War Diary 7: Checkmate

A month into the war in Ukraine, former Russian president and Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev said that Russian nuclear deterrence doctrine “clearly indicates the grounds on which the Russian Federation is entitled to use nuclear weapons." He named four of them.  The first two involve nuclear attack on Russia or its allies. The third is any endangerment of Russia’s nuclear capability. “And the fourth case is when an act of aggression is committed against Russia and its allies, which jeopardised the existence of the country itself, even without the use of nuclear weapons, that is, with the use of conventional weapons.”

 

That same day, March 26^th, Biden ended his speech in Warsaw with the famous ad lib, “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

 

One month after that, during an originally-secret visit to Ukraine by the US Secretaries of State and Defense, Anthony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, Austin said, ““We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine. It had already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops, quite frankly, and we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”

 

The top officials in the U.S. government have directly jeopardized the existence of the Putin government of Russia, which is the same as the existence of their Russia.  I can’t tell if they’re keeping Russia’s nuclear option alive through intent--which can't be ruled out--or blundering stupidity. But the result is the same: Putin and his government thinking the West’s response to the Ukraine invasion is an existential threat to them.  The U.S. response to that has been further displays of contempt.

 

It’s contempt without a plan for de-escalation.  On his April 28^th episode of Background Briefing, Ian Masters spoke with a frequent guest, Robert Baer, the former CIA agent and author who’s best known for the material that led to the film Syriana, about brutal US policy in the Middle East.  Around 15’45”, an alarmed Masters starts to push Baer to produce a concrete answer about how Putin can stop from escalating in Ukraine and beyond it.

 

Masters: But his army’s a paper tiger. You were saying that earlier. So how the hell is he going beyond where he is right now?

 

Baer: He simply has to produce artillery shells. And run them through his artillery pieces. Until Ukraine simply no longer exists. And as of today that’s where he’s going.

 

Masters: And what can Biden do? Biden today announced a 33-billion-dollar package. They’ve been very slow getting stuff to the Ukrainian military, but what’s the 33 billion dollars going to do if this is the ultimate plan? Is there any way to stop Putin?

 

Baer: The 33 billion dollars is a down payment on World War III. 

 

Masters: meaning what?

 

Baer: Meaning an attack on a NATO country.  The Baltics. Go in, take them. He’s got to continue this war on the West and War on NATO. He cannot let it go at this- a piece of the Donbas. There’s so much he’s lost, he’s got to keep going. …. He can’t turn to the Russians and say hey, it was a mistake, we got a bigger piece of the Donbas, let’s declare victory and leave. People have been watching him for years—that’s not what he’s going to do. …We don’t really know what he’s going to do. He’s been listening to these mystics, you know, Russian superiority and the Russian soul and it’s the clash of civilisations. He believes this. We don’t know what he’s going to do.

 

Masters: Let’s just go back to the idea that he fires a nuke at Odessa. That’s a huge game-changer. What’s the West going to do then?

 

Baer: I have no idea. And I don’t think anyone in Washington does. They don’t know what’s going on. They never took him seriously.  When he went into Crimea in 2014 and all this blabbering on about how he’s going to take on NATO and take on the West—nobody believed it. And now all of the sudden you have to figure out what this guy’s going to do next. You can’t tell from pictures, but I’m beginning to wonder whether he’s completely lost his mind. And that means you can’t predict what he’s going to do. You can’t predict whether the Russian command and control will follow orders to launch nukes. That’s unknowable.  We don’t know.

 

Masters: Assuming he does fire a tactical nuclear weapon as a way to break the will of the Ukrainians and destroy Odessa—as much as there are international sanctions now, he’d become an international pariah, nobody would want to deal with him, not even the Chinese, would they?

 

Baer: Ian, right now it’s the Sampson option for him. He has to die and take down the temple. 

 

Masters: right but is there any way that you can let him have some kind of victory that he can dress up as a victory?

 

Baer: there’s nobody to give him that victory.  I  Zelensky turns to the Ukrainian military and says, “hey, we’re going to give up the Donbas to stop this,” Zelensky will be gone the same day.

 

Masters: so both sides are fighting to the death.

 

Bear: Yep. …they’re determined. They’re going for broke.

 

Masters: well they have every reason.  They’re being invaded, right?

 

Baer: yep, they’re being murdered. It’s genocide. What do you do when you’re up against genocide? You fight back.  And surrender does nothing for you, because they’ll keep going.  All these things, it doesn’t really matter what the plans are. It’s what people believe. 

 

Masters: well you’ve given us a lot to think about, Bob Baer, and I thank you very much for joining us here today.

 

Baer: yeah, well none of it is optimistic.

 

Masters: that’s an understatement. 20’15”

 

Two big things are happening here. The first is that a tactical nuclear strike is being discussed as a realistic possibility.

 

Second, Baer dismisses the two current standard "solutions." Arms flows to Ukraine won't stop the destruction of Ukraine. And the other, a diplomatic solution, is no longer possibly psychologically.  

 

We can state the diplomatic solution's starting points: Russia keeps Crimea, Ukraine keeps the Donbas with formal rights for ethnic Russians there, Ukraine pledges neutrality and permanent withdrawal of any bid to join NATO. Something like this was proposed yet again on the same day as the Masters-Baer exchange by the Quincy Institute's Anatol Lieven. But, as Baer would expect, this framework didn't survive even to the end of the show: Lieven later said that Russia needs all of the Donbas to justify its losses, but left out the next sentence as provided by Baer—that the Ukranian military, their country invaded and half destroyed, their existence denied by Putin, will fight to the death to prevent this.

 

Lievan also said,

Lloyd Austin’s comments, and those of the British government, as well, imply a war that will go on essentially forever, you know, an endless war against Russia. You know, we have to ask what that will do to Ukraine, what it will do to the world economy, and what it will do to Europe.

 

We actually don't need to ask because we already know: if the war isn't forever, it's nuclear.

 

Checkmate. See this war for what it is, in order to think past it. 

Warlord Schoolboy

I'd almost forgotten what a dunce David Schoolboy Brooks is because I never read him anymore, but this terrible piece was somehow unavoidable.  In it, Schoolboy offers no actual argument for escalating in Afghanistan. He just refers to unnamed gladiators like himself to taunt and bully Obama with that great question of modern statecraft: "are you man enough to go to war"?

Glenn Greenwald has previously sent Schoolboy to the corner for chest-beating in class.  He does it again this time (as does Amy Davidson at the New Yorker), so I'm reluctant to mention the man again.  The problem is that Schoolboy spent the Bush years not only defending all pointless invasions but also establishing himself as the national spokesperson for middle-class values.  In other words, he has specialized in defining extreme right-wing positions - particularly military conflict-resolution and economic plutocracy - as the foundation of bourgeois utopia. 

A few people call Schoolboy on this publicly, and Greenwald is exemplary in railing tirelessly against the weird, myopic hypocrisy of media and political elites who are happy to spend money we don't have for war but not for health care.  To me they sound like the clueless leaders of France during Napoleon III's mid-19th century Second Empire, a period when France should have been democratizing and developing its social capacities for various kinds of economic and social development, and when it instead became increasingly militaristic and economically second-rate.  Schoolboy's term "tenacity" accidentally invoked not Churchill but Nixon in Vietnam.  The middle-class lets people like Brooks speak for it only at its own mortal peril.

Schoolboy published the day after his own paper shone yet another light into the cesspool of Afghan leadership with a story revealing that Ahmed Wali Karzai, already suspected of being a major opium trafficker, is a CIA operative who helps them run a paramilitary force in Kahdahar province. The past couple of weeks have seen increasing exposure of Afghan and "AfPak" reality, including Jane Mayer's report that the CIA is also running a U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan (see also UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston), Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's unpopular visit to Pakistan, marked by the market bombing in Peshawar (and Clinton pushing "the button on a computer that randomly chose more than 700 lottery winners"),  and the U.S. visit of Afghan democracy activist Malalai Joya, whose book, A Woman Among Warlords, is a reminder of the costs of the real-world version of the armchair warlord schoolboys.
 

The Media's Quagmire

Mark Weisbrot's slam of the amazing establishment bias in the media was a nice end to my computer day.

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a Democrat, was apparently intended to represent the "other side" of the debate. Here is what he said: "Clearly we should keep the number of forces that we have. No one's talking about removing forces."

"No one" in the above sentence refers to the American people, whom Levin understandably sees as nobody in the eyes of the US media and political leaders.

And he goes on to make a crucial distinction between Obama catering to elite media and Obama catering to polls, which might lead him sometimes to do what large popular majorities actually want:

If you want to know why Obama has not fought for a public option for healthcare reform, why he has caved to Wall Street on financial reform, why he has been Awol on the most important labour law reform legislation in 75 years (despite his campaign promises), just look at the major media. Think for a moment of how they would treat him if he did what his voters wanted him to do. You can be sure that Obama has thought it through very carefully.

Obama's whole political persona is based on media strategy, and on not taking any risk that the major media would turn against him. That is how he got where he is today and how he hopes to be re-elected. Many analysts confuse this with a strategy based on public opinion polling. But as we can see, these are often two different things.

Damned by Leaders

American leaders, Dims and Rips alike, lined up for Israel's right to respond to rocket fire with its turkey shoot in Gaza. I will spare you the gruesome and abundant details in this appalling international ritual we have seen many times. But in reference to our favorite social group, the American middle class, it is amazing that they seem not to realize that the war, the defense, the killing, the expense, will make everything good impossible for them.

I mean that literally. There will be no real economic recovery, no redevelopment of US society without peace in the Middle East, whose conflicts are draining the world. For US society, more crudely, there will be no money.

See Robert Fisk for the noir leadership vision of what keeps it going, "Leaders Lie, Civilians Die."

And speaking of leaders who lie, Dan Rather is suing CBS for $70 million, claiming breach of contract by CBS in caving to political pressure to retract his story that George W. Bush had a very poor national guard service record.

Mixed Signals

Yes - United manage- ment IS asleep as usual. They think they can over- come "peak oil" and their own ineptitude by charging $15 for checked baggage.

Leaders don't generally pay their way. In fact they cost a lot more than they're worth - generally about 3,400,000 more, by my scientific estimate. People kind of know this, and don't expect much, and try not to think about politics most of the time. Folks I know like Obama because he will bring people together, Whitman style - "and what I assume you shall assume." They don't like him because he will lead them solo out of the wilderness.

The good news this week was a massive reigning-in of leaders - the Guantanamo decision, in which the Supreme Court said in essence that executives can't do whatever they want to prisoners by putting them in off-world limbos like Guantanamo. It was a nice victory for habeas corpus, even if it never should have been necessary. It was also a win for the regular folks - the mass middle class - who either win with law or lose with force.

To Do Nothing is to Die a Little

The hardest thing about any kind of decline is watching its victims take it lying down.

Lying down also takes the form of sheer ignorance, and standing up can take the form of correcting it. So on Memorial Day it's worth also remembering the teachers and the journalists who devote themselves to setting the record straight. The Sacramento columnist for the LA Times, George Skelton, offers a nice example of the genre today, correcting a few instances of massive middle-class dumbness about taxes and what they pay for.

Speaking of the uncorrected, our Governor has been spreading the myth that private companies will rebuild California more efficiently and cheaply than government can. His ode to public-private partnerships in his State of the State address last January is worth quoting in full:

Now, also over the next 20 years we have $500 billion worth of infrastructure that needs to be met. Now, as we head into this new century, we also need digital infrastructure to keep our economy growing. So the question is: How do we meet all those needs?

There isn't enough money in the public sector, we all know that. Can't do all of it. We need to expand partnerships where government and the private sector work together to meet the needs of the people. These partnerships can often deliver infrastructure faster, better and cheaper.

For instance, in British Columbia, public/private partnerships are common for building highways, bridges, rapid transit, water treatment and so on, and everyone is happy. The political leaders are happy, business is happy, the public is happy, the economy is happy, the future is happy.

Well, bond investors are happy. As Skelton points out, Arnold's champion borrowing has tripled the amount of state money that goes directly to service the states' debt. His latest plan, to increase state revenue by issuing bonds backed by future state lottery revenues, is another in his series of Wall Street Full Employment Acts - the fees and returns on these customized investment vehicles are huge.

In reality, private money increases returns by reducing costs, and one time-honored way of doing that is to externalize costs by getting the public to pay for them. You can make more money with your trucking business if the entire public builds and maintains freeways, rather than putting most of the cost on truckers themselves. The same is true of universities, as our two reports have shown: sponsorships and philanthropy flow to focused activities of interest to the donor, and not to general education. The reason is obvious once you start thinking about it: donors want effective results, and they leverage public money to do it. They use state-funded laboratories, federally-sponsored graduate students, and the like.

Other forms of private "partnerships" spring to mind:

• corporate sponsorships of Gov. Schwarzenegger's public events puts businesses with a financial interest in state decisions into the statehouse
• privatized utilities around the world, including electricity in California: one of the unavoidable cost increases that the University of California can't figure out how to pay for next year are elevated utility costs. Privatization has encouraged underinvestment in the electricity distribution system in many countries, as nicely summarized on page 10 of this book on solar energy. The logic is obvious: you make money by operating a grid that previous generations of taxpayers or fee payers already bought, not by investing in it. The same goes for the once-great British Rail and London Underground systems which pale by comparison with the far cheaper and more efficient SNCF and urban Metro systems in France.
  

What the hey. People do stand up a lot and figure things out. Leading recent examples are the California State Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage, which was written by a Republican jurist who said he was inspired by the Black civil rights movement (and the case Perez v. Sharp).

And there was also Barak Obama fighting back when Bush implied in his speech to the Israeli Knesset that the Democrat opposition are appeasers of terrorists. This is the only thing that will allow Obama to win in November - standing up.

And there is the memory of the war dead today - the ones who caught bullets and bombs thanks to the dumbness of the living, neither in vain nor forgotten, we will make sure of that.

The New Dark Ages

The signs are everywhere that we continue to move backwards into the political past. One of the most important is the return to private government.

• A good piece on Gazprom in Russia describes the extent to which the country's monopoly gas and oil company controls the state. Putin's handpicked successor as President was Dimitri A. Medvedev, Gazprom's Chairman. Here he is, thumbs up, posing with his favorite rock group, Deep Purple. Deep Purple was my favorite rock group too - for a few months in 1972. Why do moguls and hedge-fund managers like groups who long ago stopped having anything to say? OK, I answered my own question. Back to Gazprom - their taxes constitute 20% of the Russian state's budget, may soon surpass everyone's favorite oil company Exxon Mobil as the world's largest, will start to raise domestic gas prices 25% per year (Medvedev's brilliant idea), and is about to accept the man Putin is replacing as Prime Minister, Viktor Zubkov, as its new chairman. Musical chairs - or neofeudalism.
  
• The US State Department has renewed Blackwater's contract to provide security for US diplomats, the NY Times reported yesterday. Blackwater had been under investigation for starting a Baghdad firefight that killed at least 17 Iraqis last September. Oh well. Rep. Henry Waxman says he can't understand the renewal. He's right to be upset, but wrong not to understand it. "The chief reason for the company’s survival? State Department officials said Friday that they did not believe they had any alternative to Blackwater, which supplies about 800 guards to the department to provide security for diplomats in Baghdad. 'We cannot operate without private security firms in Iraq,' said Patrick F. Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management. 'If the contractors were removed, we would have to leave Iraq.' The US government is neither large nor independent enough to protect itself. A little harmless outsourcing - or neofeudalism.
  
• Finance historian Peter Bernstein starts his column today with this: "In the darkest days of the Depression, Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, one of the richest men in the United States, opposed any government action to stem the tide of plunging business activity and soaring unemployment. Instead, he urged a policy of supreme indifference. 'Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,' he said. 'It will purge the rottenness out of the system,' he added, and values 'will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.'" Vicious, lazy, rich-man pseudo-Darwinism? No - just neofeudalism. Bernstein rejects it, but his piece is so defensive in suggesting it was ok for the Fed to intervene in the credit crisis this year that it's clear that modern government is in his financial circles a beleaguered thing.
• Same goes for Gretchen Morgenson's headline, "Big Rescues Can Work," which summarizes the difficult collaboration among banks, unions, governmental bodies, etc. that refinanced New York City's bad debt in 1976. She notes that President Gerald Ford's attitude really was "New York: Drop Dead" until he went to "an economic summit outside Paris sponsored by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of France and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of West Germany." These leaders told him that if he didn't fix New York he'd have "a global dollar crisis." Ford didn't care about New York, but he did care about the dollar, in part because he cared about himself, and his election campaign.

Politics as usual - or neofeudalism? Ford was the starting point of Pitiful Government as we know it today. I vote for the latter once again.

Bailout Bleakness

The colossus of stupidity straddles the earth. Click on Tom Tomorrow to read pretty much all you need to know about the Iraq-war torpedo that blew one of the big holes in the U.S.S. Economy. There's more nicely-condensed detail in a London Review of Books piece I've borrowed. See also the special burden for California, calculated by Joseph Stiglitz.

Key sentences from elsewhere:

Krugman on how it's 1929:

The financial crisis currently under way is basically an updated version of the wave of bank runs that swept the nation three generations ago. People aren’t pulling cash out of banks to put it in their mattresses — but they’re doing the modern equivalent, pulling their money out of the shadow banking system and putting it into Treasury bills.

Dean Baker on how the bank bailout is like pretending play money is real:

The Fed . . .. announced that it would lend $200 billion to banks and other financial firms, accepting mortgage backed securities as collateral. This is effectively the same as saying that the Fed is going to lend money to banks and accept the counterfeit currency as collateral, treating it just as though it were real money.

Japan's "Mr. Yen" of the 1990s, Eisuke Sakakibara, on how the US today is like Japan on the verge of its financial collapse:

Japan's long stagnation began as non-performing asset problems in the mortgage sector. Japanese financial turmoil in the '90s started in the mortgage sector and spread to commercial banks and security firms. This is pretty much what is happening in the U.S.

Wanna give lots of public money to the richest folks on earth, most of them hostile to public funding of everything else? Hell no. As Sakakibara puts it, people "simply don't like the banks. They are the institution that lends you an umbrella when the weather's fine and won't lend it to you when it's raining."

Should we give lots of money to the financial system to keep it going? Sakakibara says yes - tons of money, right away, early and often. On the power of generosity, I agree. But we should do this only on the condition that the money aims at general assistance and social development - help for rent and later purchase for regular people losing their houses, money for the general rebuilding of a public infrastructure hollowed out by years of right-wing attacks on government from the financial folks who want a lot of help when they need it. They should be helped: only if they agree that help in general is a good thing. They should be helped only if they agree to shut the hell up, for many years, about what an incompetent burden government is, especially compared to brilliant them.

Floyd Norris tells you as much as you want to know about Bear Stearns's stock price and about the Fed's selective bailouts: Thornburg Mortgage of Santa Fe, NM, is apparently not important enough to rescue. Norris's key sentences about Thornburg's new junk it's trying to sell almost for free: hornburg’s longtime strategy was to borrow at low rates to finance mortgage securities paying higher rates. Now it will pay 12 percent to help support securities paying a much lower rate of interest.

That is the catch of leverage. If Thornburg could borrow at a low rate, it might well survive long enough for it to find out if the mortgage securities are worth more than their current market price. But if it must pay high rates, it may not last long enough to be proved right. If a company’s credit is weak, it must pay more. But paying more makes it weaker still, and justifies an even higher interest rate.

That is a story that may be repeated many times this year as highly leveraged companies deal with the combination of recession and unfriendly credit markets.

In this spectacle of fear and loathing, where do public or developmental values come in? In rejecting the effects of fear and punishment created by the Fed's half measures, and picturing the benefits of the full ones.

In the world of partial steps of the kind Eisuke Sakakibara says we should avoid, we are still forced to end Friday with this happy thought: by the time you read about adverse economic conditions in the newspaper, your money's already gone.

The Blood Runs Everywhere

Happy 5th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq - not. I feel the same way I did last Memorial Day. only worse. Inertia is its own momentum. Repeated anger is a form of doom. We do nothing and nothing changes.

The best wrap-up of where we are now comes from outside the US of course, from Patrick Cockburn, who explains why the carnage has dropped and why it's not overall good news.

I was in Paris in December 1998 when Bill Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox, bombing Iraq for several days between December 16 and 19. On December 19, Clinton was impeached - for perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation of his sexual relation with Monica Lewinsky. Some thought the bombing was a diversion from the impeachment charges. I read an editorial in a French newspaper about Clinton's bombing that began, "It was the most lethal blowjob in world history."

Today is the last day of Eliot Spitzer's governorship. He got cleaned out in about 48 hours. I think the stories only scratch the surface - that he was paying for hookers since college, and went after prostitution rings that he used. Just guessing. But here's the real point: he didn't kill anybody. And he didn't take thousands of people out on his way down. The obvious contrast appeared in French coverage but not here: Spitzer the money-laundering john is gone. The Iraq invader who deliberately commits war crimes is still around. Maureen Dowd is mad - but what's the use?

The big difference between 2007 and 2008 is money: bloody losses, and lots of them. The Fed put up $200 billion six days ago and offered to take any worthless crap a desperate bank still owned as collateral, or words to that effect. It guaranteed $30 billion over the weekend so JP Morgan would touch Bear Stearns with a 10-foot bowl and then buy it - for $2 a share. Bear Stearns stock was aroud $160 a year ago. Then it lost half its value by the end of fiscal year 2007, in November. Now it's down to $2. These are the crash numbers of 1929.

Was Bear Stearns the biggest, meaning the worst is over? No. Merrill Lynch's declared losses are so far $24.5 billion, Citigroup's$22.5 billion, UBS $18.1 billion, and so on. Bear Stearns was number 20. Imagine how rotten its assets are - to people who can make a professional guess at what's in them - if in 4 months they went from $80 to $2.

The world looked at the Federal Reserve tugboat with Bear Stearns in tow and jumped into the water. The best global resume was in Le Monde.

Les bourses de Paris et de Londres sont retombées à leur niveau de novembre 2005, l'indice parisien chutant de 3,51% et Londres de 3,86%. La Bourse de Francfort perdait de son côté 4,18%.

La Bourse suisse baissait également de 5,02%, Stockholm de 4,07%, Amsterdam de 3,79%, Milan de 3,39% et Madrid de 2,81%.

Quant à l'indice Eurostoxx 50, qui regroupe 50 des plus importantes valeurs européennes, il reculait de 3,78%.

Au total, depuis le début de l'année, les Bourses de Francfort, Paris, Milan et suisse ont perdu plus de 20%.

Les places asiatiques n'ont pas été épargnées, l'indice Hang Seng de la Bourse de Hong Kong clôturant en chute de 5,18% et la Bourse de Shanghai de 3,6%. Celle de Tokyo, dégringolant de 3,71%, est tombée sous la barre symbolique des 12.000 points pour la première fois depuis plus de deux ans et demi. Quant à la Bourse de Bombay, elle a chuté de 6,03% à la clôture.

You don't need to read French to see which way the wind is blowing.

The only good news is the end of the fantasy that the U.S. can do any stupid thing it wants and just pile up more money. The Fed is already trying to act like an actual government. The rest of an actual public response will eventually follow. Maybe before we're all broke.

And then here are the Financial Times' headlines for tomorrow:

Scramble to calm markets
Bankers and regulators scrambled to shore up confidence in financial markets as the sudden collapse of Bear Stearns heightened fears that the credit crunch would claim more victims -
Few investors escape shockwaves
Pain expected for investors large and small
Shares plunge as market begins repricing
Lehman, UBS and other banks hit
Chaos echoes fears of worst case scenario
Cause was not predicted but many effects have been
Practised hands capture the prize
Latest deal to capitalise on rival’s collapse
Experts speculate on unorthodox measures
Expands role as lender of last resort
Bankers wonder who will be next
Comparisons to crash of 1929
Fears of cross-border European crisis grow
Questions about Europe’s readiness for crisis
Wall Street quakes as the parade passes by
‘It’s like a funeral’ inside Bear Stearns HQ
Bear Stearns: Winners and losers
Cayne, Lewis and staff all caught short

No Wonder We're Broke

I'm distrcting myself from the irrelevant news of the day, like Microsoft bidding for Yahoo! - can't create it? go buy it! -which does not give me hope for the American Innovation System. For some reason I remembered Chalmers Johnson, the International Relations expert, and his estimate that military and military-related spending in the U.S. was $1.1 trillion last year.

How dumb can we get, throwing money away like that? Then I found the reason why.

Why of course the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship ... voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Thank you, Hermann Goering at the Nrember trial, April 18, 1946 (from "Nuremberg Diary" by G.M. Gilbert, via hottub Eskimo.

Dumbest of Death Trips

About six months after the invasion of Iraq, around November of 2003, I had dinner with my father, who lives in Los Angeles and was in Santa Barbara for the day. He's voted Republican ever since I could remember, so I was surprised when all of the sudden he said, "I hate Bush." "Why, dad," I asked? And mentally finished the sentence - you voted for him in 2000, and he cut your taxes. Dad replied, "because he kills people for no reason."

That pretty much sums up the situation. We're still stuck in the DMPWE (Dumbest Most Pointless War Ever, though "ever" should really be "recently."). The death on all sides is disgusting, and I am sorry to have to remind us that we are going to pay and pay and pay for the dumb guys' unbelievable, heartless, brainless errors.

The only bright spot is that the press is running some good obituaries, and the LA Times had several today, including this particularly wrenching one, about the death of a perfect son, Felix Gonzalez-Iraheta from Sun Valley, CA. I call this a bright spot only because it has forced big newspapers to talk about regular folks for a change, meaning we can read about the invisible ones, the non-rich and non-famous who keep going and keep everything going at the same time. When we forget who works - quite different from who runs things - we have collectively lost our souls.

R.I.P Sgt. Gonzalez-Iraheta, and Steven Packer, and Christopher Moore, and the other 37 of you that DOD announced as dead in the DMPWE. We will honor you by getting our souls back.

In Memorium

Memorial Day: in memory of the lost ones, the dead ones, the ones made dead for no reason, the ones made dead by the dumbness of the living, made dead by the dumbness of the living leaders, by the dumbness of the brain-dead ones who tolerate the leaders. In memory of the ones our dumbness kills and has killed all over the green earth. May we stop digging the green earth for the bodies of the ones our dumbness killed. May we stop killing them. May we stop being so dumb before so much more time passes, and we get to the next memorial day, and the many more acres of open graves that must be dug because we are so compulsively dumb.

Bush's Iraq War on America

Bush's economic policies are designed to move wealth from the large middle to the small top of the American social pyramid. I have blogged with charts on this before, and will do so again, but it's pretty obvious that these policies continue thirty years of attacks on what I call "majoritarian economics" and that they are succeeding at increasing the gap between the very rich and everybody else.

The war in Iraq has a similar effect, continuing the slow strangulation of the public services - health, higher education, long-term research, social security - on which the large middle classes depend. The occupation of Iraq has no achievable goal, except, that is, the destruction of a useful domestic government, both in Iraq and the United States. Federal uselessness was on grotesque display in Louisiana and Mississippi after hurricane Katrina, and milder, less visible declines in the quality of everyday life are as obvious as the growing wealth and income skew. It's not the Iraqization of the U.S., but it is the Brazilianization - a long, steady regression towards the old plantation ways of the region that continues to control U.S. politics, the American South. If you doubt me, look at income, wealth, health, and education indicators for the Deep South states that remain in thrall to the Republican Right. Hell, look at the indoor plumbing indicators. Back, back, back we go to the Middle Ages. And by the way, the Middle Ages lacked a middle class.

Why the middle class votes for the chuckleheads who undermine their conditions of life - well that's the vote against life and for death that gives title to this invisible blog. We will keep trying to explain it. In the meantime, what will we do in the wake of Bush's Little Surge speech this week?

The Surge is a booby-trap, but not for the Iraqi "insurgents." 20,000 more troops is about a 15% increase. Even if you captured 15% more snipers and bombers that would obviously not solve the problem. On top if this, the surge is actually a series of smaller incoming waves, a few thousand troops at a time. Even John McCain expressed doubts about the military value of this strategy, and the surge was basically his idea.

So who's the booby-trap set for? Congressional Democrats, of course. If they successfully oppose the surge, Bush-Rove will blame failure on them. This kind of fact-free finger-pointing works well in this undereducated country where a lot of people seem to believe their televisions. On the other hand, if the Democrats support the surge, they will squander the issue that gave them control of Congress last November. Since they ARE Democrats, they will dither and splinter and do little good for anybody here or in Iraq. We will get a better minimum wage and maybe some cheaper medications, and that's about it.

The reason is that the Democrats cannot take responsibility for the consequences of their values and choices, since these consequences generally contradict their values and choices. Democrats don't like to cut health care benefits and see mass layoffs - that's their long-standing pro-working class value frame. And yet they vote for forms of free trade, tax cuts, and fiscal austerity that do exactly that. The same is true of the war in Iraq, which the vast majority of them supported. They may not have wanted the invasion, but they felt they had to go along with it - support the president, fight terror, look tough, look good, not be called bad names by Republicans. The war - their Democratic war too - is a horrible failure. Actually leaving Iraq, and not just opposing being there, will make them look bad.

The pundit who faced this fact was, of all people, Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, writing on January 12th. Normally, Friedman is a cheerleader for American deindustrialization with a lemon-twist of safety net programs so the sinking middle doesn't feel so bad. But this time he faced a real reality, and not one he made up. He said Bush should set a firm deadline for withdrawl, and then wrote this:

Of course, just leaving would be bad for us and terrible for those Iraqis who have worked with us. We need to give them all U.S. passports. We have a moral responsibility to them. But it would also be bad for a lot of bad people. They would be left to fight it out with each other. And yes, Syria and Iran would “win” Iraq — meaning they’d win the responsibility of managing the mess there or have it spill over on them. Have a nice day.

Friedman also said some decent stuff about reducing the flow of oil money to oppressive authoritarian leaders in the oil states.

Forget the "make them fight all of us" bravado. Friedman offers two insights that would make the middle-class less self-destructive. First, follow the money, and then be ready to change its course. And second, face the effects of what you do.

The only hope lies in the economic and political majority of this country no longer pretending to look good, and learning to face the bad. Their bad.