Putin and the Jews

The op-ed “Save the New Ukraine” in the New York Times by Bernard-Henri Levy and George Soros (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/opinion/bernard-henri-levi-george-soros-save-the-new-ukraine.html) makes me wonder what prominent Jews are up to regarding Ukraine and Russia.  Levy, who is supposed to be a French philosopher, was the man behind the ouster of Kaddafi in Libya, which has led to much chaos and bloodshed.  He no doubt relished the humiliating death of Kaddafi and the ensuing Arab on Arab bloodletting in Libya.  So, now what violence and chaos does he want to create in Ukraine and Russia?  Soros, an extremely wealthy and powerful Jew, lends his name to this enterprise, whatever it is.  To the extent that Ukraine separates from Russia and joins the West, it weakens Russia.  Putin realizes he is in trouble, but is being pressed on so many sides that he is having difficulty dealing with the situation. 

There is clearly a Jewish issue in Ukraine.  Ukraine has the third largest Jewish community in Europe and the fifth largest in the world, more than 250,000.  Before World War II there were over one million Jews in Ukraine.  (http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/communities/show/id/91)  So, it makes sense for Jews to concern themselves about Ukraine, not just from an international relations perspective, but from a Jewish racial perspective. 

Meanwhile, Jews played an outsized roll in the creation of the Communist state back in the early 1900s.  Then 75 years later, many (about half) of the billionaire oligarchs created by the destruction of the Communist state were Jews.  It’s these Jewish oligarchs who I think are a thorn in Putin’s side and likely to be shoved out in favor of KGB and old party types who are closer to him.  In 2007, the Guardian wrote (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jul/02/russia.lukeharding1)

…in a country where anti-Semitism is still rife and openly expressed, nationalist rabble-rousers have made much of the fact that of the seven oligarchs who controlled 50% of Russia's economy during the 1990s, six were Jewish: Berezovsky, Vladimir Guzinsky, Alexander Smolensky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Friedman and Valery Malkin. 

The 2007 Guardian article goes on to say that some of the Jewish oligarchs were replaced by Slavs who were closer to Putin.  The 2007 oligarchs included Roman Abramovich, Oleg Deripaska, Mikhail Khodorkovsky (a Jew who ended up in jail), Boris Berezovsky (a Jew who lives in London as Putin’s enemy), Mikhail Prokhorov, Viktor Vekselberg, and Mikhail Friedman (a Ukrainian Jew then on decent terms with Putin). 

A 2012 Jerusalem Post (http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/At-Putins-side-an-army-of-Jewish-billionaires) article, “At Putin’s Side, an Army of Jewish Billionaires” described the unveiling of the Red Army monument in Netanya, Israel.  With Putin were Mikhail Friedman, Moshe Kantor, as well as several other wealthy Russian Jews who now live in Israel. 

A January 2015 Bloomberg article (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-22/putin-said-to-shrink-inner-circle-as-ukraine-hawks-trump-tycoons)

 said: 

Businessmen who have long been close to Putin are “on the periphery now,” said Sergei Markov, a political consultant who helped monitor the referendum in Crimea that led to Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in March.

The core group around Putin is led by Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, Federal Security Service head Alexander Bortnikov, Foreign Intelligence Service chief Mikhail Fradkov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, according to Markov.

It will be interesting to see how Putin’s relationship develops with Russia’s Jewish oligarchs as he comes under increasing international pressure from the West.  Will he trust the Jews to continue to support him?  The Jews close to him will come under increasing financial pressure from Western sanctions, which may make them rethink their support for Putin. 

 Meanwhile, what to powerful, influential Jews like Levy and Soros have in mind.  Jews play an important roll in financial activities throughout the world.  They will be very involved in sanctions on Russia, and thus on at least some of their fellow Jews.  If Putin is making it more difficult for Jewish oligarchs in Russia, will the Jewish financial community act together to try to force him out.  If he perceives that they are trying to do that, how will he react?  If they were trying to do something sneaky to Putin, they would hardly call attention to it by writing an op-ed in the New York Times. .  But Putin must know that Levy succeeded having Kaddafi killed and throwing Libya into bloody chaos. 

  

The Moneychangers

I just finished reading The Moneychangers by Upton Sinclair, and was surprised by how little the financial industry has changed in the 100 years since he wrote the book.  Sinclair is best known for The Jungle about tainted food and general poor living conditions of immigrants in America, which resulted in the creation of the Food and Drug Administration.  Since he wrote The Moneychangers, the US has created the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, but the main difference is that the unscrupulous bankers and traders are now billionaires instead of millionaires, and the old trusts are now called hedge funds.

The 2008 “Great Recession” was very similar to the Panic of 1907 that Sinclair wrote about.  Lehman Brothers went down in bankruptcy in 2008 as the Gotham Trust Company did in The Moneychangers.  One of Sinclair’s main points was that Wall Street tycoons made their money by using other people’s money, usually leaving the little guys exposed to the loss if anything went wrong.  In the housing meltdown, it was the homeowners and retiree pension funds that suffered most of the losses, while the fat cats got bailed out by the government.  The nation can endure thousands of small individual foreclosures and bankruptcies, but not one huge one.  Lehman was just small enough to let die.

Relating to my obsession with the involvement of Jews in the financial industry, The Moneychangers only mentions the word Jew once, when a cleaning woman tells the main character that a man who looked like a Jew had paid her to go through his trash.  Presumably all the stock market manipulators were Episcopalian Christians, who perhaps had not paid too much attention to the sermons.  They all loved the show of money in their elegant town houses, their massive Newport beach “cottages,” their yachts, etc.  It sounds like the titans of Wall Street today.  And the banking practices still sound almost the same.  They have made some changes to get around the regulations designed to protect the public, but the results are pretty much the same, and as 2008 showed, the public is still not protected.

The Charlie Hebdo Terrorists Won Something

The Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack aftermath showed serious problems with democratic institutions and  national security among western nations.  By publishing a cover that was a challenge to Muslim terrorists, Charlie Hebdo put the West on the spot after all its protestations that “We are Charlie.”  Clearly we were not Charlie.  Only CBS TV news initially began showing the new Charlie Hebdo cover, and after all other major news outlets turned out to be absolute cowards, CBS began showing only pieces of the cover, like everyone else.

Certainly there are restraints on free speech.  Just ask anyone remotely controversial who has tried to speak on a college campus recently.  Colleges are the leading centers of censorship.  Students abhor free thought and college administrators let them have their way.  Certainly there should be limits on free speech, but we find free speech much more restricted than it was fifty years ago.  Big brother is here and monitoring what you say.  Surprisingly, it is not so much NSA or the FBI, but your friends, neighbors and fellow students, who stand ready to attack you for anything you say that they think is “wrong.”  America is less free than it used to be.

In addition, there is the national security issue.  News organizations do not believe that the various levels of government (national, state, local) can protect them from terrorism.  They are afraid that if they show the Charlie Hebdo cover they will be killed on the way to work, or at work, like Charlie Hebdo.  They have some good arguments.  The best is probably that they have Middle Eastern correspondents in the region and that showing the cover would put those correspondents lives in danger.  But there is also the implication that the network anchors and newspaper editors are afraid for their own lives and refused to show the cover out of cowardice, which means that the terrorists won.

I think on balance you have to say that the Charlie Hebdo terrorists won something.  They did not significantly change the societies they attacked, but they did illustrate the moral and security weaknesses of those societies.  France claimed to be a home for unfettered free speech, but then restricted the free speech of those criticizing Jews and some others.  These restrictions may be reasonable but they do not correspond to the high ideals enunciated after the attacks.

Israeli Dishonor of the Holocaust

I am disappointed that there has not been more of an outcry from the Jewish community about the terrorist killings of thousands of civilians by Boko Haram in Nigeria.  This is exactly the kind of indifference that the Jews accuse America of during the World War II Holocaust.  Many Jews disparage Roosevelt (and Churchill) for not acting sooner to end the Holocaust by invading continental Europe sooner to reach the death camps.  The Jews believe that millions more Christians should have died in order to save millions more Jews in the camps.  Roosevelt and Churchill insisted on waiting until the invasion had a better chance of success.  Of course the reason it had a better chance of success was that something like 11 million Soviets died fighting Hitler in Russia along the Eastern Front softening up the Germans for the D-Day invasion.

If they are not racists, Jews in general and Israelis in particular need to speak out about the atrocities in Nigeria,  Ideally, Israelis should come to the aid of the Nigerians, if not, at least they should lead a worldwide campaign to protect the Nigerians from Boko Haram.  It’s a Holocaust issue.

While it did not point out the Jewish hypocrisy on the matter, a recent op-ed in the Denver Post pointed out the worldwide hypocrisy in reacting so strongly to the Charlie Hebdo killings in France and so weakly to the killings in Nigeria.

Hoothis Take Over Yemen

The situation in Yemen appears to be a mess.  We don’t really know who is in control of the country.  That’s not unusual.  For a long time, Yemen was more or less divided into two countries, North and South Yemen, with Sanaa and Aden as its respective capitals.  The Hoothis who are taking over the country in Sanaa, are a relatively unknown group, described to some extent by the NYT  

They are Shiites getting help from Iran, but apparently not your ordinary Shiites. And they are fighting al Qaida in Yemen (which sponsored the French terrorist attacks), as is the government that they are overthrowing.  Again we find the US allied with Iran against al Qaida, while Israel is killing Iranian generals in Syria.  

Strange world! 

Yemen would have been a mess in any case, but did we make it worse by intervening in the Middle East in Iraq and Afghanistan, and encouraging government overthrows in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and other countries?  We certainly did not have a beneficial effect. 

Yemen borders on Saudi Arabia.  Does the instability in Yemen bode ill for Saudi Arabia, especially if the Shiite Hoothis take over?  Although their border is mostly desert, it can’t be a good thing.  

Who Should I Worry About?

The attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris presents the question of whether I should be worried about Jews taking over America and transferring its wealth and power to Israel, or whether I should be worried about Muslim terrorists attacking Western institutions, or whether I should be worried about the increasing Hispanic nature of America due to the Hispanic influx.  Or maybe something else, like the decline of religion in America.  Things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.  People fight, sometimes because they have to in order to survive, sometimes because the choose to overthrow the status quo.

The fact is that I agree with the Democratic side of the Jewish establishment on most issues.  I just worry that they love Israel more than America.  Jews tend to consider Israel as a 51st state, and people in the Middle East perceive it the same way.  They see Israel with its occupation of Palestinian land as an extension of America.  They tend to see Israeli hatred of Arabs as an extension of American hatred of Arabs.  Israeli and American Jews bear a significant responsibility for Muslim hatred of the West.  It's hard to say which came first Arab hatred of Jews before Israel, or Arab hatred of Jews (and the West) due to the creation of Israel and resulting displacement of millions of Arabs.  Israel was created first, then the Arabs stated the first war.  

The Israelis have faced Arab and/or Muslim terrorism ever since the creation of Israel.  Of course the Israelis also stooped to terrorism in order to create Israel.  Now terrorism has spread to the whole world, in part thanks to cheaper, easier transportation.  The first step was high jacking airliners.  The world responded pretty well to these hijackings and now we have moved to a new tactic.  It is pretty cheap and easy to get from Yemen to Paris, much easier and cheaper than it would have been 50 years ago.  Or over the Internet you can recruit someone in Paris to do your dirty work without having to travel.  The increasing homogenization of populations another factor favoring terrorists.  A couple of generations ago, a Muslim in Western Europe would have stood out and been easy to track, but not so today.  Muslims make up a significant percentage of the French population, partly a result of a long war in Algeria, which brought many Algerians to France under unpleasant circumstances.

All of that is no excuse for the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians.  If Muslims want to prevent unpleasant depictions of the prophet Mohamed, they should go about it like everybody else in democratic countries.  They could try to get a law passed outlawing such depictions.  Hopefully they would not get such a law, but that is the way you go about it in democratic societies.  We have laws against certain types of pornography and other things that offend most of the population.  If many people are offended by certain characterizations of Mohamed, then they could be outlawed or restricted.  But violence is not the way to do it.  If some Muslims are not going to act in a civilized manner, then Western society must take steps to protect itself from them.  The problem, of course, is to take steps that do not destroy the very civilization that we are trying to preserve.

That is the attack from the top, by rich Jews and militant Muslims.  What about the attack from the bottom, the increasing influence of Hispanics, who have recently arrived, and blacks, who have recently begun to acquire political and economic power.  As a while Anglo, I am sorry to see our traditional power eroded.  Rich Anglos may have been as bad as rich Jews, but I always had hope that culture and religion would be some restraint on them, which has been lost in recent years.  Rich, white bankers may have been a inwardly greedy as Jews or others, but they had to sit through Sunday services in main line Protestant churches which held them to Jewish and Christian standards set out in the Bible in the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and many other places.  They at least had to publicly subscribe to these teachings in order to do business and maintain their place in the community.  That no longer seems to be true.  Thus there are fewer restraints of the worst impulses of human nature.  I often thought that blacks, especially black women, had a sincere religious faith and decency that surpassed most everyone else in society.  Much of that seems to be lost, as so many black women today end up as struggling, single mothers.

The Hispanic influx is probably much like the earlier influx of Poles, Germans, Irish, Italians, and so on.  One difference is that the influx has been so large, at least until recently, that there are not the same pressures to assimilate as there was on the previous immigrants.  They could always live in small communities where they could speak their native language, but with Spanish, they are not restricted to small communities.  You can pretty easily live a normal, active life in America speaking only Spanish.  You are hardly restricted at all.  There might be some grocery or department stores that are not Spanish friendly, but there are many that are.  If you compare Spanish immigrants to Asian immigrants, there appears to be a big difference.  Asians don't bend the community to their ways, but Hispanics do.

I guess I have to accept change, but I'm still resisting.

Don't Blindly Trust Southern Poverty Law Center

I question the Washington Post article, The current state of white supremacist groups in the U.S.,” using the Southern Poverty Law Center as an authority on who self-respecting people should hate or not hate.

I don’t think people should blindly accept the pronouncements of he Southern Poverty Law Center about who is a hate group and who is not.  Although the SPLC’s main goal is defending the rights African Americans, an unstated but important goal is protecting Jews. Jews in general believe that they are superior to blacks, so that if they can protect the inferior race of blacks from discrimination, they can certainly protect superior Jews from it.  (There are of course Jews who depend black on principle, not just self-interest.)  Morris Dees. the primary founder of SPLC is not Jewish and was probably motivated by his genuine concern about protecting the rights of blacks.  His cofounder and law partner, Joe Levin, was Jewish, and was motivated by an experience he had at the University of Alabama in which a fellow member of his Jewish fraternity was mistreated and discriminated against because he had argued in favor of integration in the school newspaper.  Thus, he appears at least superficially to be motivated by Jewish self-interest rather than altruism.

My concern about Jewish attitudes toward race are due in large part to what is going on in Israel.  Israel seems increasingly to be turning into an apartheid state espousing race hatred, perhaps not surprising since it was founded by Irgun terrorists like Menachem Begin, who killed almost 100 foreign officials when they bombed the King David Hotel.  There are almost no blacks in Israel.  Israelis would say that’s because there are no black Jews, I think it’s because Jews don’t want blacks to become Jews.  In any case, Israel is lily white.  And of course Jews hate Palestinians, although race is only one factor underlying that hatred.  Now Israel is in the throes of deciding whether it should be a Jewish state or a democratic state.  It can’t be both because Arabs outnumber, or will outnumber, Jews in Israel.  Netanyahu wants to define Israel as a racist, Jewish state.

An op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, “How to Fight the Campus Speech Police: Get a Good Lawyer,” about a dispute between Jewish students at Brandeis University points up the growing strength of the conservative, racist Jews in Israel.

So, the Washington Post tells us that Jews hate David Dukes.  Big deal, they hate Palestinians, Arabs in general, and lots of other people.  David Dukes has company, maybe undesirable company, but company nevertheless. The Washington Post picks sides and sides with the Jewish bigots rather than the Christian bigots.

Jewish Spies in Cuba

As this Washington Post op-ed says, Alan Gross's involvement in the US rapprochement with Cuba is a subplot that will soon fade away.  To me, however, it illustrates the enormous power of Jews in America and the Jewish lobby in Washington.  The US embargo on Cuba and related sanctions, including the Helms-Burton Act which I find horrendous, has been in place for decades and attacked by various people and groups for decades, but it took the Cuban arrest of Alan Gross, an American Jew who was working on some sort of spy mission involving Cuban Jews, to break the back of the sanctions.  The fact that Alan Gross was exchanged for three high value Cuban spies illustrates his importance and the Jewish influence behind him.  The US claimed that the three Cubans were exchanged for an unidentified American spy, not Alan Gross, but the reason the other spy was never identified is because he did not exist.  There may have been another spy exchanged, but he was nothing compared to Alan Gross and his importance to the Jewish lobby.

It's not clear to me what Gross's spy mission was.  He was setting up a clandestine internet for Cuban Jews, but I don't know if this clandestine connection was for American Jews to use to support Cuban Jews, or was to get Cuban Jews to report information about Cuba to the CIA or some other American group collecting such information.  In one case, Cuban Jews stood to benefit from outside contact, in the other they became liable to arrest as spies working for America.  The Cubans seemed to view it in the latter light, no matter what the original intent was.

Interestingly, Raj Shah, the head of USAID, resigned shortly after Gross's release, although everyone claimed there was no connection between the two events.  Shah was also accused of being involved in two other clandestine activities in Cuba, some kind of hip-hop activity and some kind of twitter set up.  The Washington Post article noted above raises the question whether Gross was an unwitting civilian contractor manipulated by USAID.  Of course the other question is whether Gross was really a CIA agent operating under USAID cover, or perhaps under the additional cover or some Jewish organization.

Cuban Relations

It sounds as if the US will restore diplomatic relations with Cuba, according to news reports.  This is something that should have been done years ago.  The terrible Helms-Burton Act denying visas to children with even the slightest connection to Cuba was one of the reasons I left the Foreign Service.

Nevertheless, I am disappointed that it happened the way it has.  It gives the impression that Jews are in control of the United States Government.  The main emphasis of the announcement was the release of Alan Gross, an American Jew, from a Cuban prison, and his return to the United States.  According to the Jerusalem Post, Gross was sent to Cuba to set up a clandestine internet service for Cuban Jews.  Although he is an American, Gross was essentially an Israeli Mossad spy sent to Cuba under American USAID cover.  Interestingly, Gross was released while the US released three Cuban spies, but to cover the Mossad connection, the US said Gross was released on "humanitarian grounds, "not as part of a swap of spies.  Despite the denials, Gross was apparently worth three Cuban spies.

So, we see the Jewish lobby is more powerful than the Cuban lobby, and also more effective than clear-thinking, normal Americans (as opposed to Jewish-Americans, Cuban-Americans, or other hyphenated Americans).  It's sad that Jews and Cubans are both so racist, but in this case the result was the correct one.

Congressional Torture Report

I think that to some extent the Congressional torture report is much ado about nothing.  I haven't read the report, but based on TV and press discussions of it, I don't think that there is much new in it.  It may just be official verification of allegations already made by journalists.  It does accuse the CIA of torture, but I think torture is a vague term.  When I was in Brazil, the military government used to do much worse things to Brazilian dissidents than waterboarding.  I had one American prisoner who was sort of my responsibility since he was a fellow Vietnam veteran, and I went to visit him frequently to discourage the Brazilians from doing anything bad to him.  He was held in the basement of an unmarked house in a very nice neighborhood with other "political prisoners."

But whether something is torture or not, it is probably good for the US to debate whether we want (or should) do it or not.  We are debating this for us, to maintain our integrity, not to coddle the prisoners.

One thing that seems to have come out is that career CIA officers did not want to do these things, waterboarding, etc.  So, the CIA hired some contractors to do it.  The fact that career officers did not want to do it seems to speak well of the CIA, and seems to call into question whether it should have been done.  The other question is whether these tactics worked, whether they got information.  There seems to be a split of opinion on whether they did or not.  It seems to me that this is a question that additional information should help clear up.  How did we learn about Osama bin Laden's courier?  Somebody must know the correct answer.  But it seems like all we get are political answers.

Constitutional Convention

The following are my thoughts on this article about calls for a Constitutional Convention.

When I grew up in the South, the standard justification for the Civil War was that it was not about slavery, it was about “states’ rights.”  That is what this constitutional convention is promoting.  I’m not worried that war is coming soon, but clearly discontent is building.  Much of this article is about the evils of money in the political system.  My view is that the Supreme Court’s conservative justices are largely responsible for that problem, in part by striking down their fellow Republican’s legislation, the McCain-Feingold Act, and of course the more recent decisions, such as Citizens United v. FEC.  This has basically turned Washington over to the billionaires and corporations and their lobbyists.

On term limits, I think their efficacy is debatable.  Sometimes it takes a while to learn how the system works.  In the old days, this meant that some old timers like Everett Dirksen, Bob Dole, Sam Nunn, etc., could get some good things done.  Now they use their expertise to block legislation rather than create it, but that could change.  Another big problem is gerrymandering.  Each party creates safe house districts that make it impossible for the opposing party to challenge the incumbent.  House elections are no longer genuinely democratic (small “d”); they are rigged by both parties to return the incumbent in every election.

Unfavorable Book on Gen. George Marshall

I was saddened to read the review of the new book on Gen, George Marshall, who is one of my heroes.  The New York Times Book Review of George Marshall by the Ungers and Hirshson is critical of Marshall and downplays his leadership.  The review by Mark Atwood Lawrence states:

Debi and Irwin Unger take exception to this [usual] heroic depiction [of Marshall] in their elegant and iconoclastic biography, which pokes innumerable holes in Marshall’s reputation for leadership and raises intriguing questions about how such reputations get made. Marshall emerges not as the incarnation of greatness but as an ordinary, indecisive, “less than awe-inspiring” man who achieved an unexceptional mix of success and failure.  

Looking up Debi and Irwin Unger and Stanley Hirshson on the Internet, Iwas not surprised to find that they appear to be Jewish.  Jews do not like Marshall because as Secretary of State he opposed Truman's immediate recognition of Israel when it was created.  Marshall thought it might create problems in the Middle East.  Jews also resent the fact that Allied leaders -- including FDR, Churchill, and Marshall -- delayed invading Europe until D-Day.  Jews feel that the Anglos allowed more Jews to die while they were preparing the assault.  Of course, more Anglos would have died, and the invasion might have failed, without that preparation.  Nevertheless, many Jews hate the Anglo leadership, including Marshall, for not trying to stop the Holocaust years earlier than they did.  Interestingly, the review states:

  They also laud Marshall’s determination, in the face of opposition from much of the American public, to prioritize the war in Europe over the fight against Japan and, over British objections, to make a major attack across the English Channel the focal point of Allied strategy rather than operations in the Mediterranean. 

Of course, these decisions helped speed up the rescue of Jews from the Holocaust, just not by enough to win more praise from the authors.

Thus, I find this biography to be flawed by the prejudices of the authors.

Bad News

I can’t find an American news network that has worldwide coverage even close to matching Aljazeera’s.  I watched the main news summaries on several American morning shows – Morning Joe, Good Morning America, CBS Morning.  None of them mentioned the fact that VP Joe Biden is in Ukraine.  Even if he is not doing much, he presence is news, especially his helping President Poroshenko mark the one year anniversary of the protests that ousted Putin buddy President Yanukovych.  I thought that Charlie Rose was going to add some substance to the CBS morning show, but he hasn’t added much.  Nevertheless, I think it has somewhat better news coverage than ABC or NBC. 

Recently Aljazeera has had good environmental reports on the plight of elephants and rhinos in Africa.  I haven’t heard the US networks mention that, although the NYT has covered the environmental group’s report that was the basis of the elephant story. 

Aljazeera reporting on the Middle East is extensive, but probably questionable because of Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Muslim movements.  However, it seems to be making an effort to be balanced.  On its main nightly news show John Seigenthaler recently interviewed a Jewish correspondent about the situation in Jerusalem.  I worry that American newsrooms are dominated by Jews, who may skew their news coverage on the Middle East in an anti-Muslim direction. 

Mainly, the American networks no longer have correspondents stationed around the world as Aljazeera does.  The networks have a few foreign correspondents that they fly around to wherever the hotspots are, but they don’t have correspondents on the ground who have some personal information about the situation.  By and large, the American network guys and girls just stand in front of some local landmark and report what they have gotten from a recent press briefing.  Each American network has one or two correspondents who spend lots of time in the Middle East (e.g., Richard Engel), but Aljazeera appears to have dozens who go places the Americans never visit.  Martha Raddatz used to be very good on covering the military in the Iran and Afghan wars, but since the wars have wound down and she has lost her military contacts, she seems to be relegated to the same rote reports as the other correspondents. 

I don’t watch CNN much anymore because it just seems to have pundits and talking heads arguing about news that somebody else reports.  Aljazeera is what CNN used to be before it self-destructed. 

The American network morning shows always have lots of reports on the weather.  I think it is because weather is easy to do.  They just send some reporter to stand in the wind, the rain, or the snow, and talk about how bad it is.  If they are really lazy, they just use a local reporter rather than sending a national one.  They know Americans probably care more about the weather than about foreign affairs or the economy.  CNBC and Bloomberg do a fair job of reporting on the economy, but the evening and morning news tend to concentrate on easy topics, like the price of gas.

The one American news show that matches or exceeds Aljazeera is the PBS News Hour.  Although it does not have its own overseas correspondents, it uses ITN's.  It covers international and economic news much better than the commercial networks.  Margaret Warner's coverage of international issues is superb.  She travels frequently, and when she does, she interviews senior news makers, rather than just reporting press conferences.  

Soviets and the Holocaust

Jewish screaming about the horrors of the Holocaust and the evil indifference of the Allies in not coming to their aid soon enough has obscured the important role of the Soviet Union in winning World War II.  If Hitler had not invaded the Soviet Union and brought them into the war, Hitler may have solidified his domination of Western Europe even if he had not been able to invade England or the US.  The result would have been that many more Jews would have died and the status of Jewry in the world would have been greatly diminished.  Israel would probably never have been created.

The Soviets suffered the most casualties of any nation in the War, about double what the Jews suffered in the Holocaust.  But the Jews spit on the Soviet sacrifices although they probably saved millions of Jewish lives by defeating the Germans.  It is unlikely that the US and UK alone could have invaded Western Europe on D-Day if the Soviets had not defeated a major part of the German army on the eastern front.

Even in America, we have a World War II memorial because the Jews made the war about the Holocaust.  American GIs thought their victory over Hitler would have ensured their legacy, but the Jews perverted it by accusing them of delaying the invasion of Europe while Jews died in German prison camps.  The Jews portray American leadership from FDR down as morally and militarily weak.  America had to create World War II memorials to offset the Jewish defamation of World War II veterans.  While Americans did fight valiantly and were probably a deciding factor in the defeat of Germany, the Soviets were also essential, but they get even more Jewish derision than American veterans.

Oligarchy versus Free Markets

            To function well, capitalism requires a free market.  Markets in America are becoming progressively less free as they become more oligopolistic.  Antitrust is basically dead.  Mergers and acquisitions are becoming more frequent and much larger, highlighted by this Wall Street Journal story.  A market dominated by a few huge players is not free.  It’s bad for customers, who cannot bargain with so few alternatives, and for employees, who are hugely overmatched by the power of management.  It tends to stifle innovation, because in many cases small companies cannot compete with the market giants, who will drive new competitors out of business by cutting prices or other punitive measures.   

            Outsourcing and automation have increased the power of the already powerful market giants.  .  Very little is manufactured in America, despite ABC TV’s efforts to find things made here.  Bank tellers are one of the latest entry level jobs to go the way of the dodo bird, replaced by on-line banking and ATMs.  Management of these large companies is furiously trying to bring labor costs to zero.  They have enlisted the Republican Party to help them break unions.  There are almost no unions left in the manufacturing sector; the most powerful ones are in the public sector, particularly teachers.  For lobbyists’ money, Republicans politicians have taken on the task of destroying the teachers’ union, which would probably be the death knell for unions across the country.  Republicans already dislike education; how many times did Republicans say, “I am not a scientist,” during this last election.  They are uneducated and proud of it, but they also have an economic agenda behind their efforts to destroy schools and teachers. 

            The heart of the matter is that Republicans love money and love people with money.  This is why they are willing to outsource the defense of the country to their friends who supply private armies for money.   That’s why they want to lower taxes, and end regulations that in any way hinder their patrons from making a quick buck.  That’s why we have even government healthcare like Medicaid run by private insurance companies, of which there are only a few giants who dominate the market. 

            The American people sense these dislocations.  They recognize that American business is not the same as it was a generation or two ago.  That is one reason they don’t have faith in the current economy.  They see, either objectively or subjectively, that the American economy is not a free market.  It is stacked in favor of the rich, who get their taxes lowered, their political influence strengthened.  At the moment, relatively few people are starving; we are not on the verge of a French Revolution, but we seem to be moving toward that sort of climax, rather than away from it. 

            The most recent episode of HBO’s “The Newsroom,” with federal agents swarming the newsroom floor, was no doubt intended to be reminiscent of France’s “Le Miserables” or perhaps even Nazi-era Germany.  As Thomas Jefferson said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”  

Problems with 501(c)(4) Organizations

The recent elections point out how corrupting the influence of 501(C)(4) organizations is.  The organizations are the means of protecting the use of dark money in elections which cannot be traced to any individual or organization.  The IRS was right to investigate applications for 501(c)(4) organizations; almost everyone involved in them is corrupt and is corrupting the American elections process. 

To qualify under 501(c)(4), an organization must be a nonprofit organized exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.  It is not supposed to be a political advocacy organization, except to the extent that something like historical preservation or child welfare might get involved in the political process in order to further its social aims.  It may engage in lobbying for its cause as its primary activity; however, political activities may not be the organizations “primary activities.”  Presumably this means that political activities cannot constitute more than 50% of its activities, probably determined by how it spends its money. 

The OpenSecrets.org web site list the following as the main 501(c)(4) spenders in the 2014 campaign:

Crossroads GPS	$26,015,174
NRA Institute	$10,686,049
Patriot Majority USA	$10,652,302
League of Conservation Voters	$9,472,561
American Action Network	$8,958,129
Kentucky Opportunity Coalition	$7.573,762
Carolina Rising	$6,459,252
Americans for Prosperty	$5,540,280

An Ohio State College of Law article on 501(c)(4)’s states that they must file a Form 990 with the IRS.  While the 990 includes information regarding contributors who give at least $5,000, that information is not made public.  In discussing the IRS controversy pursued by Congressman Issa, the article says: 

When Congress passed the disclosure provisions in § 527, it required disclosure by organizations that intervened in political campaigns. Some organizations that engage in significant political activity have claimed that their activities are not political but are social welfare activities. If organizations primarily engaged in political activity are classified as social welfare organizations, then Congressional intent regarding disclosure will be flouted. Determining the primary purpose of the organization, therefore, requires the IRS to examine the political activities of the organizations seeking status as a social welfare organization and to determine whether those organizations are social welfare organizations or political organizations.

In discussing the IRS investigation, the article goes on to say:

It is very difficult to determine the primary purpose of an organization. The questions asked of these organizations were clearly designed to try to examine the organizations’ activities. Obviously, an organization seeking status as a social welfare organization that is familiar with the legal rules in this area is not going to state that its primary activity is intervention in a political campaign. If it did so, it would be a § 527 political organization. The IRS needs to examine an organization that applies for recognition under § 501(c)(4) to determine its true purpose. To take an extreme example, if the organization spent $10,000 on social welfare activities but had 1,000 volunteers who engaged in campaign intervention activities, the primary purpose of the organization would likely be political, despite the fact that it spent more money on social welfare activities. It is understandable how an agent thinking about investigating an organization would ask these types of questions. It is also understandable that in the aggregate these questions were unduly intrusive. 

The law appears to be designed to facilitate misuse and thereby contribute to the corruption of elections.  My opinion is that anyone who uses a 501(c)(4) organization is probably undermining the American electoral system.  It is a bad law and should be repealed.  

Chaos in the Middle East

I am disgusted by US policy in the Middle East.  It appears to be the US policy to overthrow every government and replace it with chaos.  We have created an enormous, fertile breeding ground for terrorism.  Afghanistan pre-9/11 was a relatively safe, orderly country compared to Syria today, and thanks to the US policy of destroying governments that might have helped contain the chaos in Syria things are getting worse. 

The most recent target of US destabilization is Turkey.  Whether rightly or wrongly, Turkey perceives the Kurds, particularly under the leadership of the PKK, as terrorists who want to form a greater Kurdistan that would take away part of Turkey, or ideally for the Kurds, overthrow the Turkish government.  The US is supporting the Kurds despite the protests of the Turkish government.  Because of Turkey’s fear of the PKK, the US came up with the idea of bringing Kurds from Iraq to fight in Kobani, because Turkey doesn’t care of the Kurds create a Kurdistan in Iraq; that is not their problem.  The US currently seems much more favorably disposed toward creating a Kurdistan from Iraq than it did when Biden first proposed it years ago. 

But Turkey is only the most recent target of US destabilization attempts.  We have already destabilized Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt (especially the Sinai), Libya, and Yemen.  While Tunisia looks better, having just completed fair elections, it is a big source of recruits for ISIS.  Regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, Iraq is already going down the tubes, and Afghanistan looks set to follow after we leave.  Several recent articles have compared the Iraq and Afghan wars to Vietnam, especially to the battle of Khe Sanh, positing the idea that American soldiers won every battle, but the political leadership lost the war. 

It’s still not clear which way the battle for Kobani will go, but today there are reports of the defeat of the American proxies, the Free Syrian Army around Idlib in Syria, with the bad guys, reportedly al-Nusra, capturing anti-tank weapons, after ISIS captured some of the supplies we dropped for the Kurds in Kobani.  The American news reports of this on TV tonight were particularly bad.  ABC’s Martha Radditz, who is usually good on military issues, looked like she didn’t know what she was reporting on.  Tom Friedman’s recent column in the NYT raised the pertinent issue that because of the threats to news reporters in these hot spots, we don’t have good information about what is going on.  We are often depending on propaganda posted on Twitter or Facebook, or on reports from ordinary people like refugees, who may not be reliable sources.  Hopefully our intelligence agencies with all the billions we spend on them have some humint, sigint and photint that the news people don’t have.  And hopefully they will leak some sanitized information to the news media that is not entirely spin supporting the administration’s policies.  But it’s hard to verify. 

I think that we are making things worse in the Middle East.  If we had let nature take its course in getting rid of Saddam, Mubarak, Kaddafi, Assad, etc., we might have more stability there and less terrorism.  I worry that the instability is a plus for Israel.  Certainly al-Sisi’s takeover in Egypt has been good for Israel.  If the Israelis believe this, then influential American Jews may be pushing America to pursue policies that are good for Israel, but not necessarily good for America.  

Is Jerusalem in Israel?

I have just learned of the Supreme Court case Zivotofsky v Kerry (see http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/11/argument-preview-court-edges-close-to-the-mideast-cauldron/), which asks the State Department to list the country of birth as Israel for Americans born in Jerusalem.  Currently the State Department lists the country as Jerusalem because of international disputes over the legal status of Jerusalem.  The UN resolution creating Israel did not include Jerusalem as part of Israel.  In the years since, Israel has conquered most of East and West Jerusalem, but international law has not recognized the authority that Israel has claimed.  A number of UN resolutions have criticized Israel for its violation of international law.  See http://www.un.org/Depts/dpi/palestine/ch12.pdf  

During the Bush II administration Congress passed a law requiring the State Department to list Israel as the place of birth for people born in Jerusalem it they want it so listed.  Bush signed the law but issued a signing statement saying he would not enforce this provision because it impinged on Presidential power.  

The US has resisted recognizing Jerusalem as part of Israel, because Israel took it in violation of international law.  Jews and Gentiles in Congress who are dependent on Jew money to get elected want the US to ignore international law and recognize Jerusalem as part of Israel. This Supreme Court case is another effort to reach the same result through another path. 

I don't think that the Supreme Court should have taken this case either the first time or the second time.  The District Court was correct.  This is a foreign policy issue, not a domestic legal issue.  To me it indicates that for all Jews, including those on the Supreme Court, Israel is the country that comes first, before the United States.  The expatriate American plaintiffs bringing this case live in Israel, not in America.  Former White House chief of staff Raum Emanuel served in the Israeli army rather than the American army.  Jews are racists at heart, and Supreme Court justices are no exception.  American GIs have largely gotten over Vietnam and gone on with their lives.  Jews are still consumed with World War II, the Holocaust and hatred of Germans, FDR (for not invading Europe sooner), and everything related to them.  

Republicans Hate American Government

The Orbital Sciences launch failure illustrates to me the bankruptcy of the Republican effort to privatize everything that the US Government used to do.  Republicans claim that they love America, but hate the government.  They cite Reagan’s famous saying that “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”  I would reply that closing down the government and contracting out all of its activities to the private sector is an even bigger problem.  Blackwater in Iraq and the absence of any manned space launch capability are only two of the most glaring examples.  Another unfortunate one is ObamaCare, which expanded the private sector insurance model of healthcare insurance rather than expanding government-administered Medicare, the Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney plan.

You can’t say you love America but hate everything the American government does.  Private industry loves money, and Republicans love money, especially the campaign money that private industry gives Republican politicians to contract out government services to them.  It undermines the civil service act that was supposed to keep outside money away from government service.  In the old days, civil servants were proud of their jobs and did them well because they wanted to see their country succeed.  By abusing government workers and denigrating government service, Republicans have undermined the morale of the civil service.

The revolving door is another problem.  Private sector salaries and regressive income taxes make it impossible for government to compete with the private sector.  A young lawyer can work a year or two at the SEC and then go out and work for Wall Street quadrupling his salary.  A few people who have become obscenely rich will come back and work for government, but they consider their government work as pro bono, unpaid labor, although they are making the highest government salaries.

The result is that in addition to a dysfunctional Congress, we have an almost dysfunctional bureaucracy.  It means the government will do a worse job of enforcing its laws, collecting taxes, protecting the environment, even fighting its wars.  But Republicans like the fact that there is less de facto regulation, less strict enforcement of income tax laws, and they are by and large unwilling to fight in the military.  Even for our military services, they basically contract out the fighting to poor rednecks.  The wealthy don’t fight for America, they hire some else to do it.  Bill O’Reilly’s proposal for a mercenary army is only the most obvious expression of this lack of patriotism.

Roman Holiday 2

I remembered another incident connected with my Foreign Service transfer from Warsaw to Rome during the government shutdown.

When we unexpectedly transferred, my wife did not have a job in Rome.  The political minister of the embassy arrived about the same time as we did, and he offered her a job working as an assistant in the political section.  She was happy to have a job and started off learning the many combinations of the safes in the political section where classified material was stored.  A few days after she had started, the embassy security section informed her that she could not work there because her security clearance had lapsed.

It turned out that someone in Warsaw had forgotten to fill out some security forms that would have extended the security clearance that she had obtained before we left Washington for Warsaw.  As a result, not only did she lose her job, but the political section in Rome had to change all of its combinations because an uncleared person had had access to them.  She felt terrible for inconveniencing them.

Again, this was just another example of government bureaucracy at its worst, but I deeply resented the implication that my wife, and by association myself as well, were security risks.  The embassies in Warsaw and Rome were full of first generation Americans of Polish or Italian ancestry who had managed to get assigned to their family’s home country.  Even the Ambassador was an Italian-American.  It turned out that Amb. Reginald Bartholomew’s original family name was Bartolomeo before they anglicized it.   He remained in Rome after finishing his ambassadorship.  All these people with strong ties to the host government were not security risks, but my wife and I, who were third-, fourth-, fifth- or more generation Americans of British ancestry were risks.

My wife’s security clearance was eventually restored.  She ended up with a job in the embassy security office because she spent so much time there getting the situation straightened out.  By itself the incident would have been just a blip on the radar, but combined with the government shutdown, the failure to provide housing, and the downgrading of my diplomatic title, it created the impression that the State Department was not an honest, reliable employer for whom I wished to continue to work.