Money in America

I was saddened by two op-eds in the NYT on Friday.  David Brooks said that the only way to measure success in America is money.  Paul Krugman said that technology will mean that fewer and fewer people will have more and more of that money.

I don't disagree with Brooks that in today's America financial success is the main way to measure success, but I think there are still people, religious or not, who have other values, and who may value some form of personal goodness, loving your neighbor, or doing good for society in general as a higher value than financial success.  It's interesting that although Brooks column talks a lot about religion, it does not mention the "Protestant work ethic" which is probably the most well-known description of the moral system that he says is now dead.

By Brooks' measure, no doctor should aspire to be a family physician, keeping regular people well over time.  All doctors should aspire to be neurosurgeons, cardiac surgeons, or orthopedic surgeons, where the money is.  Everyone should be a specialist.  I suppose you could argue that the best doctors become specialists in high-paying fields, while the worse doctors have to settle for family practices.  But I think at least a few of those actually choose to be general practice doctors because they actually want to make people well and keep them that way, not just make money.

Similarly, no lawyer would ever become a judge.  Judges' salaries are nothing compared to corporate lawyers' or plaintiffs' lawyers.  But somebody has to make decisions that keep society functioning.  Many judges do it, because they feel that it is a higher calling than litigating or finding tax dodges for multi-billion dollar companies.  There are lots of claims that today judges are being bought or influenced by the enormous financial power of big corporations and super-rich individuals, but there are still some honest judges.

But Brooks is right that in today's society a good judge or family doctor no longer has the social status that he would have had a generation or two ago.  The military is another victim.  It's pinnacle was probably after World War II, because almost everybody served, the US won, and the US was relatively unscathed by the war, compared to Europe or Asia.  The nadir was probably post-Vietnam.  9-11 helped restore some luster to the military, but still no one from a "nice" family would serve.  We have developed something of a military caste, with an officer corps drawn from military families or families not connected to the American power structure, and enlisted men drawn from the under-classes of the country, again people who are somewhat alienated from "good" society before they enlist.  They get lots of thanks, but you don't get many people from good universities or wealthy families joining the military.  Because of the relatively small base from which to draw soldiers and the high volume and long duration of the wars they are called to fight, the military is constantly under stress.  In addition, it is now becoming a social experiment by integrating women and gays into the force.  Integration worked pretty well for blacks in the military, but that was a more democratic military with a broader cross-section of soldiers than today's.  We will see whether that makes the social experiment easier or harder.  But Brooks is right that the relatively low pay for the military reduces its stature in American society.  many people who sing the National Anthem or America the Beautiful at sporting events think they are doing just as much to show their love for America as soldiers facing bullets in Afghanistan or some other foreign war.

In the other column, Paul Krugman says that we are going through a change in the economy and the nature of work as great that of the industrial revolution.  It is changing the whole balance of power between labor and capital with capital far outstripping labor in importance.  Manual labor is no longer being outsourced to poorer countries, it is being eliminated by technology.  A CEO can almost run an industrial empire from a computer on his desk.  Thus he reaps almost all of the profit from his factories' production because there are no laborer with whom he has to share it.  For the last generation or so, the technological revolution created jobs in the tech industry, writing code for all the new computers, but Krugman adds that today even those jobs are disappearing.  Education is no longer a guarantee of a decent job.  Furthermore, he says we are duping our young people into going into huge debt to finance their education, which may turn out to be useless in the job market.

If they are both right, we doom the majority of Americans to a life of poverty and low self-esteem.  Neither of them addresses the issue of "celebrity," which is a relatively new American phenomenon.  It often includes people with no special or socially useful skills who make tons of money by playing themselves of some made-up version of themselves on television and the Internet.  If money is really the indicator of social value, we find these people with almost no real value given the highest social value under the new standards.

The histories of the Roman Empire and French Revolution show similar trends, as societies abandoned the values which made them great, in both cases yielding to corruption and income inequality that eventually destroyed them.  The demonstrations yesterday in Brazil, the day before in Turkey, and perhaps last year's Occupy Wall Street, and the Arab spring show that there may be a growing perception among the masses that the super-rich 1% is saying "Let them eat cake," while the masses want jobs and salaries that allow them to buy bread and veggies.

What Next for Syria?

It is odd that the administration has sort of anonymously announced that Syria has crossed the "red line" of using chemical weapons.  Nothing new has happened in the last few days, except that Susan Rice and Samantha Power have been named to new foreign policy positions.  Both of them are activists for using power to right humanitarian wrongs.  I think the new announcement is in some way linked to their joining the administration.

Apparently the finding is that the Assad regime used chemical weapons to kill 100-150 people.  No word on specifically when and where.  Why is it worse to kill 100 people with sarin, than to kill 93,000 (a recent estimate of deaths from the war) by conventional means?  Why would Syria purposefully cross Obama's red line by using sarin to kill 100 people, when the whole idea of WMD and the red line is mass casualties.  There is no "mass destruction" alleged.  It only makes sense if think Assad purposefully wanted to stick his finger in Obama's eye.  That's possible, but unlikely, unless it got Assad some reward from the Iranians or the Russians.

I would not discount the possibility that the rebels got some small quantity of sarin gas and used it to frame Assad.  Until we know more about when, where and how the sarin was used, I think that is a possibility.  I would not put is past the rebels to use sarin gas on a few of their own people if it meant that they would get Patriot missiles from the US.

So now we are going to arm the rebels.  The best justification I have heard was from David Ignatius on "Morning Joe," who said that we are not arming them for the fight against Assad, but for the war after Assad falls.  The rebels purportedly have some good guys interspersed with the al-Qaeda linked terrorists who are fighting Assad.  Presumably we would arm the non-terrorists to fight the terrorists after Assad falls.  However, most of the radical Sunni countries in the Middle East side with the terrorist-linked rebels, or at best don't care who they are as long as they fight the Shias and the Alawites.  The idea that that we can produce a good outcome from the Syrian civil war is preposterous.  You only have to look at the most successful of our recent interventions -- Libya -- to see that a good outcome is very unlikely.  The first thing that happened after we killed Qaddafi was that the Libyans killed our ambassador.  Libya is less of a mess that Iraq or Afghanistan, but it's still a mess.  Meanwhile, the Iraq war ended up strengthening our enemy in Iran, and the war in Afghanistan has failed to stop the Taliban, but has destabilized Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons, possibly facilitating the transfer of nuclear weapons to terrorists around the world.

On this issue, as on most foreign policy issues, the two best commentators are Fareed Zakaria and Zbigniew Brzezinski, possibly joined by David Ignatius.  Meanwhile, the Republican lynch mob in Congress, led by John McCain, and now aided by Rice and Power, cries for more blood.

NSA Spying on Americans

So far the biggest problem with NSA's collection of meta-data from various American phone companies is that it is spying on Americans.  NSA, Obama, and Congress argue that collecting just the phone numbers, locations, times, etc., in not an infringement of Fourth Amendment protection against searches and seizures.  However, it is collecting information about Americans that can be used for intelligence purposes, and the fact that it is stored by NSA means that it is already treated as intelligence data.  This data can be mined for many types of information by NSA, some legitimate and permitted under the Fourth Amendment, and some not.  It's sort of like saying that the government has the right to set up microphones and cameras in your house to record your every move, but it doesn't have the right to look at it, unless it gets a court order.  Maybe NSA is being law abiding, and maybe they are not.  Maybe they are being law abiding now, but won't be in ten years, but they will still have the data to mine for inappropriate information.

If the US faced a clear and present danger to its survival, then this program might be justifiable, but I don't think that it does.  The terrorism threats we face are low-level and usually amateurish.  If you weigh the threat against the loss of civil liberties, I think that loss of civil liberties far outweighs the threat.  The threat does not justify spying on Americans, even if this spying is just recorded and not looked at.  This is exactly the kind of thing that Hitler would have used against the Jews.  In today's world, he probably could have found out where Ann Frank was hiding within hours by collecting and analyzing the meta-data of the electronic footprint of the family hiding her.

Massive Intelligence Collection Threatens Liberty

The collection of metadata about the telephone calling habits of ordinary Americans is ust the sort of thing that an authoritarian government would need to keep its population under control.  By using location and numbers called, you can tell who is white, black, Hispanic, who is Muslim catholic, or Jewish, who is rich or poor, who is politically active as a liberal or conservative.  The information is all there in the big data that NSA is collecting, but NSA promises they won't mine the data for that information.  Maybe it won't today, but what about tomorrow.

Today the system targets Muslims who don't like America.  Tomorrow it could be Jews who belong to the ACLU, or Christians who belong to the NRA, depending on ho is in charge.  The information is all there in NSA's computers; it just depends on who is processing it, and what they do with the results.

Intelligence Leaks

All the talk about the administration's investigation of intelligence leaks reminds me of one of my experiences about 20 years ago while I was in the Foreign Service.  I was the chairman of a committee looking at violations of certain US export control laws. Occasionally we would get intelligence that somebody was trying to violate the laws, and we would debate whether we could take action on the intelligence, and if so, what kind of action.  The intelligence agencies were often resistant to taking action on intelligence, because they worried that it might reveal "sources and methods."  Occasionally I opposed taking action because I did not think the intelligence was good or reliable enough.  In that case, I would usually ask the intelligence agency involved to try and get better or confirming information.  Several times when I did not want to act on questionable intelligence, I got calls at home at 10:00 or 11:00 o'clock at night from Michael Gordon (I think) who had been told the intelligence information and wanted me to confirm it.  I would not confirm it; I fell back on the old saw, "neither confirm nor deny."  I don't even remember if the articles ran.  However, I was amazed that the leaks must have come from the conservative side of the people working on the issue, probably from the CIA or the Pentagon.  And the leaks were of very highly classified information.  Somehow, I expected that if anyone were going to violate the law in order to "do good," it would be some crazy liberal, not some conservative, who claimed to be super patriotic.  I never knew who did it, but I was appalled at the cavalier treatment of classified information.

I didn't have any personal connection to the Iraq war, but I was similarly surprised that Judith Miller wrote a number of New York Times articles on the war, particularly regarding weapons of mass destruction, that were false and planted by conservatives linked to Dick Cheney and company.  It's as if conservatives have no regard for the law or the truth.  I'm sure many do, but the moral standards on the right have in the past seemed to lower than on the left.  I will be interesting if we ever find out where the new set of leaks came from.

Despite my experience, I am not in favor of the way the Obama administration is going about its investigation of the recent leaks regarding Yemen and North Korea.  I don't think Obama should be pursuing journalists; he should limit his investigation to government employees.  If the FBI is too inept to figure out who is doing the leaking without looking a journalists' phone records, then they should give up.  The journalists are not violating the law (in most cases); the leakers are.  Let the journalists do their job, and just go after the government employees.

IRS Scandal Overblown

On its face, the IRS scandal involving the questioning of 501(c)(4) applications by conservative Tea Party groups looks bad, and it is, but it's not terrible.  David Brooks makes a good point in his NYT column on the issue, generally critical, but pointing out that most Tea Party groups hate the IRS, which is reviewing their applications, and would eliminate it or drastically limit it.  Brooks says, "It’s hard to tell now if the I.R.S. scandal is political thuggery or obliviousness. It would be one thing if the scandal is just a group of tax people targeting the most anti-tax groups in the country. That’s just normal, run-of-the-mill partisan antipathy."

In addition, the 501(c)(4) provision is bad policy, as Steve Rattner wrote in the NYT, and as Stephen Colbert illustrated when he created his bogus, but legal, Super PAC during the last election cycle.  Rattner points out the one of the biggest advantages of 501(c)(4) status is that the group does not have reveal the names of its donors.  Carl Rove has worked out a scheme where he collects money through his 501(c)(4) so that he does not have to reveal donors' names, and then transfers the money to his Super PAC.  In theory the 501(c)(4) group should not be overtly political, but the Super PAC can be.  So, the IRS was given the job of overseeing one of the most controversial  election financing provisions, something that should be overseen by the Federal Elections Commission, but the FEC is toothless and worthless, the IRS is probably a better organization to it, if you are interested in protecting the American people from election fraud.  Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has only strengthened the legal channels for political corruption in America.

So, the IRS made a little stand against political corruption, and it has been viciously attacked for doing so.  It is at fault, particularly if it routinely granted 501(c)(4) status to liberal groups while giving conservative groups a hard time.  However, the real problem is the corrupt politicians who passed section 501(c)(4) in the first place so that their campaigns could rake in millions of dollars in untraceable contributions.

Try Diplomacy with Syria

Here's an op-ed in the NYT by a real FSO in Colorado, Amb. Christopher Hill, arguing the case for diplomacy to solve the Syrian civil war.  I think it is worth a try.  We should be having meetings with the Russians, the Syrians, and anybody else signficantly affected by the war, like the Jordanians and Turks; however, I am not optimistic that anything will stop the bloodshed, including American boots on the ground, much less creating a no-fly zone, or other half-way measures.  It is becoming increasingly clear that the US intervention in Libya, which appeared to be relatively cost-free and successful, was not so successful.  The attack on the American mission in Benghazi, the attack on the Amenas oil facility in Algeria, and the al Qaida unrest in Mail all showed the remaining power of the Libyan rebels who do not like us.  So, the American intervention in the relatively manageable Libyan civil war, was less than completely successful.  Whether it turns out to be 25%, 50% or 75% successful, only history will tell, like the war in Iraq.  Hopefully Libya will turn out better than Iraq.  Unfortunately one of the best American strengths in Libya, the well-liked Ambassador Christopher Stevens, was killed by the anti-American group Ansar al Sharia, weakening America's future role there.

Too Much Benghazi

I have had enough of the Republicans' screaming about Benghazi.  They are overjoyed that Amb. Stevens was killed, and they are dancing on his grave, making political capital with his death.  They, of course, argue that it is the administration and the Democrats who are dishonoring his death by not saying that he was killed by terrorists.  If you compare Benghazi to the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, where the Bush administration actually lied to cover up the fact that he was killed by friendly fire, there is no doubt that the Obama administration was more honest and more concerned about the death of those serving this country.

Only recently has it become clear that Benghazi was neither an embassy nor a consulate; it was some kind of other diplomatic mission, which seems to have been devoted to the CIA.  There were relatively few State Department personnel there; the Ambassador and an IT specialist just happened to be visiting when the attack occurred.  It's not clear what the CIA was doing; they could have been advising local leaders on political and security issues, or they might have been planning drone attacks on the very people who attacked the mission.  If that's the case, they were just too slow.

I also think it's unbalanced to have a man of outstanding moral character arguing with a low-life like Issa.  Wikipedia says Issa was accused of several car thefts, although he apparently was never convicted, and collected on a large fire insurance policy on his company under suspicious circumstances.  He apparently served honorably in the military, although apparently without leaving the US or serving in combat.  Meanwhile, Ambassador Pickering is an honorable man who has served in many senior jobs in the State Department, as ambassador to several countries and as assistant secretary and under secretary in Washington.  While I was an intelligence analyst in the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, I worked with Pickering when he was Assistant Secretary for Oceans, Environment, and Science, and had such a high opinion of him that he is one of the reasons I stayed in the Foreign Service.

Ambassador Pickering's report led to the firing of several State Department employees from their jobs dealing with security.  The Republicans are less interested in security; they are only interested in the talking points prepared for Ambassador Rice the Sunday after the Benghazi attacks, claiming that the talking points were modified for political reasons because of Obama's election campaign.

There seems to be some consensus that the attack was carried out by a group called Ansar al Sharia, although different from the group with the same name in Yemen. This group made a positive name for itself during the rebellion against Qaddafi, but it aroused hostility by its attack on the Benghazi mission, especially since Amb. Stevens was well known and loved by the Libyan people.  It does not appear that it has done anything of significance since 9/11/2012.  It seems to me that in a rational world the Republicans would be mad at Ansal al Sharia for killing the Americans, rather than at President Obama for allowing some watered-down talking points to be used while the US Government was still trying to figure out exactly what happened.

Income Inequality Changes Housing Market

Income inequality is putting more and more houses into the hands of the wealthy 1 or 2 percent, raising prices and making it more difficult for regular people to buy a house.  Stories in the Washington Post and the New York Times document this phenomenon.  The big investors buying the homes are counting on regular people not being able to buy and having to rent the homes the investors are buying.  The New York Times says that the investors are taking a risk, because renting a large number of single family houses is a new undertaking that is difficult to manage.  The investors say that computer technology will allow them to keep up with the numerous records, repairs, etc., that have to be kept for each house.

The Washington Post says that in the formerly depressed Florida market, big investors are buying as much as 70% of the houses sold, perhaps inflating the figures indicating a revival of the housing market.  These are houses that had been owned by individuals until they were foreclosed.  Now they will be rental units being rented by the rich to regular people, who used to own their homes.  The Washington Post says the percentage of Americans owning their home has fallen from 69.2% to  65.4% since 2004.

The attraction for big investors is that very few assets these days pay any significant return.  Bond and stock yields are low and the risk is relatively high for the low return of 1 or 2%.  Buying cheap, foreclosed properties that can yield an 8% return quickly is inviting.

Both articles point out the risks for investors if there is another housing downturn, but the problem with income inequality is that for the rich, an investment that turns sour is not the end of the world, while for a regular person, losing his only home to foreclosure is something like the end of the world.

Foreign Service Losing Ground at State Department

The op-ed in the Washington Post about the State Department's Foreign Service losing ground even within the Department struck a nerve with me.  One of the authors was Susan Johnson, whose parents I knew in Washington; her father was a Foreign Service officer.  Another was Amb. Tom Pickering, whom I worked with as a junior officer and whom I looked up to during my whole career in the Foreign Service.

The issue is an old one, the fact that political appointees are taking over more and more jobs at the State Department.  It also highlights the Foreign Service's loss of prominence to the State Department's Civil Service employees.

When I was the Science Counselor at the American Embassy in Warsaw, Poland, the State Department asked me if I would be willing to transfer to the American Embassy in Rome, because the Science Counselor in Rome was leaving, and Italy was taking over the Presidency of the European Union, which meant a big increase in the workload for Rome, since it would have to deal with the usual bilateral issues, plus EU-wide issues that came up to Italy as the EU President.  I agreed to go, since I thought the State Department needed me there.

When I arrived, however, I found that Embassy Rome had been fighting with the State Department personnel system for some time over this position.  The incumbent Science Counselor, who was being forced to leave was a political appointee, one of the problems pointed out in the op-ed.  He had come in with Ambassador Reginald Bartholomew, who was then the American Ambassador in Rome.  The political appointee had been in the State Department for eight years, which was the limit for "Schedule C" political appointments.  Bartholomew had tried to get the Science Officer accepted into the career Foreign Service, but for whatever reason, the Foreign Service personnel system had refused; so, he was had to leave.  Apparently Amb. Bartholomew was angry and the system, and was determined to get his own man, apparently someone other than a Foreign Service officer, if only the spite the system.  The odd thing to me was that I knew the Civil Service officer they wanted.  In a previous job, he had worked just across the hall from me.  His office was partly responsible for assigned science officers overseas, and had had a role in my assignment to Warsaw, but apparently not to Rome.  When I had worked with him, I thought he had been a nice enough guy, but under the circumstances I felt that I had been stabbed in the back.  My immediate boss, the Economic Minister in Rome, obviously wanted to replace me to please the Ambassador.  Since I was eligible to retire, I decided to retire rather than try to work for two people who did not want me there.

I was ready to retire anyway.  In Warsaw, the budget for the American-Polish science cooperation that my office supervised had been cut to zero by Newt Gingrich and the Republicans, although we had formally agreed to fund it for several more years.  Then, the day I was to transfer from Warsaw to Rome, Gingrich shut down the entire US Government.  My wife and I had moved out of our house in Warsaw, shipped all of our household effects to Rome, and just had a few suitcases in the car, ready to start to drive to Rome that night.  At about 5:00 pm, Rome called and said, "Don't come."  We had nowhere to live.  I finally got Rome to agree that we could leave and go to Rome, but the idea that the US Government would put my wife and me on the street in the winter in Warsaw was abhorrent to me.  It was like sending soldiers into battle and then abandoning them.  It soured forever my opinion of the US Government.

When I got to Rome, one of my jobs was working with the Italians on North Korea.  The US had agreed to supply North Korea with certain things if the North Koreans would give up their nuclear bomb building program.  However, as part of the budget cutting, the Republicans were refusing to appropriate the money necessary to meet America's obligations under the agreement.  Thus, one of my jobs was to go hat in hand to the Italians and ask them as Italians and as the European Union if they could put some money into the pot to pay for what we had to send to North Korea to meet our obligations.  After what had happened in Warsaw and during my transfer to Rome, I was very unhappy to be representing a government that refused to pay its bills.

So, between the Embassy's lobbying to replace me with a Civil Service officer, and the US Government asking me to plead for money from the EU that the US was obligated to pay, I decided that I had had enough and I retired.  It's sad that I left the Foreign Service feeling so bitter.  I suppose I could have stayed and fought the system.  I had tenure and good efficiency reports up to that assignment; I could have stayed for at least a few years, but I didn't really want to work for an Ambassador and immediate boss who wanted me gone.  It was unpleasant while I was there, and if I had fought the system, it would have become still more unpleasant.  I was replaced by the Civil Service officer, but I never heard how his assignment worked out.  I hope for America's sake that it went well.

It's interesting that the op-ed highlights today's problems particularly in "policy bureaus that deal with issues such as ... environment and disarmament."  Both of these fell in my area of responsibility in Warsaw and Rome, as well as in many of the assignments I had during my career.  Had I worked more on bilateral political and economic issues, perhaps my career would have gone better.

When I worked with Amb. Pickering, he was Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Oceans, Environment and Science (OES).  I gather that it would be unusual for a career Foreign Service officer like Amb. Pickering to have this job today.

Fear of North Korea Overblown

Yesterday Colorado Congressman Doug Lamborn disclosed a previously classified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) evaluation that North Korea could put a nuclear warhead on a missile, according to the New York Times.  When I worked at the State Department, including in its Bureau of Intelligence and Research, people uniformly thought that DIA's intelligence analysis was poor, except in areas such as particular tactical weapons evaluations.  In strategic areas, such as nuclear weapons development, DIA always tended to overplay the threat, presumable because it meant budget money.  The Pentagon needed dire threats to justify spending the huge amounts of money it wanted for its various weapons programs.  Thus, it needed to build up the threatening image of the enemy, whoever it was, the old Soviets, or the new terrorists, or North Korea. 

I think there probably was some collusion between Congressman Lamborn and the Pentagon.  It may not just be accidental that the sentence or paragraph that Lamborn quoted was unclassified, while the rest of the report was.  Somebody at DIA probably wanted to get that analysis out, and worked out a way to do it through Lamborn.  But the rest of the US Government has pretty much disavowed the statement as just the unfounded opinion some crazy DIA analysts. 

I don't think that even next door neighbor South Korea needs to worry about being hit by a nuclear tipped North Korean missile, although it might need to worry about a nuclear weapons delivered by some more conventional means, such as aircraft, truck or ship.  In addition, North Korea probably has few nuclear weapons.  Despite their flouting restrictions on their nuclear program, over the years the international pressure has slowed down their program, meaning that they have relatively little nuclear material, either plutonium or enriched uranium. Just recently they have threatened to restart the plutonium production reactor which has been shut down for years. 

Fear of North Korea Overblown

Yesterday Colorado Congressman Doug Lamborn disclosed a previously classified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) evaluation that North Korea could put a nuclear warhead on a missile, according to the New York Times.  When I worked at the State Department, including in its Bureau of Intelligence and Research, people uniformly thought that DIA's intelligence analysis was poor, except in areas such as particular tactical weapons evaluations.  In strategic areas, such as nuclear weapons development, DIA always tended to overplay the threat, presumable because it meant budget money.  The Pentagon needed dire threats to justify spending the huge amounts of money it wanted for its various weapons programs.  Thus, it needed to build up the threatening image of the enemy, whoever it was, the old Soviets, or the new terrorists, or North Korea. 

I think there probably was some collusion between Congressman Lamborn and the Pentagon.  It may not just be accidental that the sentence or paragraph that Lamborn quoted was unclassified, while the rest of the report was.  Somebody at DIA probably wanted to get that analysis out, and worked out a way to do it through Lamborn.  But the rest of the US Government has pretty much disavowed the statement as just the unfounded opinion some crazy DIA analysts. 

I don't think that even next door neighbor South Korea needs to worry about being hit by a nuclear tipped North Korean missile, although it might need to worry about a nuclear weapons delivered by some more conventional means, such as aircraft, truck or ship.  In addition, North Korea probably has few nuclear weapons.  Despite their flouting restrictions on their nuclear program, over the years the international pressure has slowed down their program, meaning that they have relatively little nuclear material, either plutonium or enriched uranium.  Just recently they have threatened to restart the plutonium production reactor which has been shut down for years. 

Jury Duty

I had to report for jury duty on Monday for the first time in my life.  When I lived in Virginia, lawyers were automatically exempted, at least for part of the time that I lived there, plus I was overseas for much of my career and thus unavailable for jury duty.

I was one of the jurors initially selected for a misdemeanor trial.  The judge and the lawyers asked the potential jurors a number of questions, and my reply to one surprised me.  They asked how much faith we had in the American legal system on a scale from 1 to 10.  I decided on 6, which made me lower than most. I chose such a relatively low number because I am unhappy with the American legal system.

I think that we are approaching a double standard for justice before the law, one for the rich and famous and one for everybody else.  In particular, I'm unhappy that more people have not been brought to trial (and convicted) for the financial shenanigans that produced the banking crisis that created the "Great Recession."  In addition, insider trading seems to be the rule, rather than the exception, for the rich.  There have been a few trials, but I think it is only the tip of the iceberg.  More and more rich people don't even trade on the public market; they trade in dark pools, where who knows what they do.  They also come up with complex transactions, often through foreign markets, since much of their money is probably already in overseas tax havens.  Hollywood actors may go to trial, but they seldom get convicted, and if they do, they seldom serve any actual jail time.

In theory the jury system, providing a jury of regular people, should counter this favoritism for the rich and famous, but good, expensive lawyers manage to sway jurors, who may already be overawed by the fame of the people they are judging.

Cheney's Military Service

I watched the Showtime movie "The World According to Dick Cheney," but was disappointed at its failure to challenge Cheney's views.  My first objection was that it did not say anything about Cheney's failure to serve in Vietnam.  It talks about how he was expelled from Yale and worked back in Wyoming as an electric lineman before resuming his education in Wyoming and then Wisconsin.  This was in the 1960s, prime time for the Vietnam draft.  His Wikipedia page and this Slate article describe how he weaseled out of the draft.  Normally a student deferment was for only four years; Cheney got more.  For his fifth deferment, he reportedly got a hardship deferment because his wife was pregnant.  Wikipedia says he told that Washington Post, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."

I don't think that everybody who avoided the draft was a coward, but it certainly raised questions about their patriotism.  I think that Cheney thought he was more important than America.  Maybe he thought he was destined to save America from itself.  If so, it didn't work out.  The wars have probably weakened the US militarily and damaged our image abroad.  The huge costs incurred without increasing taxes to pay for the wars damaged the US economy for years to come.

One new, unfavorable fact about Cheney that I learned from the movie was that toward the end of the Bush administration, he became seriously estranged from President Bush.  Bush thought that Cheney had led him astray on foreign policy and defense issues, and in particular had sandbagged him on the issue of illegal wiretapping by the government.

I think it is safe to say that Cheney has no regrets because he has no heart and no conscience.  While he avoided the draft as a young man, he let young men from Wyoming serve in the wasteful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although it looks like only 14 from Wyoming died in Iraq.

Dick Cheney: unpatriotic coward who undermined American greatness.

Government Funding Deja Vu

The sequester episode brings to mind very bad memories of my government service.  I basically quit the Foreign Service because of the government's refusal to fund things I thought it should have funded in the turmoil around the government shutdown in 1995 and 1996.

In the early years of the Clinton administration, before Newt Gingrich and the Republicans came to power in 1994, two years into the Clinton administration, the US had signed a agreement to provide funding for joint science projects between the US and Poland and other former eastern bloc countries for five years.  When I arrived in Warsaw, the US had already provided $2 million funding for one year, and it provided the same amount for the second year, which was the first year of my assignment in Poland.  But Congress refused to provide funding for what would have been the third year of the program.

A fairly senior Polish diplomat repeated called me into the Foreign Ministry to berate me on behalf of the United States for failing to live up to its obligations.  I told him that if wanted results, he should call in the Ambassador rather than me, but at that time Poland was not yet a member of NATO, much less of the EU, and it did not want to do anything that would damage its efforts to join those organizations.  So, he continued to tell me how upset Poland was at the US default.  Having been raised in the South with a heavy dose of lecturing on the importance of honesty, honor, integrity, etc., the fact that I was the representative of a country that failed to live up to those standards hurt me deeply.

About six months or so after the US decision to abrogate the cooperation agreement, the Ambassador decided that the embassy had no need of a science officer, because there was little scientific activity outside of the cooperation agreement.  He said that I could finish my tour, but I would not be replaced when I left.  A little while after that, the State Department in Washington asked if I would be willing to transfer from Warsaw to Rome to take the science job at the embassy there.  I agreed and was scheduled to leave in a few weeks.

It turned out that the day of my departure from Warsaw to Rome was the day the United States Government shut down, November 14, 1995, according to Wikipedia.   My wife and I had moved everything out of our government housing in Warsaw.  Most of our things had been shipped to Rome, but we had a car full  of clothes and two dogs that we planned to drive to Rome.  At about 4:00 pm, while I was saying farewell to some friends in the embassy, Rome called and said not to come because I had been furloughed and there was no funding for travel.  However, we had nowhere to live in Warsaw and everything we owned was either in transit or in the trunk of the car.

Unfortunately, this reminded me of an experience in the Army during the Vietnam War.  My artillery battery was stationed on a mountaintop at a base called Firebase Barbara, west of Quang Tri, near the Laotian border, where we were shelling the Ho Chi Minh trail.  Vietnamization had started; so, we had no American infantry to defend us.  Instead we had two "dusters," old anti-aircraft weapons systems that shot 40 mm rounds like a machine gun.  The duster crews were always stationed in isolated, dangerous places and had a reputation of having gone native and not being very professional.  One night we got an intelligence report that enemy troops were massing at the base of our mountain, apparently planning to attack us.  I got a radio call from our headquarters telling us not to give the dusters any gasoline, because they were famous for not having any, and it was too hard to get it out to us.  However, it looked like if the dusters could not shoot, we were all going to die.  We made sure the dusters had gas; they blew away the area at the base of the mountain where the enemy was supposed to be assembling, and the attack never materialized.

But that's how it struck me -- that the US Government would rather that my wife and I freeze to death in Poland than provide us shelter.  A government that sends troops into the field and then fails to provide them with ammunition and other necessities is a pretty worthless government, and that's what I thought of our government.  We weren't going to die, but for all the government cared, we could have.  Unfortunately, a similar attitude led to the deaths of the American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, a few months ago.

I tended to be just a soldier in the Foreign Service.  I was not an outstanding diplomat.  The assignment in Rome was a plum, but it had fallen into my lap.  Most people who go to nice places lobby hard for the assignment.  I didn't know much of anything about the personnel in Rome.  I was so mad that this time, rather than be the good soldier and camp out in some hotel in Warsaw, I called Rome to complain about being left on the street.  It turned out that the DCM, the deputy ambassador, was someone I knew from a previous assignment in Brazil.  He said to go ahead and travel to Rome and they would figure out the paperwork somehow.  I did, but that basically ended my desire to serve the US government.  I would not serve a government that abandons its troops in the field.

A diplomat is many things: a journalist reporting on the country where you are assigned, a mailman carrying messages from our government to theirs, but also a salesman, both for American products and for the American way of life.  When the government I was representing fell to some mean-spirited, dictatorial, third-world standard, I didn't want to represent it anymore.

I went to Rome.  One reason they wanted me there was that Italy was assuming the presidency of the European Union, which meant that most of the diplomats in the embassy did double duty, they had to deal with the Italian government on the usual bilateral issues, but also on European Union issues.  The presidency lasts for six months.  I stayed for six months to take care of the extra work, but then retired from the Foreign Service and left.

Hegel Confirmed

Chuck Hegel was confirmed today as Defense Secretary according to the Wall Street Journal.  The article cites Hegel's positions on Israel and Iran as obstacles to his nomination.  Iran is really a subset of the Israel issue, since Iran is much more of a military threat to Israel than to the US.  I have been upset that his nomination was being blocked by Jews who were more concerned about Israel than the US.  However, in the final vote, most of the Jews in the Senate are Democrats who vote for Hegel, while the good-old-boy,
Christian, conservative Republicans voted against him.  The one favor that some of them did was to vote against filibustering his nomination.  Many of these conservative, Christian Republicans were responding to urging by the Jewish lobby AIPAC, which represents the conservative wing of Israeli politics.

Jewish Vendetta

This Politico article reinforces the impression that there is a Jewish vendetta against Hegel for his comments about the Jewish lobby.  It says that right-wing Hegel opponents were seeking a video of a speech he made to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League because they thought it would contain anti-Israel or anti-Semetic comments.  So, the opposition to Hegel seems motivated by those who love Israel more than America and who consider themselves Jews rather than Americans.  But Politico says Hagel said nothing of note to the ADL.  Nevertheless there seems to be a lot of race hatred behind the opposition to Hegel

Gutless Federal Government

Stephen Colbert had great segments tonight on the failure of the US to prosecute anyone in the banks responsible for the meltdown that led to the great recession, although it is going after one rating agency, and Wells Fargo is going after one employee who put slugs in a coin laundry 40 years ago.  But Wells Fargo thinks it is fine to defraud customers of millions of dollars.  No punishment for that!

The S&P rating agency was basically a character reference for the banks, who were the actual crooks.  It was the banks who put together the fraudulent financial packages.  S&P was stupid enough to believe the banks, who lied through their teeth to the rating agencies and there customers.  Is there no penalty for the banks lying in exactly the same way the rating agency did?  The difference is that the banks own the American government, which has become increasingly corrupt.

Bloomberg in London

The N Y Times article about mayor Bloomberg's love for London and his big investment there goes against my hypothesis that Jews secretly love Israel more than America. The same may be true for Ralph Lauren, whose fashion inspiration often seems to come from Britain. I am happy about that, but I worry that there are many American Jews, represented by AIPAC, who do love Israel more than America. But fortunately it is not a universal phenomenon.

Too Tough on Jews

Not all Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States, but the Jewish outcry about the Hegel appointment has aroused my worst fears about Jewish disloyalty.

I really didn't think that much about Israel and the Jews until I was assigned to Poland in the mid-1990s.    First, as part of the acculturation process we went to visit the Holocaust museum which was just opening in Washington.  While it was moving, I was not pleased with the criticism of President Roosevelt for failing to come to the aid of the Jews in Europe sooner.  I suppose we will have more museums on the National Mall that are critical of America's history: museums condemning Washington and Jefferson for being slave owners and condemning the US Army for war crimes against Indians, etc.  But the Holocaust did not even occur in America, and none of the victims were Americans.

Then, in Poland in 1995, it was the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, and Clinton and Gore both came to mark different events.  It was all-Holocaust all the time.  There was no celebration of the Allied victory, in which my father fought.  It was just about the millions of Jews who died.  Of course, it's not clear in Poland what the war meant.  The US lost much less than one million killed in WW II.  The Soviets lost about twice as many killed as the 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.  The Jews did not really fight.  One of the biggest Jewish battles was the Warsaw ghetto uprising, but that uprising was insignificant compared to the Warsaw uprising by the whole city's population.  The ghetto uprising was put down fairly easily by the Germans; the Warsaw uprising led to the destruction of the whole city during the fierce battle with the Germans.

Of course, the Allies never made it to Poland; they hardly made it to Berlin.  The Soviet Union ended up controlling Poland.  It's questionable whether Britain and the US could have defeated Germany without the Soviet Union, which suffered horrendous casualties.  So, the Poles didn't have much to celebrate about the Allied victory.  The Jews didn't have much to celebrate either, except of the fact that some survived and wnt on to post-WW II lives, often in the US or Israel.  During the commemorations, I was not put off by those who had actually survived the death camps, but I was somewhat put off by the younger Jews who had not been through the Holocaust.  The survivors seemed to be grateful; the next generation seemed to have an attitude of, "You owe me,"  The West had not responded quickly enough, and they were there to collect for the West's failings.  There was some of the same attitude from the Poles for being abandoned to the Soviets, but in 1995 the were more joyful at finally getting out from under Soviet domination.

In any case, two years in Poland pounded the Holocaust into my head, not always in a good way.  Now Jews want Americans to hate themselves for not invading France sooner during WW II.  And to make up for not doing so, we must pay reparations to Israel, giving them billions and billions of dollars.  And making sure that we do is AIPAC, which is a Jewish lobby as well as an Israeli lobby, because many Jews cannot separate being Jewish from loving Israel.

Many Jews Hate Gentiles, Starting with Hegel

The Hegel confirmation hearings have illustrated Jewish hatred of gentiles.  I don't understand why gentiles like McCain, Graham, and other senators from the South join them in what is essentially self-loathing.  Meanwhile, the New York Times, which is owned by Jews, and which displays its nondiscriminatory policy by running an article about Israeli race hatred directed at Muslims on the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team.   No wonder Republicans hate the Times; compared to the Times they look like Nazi storm troopers.

Chambliss Leaving

I am disappointed that Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss is leaving the Senate because he has been too liberal and cooperative.  I will never respect him because of the campaign he ran against Max Cleland, a disabled Vietnam veteran, questioning Cleland's patriotism.  Chambliss did not serve in the military and received draft deferments during the Vietnam war.  He is a Republican chicken hawk.

Need for Seriousness on Debt

Paul Krugman has been campaigning against taking action on the US debt until the recession is over.  I would be more supportive if there were some plan to address the debt in the future, but I don't see any plan.  Krugman seems to claim that addressing the debt is and will be painless.  We shouldn't do it now while we are in a recession, and when the recession ends, growth in the economy and tax receipts will automatically take care of the problem.  But this is not the government of the 1970s,  Medicare is huge, and tax rates have been slashed.  The recession was imposed on a country that was already badly out of whack.

It looks like Krugman's plan is to wait for inflation.  It is relatively painless to run up debt now, while interest rates are low.  When interest rates go up, or when we decide that our debt is unsustainable, we will just allow (or encourage) inflation to take off.  Then we can pay off our huge debt with dollars worth much less than they are today.  However, that does not  bode well for whoever is living in the US when that time comes.

We need a plan now to address the budget deficit and the national debt, even if it doesn't go into effect immediately.  Obama's decision to accept the Republican definition of $450,000 income annually as middle class does not help.

Schumer Supports Hegel

The NYT reports that Sen. Schumer said after a White House meeting, "I am currently prepared to vote for his [Hegel's] confirmation" as Secretary of Defense.  Although the implication is that this says something good about Hegel, to me it says something good about Schumer -- that he is not as much of a racist as I thought.  I am pleased that the fact that Hegel used the word "Jew" does not appear to have totally disqualified him to be Defense Secretary. 

The idea that there is not a "Jewish lobby" is ridiculous.  There is a liberal Jewish lobby, J-Street, but it has almost no influence compared to the conservative, militaristic AIPAC, which competes with the NRA to see who is the most powerful lobby in Washington.  Because of its power and visibility, AIPAC speaks for all Jews, even if some Jews may not agree with it. 

India, Iran and Nonproliferation

With all the outcry over Iran's attempts to get a bomb, no one mentions that George W. Bush's Republican administration undermined the legal case to limit Iran's nuclear efforts, as I said in a previous post.  India seriously undermined the nuclear non-proliferation regime by developing nuclear weapons.  It did not join the NPT and thus did not violate the treaty; however, it was one of the pariah states like Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, and now Iran.  Pakistan still has its nuclear devices, but at least we continue to oppose its possessing them.  Israel flouts the non-proliferation regime, but at least it refuses to admit that it has atomic bombs, thus allowing the international community publicly to preserve the illusion that it does not have them.  At the end of the Bush administration, however, we basically welcomed India into the community of nations that have nuclear weapons.  India's refusal to adhere to the international treaty regime paid off.  Iran has clearly seen that the regime is toothless.  If you stand up to international pressure, as Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, and India have done, you will get to have nuclear weapons, and if you are like India, you even get to keep them with the international community's blessing. 

So the US has no legal regime to support its objections to Iran's nuclear program.  Is Iran less responsible than North Korea or Pakistan?  No, it's simply that the Jews hate the Persians, and the Jews have tremendous political influence in the US.  American politicians are willing to engage in race hatred for Jew money. 

The Chuck Hagel nomination for Defense Secretary has brought this issue to the forefront again.  It is sad that Jews who are usually decent and responsible, like Sen. Chuck Schumer are now resorting to race hatred.  The Jews object to Hegel referring to the "Jewish lobby" rather than the "Israeli Lobby," but is Schumer acting as an Israeli or an American?  If we didn't have enough animosity in Washington between Republicans and Democrats, Jews are now creating racial animosity between Jews and gentiles, joined in some cases by gentiles like John McCain and Lindsey Graham.  They, like Judas, are happy to crucify the Christ for money.  The US is not threatened by Iran, anymore than it is by Pakistan, but Israel is threatened, and for Jew money Republicans are happy to send American soldiers to die protecing Israel. 

Emanuel Wants His Money

I was very disappointed in Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel's (Rahm's brother's) op-ed in the NYT.  He says there is no way to reduce the expense of end-of-life care, or any other type of care, for that matter.  His basic message is that doctors deserve to be rich.  Give me my money now!  You taxpayers owe me and my colleagues big time.  Pay up!  And pay us extra if we talk to you about end-of-life care. 

He has no solution at all, except to get his money before the US goes broke. 

Avoiding Fiscal Cliff Not Great

There seems to be almost universal agreement that the decision to avoid the fiscal cliff by raising taxes a little bit on the very rich was not significant.  It merely showed that Congress could do something, not that it could do something serious.  It did the absolute minimum.  It kept taxes from going up on everybody, but it socked it to the poor as well as the rich, by raising payroll taxes.  So, working people will see their Social Security and Medicare taxes go up from 4.2% to 6.2%.  Arguably, that's only 2%, but as a percentage increase, it's an increase of almost 50%.  For rich people, the tax will go from about 35% to 39%, i.e. 4%, but as a percentage increase it's just an increase of about 12%. 

So Obama and the Congress raised taxes on poor, working people by 50%, and taxes on rich people by 12%.  We can see who pays off a corrupt Congress.  Obama seems less corrupt, but so weak and cowardly that he is virtually useless. 

Howard Dean is right that it would be better to go over the fiscal cliff than to have some half-hearted package to avoid it that just makes the long term debt situation worse.  That's what Congress and Obama did.  The debt will continue to escalate as they kick the can down the road. 

Bible Prophecies about Israel 1

Isaiah Chapter 8 verses 13-15

13 Sanctify the Lord of hosts himself; and let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.

14 And he shall be for a sanctuary; but for a stone of stumbling and for a rock of offence to both the houses of Israel, for a gin and for a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

15 And many among them shall stumble, and fall, and be broken, and be snared, and be taken.

And Ezekiel Chapter 6

1  And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,

2  Son of man, set thy face toward the mountains of Israel, and prophesy against them,

3  And say, Ye mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord God; Thus saith the Lord God to the mountains, and to the hills, to the rivers, and to the valleys; Behold, I, even I, will bring a sword upon you, and I will destroy your high places.

4  And your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken: and I will cast down your slain men before your idols.

5  And I will lay the dead carcases of the children of Israel before their idols; and I will scatter your bones round about your altars.

6  In all your dwellingplaces the cities shall be laid waste, and the high places shall be desolate; that your altars may be laid waste and made desolate, and your idols may be broken and cease, and your images may be cut down, and your works may be abolished.

7  And the slain shall fall in the midst of you, and ye shall know that I am the Lord.

8  ¶ Yet will I leave a remnant, that ye may have some that shall escape the sword among the nations, when ye shall be scattered through the countries.

9  And they that escape of you shall remember me among the nations whither they shall be carried captives, because I am broken with their whorish heart, which hath departed from me, and with their eyes, which go a whoring after their idols: and they shall lothe themselves for the evils which they have committed in all their abominations.

10  And they shall know that I am the Lord, and that I have not said in vain that I would do this evil unto them.

11  ¶ Thus saith the Lord God; Smite with thine hand, and stamp with thy foot, and say, Alas for all the evil abominations of the house of Israel! for they shall fall by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence.

12  He that is far off shall die of the pestilence; and he that is near shall fall by the sword; and he that remaineth and is besieged shall die by the famine: thus will I accomplish my fury upon them.

13  Then shall ye know that I am the Lord, when their slain men shall be among their idols round about their altars, upon every high hill, in all the tops of the mountains, and under every green tree, and under every thick oak, the place where they did offer sweet savour to all their idols.

14  So will I stretch out my hand upon them, and make the land desolate, yea, more desolate than the wilderness toward Diblath, in all their habitations: and they shall know that I am the Lord.
 

America's Lost Greatness

As the debate about the fiscal cliff drags on, it is becoming clearer to me that the US has lost its greatness.  It is no longer the biblical city on a hill envisioned by Reagan.  Our leaders are no longer concerned about our nation, they are concerned about themselves -- their power, their wealth, their position,  No one puts their country first.

We are supposed to have a democracy that allows the people to choose good leaders, but they have chosen poorly.  Too many of our leaders are stupid, selfish, greedy, corrupt, or worse.  One of the worst things as been the capture of the political system by moneyed interests.  A few years in government are just preparation for making real money as a lobbyist, consultant, or businessman selling to the government.  Another real problem is gerrymandering, making congressional districts safe for incumbents.  The House of representatives should be the most in touch with the people's needs, but it has become less and less responsible to them.  Congressmen's main concern is keeping their donors happy, most of whom live outside of their districts.

So, it looks like we will either continue to run trillion dollar annual deficits, or we will fall off the fiscal cliff into a deep recession, neither of which would be necessary.  Economists have good ideas about how to avoid both disasters, but our leaders are not listening.

Why Obama Failed Me

I didn't want to vote for Obama, but between Obama and Romney, Obama was the better choice. I was going to vote for a third party candidate, but ironically thanks to some Wall Street Journal Internet test of political positions, I found that both of the third party candidates were too radical for me. I have voted for Ralph Nader in the past, because I thought he was a good, honest man, unlike the major party candidates. This year however, I didn't know anything about the Green Party or the Libertarian Party candidates, and according to the Wall Street Journal they both espoused extreme positions. I often agreed with the Green Party on economic issues, but not on social issues. Similarly I often agreed with the Libertarians on social issues, but not on economic/financial issues. I think the Fed has saved the US from a horrible financial debacle brought on by Wall Street, which seems to be run by some of the worst people on earth. I think they are evil, but they may just be grossly incompetent.

So I was stuck between Obama and Romney, both of whom held more moderate positions on both social and economic issues, but I was closer to Obama.  However, I am unhappy with a number of things Obama did or did not do during his first term.
- He did not end the war in Afghanistan, which everybody thought was the "good" war, but it turned out that everybody was wrong (except Joe Biden).
- He did not close the Guantanamo prison, leaving the US with its own "gulag" like the old Soviet Union. It's like having a billboard that says, "The US is no longer a free, democratic country ruled by law." No wonder foreign students are going home when they graduate.
- He continued the Bush tax cuts. These tax cuts have badly unbalanced the US economy, contributing to our running up a trillion dollar deficit every year. They are unsustainable, especially when they undercut financing for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's one of the main reasons Rumsfeld said that you go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want. The Republicans were happy to pocket a few thousand dollars in tax savings, although it meant many more troops would die in those wars because they did not have the best equipment.
- He did not try hard enough to get Elizabeth Warren approved as the first head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She created the bureau, and she should have been allowed to get it started. She would have faced fierce opposition from the Republicans in Congress, but Obama should have taken them on. It's possible that the big banks hated her so much that the bribed Obama and Democrats to desert her, too. I'm glad she was elected Senator, but I would have preferred to see her take on the banks in the bureau she created. Hopefully she will be able to do some of the same things as Senator. It will be interesting to see whether she gets on any relevant committees, or whether the banks will bribe the Democratic leadership to stick her in the boondocks somewhere.
- Obama did not give us single payer health care, i.e., Medicare for everybody. He have us expanded health care based on a Republican model that is a gift to the health insurance companies and the medical community. It means much higher costs that a single payer system would have meant.
- He has continued the Bush Administration drone strikes, which in many cases have killed innocent civilians and in some cases US citizens. This is like Guantanamo. It shows the world that the US is not longer an honest, decent, just country of laws.
I am hoping that Obama will do better in his second term. His first task is to do something about the fiscal cliff in a way that will reduce the outrageous budget deficit. So far, I am not optimistic. They may reach some sort of a deal that will allow us to muddle through, but will do little or nothing to redress the fundamental problem of the debt that is destroying America.

Defense Contractors Suck Taxpayer Money

The Republicans complain about all the individual citizens who rely on taxpayer, government money, and there are a lot of them.  But what about the defense contractors, whom the Republicans want to protect from going off the fiscal cliff?  Lockheed Martin works almost entirely for the government, although it sells some weapons systems to other countries, and thus has some income from other sources, but not much.  Yahoo says Lockheed annual revenues are about $47 billion.  Some of its competitors, companies that also make money largely from government contracts funded by the taxpayers include Northrop Grumman with revenues of about $26 billion, Raytheon with revenues of about $24 billion, General Dynamics with revenues of about $32 billion, and Boeing which is only partially a defense contractor has total revenues of $79 billion, perhaps half of which are from defense sales to taxpayers, about $40 billion.  This amounts to an annual taxpayer expense of around $169 billion.  Although we are talking about budget overruns of about $1 trillion, this is a meaningful portion of that. 

These companies are very focused on lobbying.  They often succeed in getting Congress to authorize money for defense projects that the Pentagon wants to cancel.  When Republicans talk about preserving the military budget, many are mainly worried about keeping the money flowing to these companies, who have cleverly located factories and offices in many key congressional districts.  The service men and women stationed in Afghanistan and around the world are secondary to man of these congressmen and senators.  The servicemen are a drain on congressional resources, asking for better medical care, etc., while the defense contractors give the congressmen and senators lots of money for their campaigns, etc. 

One of the biggest concerns about the fiscal cliff is that it would mandate reducing payments to some of these welfare gluttons who suck up taxpayer money.  We'll see how clever their lobbyists are in keeping the money flowing. 

SAC Insider Trading

It looks like insider trading is the rule rather than the exception on Wall Street, most recently illustrated by the SEC case against SAC involving its head, Steven Cohen.  It probably extends to anywhere there is insider information to trade on, the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, for example.  Charlie Gasparino of Fox Business News says that insider trading is a victimless crime.  But the victims are potentially every other stock trader, who because they don't have insider information sell or buy at a price that hurts them and benefits the person with insider information, who knows that the stock is going to go up or down.  In essence, the insider is stealing money from those without inside information.  It's like selling fake Rolex watches while claiming they are genuine and charging the full retail price of a real Rolex.  You think you are buying a good stock, based on all the information available to you, but it's not a good stock and the man selling it to you knows that it's not, because he has nonpublic, inside information. 

Martha Stewart went to jail for what seemed to be a common practice among high-level business people.  Another story in the Wall Street Journal about executives who routinely made money trading in their own companies' stock illustrates that problem. 

It only reinforces the terrible impression created by Wall Street in the great subprime housing derivative fiasco that created the worst recession since the depression.  These guys are crooks.  They are mafioso in suits who will destroy America for a buck.  And it all the big shots who run the financial industry, which Warren Buffet said on the Daily Show last night is responsible for about 20% of the US GDP.  This is basically the figure presented by the government Bureau of Economic Analysis.  And Michael Lewis says that one reason the Germans got suckered into the housing mess was that they thought the derivative salesmen from Goldman Sachs and the other big American banks were honest, when in fact the salemen were lying through their teeth. 

In a Vanity Fair article, Lewis says, quoting a German banker:

“For 40 years we didn’t lose a penny on anything with a triple-A rating,” he says. “We stopped building the portfolio in subprime in 2006. I had the idea that there was something wrong with your market.” He pauses. “I was in the belief that the best supervised of all banking systems was in New York. To me the Fed and the S.E.C. were second to none. I did not believe that there would be e-mail traffic between investment bankers saying that they were selling … ” He pauses and decides he shouldn’t say “shit.” “Dirt,” he says instead. “This is by far my biggest professional disappointment. I was in a much too positive way U.S.-biased. I had a set of beliefs about U.S. values.”

The global financial system may exist to bring borrowers and lenders together, but it has become over the past few decades something else too: a tool for maximizing the number of encounters between the strong and the weak, so that one might exploit the other. Extremely smart traders inside Wall Street investment banks devise deeply unfair, diabolically complicated bets, and then send their sales forces out to scour the world for some idiot who will take the other side of those bets. During the boom years a wildly disproportionate number of those idiots were in Germany. As a reporter for Bloomberg News in Frankfurt, named Aaron Kirchfeld, put it to me, “You’d talk to a New York investment banker, and they’d say, ‘No one is going to buy this crap. Oh. Wait. The Landesbanks will!’ ” When Morgan Stanley designed extremely complicated credit-default swaps all but certain to fail so that their own proprietary traders could bet against them, the main buyers were German. When Goldman Sachs helped the New York hedge-fund manager John Paulson design a bond to bet against—a bond that Paulson hoped would fail—the buyer on the other side was a German bank called IKB. IKB, along with another famous fool at the Wall Street poker table called WestLB, is based in Düsseldorf—which is why, when you asked a smart Wall Street bond trader who was buying all this crap during the boom, he might well say, simply, “Stupid Germans in Düsseldorf.”

Zionism Is Racism

The recent dust up between Israel and Gaza reminds us that Israel is a racist state.  Although it allows some role for non-Jews in Israeli politics, for all practical purposes it is a Jewish state that discriminates against non-Jews, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in huge ways.  Israel may argue that its isolation of Gaza, for example, is necessary for security reasons, but the origin of the security problem is racism. 

Israel is justified in protecting itself from attack by Palestinians and other Arabs, but it should work seriously to reduce the oppression that produces those attacks.  The problem is that the Palestinian Arabs were in Palestine first.  After World War II, the British protectorate ended and the United Nations turned Palestine over to the Jews despite fierce opposition from those living there, mostly Arab Muslims. 

In some respects, it is not unlike what the United States did to the Indians when Europeans came to North America.  However, North America was mostly empty land, occupied by a relatively small population of Indians.  Palestine, on the other hand, was pretty much completely occupied by Arabs, who had to be displaced by the Jews to Jordan, the West Bank, and other neighboring countries.  The Jews have shown zero interest in granting the Palestinians land of their own, while the Palestinians, mainly from force of superior Israeli arms, have largely acquiesced in Israel's occupation of the majority of historical Palestine, although Jews were largely absent from Palestine for 2,000 years.  The Jews lost Palestine shortly after Jesus's time, apparently moving mainly to Europe in the diaspora, although the virtual absence of non-European Jews in Israel makes one wonder whether there is not a form of Israeli racism against non-Europeans.  Palestine was not a Jewish homeland in the 500s, the 1000s or the 1700s.  Jews did begin to return in the 1800s, but before the UN's creation of the state of Israel, they were a relatively small part of the population. 

A Huffington Post article discusses the racism in Israel directed by the European Ashkenazi Jews against the Middle Easrern Sephartic Jews.  It says that for many years Middle Eastern Jews Have lived as stigmatized citizens of Israel.   Although the populations of the two groups are about equal in Israel, the Ashkenazi rule the country.  Furthermore, many Sephartic Jews also come from Europe, but from Spain and Portugal, rather than Germany or Poland.

So, Palestinians have deep-seated, legitimate grievances that Israel refuses to acknowledge, and thanks to the enormous wealth and political influence of US Jews, the US has similarly refused to acknowledge the plight of the Palestinians.  It sometimes pays lip service to Palestinian claims, but meanwhile supplies Israel with hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid with which to kill Arabs. 

We Need Another George Marshall

An email from the George Marshall Foundation says:

In his new book The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today, Tom Ricks says that accountability among our highest military leaders has gone missing. Generals are rarely fired today for poor performance, and he thinks the new standards for evaluating generalships have changed in a disturbing fashion. "During World War II, top officials expected some generals to fail in combat, and were prepared to remove them when they did. The personalities of these generals mattered enormously, and the Army's chief of staff, George C. Marshall, worked hard to find the right men for the jobs at hand," he writes. But not so today, he says.

 

Gen. Petraeus personal failures are a devastating blow to the American military.   The general officer/flag officer corps is hollow.  The military usually varies between peacetime generals and wartime generals.  In the past, when a war started, the peacetime generals who were good at pushing paper and politicking failed and were removed, replaced by generals who could fight wars.  Today because of the new structure of the military, that has not happened. The paper-pushing generals have gone on the lead troops in war, with poor results, documented by Tom Ricks. 

The American military suffered a similar decline after World War I.  Marshall was able to assemble a group of war-fighting generals, such as Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton, who were ready to step in and replace the peace-time generals when World War II came.  Petraeus appeared to be a possibility to fill the George Marshall role, but not now. 

Colin Powell has been the closest to following in Marshall's footsteps, including by serving as Secretary of State, but while he was able to serve President George H.W. Bush well during the first Iraq war, he was shabbily treated by George W. Bush during Iraq war II, especially by being sent to present a false report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to the United Nations, as well as by Bush's ignoring Powell's advice on how to fight the second Iraq war. 

Powell and Gen. Schwarzkopf worked well together to fight the first Iraq war in a workmanlike way, but the bloodthirsty Republicans wanted to kill Saddam Hussein, and were upset that Bush I, Powell, and Schwarzkopf had not done so.  They got their bloodthirsty wish from Bush II, Rumsfeld, Tommy Franks, and company, but ended up strengthening the anti-American regime of the Iranian mullahs. 

Bush II not only failed to win the second Iraq war, he also destroyed the general officer/flag officer corps, leaving the US military in dire shape. 

Petraeus and the Trouble with Generals

Tom Ricks has an article in the current Atlantic Magazine on the widespread failure of American generals.  I am surprised that there has not been more discussion of it along with all the gossip about General Petraeus's romantic peccadillo's.  Ricks does not list Petraeus as one of his failed generals; Petraeus does not come in for the same criticism as Generals Franks and Sanchez, but by pulling himself down, Petraeus undercuts the status of the whole general officer corps.  In addition to Ricks deep criticism that many generals are incompetent to lead troops and fight a war, others are pointing to the perks that generals enjoy. 

Petraeus became an intellectual darling because of the success of his counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq.  But yesterday on one of the Sunday talk shows, some revisionist historian pointed out that his surge in Iraq happened to coincide with a Sunni tribe's decision to ally with the US and oppose the more radical Sunnis, that may have done more to quell the violence than the surge.  See this article in the Washington Quarterly. 

If the leading American general has no clothes (referring to the emperor tale, not his personal conduct) or feet of clay, what does that say about the rest of the generals and the American military establishment? 

Republican Senate Is The Problem

It's not clear who is responsible for the gridlock in Washington.  No doubt there is blame for all involved -- House, Senate, President, Republicans, and Democrats.  From my point of view, however, the main culprit is the Republican minority in the Senate.  This is because they are thwarting the will of the Democratic majority.  They are using parliamentary tricks, mainly the filibuster, to block majority rule, which I think goes against the Constitution.  If the Constitution wanted to require a 60% majority to pass any legislation in the Senate, it would have said so.  It already says that it requires a two-thirds majority to start the process to amend the Constitution.  It could have spelled out other times when a super majority was required; the fact that it did not, indicates that the founding fathers did not intend to require a super majority for conducting the ordinary business of the Senate. 

The Senate has imposed this new super majority requirement on itself.  The Democrats and the Republicans have both used it, but the Republicans have used it much more than the Democrats. 

The Republican use of he filibuster super majority bodes ill for the "fiscal cliff."  The Republicans can block any attempt to resolve the crisis that they do not like.  In a recent "60 Minutes" interview, Mitch McConnell indicated that he was not inclined to compromise.  He said that what the Democrats were doing in terms of running up debt, etc., was bad, and he would try to stop it.  That may be, but the problem is that doing nothing may be worse than doing what the Democrats want.  McConnell can try to limit tax increases and expand budget cuts, but that requires some kind of compromise.  If he lets the nation slide off the fiscal cliff, very few will benefit.  His extremely wealthy friends and supporters will suffer less than most; some will probably figure out how to make money from the disaster, but most people will suffer.  He is very short sighted to destroy America just to enrich a few of his friends and supporters.