Indian Prime Minister Modi has made membership in the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), which I helped create, an issue in his meeting with Obama. While the MTCR has gotten some Indian press play, it has not been an issue in the US press. According to the Indian press, Obama supports Indian membership in both the MTCR and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). Inida is not an ideal candidate for either group, since it maintains a nuclear weapons program. I do not approve of the Bush II administration's decision to give India's nuclear weapons program a pass, rather than require India to adhere to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), as I said in commenting that Trump's proposal to allow Japan and South Korea to have nuclear weapons was not as bad as Bush's allowing India to have nuclear weapons.
Bush's decision and Obama's support for India are understandable in the global power context. India, which used to be a Russian satellite, is now a rival to China. We want to strengthen India as a counter to China's power, which is more threatening to the US. Nevertheless, I am not convinced that this is the best way to do it. India's argument is that it is a late-blooming nuclear power, and therefore should be treated like the older nuclear powers, the US, UK, Russia, etc., which have separate provisions in the NPT allowing them to keep their weapons. I think this undermines the whole non-proliferation regime. If we do this for India, once North Korea has a full fledged nuclear program, why shouldn't it be granted NPT nuclear status, just as India has?
This article from the Indian Express is a pretty good summary of where things stand.
http://indianexpress.com/article/explained/narendra-modi-us-visit-mtcr-nsg-obama-us-congress-2844186/
Here are some other recent articles about the MTCR:
https://in.rbth.com/economics/cooperation/2016/06/09/india-joins-mtcr-space-missile-cooperation-with-russia-easier_601593
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/when-celebrating-progress-on-nsg-and-mtcr-thank-manmohan-singh-and-the-indo-us-nuclear-deal/articleshow/52667827.cms
http://www.siasat.com/news/ficci-welcomes-indias-entry-mtcr-regime-hopes-membership-nsg-969566/
http://www.thenews.com.pk/print/126768-Senator-blasts-Indian-membership-of-MTCR
http://www.digit.in/science-and-technology/india-usa-and-the-lucrative-defence-technology-at-hand-30586.html
http://www.prameyanews7.com/en/jun2016/national/25548/Beijing-isolated-but-NSG-race-set-for-photo-finish.htm
Friday, June 10, 2016
Bob Kerrey - War Criminal with a Medal of Honor
I believe that Roger Cohen intended his New
York Times column on Bob Kerrey to be somewhat complementary of Kerrey as a
man trying to make amends for his involvement in a wartime atrocity. However, the impression it made on me was of
his hatred for military veterans in general, and Vietnam veterans in
particular. In Cohen’s column Kerrey
comes across as one of the most evil, depraved men on the face of the
earth. Nowhere does he mention that
Kerrey was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. The implication is that America awarded the
medal to a vile monster, making America a vile, monstrous country. Cohen’s hatred of America drips like venom
from his column.
I presume that while visiting Vietnam recently, Cohen and
Kerrey had a deep, dark heart-to-heart discussion about the incident in which
Kerrey’s Seal unit killed a number of women and children. Cohen does not mention that one reason this
happened was because the Vietcong hid among women and children to protect
themselves. The VC have no remorse for
pushing women and children into the line of fire by hiding in their villages
and homes. Cohen sees the Vietcong freedom
fighters as wonderful exemplars of the nobility of mankind.
What particularly incensed me was Cohen’s last paragraph
comparing Mohammad Ali’s resistance to the Vietnam War to Kerrey’s
participation in it. Cohen’s view is
that Ali was the better of the two. Ali
beat people up for a living, often hurting his opponents, but he did it for lots
of money. Kerrey fought for his country;
he made much less money as a Seal than Ali did as a boxer, but Cohen sees
hurting people for money as a good thing, while killing people for your country
is monstrously evil. For Cohen, Ali made
the world a better place, but it would have been better of Kerrey had never
been born.
As a Vietnam veteran I am so outraged, I can hardly write
this. But Cohen is where the the rest of
the world is. People who fought in
Vietnam because they were drafted (as Ali almost was) or because they thought
they were patriotic, were fools. Their
country will forever hate and revile them, with Cohen in the forefront of the
haters.
Wednesday, April 06, 2016
Cruz Is A Loser
If Ted Cruz is the best candidate the Republican Party can
come up with, it is a failure as a political party. Cruz represents a narrow base of
very conservative, very religious, uneducated or intellectually uninterested voters.
In an interview with Steve Inskeep of NPR,
Cruz said that scientific evidence does not support global warming. He would not directly answer the question of
whether evolution is scientific fact. A PBS
summary said that he would mandate a balanced budget. Paul
Krugman reported that Cruz wants to return to the gold standard, adding, “there’s
no sign in current asset prices that investors see a significant chance of the catastrophe
that would follow a return to gold.” Cruz
would repeal ObamaCare. He would move
toward a flat tax and abolish the IRS.
Cruz must be a smart man.
He graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law. He clerked for the Supreme Court. How can he cling to ideas that are so out of
touch with reality. Apparently he uses
his brilliant intellect to defend indefensible positions. His arguments ring hollow to many, but his devotees
accept them. This is true of many
Republicans. Wisconsin looks like an
intelligent state, but it has elected Scott Walker as governor and Paul Ryan as
a congressman, despite the fact that they adhere to many of the non-fact-based
ideas that Cruz espouses. As Speaker,
Paul Ryan is considered somewhat of a moderate, although his ideas are well out
on the political fringe compared to Republican ideas for the last hundred
years.
While Cruz is terrible, my poster child for what’s wrong
with the Republican Party is Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader. I see his policies in the Senate as unabashed
hatred of the United States. If the
government won’t do what he wants it to do, he will tie it up and choke it to
death, by cutting of funding, blocking appointments, blocking legislation,
etc. He throws sand into the gears of
government so that it cannot operate.
But the United States cannot exist without some government. One of the main results of his intransigence
has been the prolonged slow growth of the economy. If we could have funded some infrastructure
projects, we could have created jobs much faster than we did. As it is, we are approaching full employment, but American infrastructure is deteriorating badly.
Mitch McConnell doesn’t care if your bridge falls down, your passenger
train goes off the tracks, or your flight runs into another one on the ground
because of inability to monitor taxiways.
He would fund some things, like the military, particularly military
hardware, but not if it means funding things like education or pollution
control.
The Republican Party had a chance to bring itself into the
21st century this election, but chose not to. As it did four years ago, it had public
debates that included a number of total losers with no qualifications to be
President. If they don’t like Donald
Trump, they have no one to blame but themselves. The idea that in order to stop Trump they
have crowned Cruz as the man who represents the very best of the Republican
Party is moronic. Everybody knows that
his fellow Senators hate him. Like
McConnell he is ready to destroy the government if he doesn’t get his way. If American schools insist on teaching
evolution, he may abolish public schools.
Every child will be on his own to learn wherever he can.
Compared to Cruz, Mitt Romney looks like a liberal
philosopher and a master politician. How
can there be no competent CEOs (that leaves out Carly Fiorina) who are willing
to be President? This is essentially how
Donald Trump puts himself forward.
Republicans have been less inclined to talk about his management skills
than his personality, which they hate.
The country could use a good manager; if they don’t like Trump, find
one. It’s not Cruz or Kasich.
One problem is that the President’s salary is a pittance
compared to what CEOs make. But thay
also have no interest in governing, like Mitch McConnell. They are motivated solely by avarice and
greed, and violate either the letter or spirit of every law they can to enrich themselves without
going to jail. If America were destroyed
by a nuclear war, J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon would be on a plane leaving the
country before the bombs hit, and would set up shop in London or Hong Kong,
making money off of the war and never shedding a tear for the millions of
Americans who died. He and his follow
CEOs represent the nadir of humanity, the darkest depths to which mankind has
sunk in the 21st century.
There are no Republican leaders to be found there.
In the old days, the military often was a source of national
leaders, but after Vietnam, the military has fallen into such disrepute that it
cannot attract high caliber people to its ranks. No one who graduated from Harvard or Stanford
would think of making a career in the military.
The military has some good people, but they are not of the first
quality.
Monday, April 04, 2016
Trump on Nuclear Proliferation
Everybody is making fun of Donald Trump for suggesting that perhaps
Japan and South Korea should be allowed to develop their own nuclear weapons to
defend themselves from North Korea. Most
of this criticism is just more ignorance.
Obama is not ignorant, but he has to campaign for Hillary, and so he just
allows himself to look stupid in order to defend her.
George W. Bush has already done something much worse than
what Trump has proposed. In 2005 the US
signed an agreement with India that allowed India to develop its own nuclear
weapons, despite a history of decades of international pressure on India not to
do so. The US agreed to accept Indian nuclear
weapons despite its proximity to Pakistan and China, both of which it has
fought wars with in recent history.
Pakistan is as unstable and dangerous a nuclear neighbor as North Korea,
and Pakistan has many more nuclear weapons.
Japan is certainly more reliable as an ally than India, and South Korea
probably is, too. In addition, the US
undoubtedly knows that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, which it openly
accepts. Of course Israel denies it has
them, but this denial is universally regarded as a lie, or at best a thinly
veiled fiction. The US accepts Israel’s
nuclear weapons because of the enormous political influence of Jews in America,
particularly the AIPAC lobby. Japan
certainly has a more reliable, responsible, stable government than Israel. I don’t think any leader of Japan has
publicly humiliated the President of the United States as Netanyahu did to
Obama.
Under the US-India Civil
Nuclear Agreement negotiated by Bush, which could be a model for the
arrangements proposed by Trump, India agreed to separate its civil and military
nuclear facilities and to place its civil facilities under IAEA
safeguards. The US had to pass a new law
in 2008 to allow nuclear cooperation with a state that had nuclear weapons and
was not one of the five existing nuclear states recognized when the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed in 1968.
Ambassador Nicholas Burns, who negotiated the India agreement, should
speak out in favor of Trump’s proposal. According
to
Wikipedia, opponents of the India deal argued that “it gave India too much
leeway in determining which facilities were to be safeguarded and that it
effectively rewarded India for continuously refusing to accede to the
Non-Proliferation Treaty.” One of the arguments for the deal is that it
will enable India to build up its nuclear arsenal so that it will be better
able to fight a nuclear war with China.
This argument would clearly apply to any other nation that is threatened
by a nuclear neighbor, including Japan and South Korea.
Both Japan and South Korea are signatories of the NPT and
have been much more responsible states in the nuclear field than India. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that
negotiations with Japan and South Korea on this issue would be much more
favorable to the US, the non-proliferation regime, and international peace and
stability than the US-India agreement negotiated by Bush. Trump is more responsible on the nuclear non-proliferation
issue than Bush was.
I do not favor giving Japan and South Korea nuclear
arms. I think the current arrangement is
better for world peace and stability. The
commentariat’s condemnation of Trump’s idea without mentioning Bush’s
negotiation of the India deal and the US Congress’ approval of it illustrates their
same lack of understanding of the nuclear arms race that they accuse Trump
of. Trump’s idea is not ridiculous; it
builds on the work of previous Republican administrations.
Saturday, April 02, 2016
Trump on Abortion
Trump’s statements on abortion have helped me see the
irrationality of those who want to make abortion illegal. First, abortion is a bad thing. It’s not something that anyone should do, and
certainly should not do lightly. In most
cases, I don’t think is something that a woman wants to do; it’s something that
she feels forced to do by some situation.
If she is a young woman just starting her own life, a baby may end her
chances of improving herself by finishing school, or working hard at her first
job. An older woman may feel that she is
not able to cope with a baby at this later stage of her life. A woman may be married to a man who abuses
her and does not want a child to grow up in that atmosphere. There are any number of reasons.
In any case, it is the woman who decides to end the
pregnancy. A doctor does not just pull
women off the street randomly and force abortions on the ones who are
pregnant. Trump correctly stated that
the woman is at least partly responsible for the abortion. She is morally guilty, if not legally guilty.
Chris Matthews failed to discuss the moral issue with Trump because he is so
messed up by his Catholic church’s teaching on the issue, as Trump pointed
out. Chris Matthews has basically cursed
his church, his God, in his heart by breaking with it on the abortion
issue. He is morally damaged goods,
which is part of the reason his interview was so bad.
But the fact that the woman is morally guilty does not mean
that she is legally guilty. This to some
extent explains Trump’s “clarification” that the law should continue to stand
as it does. He’s saying that although
the woman may be morally guilty, I don’t want her to be legally guilty, which
is the current position of the law. Two
pieces on the New York Times op-ed page defend the position that if you find
abortion to be morally wrong, then you should find the woman complicit in the
abortion. One reason to exempt women is
probably the one pro-lifers use, that they love the woman who is under great
stress. It is also likely that it is
just a carryover from the old days when abortion was illegal. The charlatans who performed the illegal
abortions often killed or injured the women who came to them, and thus they
were properly punished for the injury they did and if nothing else, for
practicing medicine without a license. When
licensed doctors were penalized it might be because they were caught up in laws
mainly meant to punished unlicensed practitioners.
The two op-eds are
Gail
Collins’ “Trump, Truth and Abortion” and Katha Politt’s “Abortion andPunishment.” Both point out the illogic
of the pro-life stance that only the doctor and not the woman should be
punished for a illegal abortion. Of
course, if the abortion is not illegal, then nobody should be punished, neither
the doctor nor the woman.
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Apple Is Evil
I have been a fan of Apple products, but I am put off by
Apple’s decision to side with the terrorists in San Bernardino. I don’t believe that American citizens have
an absolute right to privacy. If this
were the case, the Fourth Amendment would not allow any searches and seizures;
instead it allows them upon proof of probable cause. It is odd that people who claim an absolute
right to privacy in their smart phones post all kinds of personal information
publicly on the internet. Facebook is a screaming
argument that Apple’s arguments against breaking encryption are baseless. Apple’s performance in the San Bernardino
case make it complicit in murder, an accessory after the fact, or some such bit
player, but nevertheless an evil participant.
Apple has lost its moral compass. It has been questionable whether Apple can
survive without Steve Jobs. It will
probably survive for a number of years as a cellphone and PC maker, but it has
lost its inspiration, its leadership, its guiding light, its genius, its
soul.
We find Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s
Larry Page and Sergey Brin on the side of terrorism and death. They have no love for America, which provided
them the possibility to create the corporations that they run. They got what they wanted, and the rest of
America can die screaming in agony for all they care. Silicon Valley has no heart; it’s all about
the money, power, and privilege. Google
has learned to be evil. Surprisingly,
Microsoft’s Bill Gates has been relatively circumspect on the issue. I don’t know about the faceless drones who
have replaced him.
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Hillary and Libya
The thrust of this Foreign Policy article is that
Hillary and Obama at some point decided to use the Libyan intervention to bring
about “regime change” and get rid of Qaddafi.
The article argues that the Libyan mission began as a humanitarian
attempt to save the people of Benghazi from Qaddafi’s attacks, but without
publicly saying so to the public, it became an effort to remove Qaddafi. Whatever the administration’s stated purpose,
its decision led to the assassination of Qaddafi in an ugly, disorderly
way.
Obama has admitted in his Atlantic
magazine interview with Jeffrey Goldberg that the Libyan operation was not
handled well. Goldberg writes:
But Obama says today of the
intervention, “It didn’t work.” The U.S., he believes, planned the Libya
operation carefully—and yet the country is still a disaster….
“So we actually executed this plan
as well as I could have expected: We got a UN mandate, we built a coalition, it
cost us $1 billion—which, when it comes to military operations, is very cheap.
We averted large-scale civilian casualties, we prevented what almost surely
would have been a prolonged and bloody civil conflict. And despite all that,
Libya is a mess.”
From these accounts, it appears that Hillary’s mistake in
Libya was not her reaction to the rebel attack on the US Embassy and CIA
facility in Benghazi, but rather her failed strategic leadership in the whole
Libyan fiasco. Somebody, ideally
Hillary, should have said at the very beginning, “This is not going to work.” There were no government institutions to take
over after Qaddafi, and the Libyan people were riven by tribal loyalties. To maintain himself in power, Qaddafi had
tried to keep any challenging group from consolidating power, and he had
succeeded.
Perhaps events undercut the Foreign Policy article’s thesis that at some point the administration
made a conscious decision to change the mission to protect population into a
mission to remove Qaddafi. Perhaps if
there had been such a definite decision, the dangers of that new course of
action to kill Qaddafi would have been weighed more carefully. Was the failure of the Libyan intervention
due to a poor decision or to the failure to make a decision, just to go with
the flow after the operation started? In
any case, Hillary bears significant blame.
Thursday, March 10, 2016
Encryption and the Fourth Amendment
Apple should be willing to help the US government access
information on the iPhones of terrorists and other criminals. I do not think that anyone living under a
democratic government has an absolute right to inviolable privacy. If someone’s home is subject to a search
warrant issued by a proper judicial process, his other possessions should also
be subject to search when properly approved.
Apple refuses toallow any search and seizure, even when there is
probable cause as determined by a court of law.
While the Fourth Amendment is explicitly a protection against
unreasonable searches and seizures, the implication is that the government should
be allowed to carry out searches and seizures when there is probable cause.
I think that some of the technical objections to requiring breakable encryption on private
phones could be overcome by requiring that decrypting the information could be
done only by physically connecting to the phone. This could mean that some sophisticated decryption
device would have to be connected to an iPhone through a lightning cable, for
example. There might be some difficulty
enforcing this physical requirement, but smart people should be able to do
it. It would mean that your phone could
not be hacked from China or Russia, or even by American law enforcement while
you are walking down the street with it.
Presumably experts could set up the connection protocol so that the
phone would sense whether the decryption device was directly connected to the
phone, and not connected through the Internet or iTunes.
As things currently stand, I think that Apple should help
the FBI access the data on the terrorists’ iPhone. Software updates could come later, as well as
hardware updates on new versions of smart phones.
My view includes the requirement that encryption software
such as texting apps also should be breakable in some way. Other countries and the military will be able
to create unbreakable communication software, but we could make it illegal to
use in the US. This is not unlike a
restriction on assault weapons. I don’t
think that everyone needs to have an AR-15, although that is not currently the
law in the US. Even though arms dealers
can physically sell AR-15s to anyone, I think there should be restrictions on
their right to do so. Similarly, the
military and diplomatic services should have encryption that is unbreakable,
but private individuals do not need it.
The ability to do search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution
is more important than individual privacy.
National security justifies the use of unbreakable encryption; personal
privacy does not.
Tuesday, March 01, 2016
New York Times Omits Bernard Henri Levy's Role in Libya
The NYT's excellent articles (Part I and Part 2) about Hillary Clinton's role in the Libya disaster after getting rid of Qaddafi, omit the role of French philosopher Bernard Henri Levy in creating the mess, examined in this France 24 article. The NYT articles talk about how the Europeans, particularly the French and British promised to take the lead in Libya, and even to go ahead there without the US, but it does not look at the role played by Levy in getting the French government to play such a leading role.
Levy clearly saw this intervention as benefiting Israel, but whether he convinced Israel or whether Israel convinced him is not clear to me. The fact that an Arab Muslim country has fallen into civil war or anarchy probably benefits Israel, although the fact that Libya has increasingly become a base for ISIS operations probably does not.
Levy clearly saw this intervention as benefiting Israel, but whether he convinced Israel or whether Israel convinced him is not clear to me. The fact that an Arab Muslim country has fallen into civil war or anarchy probably benefits Israel, although the fact that Libya has increasingly become a base for ISIS operations probably does not.
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Westward Expansion as Safety Net
Everybody makes big deal of diversity in US. It is an accident of history. Unlike Europe, which has been settled for
millennia, America was virtually empty when it was discovered by Columbus in
1492. The Indians were hunter-gatherers
who had created only a few cities or towns in North America, mostly in the Southwest,
although they had created grander ones in Central and South America. In North America there was relatively little
resistance to the westward expansion of Europeans across the continent. There was never much threat from Indians
against European-built cities after the first hundred years or so. As the Indians were driven westward, the war
against them moved westward to protect the settlers as they moved in.
The westward expansion essentially created free land for
those who were will to claim it and fight for it. This became the social and economic safety
net for Europeans who could not make it on the more civilized east coast. If you couldn’t make it in Boston or
Charleston, you could set out for Indiana or Alabama, and eventually Kansas,
Texas, or California. Life was hard, but
it was possible to get out of the oppressive slums in the east coast cities
where immigrants first arrived. Today,
if you are stuck in a slum, there is no wild West to go to. Three is no more free land, although people
like Cliven Bundy claim that there should be.
As a result, it is harder for people trapped in slums to get out.
Another mass migration that took place later was the
movement of blacks from the deep South, where they had lived since slavery, to
the industrial north, where low skilled jobs with good pay were available,
particularly in the car industry in Detroit.
These jobs became the security safety net for struggling poor people in
the South.
When the Great Depression hit, however, the geographic
safety net had largely disappeared.
There was no golden region of the country to which people could flee for
a better life. It was only then, under
FDR, that the government moved in to provide its own safety net in the form of
the CCC, WPA, TVA, Social Security and other government programs. These programs became necessary because by
1930, the formerly empty United States had filled up with people.
Prior to this there had been few restraints on immigration, because
people saw it as positive to make use of empty land by farming, ranching,
mining or manufacturing. During this
open immigration period, most of the immigrants came from Europe, mainly from
western and northern Europe. Thus it was
not surprising when prejudice grew up against immigrants from Ireland and Italy
by settlers of English and northern European extraction, for example. The descendants brought some of their old-country
hostilities with them. Irish-English
animosities were alive and well in Boston and Belfast well into the 1990s.
The idea that the United States has always been a land
welcoming any immigrants from anywhere is largely fiction. Blacks arrived as slaves. The Chinese were discriminated against for
years, as were southern Europeans. Even
immigrants like the Germans and Poles, largely went west to more open places
like Michigan and Minnesota, finding the already crowded east coast somewhat
hostile to them.
Friday, February 19, 2016
Apple Opposes FBI for Commercial Reasons
The Guardian reported that the FBI responded to Apple’s refusal to help it break into the San Bernardino terrorist’s phone by accusing Apple of using the case for financial and commercial benefit. The article said:
The FBI accused Apple of prioritizing its public relations strategy over a terrorism investigation on Friday in a significant escalation of this week’s war between the tech company and the law enforcement agency.
The accusation, made in a court filing demanding Apple comply with an order to unlock an iPhone belonging to the San Bernardino terrorists, represents a nadir in the relationship between two opponents that previously extended each other public respect.
“Apple’s current refusal to comply with the Court’s Order, despite the technical feasibility of doing so, instead appears to be based on its concern for its business model and public brand marketing strategy,” Justice Department attorneys wrote in the Friday filing.http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/20/business/justice-department-calls-apples-refusal-to-unlock-iphone-a-marketing-strategy.html?emc=edit_na_20160219&nlid=56573240&ref=cta
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Kashkari on Bank Break Up
I am pleased with Kashkari's remarks reported in the WSJ, reinforcing my earlier remarks that the big banks need to be broken up.
Friday, February 12, 2016
Bank Problems
I am concerned about declining confidence in the US banking
sector. Recently CNBC and Bloomberg have
been discussing problems at the German bank Deutsche Bank. More disturbing for Americans, declining
stock prices for big American banks indicate a lack of confidence in the whole
industry. Dodd-Frank was supposed to protect us from bank failures, but today
Sen. Elizabeth Warren grilled Fed Chair Janet Yellen at length about problems
with “living wills” for banks that fail.
I am concerned that American banks are still too big to
fail, and that Dodd-Frank has failed to keep them from engaging in risky
activities that could create a global financial catastrophe. Dodd-Frank and the Volker rule have failed to
fill the gap created by President Clinton’s elimination of Glass-Steagall.
I would like to see Glass-Steagall re-enacted. At a minimum we need to make big banks
smaller and rein in their riskier trading activities. I am alarmed to see the stock market
illustrate Wall Street’s lack of confidence in its own big banks like JP
Morgan-Chase and Goldman Sachs.
Related to this is, I believe, is the issue of income
inequality. There has been talk of lack
of liquidity surrounding the current unsettled bank environment. One problem with consolidating all the
nation’s wealth in a few hands is that the few hundred families who control
that wealth may all decide at once to do the same thing, e.g., sell bonds. If they all act at once, there will be no one
to buy bonds, for example. Prices would
plunge, and we would be back in another financial crisis. To some extent this is what happened in the
1929 market crash, when like today, much wealth was held by a few extremely
wealthy people. The aggregation of
wealth means that markets become smaller, controlled by a few people. and more
susceptible to volatility. As markets
become dominated by a few players, the country becomes less capitalistic and
more oligopolistic. This is what
happened to Russia under Yeltsin. I hate
to see America following the Russian model.
Keep the Draft
As one of the last people subject to the draft during the
Vietnam War. I am writing to support the continued existence of the Selective
Service System in case we need a military draft sometime in the future. I actually volunteered after being classified
1-A and passing the physical, rather than wait a month or two to be
drafted.
I am very disappointed that military service has become such
a contemptible, dishonorable profession in the United States. I came home from Vietnam to scorn for being a
veteran. Today, people praise veterans,
but in my opinion, it is usually because the people heaping the praise are not
willing to serve themselves. They think,
“If I tell this fool what a great job he is doing, then I won’t have to do
it.” When it comes to something more
expensive than praise, like giving veterans jobs or health benefits, the
country is less fulsome.
The military likes having an all-volunteer force, but I
think we need people who would not ordinarily serve in the military. We need people from Harvard and Stanford who
look at the world differently from the ordinary pool of recruits, who are
mostly poor and less well educated.
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan hated the military so much when she
was dean of the Harvard Law School that she prohibited military recruiting
there. The military needs a diversity of
personalities, perspectives and talents, just like any other large
organization. This lack of intellectual
diversity has hampered the military ever since Vietnam, when despite the draft,
rich, smart, well-educated people generally did not serve. That may be one reason we lost the wars in
Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. We sent
our trailer-park trash to fight and we got trashy results.
I realize that the proposal by Congressmen Coffman and Polis
to abolish the draft is motivated by the recent call to include women in the
draft. I have no objection to including
women in the draft, but I do oppose the recent decision to include women in all
fighting units of the military, including the Army infantry and the
Marines. I think the problems with rape
and other sex offenses in our universities illustrate the problems of putting
young men and women with raging hormones together in situations where there are
frequent romantic temptations. I was in
the artillery, where living conditions are better than in the infantry, but
everyone slept together in one bunker, used the same latrine, etc. Living conditions are probably manageable in
rear echelon environments, where women could certainly serve, but I think
forcing men and women to live together in combat situations is just asking for
trouble in terms of sexual contact. In
any case, there are certainly military jobs for which America could draft
women.
I believe that the draft would strengthen the military by
bringing in new blood, although the military leadership probably is not
enthusiastic about the challenges to it that would emerge from a better quality
of recruits.
Tuesday, February 09, 2016
World War I Memorial
I was struck by the fact that the announcement of the new Washington
memorial for World War I veterans, and the exposé of high administrative
costs for the Wounded
Warrior Project came out at almost the same time. It’s interesting that the Vietnam War was the
first American war in which veterans were widely reviled and hated, not
counting the Civil War, which was a special case. Other small wars were not widely supported,
perhaps the Mexican War or the Spanish-American War, but there was not
widespread contempt for the men who participated in them. Teddy Roosevelt came out of the Spanish American
War a hero, like John McCain came out a hero of the Vietnam War, unlike most of
his fellow servicemen. Similarly, there
were some heroes of the Mexican-American War, like Zachery Taylor. About the only heroes Vietnam produced were
POWs. General Westmoreland is usually
considered a failure. It was a case
where the common soldiers won almost every battle, but the generals and the
politicians lost the war. So, in order
to honor the common soldiers who died, the nation created a Vietnam Memorial to
offset to some extent the general disrepute in which the soldiers were
held.
For previous wars there was no need to build a memorial,
because those who fought were generally held in high regard. There were many local memorials in small
cities and towns, because everyone knew someone who had served. Soldiers came from ordinary people’s homes,
their relatives, their neighbors. They
often came from good families, and those who returned often went on to take
leadership roles in their communities.
The reverse was true for Vietnam, people from good families refused to
fight, and veterans who returned often found themselves treated like
outcasts. Homeless Vietnam veterans
became a common sight in most cities.
Now, people who grew up in the shadow of the Vietnam era
have little idea what national service is like.
There was a burst of patriotism after 9/11, but it was squandered in a
pointless war in Iraq that had nothing to do with 9/11. After an initial rush to join the military
after 9/11, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan began to be ignored or
disrespected like their Vietnam predecessors.
Nevertheless, people who don’t want to fight themselves want someone to
fight for them. So, they tell the
veterans how much they love and respect them, when their actual attitude is, “I’m
glad they went so that I didn’t have to.”
They tend to see veterans as people who can’t get a real job and have no
choice but to join the military. We have
an all-volunteer military, but one that does not include many of the country’s
best people.
It’s the people who don’t remember when serving in the
military was a well-respected calling who now want to build memorials. The men who fought in World War I and II did
not think that they needed memorials.
They thought that their service was their memorial, and that their
sacrifices lived in the hearts and minds of their friends and relatives. But that remembrance has died out, and average
people today think World War I and II veterans were as worthless as the
veterans of Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.
Today many people think they have to build memorials so that poor, stupid
people like me will still go off to war when the country wants to fight a
war. It’s all about themselves, not
about the veterans. At least
superficially, it is a better welcome home now than during Vietnam. But is it reasonable that people today care
more about the veterans who fought in World War I than America did 100 years
ago? And is it reasonable that people
today care more about World War II veterans than their loved ones did fifty
years ago? No, if anything, the
memorials are a penance for not caring.
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Dangers of Global Wealth Inequality
A Credit
Swisse Report says that the top 0.7% of the world’s population, those with
net wealth of $1 million or more, about 34 million people, own 45% of all
global wealth. It says there are 123,800
Ultra High Net Worth individuals worldwide who have a net worth of more than
$50 million. Fortune
summarized the report.
The
Guardian says that there are 199,235 Ultra High Net Worth individuals,
whose combined net worth is around $27.7 trillion, about 40% of the world’s
GDP.
This increasing concentration of wealth may have
implications for financial liquidity. To
be liquid, markets need buyers and sellers, and this means there needs to be
some diversity. You need people who are
looking for different things from their investments. As you narrow the group making investments,
you narrow their interests. At some
point you might end up with a small group of people who all want to sell. The people who would in the past have
been buyers, now would not have enough resources
to buy the huge amounts the superrich want to sell. The result might be a violent dive in the
price of the assests in disfavor, whether they are stocks, bonds, or real
estate. The same would be true if all
the superrich wanted to buy some particular asset. The result would be at best increasing
volatility, and at worst market crashes.
These crashes might have less effect on the superrich than on ordinary
people, because the superrich would probably be diversified. For example, a big loss in their real estate
investments would be cushioned by their investments in the stock and bond
markets, or the art market, etc. However,
for ordinary people a big loss in the value of their home might be devastating,
because they would not have other big, valuable assets to cushion the loss of
their home value.
This is more or less what happened in the 2008 subprime
mortgage crisis.
The other side of that crisis was what happened to the
banks. A few banks then and now were
humongous, dominating the market for complicated financial instruments, like
bonds made up of home mortgages. Having
only a few huge banks is like having a small group of superrich people, the
chances of some event affecting all of the players becomes larger as the group
of players becomes smaller. Dodd-Frank
and the Volker Rule were supposed to help remedy this, but so appears to have
done little, despite (or because of) the loud protests of the big banks against
any restrictions.
Thursday, January 14, 2016
Obama's State of the Union
I think Obama has done a good job as President compared to
many of his predecessors, especially George W. Bush, one of the worst
Presidents in modern history. Bush and Cheney
slept while New York City and Washington were attacked. Then they retaliated against the wrong
country. They created Guantanamo,
America’s version of the Soviet gulags, located in another country, because it
was such a horrible thing that we didn’t want it in the continental US, just as
Hitler did not want Auschwitz within the borders of Germany. Under Bush and Cheney, America descended into
a moral abyss. It fell to the level of
the terrorists who attacked it. Obama
has not done anything nearly as bad as that.
ObamaCare was not a complete success. Single-payer Medicare would have been
preferable to the messy, hybrid, expensive system we got from the process, but
it is better than nothing, which is what we had before. He has not gotten rid of Guantanamo, but at
least he says he wants to and will try to do so before the end of his
term.
His supposed admission that his one big failure was not
restoring a civil dialogue between the Republicans and Democrats, is not really
an acknowledgement of failure, it is just a nice sounding, back-handed way of
saying, “I still can’t get along with those Republicans; they are just as nasty
as ever.” It was more an insult than an
admission of failure.
On the plus side, however, he tried to get us out of failed
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He did not
entirely succeed in this, in large part because he inherited a horribly flawed
situation from the previous administration.
Bush started the destabilization of the Middle East, but Obama may have
abetted it by his encouragement of the Arab Spring’s desire to throw out all
the old leadership of the Middle East.
Bush removed the foundation of Middle East stability, and Obama pushed
over the unstable structure Bush left behind.
I believe that Obama has done the right thing regarding
Syria by not getting us deeper into that civil war. The Syrian destruction of most of its
chemical weapons was a plus for the conflict.
We would probably be hearing many more gruesome stories about chemical
attacks, surpassing the stories of starvation and mutilation resulting from
more conventional warfare. Syria only
presents a multitude of bad choices for the US, from want to do about Assad, to
what rebel groups to support. There is
no one who can replace Assad and end the war, and there is no rebel group who
will be able to put an end to the civil war militarily, without massive help
and massive casualties on the side of whoever helps them. The Republicans are anxious to see Americans
die in Syria; I am not.
On the economy, Obama has so far been pretty much a
success. He has restored employment, and
under him the economy and the stock market have soared, compared with the great
recession that Bush left for him. He
still has a year left for the economy to crater, but the gains under his
Presidency have been so enormous, that even a moderate drop would still leave
his administration with a very positive result.
He has been more willing to take on entrenched business and financial
interests, but under his Presidency, consolidation of big business and banks
has continued, and although he talks a good game against income inequality, it
has increased on his watch. Nevertheless,
things are much better than under Bush, and what he has done is vastly superior
to what the nay-saying Republicans have advocated.
On foreign policy, the Republicans chafe at his
unwillingness to kill everybody in sight, calling that weakness. But I believe that it shows strength. People may be more willing to challenge the
US because they do not fear that Obama will nuke them for a small provocation,
but they also see him as someone with whom they can negotiate. His Iran nuclear deal is far superior to a
war with Iran. He showed strength in
resisting Republican and Israeli screams for Iranian blood, based on some sort
of extreme racial, religious and ethnic hatred.
In the long run, Obama’s approach is more likely to prevent a nuclear arms
race or war in the Middle East than a
military attack.
Reestablishing relations with Cuba was another positive
step. One reason I retired and left the
Foreign Service was because of the Helms-Burton sanctions on Cuba. An Italian complained to me that his daughter
could not get a visa to visit Disneyworld because he worked for the Italian
phone company and they had some kind a connection to Cuba. It was too much like the German refusal to issue
a visa to a Jewish child in order to prevent its mother from leaving Italy in
one of the “Winds of War” books. I don’t
approve of punishing children for the sins of their parents. The US bitterness and retaliation against
Cuba has gone on too long. It was time
to end it; it was time years ago, but Obama finally did it.
I am not a fan of free immigration. I issued visas for a tour in Sao Paulo,
Brazil, and felt bad every time I denied a visa, knowing that a Mexican could
just walk across the border if he or she were denied a visa, but that it was
not so easy for a Brazilian to do so. Everyone
looked the other way at illegal immigration for years. Business benefitted because it kept salaries
low, and liberals looked the other way because they wanted to see poor
foreigners help themselves by coming to America. Our immigration laws have been like Prohibition
– strict laws on the books that are ignored in everyday life. The law should be changed so that it can and
will be enforced, whatever it turns our to be, strict or liberal. Meanwhile, I don’t think there is much of a
problem denying anyone who is a foreigner a visa for any reason; non-citizen,
non-residents outside the US have no Constitutional protections, and keeping
out anyone that poses even the least risk to the country is legal; we only need
to decide what level that “least risk” should be.
Monday, January 11, 2016
Jewish Financiers
There is so much talk in financial circles about the Federal Reserve raising interest rates that it has piqued my interest in the role of Jews in the US. There have been only Jewish chairmen of the Fed since Paul Volker in the Carter administration. Prior to Volker there had been only one Jewish Fed chairman, who held the post at the height of the great depression.
My concern is that the Jewish dominated Fed has helped Jewish bankers, financiers, and businessmen in a preferential manner. This may not have been the result of some great scheme or cabal, like that envisioned by Henry Ford, but simply the result of a convergence of interests, formed at dinners, social occasions and business meetings among Jews over the years. The results of this convergence of interests may not have been illegal insider trading, but they may have disproportionately benefited Jews over other parts of American society. It was a form of insider trading that was too vague and amorphous to be illegal, but one that affected how trillions of dollars were invested.
Jews have been involved in financial businesses since before America was a country, and they have been active in financial circles since before the founding of the country. But they did not play the huge role that they do today until after World War II. The Holocaust drove many wealthy Jews out of Europe to America, where they resumed the financial activities in which they had excelled in Europe. Today Jews not only play a dominant role in the Fed, but in most financial activities, particularly on Wall Street.
Most wealthy financiers would not win any prizes for being great humanitarians. They tend to be greedy, selfish, and often dishonest. If they don't break the law, they go right up to the legal limit, and today they pay lobbyists to change the laws to let them do what they want to do. Most of them leave a lot of their riches to charitable and cultural foundations as they approach death to try to atone for the evil they did in amassing their fortunes. But that doesn't make the evil they did while amassing their fortunes any less evil. The Protestant Rockefellers, Carneigies, Astors, Vanderbilts, Hearsts and their cohorts all fall into this same category, along with many present day Jews and Gentiles. However, this cohort contains considerably more Jews in the top 1% than their 2% of the population would represent. Jews represent nearly half of the richest of the rich in America.
Jews believe they are smarter at doing business and manipulating markets than other people, so that if business and the markets are very complicated, Jews are likely to win and do better than their Gentile competition. Thus, if interest rates are either very high or very low, Jews are likely to do better. Many Gentiles would be happy just putting their savings into insured savings accounts and earning some interest, but if interest rates are less than one percent, that is not an option. When rates are high, you have to be very clever about borrowing, or have money in hand, so that you don't have to borrow, again favoring many Jews. Thus, Jews have disproportionately benefitted from the global financial turmoil, and from the complicated financial instruments and transactions that have been developed in recent years.
NYT article on rich not paying taxes.
As described in an article in The New York Times on Wednesday, tax rates on America’s 400 wealthiest taxpayers fell sharply from the late 1990s through 2012, when their average effective income tax rate fell to 16.7 percent from 26.4 percent. Of the few names specifically mentioned in the article, most were Jews, including Loeb, Simons, and Soros.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/business/economy/for-the-wealthiest-private-tax-system-saves-them-billions.html?_r=0
Tax rates rose for wealthy last year
Data released by the I.R.S. on Wednesday shows that tax rates on the income of America’s 400 wealthiest taxpayers rose sharply to 22.9 percent in 2013, erasing a majority of the last two decades’ decline in their effective tax rate, although 22.9% is still less than the old 26.4%. They are all much lower than the maximum 39.6% tax rate which you would expect the wealthiest people to pay, even accounting for the lower tax rate they would pay on the first few thousand dollars they earn.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/upshot/thanks-obama-highest-earners-tax-rates-rose-sharply-in-2013.html
My concern is that the Jewish dominated Fed has helped Jewish bankers, financiers, and businessmen in a preferential manner. This may not have been the result of some great scheme or cabal, like that envisioned by Henry Ford, but simply the result of a convergence of interests, formed at dinners, social occasions and business meetings among Jews over the years. The results of this convergence of interests may not have been illegal insider trading, but they may have disproportionately benefited Jews over other parts of American society. It was a form of insider trading that was too vague and amorphous to be illegal, but one that affected how trillions of dollars were invested.
Jews have been involved in financial businesses since before America was a country, and they have been active in financial circles since before the founding of the country. But they did not play the huge role that they do today until after World War II. The Holocaust drove many wealthy Jews out of Europe to America, where they resumed the financial activities in which they had excelled in Europe. Today Jews not only play a dominant role in the Fed, but in most financial activities, particularly on Wall Street.
Most wealthy financiers would not win any prizes for being great humanitarians. They tend to be greedy, selfish, and often dishonest. If they don't break the law, they go right up to the legal limit, and today they pay lobbyists to change the laws to let them do what they want to do. Most of them leave a lot of their riches to charitable and cultural foundations as they approach death to try to atone for the evil they did in amassing their fortunes. But that doesn't make the evil they did while amassing their fortunes any less evil. The Protestant Rockefellers, Carneigies, Astors, Vanderbilts, Hearsts and their cohorts all fall into this same category, along with many present day Jews and Gentiles. However, this cohort contains considerably more Jews in the top 1% than their 2% of the population would represent. Jews represent nearly half of the richest of the rich in America.
Jews believe they are smarter at doing business and manipulating markets than other people, so that if business and the markets are very complicated, Jews are likely to win and do better than their Gentile competition. Thus, if interest rates are either very high or very low, Jews are likely to do better. Many Gentiles would be happy just putting their savings into insured savings accounts and earning some interest, but if interest rates are less than one percent, that is not an option. When rates are high, you have to be very clever about borrowing, or have money in hand, so that you don't have to borrow, again favoring many Jews. Thus, Jews have disproportionately benefitted from the global financial turmoil, and from the complicated financial instruments and transactions that have been developed in recent years.
NYT article on rich not paying taxes.
As described in an article in The New York Times on Wednesday, tax rates on America’s 400 wealthiest taxpayers fell sharply from the late 1990s through 2012, when their average effective income tax rate fell to 16.7 percent from 26.4 percent. Of the few names specifically mentioned in the article, most were Jews, including Loeb, Simons, and Soros.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/business/economy/for-the-wealthiest-private-tax-system-saves-them-billions.html?_r=0
Tax rates rose for wealthy last year
Data released by the I.R.S. on Wednesday shows that tax rates on the income of America’s 400 wealthiest taxpayers rose sharply to 22.9 percent in 2013, erasing a majority of the last two decades’ decline in their effective tax rate, although 22.9% is still less than the old 26.4%. They are all much lower than the maximum 39.6% tax rate which you would expect the wealthiest people to pay, even accounting for the lower tax rate they would pay on the first few thousand dollars they earn.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/upshot/thanks-obama-highest-earners-tax-rates-rose-sharply-in-2013.html
Monday, January 04, 2016
Recent MTCR News Items
Since I worked on the creation of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) back in the 1980s, I'm interested to see that it is still going. Here are some recent news articles about it collected by Google Alert. Most of them deal with India.
No Decision Yet on India's MTCR Membership Application
When MTCR jolted the efforts of Indian scientists
Read more at: http://www.oneindia.com/india/in-his-last-book-dr-kalam-writes-how-challenges-triggered-innovation-1900132.html
Italy Blocks Indian Application to MTCR
Hunter Renews Call for UAV Sales to Jordan
Read more at: http://www.oneindia.com/india/in-his-last-book-dr-kalam-writes-how-challenges-triggered-innovation-1900132.html
Italy Blocks Indian Application to MTCR
Hunter Renews Call for UAV Sales to Jordan
Turkey and the Kurds
On CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Anne Marie Slaughter picked the
Turkey-Kurd issue as one of the most important for 2016, and I agree with
her. We have become increasingly dependent
on the Kurds in the most volatile parts of the Middle East in which we are
involved – Syria, Iraq, and Iran – and now the conflict is boiling over into
Turkey.
Turkey used to be a reliable ally, a secular Muslim country
with a competent government. Now it is
becoming increasingly sectarian, and the government is becoming increasingly problematic. One of the main issues for the government is
the irredentism of the Kurds in Turkey, who want to form a greater Kurdistan
with their Kurdish brothers in Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Years ago, Turkey got the West to agree to
characterize the Kurdish rebels in Turkey as terrorists. So, while the US is primarily worried about
ISIS terrorists, the Turks are mainly worried about the Kurdish
terrorists. When we ask the Turks for cooperation
against terrorists, we are thinking, “Let’s go kill some ISIS rebels,” and the
Turks are thinking, “Let’s go kill some Kurdish rebels.” Meanwhile the US is supporting the Kurds in
Iraq and Syria, who have been the main line of defense against ISIS.
Turkey sees the Kurds as a threat to its very existence; the
Kurds would cut off a chunk of Turkey and incorporate it into greater
Kurdistan. Where does the US come
down? On the side of the Kurds who are
fighting with us in Iraq, or with the Turks who have been NATO allies for many
years.
If we lose Turkey as a NATO ally, we face big problems in
central Europe. Turkey controls the
Bosporus. Without access to the Black
Sea, we have real problems confronting Russia’s recent take over of Crimea, as
well access in general to that part of the world. I would think the US Navy would really want
Turkey on our side. In addition Turkish
air bases give American air power better access to that unstable part of the
world. We would miss them.
But if we don’t support the Kurds, what happens in Iraq and
Syria? We have to balance our interests
there against our interests in other parts of the world, including Russia and
Ukraine. Plus, we have to worry about
where Turkey is going. Is Erdogan a
passing phase for Turkey, or does he represent a long-term turn toward a less
Western, more Muslim state? We don’t
want our opposition to push Turkey away toward a more religious Muslim
orientation.
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