am I a Keynesian?

  Noah Smith sort-of approvingly quotes Russ Roberts, who views all macroeconomic positions as stalking horses for political goals, and declares in particular that

  Krugman is a Keynesian because he wants bigger government. I'm an anti-Keynesian because I want smaller government.

  OK, I'm not going to clutch my pearls and ask for the smelling salts. Politics can shape our views, in ways we may not recognize. [ . . . ]

  So, am I a Keynesian because I want bigger government? If I were, shouldn't I be advocating permanent expansion rather than temporary measures? Shouldn't I be for stimulus all the time, not only when we're at the zero lower bound? When I do call for bigger government -- universal health care, higher Social Security benefits -- shouldn't I be pushing these things as job-creation measures? (I don't think I ever have). I think if you look at the record, I've always argued for temporary fiscal expansion, and only when monetary policy is constrained. Meanwhile, my advocacy of an expanded welfare state has always been made on its own grounds, not in terms of alleged business cycle benefits.

  In other words, I've been making policy arguments the way one would if one sincerely believed that fiscal policy helps fight unemployment under certain conditions, and not at all in the way one would if trying to use the slump as an excuse for permanently bigger government.

  But in that case, why am I a Keynesian? Maybe because of convincing evidence?

  First of all, the case for viewing most recessions -- and the Great Recession in particular -- as failures of aggregate demand is overwhelming.

  Now, this could be a case for using monetary rather than fiscal policy -- and that actually is the policy I advocate in response to garden-variety slumps. But when the slump pushes rates down to zero, and that's still not enough, any simple model I can think of says that fiscal expansion can be a useful supplement, while fiscal austerity makes a bad situation worse.

  And while it's true that there was limited direct evidence on the effects of fiscal policy 6 or 7 years ago, there's now a lot, and it's very supportive of a Keynesian view.

  Krugman is generally right that Keynesian macro is preferred because it provides a more accurate and efficient understanding of the interaction between government spending and economic growth, and can back that up with evidence, especially of a predictive nature. But whether you want growth and what kind of growth you want are political issues. Those who do, like Krugman (or Nixon, when he wanted to take credit for a robust economy, and had one that often seemed to be on the verge of collapse), will be Keynesians because they want tools that work. But those who don't care about growth (except of business profits) will disparage Keynes -- after all, why acknowledge an analysis that could work when that's not what you want? Keynes wouldn't be controversial but for the purely political desire to slag the economy. You might wonder why Republicans would want to do that -- some combination of making a Democrat in the White House look bad and a preference for increasing inequality over economic growth.

  The "big government" association with Keynesianism is, as Krugman shows, misdirection. I'd personally like to trim large segments of government -- especially the biggest one of all, the military. That doing so would be contractionary doesn't bother me. One can always spend more elsewhere, and finding more productive investments than the US military should be easy. Or you can reduce taxes and, as Bush liked to put it, let people spend their own money. Strangely enough, anti-government obsessives rarely worry about the military -- even though from the founding of the republic up to WWII many Americans regarded a standing army as the greatest threat to liberty. Rather, what they object to is that government is subject to democratic rule and as such can be used to rebalance private fortunes, whereas their vaunted private sector tends to exacerbate inequities. They object not to the government which they need to secure private property, but to what that government might do to satisfy the masses. Over the ages they've pulled every trick imaginable to keep the belief that the nation was founded upon -- that all men are created equal -- from becoming reality. Denying the efficacy of Keynesian economics is just one such trick.

• Bill McKibben: How mankind blew the fight against climate change: Strange scenes from Exxon Mobil's annual shareholders meeting:

  The meeting came two days after Texas smashed old rainfall records -- almost doubled them, in some cases -- and as authorities were still searching for families swept away after rivers crested many feet beyond their previous records. As Exxon Mobil's Rex Tillerson -- the highest-paid chief executive of the richest fossil fuel firm on the planet -- gave his talk, the death toll from India's heat wave mounted and pictures circulated on the Internet of Delhi's pavement literally melting. Meanwhile, satellite images showed Antarctica's Larsen B ice shelf on the edge of disintegration.

  And how did Tillerson react? By downplaying climate change and mocking renewable energy. To be specific, he said that "inclement weather" and sea level rise "may or may not be induced by climate change," but in any event technology could be developed to cope with any trouble. "Mankind has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity and those solutions will present themselves as those challenges become clear," he said.

  But apparently those solutions don't include, say, the wind and sun. Exxon Mobil wouldn't invest in renewable energy, Tillerson said, because clean technologies don't make enough money and rely on government mandates that were (remarkable choice of words) "not sustainable." He neglected to mention the report a week earlier from the not-very-radical International Monetary Fund detailing $5.3 trillion a year in subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.

  All in all, a sneering and sad performance by a man paid nearly $100,000 a day, whose company spends $100 million a day looking for new oil and gas even though scientists say we simply can't burn most of the fossil fuel we've already located without devastating consequences.

  The science explaining climate change, like Keynesian economics (above), has become inconvenient for certain well established interests who prefer to think that politics trumps science, or that anything that challenges their personal interests and prejudices must be nothing but propaganda against them. While this is often true, nowhere more so than in the oil industry, where fortunes were built on nothing more than a lottery of land titles, yet every tycoon considers himself a self-made man, not to mention graced by God.

• Daniel Strauss: Brownback May Empower Kris Kobach to Prosecute 'Voter Fraud' Cases Himself: Kobach has been lobbying for this power ever since he was elected Secretary of State in 2010, although it's never been clear who he'd prosecute with this -- as he hasn't been able to get a single county to prosecute one of his cases yet. If anyone should be prosecuted for voter fraud it's Kobach, Brownback, and the state legislature, whose ID laws have prevented thousands of otherwise eligible citizens from voting. Josh Marshall comments: "He can just prosecute anyone he wants." Certainly a dream come true for a self-aggrandizing demagogue.

• Maybe the GOP Candidates Are Just as Self-Deluding as Their Voter Base: Much discussion with little insight into the plethora of Republicans who are mounting campaigns for president in 2016. This keys off a Kevin Drum piece (title: Why Do So Many Obvious Losers Think They Can Be President?) that, in the most pedestrian tradition of horserace journalism tries to handicap the hopefuls. Both pieces are governed by the idea that only candidates with reasonable chances should bother running -- an idea which in the past has mostly been used to avoid considering the issues that "fringe" candidates (Dennis Kucinich is pretty close to the archetype here) run on and for. But Republicans are so ideologically homogeneous that it's hard to think of a candidate with issues to be silenced. (Drum tries to dismiss Rand Paul as having views "just flatly too far out of the tea party mainstream" -- actually, Paul's tea party bona fides are as strong as any candidate's [Cruz being the only obvious competition], his one major unorthodoxy [opposition to the PATRIOT Act] is quite popular among tea party rank-and-file, and he's shown remarkable willingness to shelve libertarian positions on fetish issues like abortion and Israel.)

  Of course, Drum's supposition is fully operative among Democrats. Hillary Clinton's inevitability -- a combination of name, stature, and an almost unique access to a resource base formidable enough to stand up to Republican money power -- doesn't give any other Democrats any real chance at raising the money they'd need to be taken seriously. (This on top of the usual Democratic fundraising disadvantages, such as a lower return on graft.)

  On the other hand lots of Republicans seem to be coming up with the money to run, and the fact that they're all saying the same thing just helps reinforce the brand. (One person's may be a crackpot, but three add up to a trend, and nine gives you a new conventional wisdom even if what they're saying still sounds crazed.) And all saying the same thing reduces the contest to one of personality -- something they'd much rather have us talking about than issues, which usually require a thick layer of packaging to be palatable at all. As usual with the Republicans, one suspects that this is just pre-primary dog-and-pony show to drum up interest, with the fix revealed later at an appropriately dramatic moment.

  One hint here is the recent demise of the candidacy of Dennis Michael Lynch -- a candidate you never heard of, probably because he doesn't fit the profile of "rising Republican star," maybe because his obsessive issue (anti-immigration) is one Republican powers would rather not talk about. On the other hand, there is a role for the nearly-as-obscure Carly Fiorina. Steve M. writes:

  My first impression of [Fiorina's] campaign wasn't that it was a campaign for president or vice president -- it was that, as a candidate, she's like the one female member of a rich accused rapist's defense dream team, the attorney whose principal role is to do a really vicious cross-examination of the victim, because that would come of as sexist if a man did it.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Chloe Angyal: The Subculture of Embattled Abortion Workers: Abortion is one of the very few political issues today where ordinary debate is shadowed and haunted by one side adopting a network of harrassment and terror. Of course, this is not unprecedented in American history: the civil rights movement was met by even more violence, both in the 1960s and throughout the previous century, with much of that violence orchestrated by the various states. The labor movement up to the 1930s comes in a not-too-distant second. Still, while racism and anti-laborism persist, the level of violence and its chilling effects are far less than that experienced by the people who run and work with clinics that provide abortions. (Part of the reason may be the demagoguery of anti-choice politicians like Sam Brownback, playing the role George Wallace and Lester Maddox did on race.) Angyal reviews a book by David S Cohen and Krysten Connon: Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism (2015, Oxford University Press), which details much of this history.

• Jared Bernstein/Ben Spielberg: Inequaliity Matters: Lead in:

  Lately, one argument that's been making the rounds is that people should worry less about inequality and more about opportunity. Arthur Brooks, head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said, "I don't care about income inequality per se; I care about opportunity inequality." Senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio believes that inequality is but a symptom of immobility and constrained opportunity. Tyler Cowen argued in the New York Times that what matters is not the fact that the top 1 percent is capturing a much larger share of total income growth than they used to, but that the poor are stuck in poverty.

  These individuals have identified a worthy goal. Unequal access to opportunity offends deeply held American values, and poverty is not only a matter of near-term material deprivation -- too often, it also robs low-income children of the chance to realize their intellectual and economic potential.

  But it's not possible to effectively address either poverty or inadequate opportunity if America hives off its opportunity concerns from the broader problem of inequality (nor, as Senator Rubio intimates, can America reduce inequality by focusing solely on increasing mobility). Boosting mobility will require reductions in wage, income, and wealth inequalities.

  The authors back up their initial assertions. One question they don't address is whether opportunity is being deliberately constricted by the rich; e.g., by making elite education both more necessary for advancement and more inaccessible to the unwealthy. It makes sense that a politically aggressive upper class recognizing a stagnant economy with austerity reducing the number of slots near the top would focus more on securing those slots for their own progeny. I don't know that anyone has sorted out the evidence for this, but there are many hints -- e.g., the nepotism boom under the second Bush administration.

• Garrett Epps: Out of Spite: The Governor of Nebraska's Threat to Execute Prisoners: Nebraska's state legislature passed a bill to ban capital punishment. Governor Ricketts vetoed the bill, and the legislature overrode the veto, making the bill law. So what does Ricketts do? Follow the law? No. He vows to speed up the executions of ten prisoners already on death row. Epps surveys many of the issues, including the increasing difficulty that states are having obtaining lethal injection drugs.

• David Himmelstein/Steffie Woolhandler: The Post-Launch Problem: The Affordable Care Act's Persistently High Administrative Costs:

  Insuring 25 million additional Americans, as the CBO projects the ACA will do, is surely worthwhile. But the administrative cost of doing so seems awfully steep, particularly when much cheaper alternatives are available.

  Traditional Medicare runs for 2 percent overhead, somewhat higher than insurance overhead in universal single payer systems like Taiwan's or Canada's. Yet traditional Medicare is a bargain compared to the ACA strategy of filtering most of the new dollars through private insurers and private HMOs that subcontract for much of the new Medicaid coverage. Indeed, dropping the overhead figure from 22.5 percent to traditional Medicare's 2 percent would save $249.3 billion by 2022.

  The ACA isn't the first time we've seen bloated administrative costs from a federal program that subcontracts for coverage through private insurers. Medicare Advantage plans' overhead averaged 13.7 percent in 2011, about $1,355 per enrollee. But rather than learn from that mistake, both Democrats and Republicans seem intent on tossing more federal dollars to private insurers.

• Esther Kaplan: Losing Sparta: The Bitter Truth Behind the Gospel of Productivity: That's Sparta, Tennessee, home of a huge unionized factory owned by Philips and shut down in 2010, the equipment (and business) to be moved to Mexico.

  When Philips announced its plans to shut down the plant in Sparta, the firm was in the black, aided by $7.2 million in federal stimulus grants and contracts. Profits were even better the following year as the firm began to lay off the plant's nearly 300 workers. Even Philips's lighting division was doing well. By late 2010, three years into the recovery, corporate profits, in general, had bounced back decisively, reaching record highs. Yet layoffs continued apace -- 1.4 million in 2010, 1.3 million a year in 2011 and 2012 -- well above prerecession levels.

  Among other profitable firms -- indeed, Fortune's list of America's most profitable firms in 2012, the year the Philips plant finally closed its gates -- closures and layoffs have been widespread: Chevron lays off 103 from a New Mexico mine; Walmart shuts down a New York office, putting 275 out of work; Ford shuts down two assembly plants in Minnesota, laying off nearly 1,700; IBM lays off 1,790 from its business units; Microsoft lays off 5,000. Exxon, ranked number one in profitability by Fortune in 2012, with $41 billion in profits in 2011, shrank its global workforce by more than 15,000 between 2010 and 2012. Chevron, at number two with profits of $27 billion, added only a thousand US jobs during that period. Apple was the only one of the country's five most profitable firms to add more than 10,000 jobs during that time (and Apple's public disclosures don't specify how many of those jobs were domestic). The latest Commerce Department data show that all US multinationals combined added a net total of only half a million jobs domestically between 2002 and 2011, but added 3.5 million jobs abroad, an indication of offshoring on a very grand scale.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

Some scattered links this week:

• Charles Krauthammer: It's Obama who lost Iraq: I don't normally bother citing right-wing propagandists here. I'd rather use links to learn something or at least point out something new, and the insight that Krauthammer is a devious, despicable warmonger is far from new. Nor is Krauthammer capable of the sort of idiosyncracies -- like you might find from Cal Thomas or David Brooks -- that might shed some light into the bizarre thinking processes of conservatives. The one strength Krauthammer has is his ability to proceed from false premise to faulty conclusion: few conservatives are as rigorous, or as ridgid. But I can't let this false premise go unnoted:

  Second, the "if you knew then" question implicitly locates the origin and cause of the current disasters in 2003. As if the fall of Ramadi was predetermined then, as if the author of the current regional collapse is George W. Bush.

  This is nonsense. The fact is that by the end of Bush's tenure, the war had been won. You can argue that the price of that victory was too high. Fine. We can debate that until the end of time.

  But what is not debatable is that it was a victory. Bush bequeathed to Obama a success. By whose measure? By Obama's. As he told the troops at Fort Bragg on Dec. 14, 2011, "We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people." This was, said the President, a "moment of success."

  Which Obama proceeded to fully squander. With the 2012 election approaching, he chose to liquidate our military presence in Iraq. We didn't just withdraw our forces. We abandoned, destroyed or turned over our equipment, stores, installations and bases.

  We surrendered our most valuable strategic assets, such as control of Iraqi airspace, soon to become the indispensable conduit for Iran to supply and sustain the Assad regime in Syria and cement its influence all the way to the Mediterranean. [ . . . ]

  Iraq is now a battlefield between the Sunni jihadists of the Islamic State and the Shiite jihadists of Iran's Islamic Republic. There is no viable center. We abandoned it. The Obama administration's unilateral pullout created a vacuum for the entry of the worst of the worst.

  Probably the biggest mistake Obama made in the early days of his presidency was how graciously he let Bush off the hook, not only for his disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but for his mishandling of the economy and numerous other malfeasances of government. He did this in some sort of unrequited lust for bipartisan appeal, thinking that, for instance, if he expressed confidence that would help the economy. The real definition of the "success" he referred to was that he had managed to extricate American troops from an occupation that went sour from the very start and that would continue to be resisted violently as long as it went on. Those troops left not because they had accomplished any American goals but because the Iraqi government, whose legitimacy we could not dispute, had insisted on their leaving -- indeed, that government would never be regarded as legitimate in the eyes of its own people had the US continued to prop them up. Whether Obama wanted that to happen or not is beside the point. What he tried to do was to buck up the troops is a moment of retreat. Doing so was, I think, a mistake, and not just because it allowed Krauthammer to twist his words around. It was mostly a mistake because he squandered an opportunity to remind the nation that the entire Iraq War was a disastrous misjudgment, principally by George W. Bush. His generous words to the troops not only sullied his own reputation, it denied America a critical opportunity to learn from past mistakes.

  For an example of Krauthammer's weasel wording, consider his line: "With the 2012 election approaching, he chose to liquidate our military presence in Iraq." After the Dec. 14, 2011 "success" pronouncement, this implies that the "liquidation" came later -- perhaps closer to November 2012 election. In fact, the "liquidation" was completed by Dec. 18, 2011, four days after Obama's speech. And as I said, it wasn't Obama who chose to withdraw. All he decided was to honor and implement an agreement Bush signed in 2008 that set a Dec. 31, 2011 timetable for US withdrawal, and that was largely because Iraq didn't offer any other option.

  Perhaps had Obama sided with history, and the vast majority of the American people, that the 2003 invasion of Iraq had been a mistake, and laid the blame for that mistake clearly at the feet of the people responsible for it, he might not have repeated the mistake in sending troops back to Iraq to fight ISIS -- a move which, by the way, Krauthammer applauded. By the way, Ramadi fell to ISIS not in the wake of the US withdrawal, but after Obama sent troops back into Iraq.

  The implication that Iraq had a "viable center" before Obama withdrew is especially scurrilous. Iraq has essentially the same shiite-dominated government now it had in 2011 (or for that matter since the US arranged for Nouri al-Maliki to become Prime Minister in 2006). While a continued US military presence might have meant a few more "allies" ready to take American cash, they would never have developed into a politically significant faction -- in large part because as far back as Bush I the US viewed Iraq as a triad of sectarian forces to play against each other (first urging the shiites to rise up against Saddam Hussein, then helping the Kurds break away, then using both as proxies in the 2003 invasion, and later fomenting a Shiite-Sunni civil war to keep the anti-American Sadr movement from linking up with various anti-American Sunni forces (everything from Baathists to Al-Qaida-in-Iraq). But also because "American interests" in Iraq never extended beyond the military-industrial complex and other corporations (notably in the oil industry), so the US never offered anything concrete to the Iraqi people.

  Krauthammer also has a peculiar argument about 2003:

  It's a retrospective hypothetical: Would you have invaded Iraq in 2003 if you had known then what we know now?

  First, the question is not just a hypothetical, but an inherently impossible hypothetical. It contradicts itself. Had we known there were no weapons of mass destruction, the very question would not have arisen. The premise of the war -- the basis for going to the UN, to the Congress and, indeed, to the nation -- was Iraq's possession of WMD in violation of the central condition for the ceasefire that ended the first Gulf War. No WMD, no hypothetical to answer in the first place.

  He seems to be saying that had Bush known Iraq had no WMD, he wouldn't have even considered invading Iraq. But actually there is little reason to think either that Bush's top security people believed Iraq possessed WMD or that that possession was the real reason they wanted to invade and occupy Iraq. Every scrap of stovepiped intelligence that the administration presented had been refuted well before the invasion -- the Niger uranium buy, the aluminum tubes, the mobile biological weapons vans, what else was there? -- and repeated inspections had failed to find anything. If Bush wanted to find proof he should have allowed the UN inspectors to continue their work, but he cut them short. As for real reason, Bush's people were very forthcoming about their desire to remake the Middle East in America's image -- actually, during the Bremer viceroyship it looked more like the aim was Texas's image -- while Bush himself much enjoyed the political prospects of leading a successful war (something his father nearly managed but lost by allowing Saddam Hussein to survive). The phrase "knowing what we know now" doesn't just mean "knowing Iraq had no WMD"; it means "knowing that the war would last eight year, cost over 4,000 US soldiers lives, kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and leave the country mired in a civil war with no end in sight, hosting groups like ISIS that present threats impossible under Saddam Hussein." Krauthammer doesn't like that question because even now, even given that everyone across the political spectrum from George W. Bush to Jeb Bush would answer the question "no" -- Krauthammer himself would still say "yes," because quite frankly Krauthammer likes disastrous wars as much as he likes rousing wars, because he knows how to spin both into future wars, and that's all he really cares about.

  By the way, in looking up some points above, I ran across Ali Khedery: Why we stuck with Maliki -- and lost Iraq. Khedery was a high-level US operative in Iraq, working for various US ambassadors and General Petraeus, and claims to be the guy who secured US support to make Maliki Prime Minister in 2006. His article supports several of Krauthammer's premises. In particular, he regards Petraeus's "surge" was a brilliant success, and as such he thinks that Iraq was something the US had to lose, then lost it. But he sees this as something that Iran did, not something Obama didn't do. In fact, his only mention of Obama is rather oblique:

  The crisis now gripping Iraq and the Middle East was not only predictable but predicted -- and preventable. By looking the other way and unconditionally supporting and arming Maliki, President Obama has only lengthened and expanded the conflict that President Bush unwisely initiated. Iraq is now a failed state, and as countries across the Middle East fracture along ethno-sectarian lines, America is likely to emerge as one of the biggest losers of the new Sunni-Shiite holy war, with allies collapsing and radicals plotting another 9/11.

  Khedery is arguing that Maliki (his own pick in 2006) should have been removed from power in 2009-10 in favor of an alternative who would have worked to heal the sectarian divisions the US exacerbated since 2003 (actually 1991), as if the US effectively had the power (and insight and wisdom) to manipulate the elected government. Had Obama managed that, and had the reformed government reunited Iraq and sparked widely shared economic growth, then ISIS wouldn't have been able to expand from Syria, and the US wouldn't have gotten dragged back into Iraq's conflict. That's a lot of hypotheticals.

  As for the "radicals plotting another 9/11" that's almost completely because the US continues to be intimately involved in the civil war conflicts of the Middle East, picking allies and attacking enemies on both sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide, because the only coherent allegiance we have is how we favor the oligarchs over the masses -- no big surprise that the Cold War lives on in Washington, firm in the conviction that we'll support any despot willing to do business with us, and we'll adopt any religious fanaticism that seems to help our cause. Long ago sane people realized that this was an insane way to view the world, and we'd be better off just quietly doing nothing. Then all we'd have to worry about is pundits like Krauthammer and Trudy Rubin and their perpetual warmongering.

• Brent Frazee: Tying lures and fishing help put veteran on the road back from war: After reading several articles trying to use vets as pawns in debates over the Iraq War, I ran across this one, which may not be typical but at least is a realistic slice of life:

  When Joe Bragg caught a live well full of big crappies Thursday, it represented one more step on his road to recovery.

  Just two months ago, the Army veteran couldn't imagine such moments would ever be enjoyed again.

  "I was totally stressed out," said Bragg, 36, who served two tours of duty in Iraq. "My life just hit rock bottom.

  "At the time I couldn't see any way out."

  After returning from the war, Bragg's life unraveled. His wife left him, he lost his house, he couldn't find a job, and he suffered from the effects of post traumatic stress disorder.

  That's when he turned to a unique kind of therapy. During the nights when he couldn't sleep, he started tying feather crappie jigs. It was a craft he learned years ago from his father, who looked for unique lures that the fish hadn't seen before. [ . . . ]

  "I started tying jigs so I didn't have to sit in front of Wal-Mart begging for money," said Bragg, who lives in Topeka. "It was that bad.

  "I was a master carpenter before I went into the service, but after you've been in the Army, your body gets banged up. The mind's willing, but the body just can't handle a lot of things." [ . . . ]

  Serving in a war can be tough on a man, he'll tell you. He witnessed horrors that he wouldn't wish on anyone. He saw friends killed. He survived mortar fire 17 times (yes, he remembers the exact number), and he suffered the pain of losing three friends to suicide.

  "Not one of them was over 25 years old," he said.

  Bragg served in the Army from October 2006 to July 2013 and was in a unit that did scouting. He was on the front line, and he and his unit won commendations for their service.

  Personally, I don't think that anyone, ever, under any circumstances, should sign up to join the US Army or any of the other "armed services" (with the marginal exception of the Coast Guard). I don't think the US military has done anything in my lifetime that's been worth the cost, and not just in dead or broken soldiers. Moreover, I think that people should be sufficiently well informed to decide not to join -- as I was and did when my time came. So when they do join, especially now that the draft is no longer trying to coerce them, I think that's a person who doesn't understand what they're getting into, or why -- certainly not someone I can give any credit to. Some survive their ordeal without obvious damage, but many -- it seems like the ratio has increased over time -- come out more/less damaged. Some learn better, and some come out with totally warped worldviews. People like to believe that what they do for a living is worthwhile to the world at large, and sometimes they go to ridiculous lengths to do so.

  One of the veterans pieces I saw was Rebecca Santana: Iraq war question frustrating veterans:

  Veterans of the Iraq war have been watching in frustration as Republican presidential contenders distance themselves from the decision their party enthusiastically supported to invade that country.

  Some veterans say they long ago concluded their sacrifice was in vain, and are annoyed that a party that lobbied so hard for the war is now running from it. Others say they still believe their mission was vital, regardless of what the politicians say. And some find the question being posed to the politicians -- Knowing what we know now, would you have invaded? -- an insult in itself.

  All sorts of comments follow, starting with an ex-Army sniper who "feel such a strong attachment to Iraq that he's thought about going back to fight as the country has plunged into chaos since U.S. troops left." Another vet says he "feels the emphasis really shouldn't be on the decision to invade but on whether the U.S. should have stayed past its 2011 departure date to secure the gains made. Many vets blame President Obama -- not Bush -- for the current state of affairs, saying he was in too much of a hurry to withdraw." The fact is that people go to remarkable lengths to justify their choices and actions, to impart some greater value to them than they ever had. Of course, there are antiwar vets too -- one is quoted, "A mistake doesn't sum up the gravity of that decision."

  No More Mr. Nice Blog cites a story about the mother of a SEAL who died in Ramadi, complaining "my son's blood is on Ramadi soil. Now ISIS has it . . . that's 'gut wrenching' to me." Steve M. replies (emphasis in original):

  Look, I'm sorry it worked out this way for everyone who fought there. But I'm not sorry we withdrew -- I'm sorry we sent these troops to a war we never should have asked them to fight. It's a harsh truth, but yes, their sacrifice was for nothing. That's our fault. They did what we asked them to do. We deserve to burn in hell for asking them to do it.

• Paul Krugman: Hypocritical Sloth: Notes Politico posted a "hit piece on Elizabeth Warren, alleging that she's being hypocritical in her opposition to a key aspect of TPP," because, well, I'm not sure -- something. Krugman sees this as "another illustration of the poisonous effect the determination to sell TPP is having on the Obama team's intellectual ethics." He goes on to generalize:

  And more generally, the whole affair is an illustration of the key role of sheer laziness in bad journalism.

  Think about it: when is the charge of hypocrisy relevant? Basically, only when a public figure is preaching about individual behavior, and perhaps holding himself or herself up as a role model. So yes, it's fair to go after someone who preaches morality but turns out to be a crook or a sexual predator. But articles alleging that someone's personal choices are somehow hypocritical given their policy positions are almost always off point. Someone can declare that inequality is a problem while being personally rich; they're calling for policy changes, not mass self-abnegation. Someone can declare our judicial system flawed while fighting cases as best they can within that system -- until policy change happens, you have to live in the world as it is.

  Oh, and it's very definitely OK to advocate policies that would hurt one's own financial interests -- it's just bizarre when the press suggests that there's something insincere and suspect when high earners propose tax increases.

  So why are charges of hypocrisy so popular? Mainly, I think, as a way to avoid taking on policy substance. Is Elizabeth Warren right or wrong about TPP? Never mind, let's sneer at her for having been a prominent law professor.

  The same motives drive the preoccupation with flip-flopping. You once said that deficits were bad, now you say that they're OK. Hah! Never mind whether deficits are in fact OK right now, and whether either the situation has changed or you have learned something. (As someone pointed out, both Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton have rejected policies they used to support -- but Romney has rejected policies that worked, while Clinton has rejected policies that didn't. A bit of a difference.)

  I think it was Violent Femmes who did a song that went America is the home of the hypocrite. I remember hypocrisy being a big deal when I was a teenager and seemed to be running into it in every corner. The writer then known as Leroi Jones (you know him as Amiri Baraka) wrote a novel -- one of the first "adult" books I read -- called The System of Dante's Hell where he noted that he would assign hypocrites to a lower spot in hell than Dante had, because they were a more egregious problem now than then. Some early examples were pompous public preachers getting caught in sex scandals -- the sort of thing that returned as farce with this week's Josh Duggar scandal -- but the worst cases always struck me as political, like J. Edgar Hoover as the defender of freedom, or the refrain "kill for peace." I suspect that charges of hypocrisy often have instant resonance for ex-believers. Still, these days I worry more about consistent, relentless liars -- like Charles Krauthammer up above, who always has an agenda to make the world a more miserable place. And it hardly matters whether his interest in doing so is because he's a paid hack or a true believer (in God or the ruling class or the principle of sheer greed or something equally loony). On the other hand, hypocrisy is starting to look like part of the human condition, a failing we should probably forgive lest we lose everything. For instance, Thomas Jefferson is well known to us as a slaveholding hypocrite, but his declaration that "all men are created equal" should still matter to us.

• Cathy O'Neil: Kansas redistributes money from the poor to the banks: Reaction to a recent Kansas state law which imposes a long list of restrictions on welfare recipients, intended to prevent them from enjoying any "luxuries" at the state's expense. One such restriction is that one cannot withdraw more than $25 from an ATM at one time. As O'Neil points out, most ATMs (certainly all the ones I use) only deal in $20 bills, so that is the effective limit. Also, most charge fixed fees per transaction, the same amount for $20 as for $200 or more, so forcing people to make more transactions is effectively a subsidy for the banks. O'Neil doesn't note that this part of the state law is contrary to federal law and will probably have to be dropped unless the point is to kill off the state welfare program by disqualifying it from federal money -- that is, after all, where the money comes from. (That may seem insane, but Kansas is one of the states that refuses Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, much to the consternation of the program's real beneficiaries: the state's hospitals, doctors, and their corporate support networks.) There's also much more to the state law than this banking proviso. Among the prohibited "luxuries" are movie tickets -- note that Wichita has a discount second-run theater where shows are $2 on Tuesdays, but that's still a prohibited luxury. I've seen a lot of discussion about this law -- the sponsor, by the way, is Michael O'Donnell, a young Republican who unfortunately represents my state senate district; he is what we used to call a PK [preacher's kid], and is a textbook example of how ignorant and unrealistic a sheltered and pampered young person can be -- but one thing I've never seen discussed is how the hell all these restrictions are going to be enforced. Are movie theaters going to be held responsible for making sure no welfare recipients buy tickets? Are ATMs going to be reprogrammed to enforce limits on withdrawals? (That, at least, would be easier given that the accounts could be flagged.) Maybe they could hire auditors to comb through the books of the poorest people in Kansas? Or they could set up a hot line so nosy neighbors could rat on the welfare cheats? If there is any enforcement, it is bound to be sporadic and arbitrary -- just the thing to impress on poor people that government is hostile and views them as probable criminals. Indeed, that seems to be where this anti-welfare mindset is heading, even if someone like O'Donnell is way too clueless to figure it out. If they succeed in making the welfare system so onerous that no one will deal with it, they will wind up driving more people into crime, and into prisons -- the most expensive and destructive of "safety nets." They forget that welfare, even with the stigma that it is unearned, is the least destructive and least expensive remedy for people who lack the skills and/or opportunity to earn a living -- and increasingly for people whose jobs don't pay enough to live on. Welfare could be done better if government put more effort into developing skills and personal discipline, in increasing opportunity by growing the economy, and in providing affordable services -- especially banking. (For one thing, free bank accounts would kill off the predatory check cashing/payday loan industry; for another it would give poor people the chance to manage their money the way the better off do.)

  By the way, as the Kansas state legislature tries to plug the budget hole caused by Brownback's income tax cuts (especially, exempting business income from taxation) and their inverse Laffer Effect (rather than stimulating the economy, they forced cutbacks which depressed it). They've been scrounging around for ways to make the tax code more regressive -- a favorite has been increasing one of the nation's highest state sales tax rates -- and they've finally found a real winner: eliminate the earned income tax credit (EITC). Conservatives have traditionally supported EITC as a way to make low-wage jobs more attractive -- a break to skinflint employers as much as to their workers. The only problem with such poor-get-poorer strategies is their isn't much tax revenue to be raised there. Sooner or later they're going to have to tax the rich if for no other reason than that's where all the money is. (The state legislator who's trying to write the new tax bill admits that the exclusion for business owners goes too far. He's one of the beneficiaries of the scheme, but he's pushing a compromise, whereby his current $60,000 savings would be reduced to $32,000. As I recall, the top state income tax rate is about 6%, so that means his pretax income is about $10 million.)

  Max Ehrenfreud: Kansas has found the ultimate way to punish the poor is also about this.

• Nancy LeTourneau: President Obama is "Deeply in Touch With the Heart and Spirit of the Jewish People": Mostly taken from an interview Jeffrey Goldberg did with Obama, including a long quote where Obama expands upon his sense of how the principles of "Jewish democracy" are inextricably linked with his commitment to civil rights. This is Obama:

  And I care deeply about preserving that Jewish democracy, because when I think about how I came to know Israel, it was based on images of, you know -- Kibbutzim, and Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir, and the sense that not only are we creating a safe Jewish homeland, but also we are remaking the world. We're repairing it. We are going to do it the right way. We are going to make sure that the lessons we've learned from our hardships and our persecutions are applied to how we govern and how we treat others.

  In other words, Obama's stuck in a time warp, believing in an Israel that probably never existed but was constructed as myth and embraced by distant, hopeful admirers. Josh Ruebner, in Shattered Hopes: Obama's Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace, has a long section on Obama's tutelage and mentorship by liberal Jewish political figures in Chicago, offering many examples of why Obama has such deep sentimental affiliation with Israel. So sure, this quote rings true as something Obama believes, and it helps explain why he is so ineffectual in his efforts to realign Israel with its supposed ideals. I find it especially ironic that he cites Dayan as one of his Zionist icons. Dayan once said "Our American friends offer us money, arms, and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice." When you revere Dayan, as Obama does, you don't even notice the latter. You're so convinced of Israel's moral authority it never occurs to you that their failure to achieve peace or to manage a society that is even remotely just and equitable could be their own fault. It must, you know, be those evil Palestinians, so full of hate they constantly provoke good Israelis to tear down their houses, rip up their land, jail and kill them. What's that Golda Meir line? "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us." Obviously, they don't, because we don't have peace yet. So when Obama reiterates his belief in Jewish/Israeli ideals, all the Israelis have to do is smile and agree. Acts are never required.

  By the way, after writing the above, I found this link: Donald Johnson: The grotesque injustice of Obama's speech at the Washington synagogue. Much the same language, but also a joke that "Palestinians are not easy partners."

• Nancy LeTourneau: President Obama Helped Moved the Overton Window to the Left: The "Overton Window" is defined as "the range of ideas the public will accept," which for all practical purposes is equivalent to "the range of ideas the mainstream media will discuss seriously." The latter is a more conservative formulation since, well, mainstream media is by definition owned by rich people, who as a class skew well to the right. One can think of things like, say, nuclear disarmament that the public may very well endorse but are never seriously discussed because few elites feel like bucking the status quo. Until recently, marijuana legalization was in that category. LeTourneau expects Clinton to run a much more progressive presidential campaign in 2016 than she did in 2008, and attributes this to Obama moving "the Overton Window to the left." Clearly, some things (like marijuana legalization) are on the table now that weren't a few years ago, but it's hard to relate most of them with anything that Obama has done (Cuba is an exception here, and maybe Iran). Rather, it looks to me like the window has shifted partly because conditions on the ground have worsened -- e.g., it's harder to pretend that inequality isn't a problem, that the rich are undertaxed, that government services are extravagantly inefficient, or that the US military is the answer to all the Middle East's problems -- and partly because Republican nostrums for common problems have fallen off the deep end, becoming so implausible Democrats are losing the fear they developed during the Reagan era. It's also notable that while Democrats in Washington have been prevented from enacting any remotely progressive legislation -- there wasn't even much to show for the large 2009-11 "fillibuster-proof majority" (not that the finance and health care laws were nothing; indeed, they've clearly helped, even if not as much as we wanted) -- left-leaning think tanks and bloggers have kept working on real problems, advancing real solutions. I think all of this does add up to a slight leftward shift in public opinion, not that there aren't plenty of well-moneyed obstacles (including a mainstream media that cares little for "public interest journalism"). So I wouldn't be surprised if that drift shows up in Clinton's polls as something she needs to cultivate, regardless of her disinclination. And in the long run, Obama will probably deserve some credit: although I'm much more struck by how deeply conservative his conventional liberalism is, he clearly has broken some barriers, and the nonsense spouted by his crazed enemies will soon enough fade into the shameful dark corners of American history.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, May 17, 2015

No head start this week, and didn't have much time on Sunday what with going to a Global Learning Center panel on Israel/Palestine (Laura Tillem was one of the panelists). Still came up with the following links and comments:

• Josh Marshall: Sorry. Iraq Wasn't a Good Faith Mistake. It Was Based on Lies. Fox News is on a kick of asking Republican presidential wannabes whether "knowing what we know now" they would still have invaded Iraq in 2003. Most candidates answered no, they wouldn't invade, although it did take Jeb Bush two guesses to get the right answer. Frank Conniff tweeted: "Stop asking GOP candidates about Iraq War. It distracts us from their stupid & incoherent thoughts on a host of other issues." Actually, they remain pretty stupid and incoherent today. Whether they would have invaded is only part of the question. Another is whether they would have contrived the phony evidence Bush and Cheney collected to support their predisposition to go to war. Marshall explains:

  While it's welcome to see the would-be heirs of President Bush, including his own brother, acknowledging the obvious, this history is such a staggering crock that it's critical to go back and review what actually happened. Some of this was obvious to anyone who was paying attention. Some was only obvious to reporters covering the story who were steeped in the details. And some was only obvious to government officials who in the nature of things controlled access to information. But in the tightest concentric circle of information, at the White House, it was obviously all a crock at the time.

  While it is true that "WMD" was a key premise for the war, the sheer volume of lies, willful exaggerations and comically wishful thinking are the real story.

  Marshall got some catcalls for this piece, at least from those who remembered that he was one of the ones suckered into supporting Bush's folly. Many of us knew better at the time -- even if we didn't know exactly which points were fabricated, we had better instincts, mostly because we had learned painful lessons from previous wars. The real question that the presidential candidates (Clinton included) should be asked is what have they learned from the Iraq War experience? Given how many of them are itchy to rejoin and escalate the war against ISIS, it doesn't look like they learned enough.

  Paul Krugman (Blinkers and Lies) repeats the point then adds something more:

  Finally, and this is where Atrios comes in, part of the answer is that a lot of Very Serious People were effectively in on the con. They, too, were looking forward to a splendid little war; or they were eager to burnish their non-hippie credentials by saying, hey, look, I'm a warmonger too; or they shied away from acknowledging the obvious lies because that would have been partisan, and they pride themselves on being centrists. And now, of course, they are very anxious not to revisit their actions back then. [ . . . ]

  But back to Iraq: the crucial thing to understand is that the invasion wasn't a mistake, it was a crime. We were lied into war. And we shouldn't let that ugly truth be forgotten.

  I want to emphasize one more point here: the lies weren't just what the Bush administration told us about Saddam Hussein and Iraq. They also lied to us about ourselves (who America was and what US troops could and would do) and about themselves (what Bush's own ambitions were for the war). And those lies worked mostly because they built on self-delusions that Americans have been telling themselves for years, especially since the nation turned its back on reality in electing Ronald Reagan in 1980. That, too, was known (or knowable) at the time: I recall John Dower writing that the occupation of Iraq would not resemble the US occupation of Japan not only because Iraq is not Japan but also because America now is not the same country America was then. It's an easy (and sobering) exercise to sort out both sides of that ledger, and that's all it should have taken. But politicians in America aren't selected for their grasp of history. They are, rather, elected for their ability to flatter voters, telling us how wonderful we are, how capable, how competent, how righteous, how magnamimous. That's a much bigger crock than the one Marshall sees. Indeed, it's the one that swallowed him up.

• Richard Silverstein: Israeli Government Most Racist, Extremist in History:

  Israel named its new cabinet yesterday and the names are a Who's Who of the most rabid, racist, brutal and cruel politicians in the nation. The only one who rivals them and is missing from the show is Avigdor Lieberman, who's bowed out for political reasons of his own. In the past, nations of the world have isolated individual leaders of nations and refused to visit or meet with them because their ideas are so noxious that they fall outside the consensus of international discourse. Kurt Waldheim and Jorg Haider are examples of this. The time has come to put the Israeli government in herem. You can pick your poison among them as to which deserves special ostracism.

  This intro is followed by quotes, their "Greatest Hits of Hate," with Naftali Bennett's "I've killed many Arabs in my life and there's no problem with that" and Eli Ben-Dahan's "In my opinion, they are beasts, not humans" singled out, although I'm not sure those are worse than the many cancer analogies. Not everyone managed to score an obscene quote. Some were noted for their felony records. And for an example of exception-proving-the rules, there's Benny Begin (son of terrorist prime minister Menachem Begin): "ejected from [Likud] Party leadership during last party primaries for his so-called 'moderate' views; apparently he's been included as a moderate fig-leaf for an extremist government." I remember Begin when he was a young firebrand trying to outflank his father, so score one for maturity, and subtract two for the rabid drift that has managed to make him look good (albeit only relatively).

• Richard Silverstein: AIPAC Wants Congress to Criminalize BDS: I have three points to make about BDS (the boycott-divest-sanctions movement against Israel's occupation and apartheid regime): one is that if Europeans and Americans reject BDS they'll be sending a message to Palestinians that violence is their only resort. The other is that BDS is something America and Europe routinely does to express disapproval without resorting to war -- the difference here is that by starting with individuals and private organizations BDS is a grass roots movement, not just something imposed by state powers for their own purposes. Third is that Israel is enough of a democracy that its political response should be fluid -- as opposed to dictatorships (North Korea being the most extreme example) which have only been hardened by sanctions. BDS finally imposes a (small) cost on Israel for acts it gets away with the way most bullies do, and that's their basic response to BDS. Gandhi on non-violent political movements: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Trying to outlaw BDS is the kneejerk reaction of bullies. With all due respect to AIPAC's Congressional prowess, I can't see Americans abandoning their right to free speech just to let Israel ignore criticism. Indeed, it looks like AIPAC's proposal is somewhat more circuitous in that what it seeks to do is impose trading sanctions on Europe if Europe implements BDS through some back door TPP-like mechanism. Looks like Gandhi's stage three.

• Richard Silverstein: GOP's Go-To Jews: One of the classic anti-semetic tropes is the suggestion that Jews are secretly running things, pulling strings to exert inordinate power. In the old days such aspersions were demonstrably untrue, but the trope seems due for a comeback, partly because one can point to real-life examples like these. And while truth be told Adelson et al. are acting more like pompous billionaires than Jews, they make matters worse when they wrap themselves in the Israeli flag and use their influence to prod the US into self-destructive wars in the Middle East.

  Over the past week, the media has exposed several critical relationships between major GOP presidential candidates and their key Jewish donors, including Sen. Marco Rubio and Scott Walker. Though I didn't coin this term, it's apt to call these individuals "go-to" Jews; or in older parlance, they are the Court Jews who provide access for the pro-Israel community to the arenas of power.

  Rubio has for years enjoyed the patronage of Norman Braman, a wealthy Miami auto-dealer. Braman has not only heavily financed the Senator's campaigns for state and federal office, he's employed both Rubio and his wife and engaged in an extensive set of financial relationships with them involving gifts, loans and other support.

  But in just the past week or so, an even greater Jewish (blue and) white knight has emerged to bless Rubio's candidacy: none other than Sheldon Adelson. It seems the self-made fat cat Jews who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps are enamored by Rubio's life story of growing up poor as a Cuban immigrant and making something of his life in the contemporary version of the American Dream. The media report that Adelson has decided to go "all-in" with Rubio, as he did with Newt Gingrich in the last presidential campaign. Politico adds that Paul Singer, the Likudist hedge fund billionaire, is joining Rubio's camp as well.

  I'm wondering when Adelson's involvement with the Chinese mob, including offering his blessing to Chinese triads engaged in gambling, prostitution and loansharking at his Macau casino, will catch up to him. GOP presidential candidates are delighted to take his $100-million (in the last election cycle -- likely to rise to $200-million in the 2016 cycle). But when will the moment come when the public will realize how dirty Sheldon's money is and severely penalize candidates who've availed themselves of it? This is a ticking bomb for Republicans. Adelson is a golden teat, till he isn't.

  Walker's sugar daddy is Larry Mizel: "paving the way for Scott Walker's visit to the Holyland, where he will presumably make a pilgrimage to the Stations of the GOP pro-Israel cross. . . . Walker, having no previous pro-Israel credentials given his role as Wisconsin governor, is strongly in need of a pro-Israel heksher (kosher certification), which Mizel provides."

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, May 10, 2015

We had four or five straight days this week of "elevated" severe weather threats. Most of the real damage took place in Oklahoma and north Texas, but we did have one EF-3 tornado on the ground for 15 miles near Rose Hill, about ten miles west of here. Rain itself has been spotty, and most likely we're still below average year-to-date. More surprising to me is Tropical Storm Ana appearing a month ahead of the Atlantic hurricane season -- the earliest such storm since 2003. Wikipedia says the forecast for hurricanes this year is about 20% below the 1950-2014 average, but such an early storm strikes me as ominous.

This week's scattered links:

• Mark Bittman: Obama and Republicans Agree on the Trans-Pacific Partnership . . . Unfortunately: I gather from Twitter (err, TPM) that Obama dismissed Elizabeth Warren's opposition to TPP by saying, "The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else." Obama, on the other hand, is so far above the political fray that he's got George Will applauding TPP as "Obama's best idea." Of course, it's easy for Obama to dismiss the concerns of Democrats as "speculation" because he's spent the last five years negotiating TPP in secret. [Yves Smith: "There would be no reason to keep it so secret if it was in the public interest."] Indeed, it's only come up now because he wants Congress to write him a blank check to negotiate whatever without allowing future amendments. You'd think folks as paranoid as the Republicans in Congress would never go for that, but evidently the fix is in. Bittman normally writes about food -- I can recommend his cookbooks How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food and The Best Recipes in the World: More Than 1,000 International Dishes to Cook at Home -- so it's surprising to see him wander into political waters, but he points out:

  Even if you look "only" at food and the environment, the TPP should be ripped apart and put back together with public and congressional input. The pact would threaten local food, diminish labeling laws, likely keep environmentally destructive industrial meat production high (despite the fact that as a nation we're eating less meat) and probably maintain high yields of commodity crops while causing price cuts.

  It would certainly weaken food safety. For example, more than 90 percent of our seafood is imported, a figure that includes fish that were caught domestically and sent overseas for processing before coming back in, which makes the inspection process even more complicated. All told, that's more than five billion pounds of imports annually, and according to the Center for Food Safety, just 90 federal inspectors guarantee its safety. (The Food and Drug Administration inspects less than 2 percent of imported seafood.) By reducing restrictions on Southeast Asian imports, the TPP would allow more fish containing chemicals that are illegal in domestic aquaculture to reach our shores; by making inspections less effective, it would virtually guarantee that those chemicals make it to our tables.

  The agreement would even allow countries to challenge one another's laws, so that "equivalency" may simply mean that the least powerful regulations become the norm. The United States would have no special standing: If our laws are seen as restraining trade or limiting profits, they could be challenged in special courts, per the TPP's "investor state" clause. Philip Morris is suing Uruguay over that country's antismoking laws under just such circumstances; there are several examples of American companies' flouting local laws and citing trade agreements as an excuse; and Mexico has been sued repeatedly for theoretically diminishing investor profits.

  When individual governments have little say, corporate "efficiency" amounts to the global economy's being run as an ill-regulated business model (an equally egregious trans-Atlantic agreement is currently being negotiated). The projected benefits to the public -- as usual, "job creation" leads the list -- are mythical, and you don't have to take my word for it.

  Some other relevant links:

  • Peter Baker: Obama Scolds Democrats on Trade Pact Stance: Obama gave his TPP speech at Nike corporate headquarters. Baker wrote, "Nike was a risky choice for Mr. Obama to make his case for trade. For years, the multibillion-dollar company has been cited as a case study by opponents of trade liberalization for its reliance on low-wage workers in Asia."
  • Robert Reich: Nike is everything that's wrong with the U.S. economy: OK as a gut reaction to Obama's choice of venue, but it's really not just Nike that's a problm -- Boeing, Comcast, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, Walmart, and many others have made their own unique contributions to the problem.
  • Josh Bivens: The Trans-Pacific Partnership Is Unlikely to Be a Good Deal for American Workers [Economic Policy Institute].
  • Jeff Faux: TPP: Obama's Folly.
  • Glenn Kessler: The Obama administration's illusionary job gains from the Trans-Pacific Partnership: linked to by Bittman under "and you don't have to take my word for it."
  • Lori Wallach: NAFTA on Steroids.
  • Electronic Frontier Foundation: What Is TPP: Brief summary of leaked "intellectual property" (IP) provisions. The US has consistently been very aggressive about protecting and extending the monopoly rents of IP owners, presumably because the net balance of rents favors American (or more often multinational) companies but in fact those rents only benefit a tiny share of the very rich, at great cost to most Americans.

• Paul Krugman: Race, Class and Neglect:

  Every time you're tempted to say that America is moving forward on race -- that prejudice is no longer as important as it used to be -- along comes an atrocity to puncture your complacency. Almost everyone realizes, I hope, that the Freddie Gray affair wasn't an isolated incident, that it's unique only to the extent that for once there seems to be a real possibility that justice may be done.

  And the riots in Baltimore, destructive as they are, have served at least one useful purpose: drawing attention to the grotesque inequalities that poison the lives of too many Americans.

  Yet I do worry that the centrality of race and racism to this particular story may convey the false impression that debilitating poverty and alienation from society are uniquely black experiences. In fact, much though by no means all of the horror one sees in Baltimore and many other places is really about class, about the devastating effects of extreme and rising inequality.

  Take, for example, issues of health and mortality. Many people have pointed out that there are a number of black neighborhoods in Baltimore where life expectancy compares unfavorably with impoverished Third World nations. But what's really striking on a national basis is the way class disparities in death rates have been soaring even among whites.

  Most notably, mortality among white women has increased sharply since the 1990s, with the rise surely concentrated among the poor and poorly educated; life expectancy among less educated whites has been falling at rates reminiscent of the collapse of life expectancy in post-Communist Russia.

  And yes, these excess deaths are the result of inequality and lack of opportunity, even in those cases where their direct cause lies in self-destructive behavior. Overuse of prescription drugs, smoking, and obesity account for a lot of early deaths, but there's a reason such behaviors are so widespread, and that reason has to do with an economy that leaves tens of millions behind.

  Actually, the adverse effects of inequality have been well documented (see, e.g., Ichiro Kawachi/Bruce P Kennedy: The Health of Nations: Why Inequality Is Harmful to Your Health and Richard Wilkinson: The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier). Still, the Russian analogy is shocking (if I recall correctly, life expectancy for males dropped from close to 70 to 49 in a decade, which probably hasn't happened anywhere else since WWII). It's hard to believe that the US economy and safety net have sunk that far, but the sheer indifference of many political figures borders on cruelty, and the cult of austerity has convinced many people that public action is impossible. It's curious that one effort no one has lined up to celebrate the 50th anniversary of is the War on Poverty: even the heirs of its supporters don't seem to have the energy or vision (or memory) to recall that it actually was working until sabotaged by political indifference (Nixon) and contempt (Reagan) and cowardice (Clinton).

  Also see Jeff Madrick: The Cost of Child Poverty.

• Dean Obeidallah: Muslim-Bashing Can Be Very Lucrative: Geller got more than the usual press this week when her "Draw Muhammad" cartooning event in Texas provoked a couple of overly sensitive American muslims to commit martyrdom-by-cop trying to shoot their way into the event. That may have seemed like a PR coup, but I haven't seen anyone -- even muslimphobes like Bill Maher -- stand up to identify with her. Author looks at the money trail, such as it is, citing a "Fear, Inc. report that found that certain key foundations have donated close to $60 million in recent years to these anti-Muslim advocates." Geller's only getting a small slice of that, but she's more than making ends meet.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Dean Baker: The Reconnection Agenda: The Fun and Easy Route to Broadly Shared Prosperity: Review of Jared Bernstein's new book, The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity -- available as a free PDF, a cheap Kindle book, or a moderately priced paperback. Bernstein was briefly famous when VP Joe Biden hired him as economic advisor in 2009, although I ran into him earlier when I read his 2008 book Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries). As the Biden appointment shows, obviously not a flaming radical, but much of what he argues for -- like full employment -- proved unthinkable even within Obama's circle of "confidence men." Bernstein's book looks to be heavy on policy wonkery -- i.e., he describes what could be done if we wanted to do it, rather than exploring why such political will doesn't exist (at least at the level of practical politicians). Baker adds some quibbles, notably pointing out that the persistent trade deficit (and overvaluation of the dollar) is something that exists because certain US interest groups favor it.

• Andrew Cockburn: The Kingpin Strategy: Subhed: "Assassination as Policy in Washington and How It Failed, 1990-2015." I've been inclined to attribute Washington's jones for targeted assassination to a case of neocon Israel envy, but Cockburn finds earlier roots in the War on Drugs' "kingpin strategy": a program to put faces on various "drug cartels" and mark progress by knocking off their heads -- Pablo Escobar, of the Medellin cartel in Colombia, was an early target. (Of course, now that I think of it, this is the Vietnam Phoenix Program all over again.) Of course, it turns out that killing drug kingpins actually resulted in more drugs at lower prices -- the cartels, after all, were just that, so breaking them up only increased competition. With the War on Terror, drug kingpins gave way to HVIs ("high-value individuals"). Turns out that didn't work so well either:

  The results, [Rivolo] discovered when he graphed them out, offered a simple, unequivocal message: the strategy was indeed making a difference, just not the one intended. It was, however, the very same message that the kingpin strategy had offered in the drug wars of the 1990s. Hitting HVIs did not reduce attacks and save American lives; it increased them. Each killing quickly prompted mayhem. Within three kilometers of the target's base of operation, attacks over the following 30 days shot up by 40%. Within a radius of five kilometers, a typical area of operations for an insurgent cell, they were still up 20%. Summarizing his findings for Odierno, Rivolo added an emphatic punch line: "Conclusion: HVI Strategy, our principal strategy in Iraq, is counter-productive and needs to be re-evaluated."

  As with the kingpin strategy, the causes of this apparently counter-intuitive result became obvious upon reflection. Dead commanders were immediately replaced, and the newcomers were almost always younger and more aggressive than their predecessors, eager to "make their bones" and prove their worth.

  Cockburn, by the way, has a new book: Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins. Article also at TomDispatch.

• Seymour Hersh: The Killing of Osama bin Laden: Much new detail here, if you're into that sort of thing -- I didn't bother with any of the Seal memoirs, although I wonder how clear they were that Bin Laden was an ISI prisoner, or that the raid was arranged with collaboration and consent of Pakistani officials. For instance:

  One lie that has endured is that the Seals had to fight their way to their target. Only two Seals have made any public statement: No Easy Day, a first-hand account of the raid by Matt Bissonnette, was published in September 2012; and two years later Rob O'Neill was interviewed by Fox News. Both men had resigned from the navy; both had fired at bin Laden. Their accounts contradicted each other on many details, but their stories generally supported the White House version, especially when it came to the need to kill or be killed as the Seals fought their way to bin Laden. O'Neill even told Fox News that he and his fellow Seals thought 'We were going to die.' 'The more we trained on it, the more we realised . . . this is going to be a one-way mission.'

  But the retired official told me that in their initial debriefings the Seals made no mention of a firefight, or indeed of any opposition. The drama and danger portrayed by Bissonnette and O'Neill met a deep-seated need, the retired official said: 'Seals cannot live with the fact that they killed bin Laden totally unopposed, and so there has to be an account of their courage in the face of danger. The guys are going to sit around the bar and say it was an easy day? That's not going to happen.'

  They did make the operation more dramatic by crashing a helicopter, which they then had to blow up while ordering in a replacement. Hersh's final lines:

  High-level lying nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no.

• Costas Lapavitsas: The Syriza strategy has come to an end: An interview with the Greek economist, author of Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (2014, Verso), on the various differences in Europe, especially between Germany and Greece, and how they're tearing the Eurozone apart.

• Nomi Prins: The Clintons and Their Banker Friends: Adapted from her book, All the Presidents' Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power, recently reprinted in paperback. Although Bush and Obama did more to bail out bankrupt banks, no one made them more money, through generous legislation and hands off regulation, than Bill Clinton.

• Sandy Tolan: The One-State Conundrum: What makes Tolan's The Lemon Tree one of the most accessible books on Israel-Palestine is how he uses a couple very real individuals as a prism for the big picture story. His new book, Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land, picks another such example, a Palestinian violinist who founded a music school in the Occupied Territories. Example:

  I have spent the last five years documenting both the harsh realities of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Ramzi Aburedwan's dream of building a music school that could provide Palestinian children with an alternative to the violence and humiliation that is their everyday lives. I sat with children in the South Hebron hills, who had been stoned by Israeli settlers and set upon by German shepherds as they walked two miles to school. I met a 14-year-old girl who was forced to play a song for a soldier at a checkpoint, supposedly to prove her flute was not a weapon.

  Farmers in villages shared their anguish with me over their lost livelihoods, because the 430-mile-long separation barrier Israel has built on Palestinian land, essentially confiscating nearly 10% of the West Bank, cuts them off from their beloved olive groves. I've seen men crammed into metal holding pens before being taken to minimum-wage jobs in Israel, and women squeezed between seven-foot-high concrete blocks, waiting to pray at Jerusalem's Al Aqsa Mosque. I've spoken with countless families who have been subject to night raids by the Israeli military, including one young mother, home alone with her one-year-old boy, who woke up to the sight of 10 Israeli soldiers breaking down her door and pointing guns at her. They had, it turned out, raided the wrong apartment. The baby slept through it all.

  Ramzi and the teachers at his school, Al Kamandjati (Arabic for "The Violinist"), see it as an antidote to the sense of oppression and confinement that pervades Palestinian life. And it's true that the students I talked to there regularly reported that playing music gave them a transformative sense of calm and protection -- and not only in the moments when they picked up their instruments and disappeared into Bach, Beethoven, or Fairuz.

  Hope they play some Ellington too.

• Philip Weiss: 'NY Review of Books' says Tony Judt didn't really mean it when he called for the end of a Jewish state: A rebuttal to assertions made in a review of Judt's essay collection When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010 by Jonathan Freedland (paywalled). The late historian's piece, included in the book, dated from 2003, and as Weiss points out included a number of predictions which have held up rather well. Weiss writes:

  I don't think I've seen anything like this before: such a retraction, issued after the author's death, of a signature portion of his beliefs. And I understand why; it anguished liberal Zionists to hear anyone thoughtful come out against the idea of a Jewish state, won so heroically over 80 years of battle in the chambers of western officials. It was a betrayal of an article of faith, by someone who had previously been a Zionist.

  The New York Review of Books has done all it can to bury Judt's essay. It never asked Judt to expand on his views in the years that followed, let alone ask Ali Abunimah or Ghada Karmi or any other Palestinian who can pick up a pencil to respond. No, this was an all-Jewish event. And the retraction here is being performed by a man who wrote a year back that Ari Shavit is a "liberal" and the right person to talk to American Jews about the conflict (Shavit who "opposed the Oslo Agreement, calling it 'a collective act of messianic drunkenness' and defending its most prominent opponent, Netanyahu, against charges that he was partly to blame for its failure . . . [who] during the Second Intifada, . . . praised Sharon for having 'conducted the military campaign patiently, wisely and calmly' and 'the diplomatic campaign with impressive talent' [, who in] the final week of the war in Gaza this summer that took the lives of 72 Israelis and more than 2100 Palestinians, . . . wrote that strong objection to Israeli conduct was illegitimate and amounted to anti-Semitic bigotry").

  As he's explained in his memoirs, Judt was very attached to Israel, even working on a kibbutz there, so his 2003 essay had the impact of a jilted believer -- Judt was a huge fan of a collection of essays by disenchanted ex-Communists, The God That Failed, so he would have appreciated that a comparable book could collect key essays by ex-Zionists.

• Some links on the UK (and other) elections: I still have enough residual sense of international solidarity to at least root for left-leaning parties all around the world, although UK "New Labour" leader Tony Blair's "Bush's Poodle" act sorely tried those sympathies, and it seems like France's Socialists have long tended to be more enthusiastic about French imperialism than the competing Gaullists were. On the other hand, I keep favoring the Democratic Party here in the USA, even though they have the worst record of all, so I'm not unaware of how these travesties happen. My sense of solidarity even extends to Israel's Labor Party (if indeed it still exists). But beyond oft-frustrated sympathies, I haven't tried to sort out what's just happened in the UK. I'll just note some links for future reference:

  • Five Thirty Eight Live: UK General Election 2015.
  • Shaun Lawson: The polls (and all but one of) the forecasts WERE wrong. Ed Miliband was nowhere near becoming Prime Minister.
  • Peter Jukes: The British press has lost it: "Rarely have the economic interests of the handful of wealthy men who own most the press (nine men own 90 percent of all national and regional titles) appeared so brutally transparent."
  • Allison Dreger: Netanyahu's coalition: Who's in, who's out: After Likud's surprisingly strong showing in Israel's Knesset elections, Netanyahu got first crack at forming a coalition government. As the deadline ticked down, he managed to scrounge up a bare minimum of 61 votes in a deal with Naftali Bennett's "hardline pro-settler group Bayit Yehudi" as former allies like Avigdor Lieberman opted for the opposition. Bennett becomes education minister, and Ayelet Shaked is the new "justice" minister.
  • Richard Silverstein: Israel's New Government: the Power of One.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Geology trumped the news twice this week: first with a volcanic eruption in Chile, then a massive earthquake in Nepal. Worth noting that bad things can still happen that can't be attributed to bad policies of the political right. Also in the news: anniversaries keep happening, including this week the 100th anniversary of one of Winston Churchill's most immediately obvious blunders, the Battle of Gallipoli in Turkey. Churchill got his first taste of battle at Omduran in the Sudan and found it totally exhilarating. Had he been present at Gallipoli he would have gotten a taste of what the Sudanese experienced. Also 100 years ago, the Ottomans started their genocide against the Armenians, ultimately killing up to 1.5 million of them. Turkey has refused to acknowledge what Taner Akcam termed A Shameful Act, which has the accidental benefit of letting Britain and Russia -- who tried to cultivate the Christian Armenians as a "fifth column" against the Ottomans -- off the hook.

Some scattered links this week:

• Brendan James: Michele Bachmann: Thanks Obama for Bringing On the Apocalypse: As Bachmann explains:

  "Barack Obama is intent, it is his number one goal, to ensure that Iran has a nuclear weapon," she said. "Why? Why would you put the nuclear weapon in the hands of madmen who are Islamic radicals?"

  Bachmann, however, then seemed to approve of the President moving mankind into "the midnight hour."

  "We get to be living in the most exciting time in history," she said, urging fellow Christians to "rejoice."

  "Jesus Christ is coming back. We, in our lifetimes potentially, could see Jesus Christ returning to Earth, the Rapture of the Church."

  "These are wonderful times," she concluded.

  Now, I come from a long line of "Revelations scholars" -- I can still recall (and I was less than ten at the time) my grandfather asking me whether I thought Israel's founding was a sign that the rapture was near. My father, too, spent a lifetime studying "Revelations" -- mostly, as best I could figure out, to prove that his father had understood it all wrong. (My own theory was that the "book" was tacked onto the end just to discredit the whole Bible, as if the other "books" weren't proof enough of some sick hoax.) So I do have a little trouble treating the people who believe in the rapture as batshit crazy, but there is at least one difference between Bachmann and my forefathers: the latter didn't go around acting like it's going to happen any day now.

• Paul Krugman: The Fiscal Future I: The Hyperbolic Case for Bigger Government: Turns out Clinton threw the baby out with the bath water when he declared that "the age of big government is over." Back in the 1990s some conservatives were arguing that the ideal size of government relative to GDP was set during the Coolidge administration and we should lock that into law. Others preferred to idealize the McKinley administration, and Grover Norquist just wanted to shrink the whole thing so small he could drown it in the bathtub. It's taken a while for someone like Brad DeLong to come along and argue that the opposite is the case: that government should grow even larger.

  So, how big should the government be? The answer, broadly speaking, is surely that government should do those things it does better than the private sector. But what are these things?

  The standard, textbook answer is that we should look at public goods -- goods that are non rival and non excludable, so that the private sector won't provide them. National defense, weather satellites, disease control, etc. And in the 19th century that was arguably what governments mainly did.

  Nowadays, however, governments are involved in a lot more -- education, retirement, health care. You can make the case that there are some aspects of education that are a public good, but that's not really why we rely on the government to provide most education, and not at all why the government is so involved in retirement and health. Instead, experience shows that these are all areas where the government does a (much) better job than the private sector. And Brad argues that the changing structure of the economy will mean that we want more of these goods, hence bigger government.

  He also suggests -- or at least that's how I read him -- the common thread among these activities that makes the government a better provider than the market; namely, they all involve individuals making very-long-term decisions. Your decision to stay in school or go out and work will shape your lifetime career; your ability to afford medical treatment or food and rent at age 75 has a lot to do with decisions you made when that stage of life was decades ahead, and impossible to imagine.

  Now, the fact is that people make decisions like these badly. Bad choices in education are the norm where choice is free; voluntary, self-invested retirement savings are a disaster. Human beings just don't handle the very long run well -- call it hyperbolic discounting, call it bounded rationality, whatever, our brains are designed to cope with the ancestral savannah and not late-stage capitalist finance.

  When you say things like this, libertarians tend to retort that if people mess up on such decisions, it's their own fault. But the usual argument for free markets is that they lead to good results -- not that they would lead to good results if people were more virtuous than they are, so we should rely on them despite the bad results they yield in practice. And the truth is that paternalism in these areas has led to pretty good results -- mandatory K-12 education, Social Security, and Medicare make our lives more productive as well as more secure.

  I'm not wild about calling this stuff "paternalism" -- one of the things that has made government spending objectionable is how often it is subject to political propriety. (For instance, art is generally a public good, especially when it can be reproduced at zero marginal cost. It would be a good public investment to pay lots of artists to produce lots of art, but not such a good idea if every piece had to be approved by a local board of prudes.)

  I think there's also a macroeconomic argument. For a variety of reasons, it strikes me that the private sector economy has become increasingly incapable of sustaining full employment, and as such needs permanent, possibly increasing, stimulus. (It could be that the deficit is the result of increasing inequality, which depresses demand while producing a savings glut. And/or it could be due to technology which keeps reducing the number of work hours needed to produce a constant amount of goods and services. Most likely both.)

  Krugman followed up with The Fiscal Future II: Not Enough Debt?. This is more technical, so I won't bother quoting it here. The upshot is that you can grow government without having to pay for all of it through increased taxes.

• Caitlin MacNeal: White House: Two Hostages Killed in US Counterterrorism Attack: Quotes the White House statement disclosing that the CIA had killed two Al-Qaida hostages with a drone strike "in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan" (evidently doesn't matter which side of the border was struck). Also that two US citizens involved with Al-Qaida were killed (but not targeted) in drone strikes "in the same region." Of the hostages, "No words can fully express our regret over this terrible tragedy." Of the other two, well, stuff happens. The statement goes on: "The President . . . takes full responsibility for these operations." The statement doesn't explain how Obama intends to "take responsibility": Will he turn himself over to the ICC or local authorities to be tried? Will he change US policy to prevent any repeat of these tragedies? Or is he just enjoying one of those "the buck stops here" moments? What should be clear is that the CIA has no fucking idea who they're killing and maiming with their Hellfire missiles. Lacking such "intelligence" all they're doing is embarrassing themselves (and Obama and the nation) and aggravating and escalating animosities. Indeed, by going into their back yards to kill anonymous people with no hint of due process they're conceding the moral high ground as surely as Al-Qaida did on Sept. 11, 2001 when they launched attacks on American soil.

  For more on the drone strikes, see Spencer Ackerman: Inside Obama's drone panopticon: a secret machine with no accountability:

  Thanks to Obama's rare admission on Thursday, the realities of what are commonly known as "signature strikes" are belatedly and partially on display. Signature strikes, a key aspect for years of what the administration likes to call its "targeted killing" program, permit the CIA and JSOC to kill without requiring them to know who they kill.

  The "signatures" at issue are indicators that intelligence analysts associate with terrorist behavior -- in practice, a gathering of men, teenaged to middle-aged, traveling in convoys or carrying weapons. In 2012, an unnamed senior official memorably quipped that the CIA considers "three guys doing jumping jacks" a signature of terrorist training.

  Civilian deaths in signature strikes, accordingly, are not accidental. They are, as Schiff framed it, more like a cost of doing business -- only the real cost is shielded from the public.

  An apparatus of official secrecy, built over decades and zealously enforced by Obama, prevents meaningful open scrutiny of the strikes. No one outside the administration knows how many drone strikes are signature strikes. There is no requirement that the CIA or JSOC account for their strikes, nor to provide an estimate of how many people they kill, nor even how they define legally critical terms like "combatant," terrorist "affiliate" or "leader." The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing an obstinate administration to compel disclosure of some of the most basic information there is about a program that has killed thousands of people. [ . . . ]

  Schiff's reaction condensed the root argument of the administration's drone advocates: it's this or nothing. The Obama administration considers the real alternatives to drone strikes to be the unpalatable options of grueling ground wars or passive acceptance of terrorism. Then it congratulates itself for picking the wise, ethical and responsible choice of killing people without knowing who they are. [ . . . ]

  No Obama official involved in drone strikes has ever been disciplined: not only are Brennan and director of national intelligence James Clapper entrenched in their jobs, David Barron, one of the lawyers who told Obama he could kill a US citizen without trial as a first resort, now has a federal judgeship.

  Beyond the question of when the US ought to launch drone strikes lie deeper geostrategic concerns. Obama's overwhelming focus on counter-terrorism, inherited and embraced from his predecessor, subordinated all other considerations for the drone battlefield of Yemen, which he described as a model for future efforts.

  The result is the total collapse of the US Yemeni proxy, a regional war Obama appears powerless to influence, the abandonment of US citizens trapped in Yemen and the likely expansion of al-Qaida's local affiliate. A generation of Yemeni civilians, meanwhile, is growing up afraid of the machines loitering overhead that might kill them without notice.

• Sinéad O'Shea: Mediterranean migrant crisis: Why is no one talking about Eritrea?:

  Horror has been expressed at the latest catastrophe in the Mediterranean. Little has been said, however, about Eritrea. Yet 22% of all people entering Italy by boat in 2014 were from Eritrea, according to the UN refugee agency, the UNHCR. After Syrians, they are the second most common nationality to undertake these journeys. Many who died this week were from the former Italian colony.

  So why is it so rarely discussed? The answer is essentially the problem. Eritrea is without western allies and far away. It is also in the grip of a highly repressive regime. This week, it was named the most censored country in the world by the Committee to Protect Journalists, beating North Korea, which is in second place. Reporters without Borders has called it the world's most dangerous country for journalists.

  Nobody talks about Eritrea because nobody (ie westerners) goes there. In 2009, I travelled there undercover with cameraman Scott Corben. We remain the only independent journalists to have visited in more than 10 years. There we witnessed a system that was exerting total control over its citizens. It was difficult to engage anybody in conversation. Everyone believed they were under surveillance, creating a state of constant anxiety. Communications were tightly controlled. Just three roads were in use and extensive documentation was required to travel. There were constant military checks. It is one of the most expensive countries in the world to buy petrol. Even maps are largely prohibited. At the time, Eritreans had to seek permission from a committee to obtain a mobile phone.

  Dissent is forbidden. It is thought there are more than 800 prisons dispersed across the country. Some take the form of shipping containers in the desert. Torture is widespread. [ . . . ]

  Eritreans are thus faced with a terrible choice. They must either live in misery or risk death by leaving. I met a number of people who were preparing to go. Despite a shoot-to-kill policy on the border, thousands still leave each month.

  Of course, one reason some of us don't talk much about bad countries is that we don't want the US to attack, invade, and "fix" them.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Christian Appy: From the Fall of Saigon to Our Fallen Empire: Appy has a new book out, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, which I've just started reading. This piece is written for the 40th anniversary of the "fall of Saigon" (or the end of Vietnam's American War). Subtitle: "How to Turn a Nightmare into a Fairy Tale."

  Oddly enough, however, we've since found ways to reimagine that denouement which miraculously transformed a failed and brutal war of American aggression into a tragic humanitarian rescue mission. Our most popular Vietnam end-stories bury the long, ghastly history that preceded the "fall," while managing to absolve us of our primary responsibility for creating the disaster. Think of them as silver-lining tributes to good intentions and last-ditch heroism that may come in handy in the years ahead.

  The trick, it turned out, was to separate the final act from the rest of the play. To be sure, the ending in Vietnam was not a happy one, at least not for many Americans and their South Vietnamese allies. This week we mark the 40th anniversary of those final days of the war. We will once again surely see the searing images of terrified refugees, desperate evacuations, and final defeat. But even that grim tale offers a lesson to those who will someday memorialize our present round of disastrous wars: toss out the historical background and you can recast any U.S. mission as a flawed but honorable, if not noble, effort by good-guy rescuers to save innocents from the rampaging forces of aggression.

  The worst thing about the Vietnam War wasn't losing it, nor even not learning anything from the experience. It was the lies we told ourselves to keep from facing what actually happened, including how much responsibility the US bore for making the whole debacle far more horrendous than it was bound to be. We wouldn't, for instance, have wound up with any more of a loss had we allowed democratic elections in 1956, as agreed to in Geneva in 1954. Instead, we escalated again and again, unleashing new horrors for no practical gain. I've always thought the worst of those escalations was Nixon's "incursion" in Cambodia, which soon destabilized the neutral Prince Sihanouk and delivered the country to "the killing fields" of Pol Pot. Millions died because Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon couldn't face losing the war, and while they clearly cared nothing at all about the Vietnamese, the damage they did to their own country may have seemed relatively trivial -- 58,000 Americans dead, many billions of dollars wasted -- it went far deeper and lasted much longer. The war was founded on lies, even well before the fake "Gulf of Tonkin Incident," and in the end that lying became a way of life. Nixon himself must have set some record for mendacity, but it was Ronald Reagan who recast American politics on a basis of sheer narcissistic fantasy, and no American politician has ever looked at reality squarely again. The Vietnam War was the worst thing that ever happened to America, not because we lost it but because we were wrong in the first place and never learned better. That in turn led to the recapitulation in Iraq and Afghanistan: the main differences there were that the latter wars had less effect on everyday life so they generated less anti-war movement, while the undrafted army proved somewhat more resilient, allowing the propagandists more leeway to cover up the debacle. Appy himself concludes:

  The time may come, if it hasn't already, when many of us will forget, Vietnam-style, that our leaders sent us to war in Iraq falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction he intended to use against us; that he had a "sinister nexus" with the al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked on 9/11; that the war would essentially pay for itself; that it would be over in "weeks rather than months"; that the Iraqis would greet us as liberators; or that we would build an Iraqi democracy that would be a model for the entire region. And will we also forget that in the process nearly 4,500 Americans were killed along with perhaps 500,000 Iraqis, that millions of Iraqis were displaced from their homes into internal exile or forced from the country itself, and that by almost every measure civil society has failed to return to pre-war levels of stability and security?

  The picture is no less grim in Afghanistan. What silver linings can possibly emerge from our endless wars? If history is any guide, I'm sure we'll think of something.

• Ben Branstetter: 7 whistle-blowers facing more jail time than David Petraeus: OK, that's a low bar, given that Petraeus avoided all jail time, punished with two years of probation after pleading guilty to passing classified secrets to his mistress-hagiographer Paula Broadwell. But then his intent was never to help Americans understand that their government is doing in secret. It was just self-promotion, business-as-usual for the ambitious general. On the other hand, Chelsea Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in prison -- nearly twice as long as Albert Speer was sentenced for running Nazi Germany's armaments industry.

• Chris Wright: Always Historicize!: Chews on the old Leninist bone of what-is-to-be-done, the perennial of those who think of themselves as activists, as opposed to us normal folk who only occasionally get swept up in the tides of history. Wright starts with the pitiful state of the Left, concluding that to be unsurprising given that the Left is, by nature of its constituency, always starved of resources, and "one needs resources to get things done." Yet this does nothing to explain the few cases when everything suddenly lurches toward the Left. That happens not when the balance of resources shifts from Right to Left, but when the Establishment collapses in chaos, opening up opportunity for the Left to save the day, provided some combination of ideas and organization. Wright sort of understands this. He is skeptical of the notion that "radical social change is a matter mainly of will and competence . . . pushing back against reactionary institutions so as, hopefully, to reverse systemic trends." He argues, instead, that "the proper way for radicals to conceive of their activism, on a broad scale, is in terms of the speeding up of current historical trends, not their interruption or reversal."

  I suppose that all depends on what trends you're talking about, but the notion that historical trends are for the better hasn't been born out by history: I can think of a few that turned rotten after initial promise, and others that were rotten from the start. The trend Wright identifies is "the protracted collapse of corporate capitalism and the nation-state system itself." I'm not so sure of that myself -- not that I don't see some problems there, but they mostly come from overreach, something not all that far removed from panic. (The Right's massive attempt to corner the political system, which has much to do with the resource imbalance cited above, seems more rooted in fear than in greed, not that its sponsors can ever free themselves of the latter. Sometimes it looks like the Right is winning, but their successes rarely go beyond the most corruptible of institutions, and when they do seize power they often crash and burn.)

  I keep coming back to ideas and organization. While there are a lot of the former floating around, it's proven remarkably difficult to get them into common circulation -- the point, I would say, of Philip Mirowski's Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, showing how a prison of constantly reiterated neoliberal ideology kept politicians from even considering alternatives after an economic collapse caused by precisely that thinking. That suggests to me that ideas have to be channeled through organization -- a role that unions filled during the industrial revolution but are unlikely to recover and repeat in the future. Figure that out and the Left won't look so lame. Don't and we run the risk that no one will be able to pick up the pieces after the Right fucks everything up.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

prev -- next