Geopolitics – Page 24 – The Wrongologist

Our Mesopotamian Badlands

We have been stuck in Iraq for 23 years, starting in 1991 when Pappy Bush gathered a coalition to chase Saddam Hussein’s invading forces from Kuwait. In 2003, George the Younger invaded Iraq, looking for WMDs. He killed Saddam and then got stuck in the quagmire. It took a commitment of large numbers of American troops to bring sectarian violence under control, and help a democratically elected Iraqi government to take hold. Then, Barack Obama extricated us from Iraq in 2011.

We are now back on track to be Iraq’s air force. Mr. Obama has America returning to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the ISIS jihadists who burst out of Syria and have reached the gates of Baghdad.

We have been asked to spend another $500 million to train Iraq’s fighters. Who pays to train the ISIS fighters? They seem to learn on the job. In fact, today’s New York Times reports on a Turkish ISIS fighter who trained for 15 days before assignment to a unit where he shot two people and was part of a public execution. From the NYT:

It was only after he buried a man alive that he was told he had become a full ISIS fighter.

And they make $150/day, plus all they can intimidate out of Iraqi businesses.

We are told that the effort will take many years. We are told that it will cost many more billions. NBC News estimates that costs will ramp towards $20 Billion per year:

The Defense Department budget for fiscal year 2014 authorized over $550 billion in spending on national defense, with an additional $80 billion for what’s called “Overseas Contingency Operations,” or OCO. That OCO fund is where officials have said funds for the ISIS fight will come from.

We are told that is quite possible that the effort will fail, because the (mostly) unwilling coalition Mr. Obama has rounded up really doesn’t want to fight ISIS. Why are most of them unwilling? The reasons vary. The Economist has a great chart that shows who sides with whom in the ME today:

The chart shows the degree to which America needs to play a delicate diplomatic game in holding together allies that may not always be friends with each other. Although ISIS is popular among young Muslim fundamentalists, the group has no allies on the political stage. But no country wants to put boots on the ground to cut ISIS off from their supply lines, their sources of cash, their command and communications. Dan Froomkin of the Intercept reports:

The big news out of the new “Global Coalition to Counter ISIL” meeting in Paris was that “several” Arab nations were willing to join President Obama’s latest bombing campaign.

But there were no details announced. And even the US’s most stalwart partner, the UK, wouldn’t actually commit to any specifics, because they are worried about the impact on the vote for Scotland secession. The “several” Arab countries are evidently “two”, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The Guardian reports that Saudi Arabia felt so threatened by Isis that it was prepared to act in a front-line role:

There is a very real possibility that we could have the Saudi air force bombing targets inside Syria…That is a remarkable development, and something the US would be very pleased to see

A Grand Coalition is the military answer. But can Mr. Obama bring so many incompatible parties together and weld them into a coordinated military campaign?

It requires a far greater fear of ISIS for Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Shias and Sunnis, Alawites and Kurds to be military allies, while working with Western military powers, whom several Arab nations actively dislike.

For at least the past decade, there has been no oxygen in the room for Non-Middle East/Non-Arab problems. And yet, the world is still full of problems, many of which could benefit from resources and attention by a Grand Coalition. Those problems will wait while we try to win a war we don’t want, against an enemy who doesn’t truly threaten us.

There is a logic against doing nothing. ISIS has grown faster (up from 8,000, to nearly 40,000 militants), while also improving qualitatively much faster than any other terrorist group in the last 40 years. With control of part of the oil revenues in Syria and Iraq, they are on a trajectory for even further growth.

So, once again we trek back into the badlands. As Springsteen says:

Badlands you gotta live it every day
Let the broken hearts stand
As the price you’ve gotta pay
We’ll keep pushin’ till it’s understood
And these badlands start treating us good

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – September 14, 2014

In this week’s “Parade of Bad News”: Yes, the Wrongologist remembers where he was on 9/11, but where we are today is way more important:

Mr. Obama must plan carefully whenever the “Coalition” gets together:

Nobody said building an ISIS “strategy” would be easy:

After the speech, the “coalition of the willing” didn’t include the 535 Commanders-in-Chief in Congress:

In other news, here’s why the NFL didn’t get it right the first time:

Friday Music Break – September 12, 2014

Today’s music break is a reflection on 9/11. It’s still hard to process those events, despite the millions of words written about the attacks. Musically speaking, it was a very creative time. But there were bad calls too. After the attack, a Clear Channel program director took it upon himself to identify a number of songs that certain markets or individuals may find insensitive: No less than 165 songs were purportedly banned, ranging from Peter Paul and Mary’s “Leaving on a Jet plane,” to Sugar Ray’s “Fly,” to REM’s “The End of the World as We Know It”, and all songs (!) by Rage Against the Machine.

The music created in the aftermath of 9/11 documents America reacting to our collective trauma. There is sentimentalism. Anger. Calls to arms. Revenge. This long after 9/11, you already know many of the tunes that, like in church, are played on each anniversary, and you know where to find them, they are not here today.

For the 13th anniversary, here are a few songs (and a short film by Woody Allen) that you may not have heard/seen as much that memorialize how we felt after the attacks.

Among the best songs produced after the attack is On That Day by Leonard Cohen from his 2004 album, Dear Heather. Cohen is simply “holding the fort” for a “wounded New York.” No pointing fingers, no aggression, its a healing number to get you started on your day of reflection:

Here is the key lyric:
Some people say
It’s what we deserve
For sins against god
For crimes in the world
I wouldn’t know
I’m just holding the fort
Since that day
They wounded New York

If there was nuanced reaction to 9/11, it was Springsteen’s 2002 album, The Rising. With “You’re Missing,” Springsteen translates the horror of 9/11 into raw pain:

Lyric:
Pictures on the nightstand, TV’s on in the den
Your house is waiting, your house is waiting
For you to walk in, for you to walk in
But you’re missing, when I shut out the lights
You’re missing, when I close my eyes
You’re missing, when I see the sun rise
You’re missing

Children are asking if it’s alright
Will you be in our arms tonight?

Next, from the British band James, here is Hey Ma. James’ lead singer Tim Booth sings, “Now the towers have fallen, so much dust in the air,” on this title track from the Brit-pop group’s 10th studio album. The song examines the price paid for revenge. Many of us felt a need to avenge the wrong that was done, perhaps by making “choices worse than the fall.” Some images are disturbing:

Next, Juliana Hatfield takes us through the early parts of the 5 stages of grief with her song, “Hole In The Sky”. This is a conversation by the artist and DJ George Bodarky on WFUV, Fordham radio,with her song mostly in background. Hatfield admits that she was terrified about going into New York City after the 9/11 tragedy. She was also too afraid to fly. She talks about creating some of the lines in the song as well:

Finally, a short film by Woody Allen made for the Concert For New York City, 2001. Watch it and laugh:

Best lines:
“I was mugged coming back from the Opera. They took my gas mask, my flashlight, all my Cipro™“.
(You may remember that Cipro™ was for the deeply paranoid who thought that there would be anthrax attacks)

Bebe Neuwirth: “I heard that Rudy Giuliani and Al Sharpton got a house together on Fire Island”

Thinking About the Slurry Wall on 9/11

It’s 13 years since that beautiful sky-blue September day when our world changed.

Consider the parallelism. Today, as we remember the terrorist attack 13 years ago, we begin another “war” against yet other group of Sunni terrorists. Mr. Obama, who was elected in 2008 to get us out of wars in the Middle East, has us on track to lead another “coalition of the willing” into the ME. The purpose of this crusade sounds depressingly familiar: To blunt the threat of another attack on the Homeland, despite little evidence that an attack is possible or imminent. And we do this because the people who face a direct ISIS threat can’t (or won’t) handle it for themselves.

The rise of ISIS is in part a consequence of US policy in the ME. Our war in Iraq and the subsequent 8 years of Iraqi internal political squabble have left many Sunnis in Iraq willing to support any challenge to the Shia central government. And now, 13 years after 9/11, we’re again strapping on our weapons and heading into war.

So today, let’s talk about the slurry wall at the World Trade Center. The Wrongologist took this photo in July, 2014 of the portion of the slurry wall that remains exposed in the Foundation Hall of the National September 11 Memorial Museum:

The slurry wall is the outer wall of what WTC engineers called the “Bathtub” in the 1960’s:

The bathtub is the 9-block area of the World Trade Center site that is excavated down to bedrock…and ringed by the slurry wall. The bathtub was created to enable the building of the Twin Towers’ foundations, and was ultimately filled with seven stories of basements housing the parking garage, mall, and building services.

Except that this bathtub kept water out of the 70’ deep basement. The ground water level at the WTC site is just a few feet below the surface, while bedrock is about 70 feet below the surface. Creating the bathtub required first building a 7-story dam below the water level of the adjacent Hudson River – that was the slurry wall.

After the 9/11 attack, the concern was that the slurry wall would fail. A breach in the wall and a flooding of the bathtub might have also flooded other adjacent below-grade structures, such as the PATH tunnels that passed through the bathtub. The NY subway, built below the PATH tubes could also have flooded with a breach of the wall.

On 9/11, most of the central portion of the wall’s south side (bordering Liberty Street) had moved inward by more than 10 inches. But, it held. According to the New York Times, George Tamaro, a former staff engineer at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who was closely involved with the construction of the trade center, believes: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

[The slurry wall construction]…may have helped prevent the Hudson River from flooding parts of Lower Manhattan

According to Tamaro’s report on the aftermath of the attack, the PATH tunnels in Jersey City, New Jersey, at the Exchange Place Station, were 5 feet lower in elevation than at the WTC PATH Station. Exchange Place became a sump for fire water, river water, and broken water mains discharging into the bathtub. But the slurry wall held.

Looking up at the exposed portion of the slurry wall in Foundation Hall, one can’t help but be thankful for the work of engineers and construction workers back in the sixties who built the bathtub, and the engineers and firefighters who stabilized the walls after 9/11. Since the attack, that unseen wall is now a symbol of the resilience of both New Yorkers and America.

But the world has spun off its normal axis since September 11, 2001. Isn’t it interesting that 9/11 was supposed to be about America striking back against a foreign enemy of freedom. Yet in the process of attempting to win the “War on Terror”, American citizens have given up a significant part of their personal freedoms. And just this month, we are starting to have a national discussion about how, since 9/11, the US Department of Homeland Security has transformed our local police into a paramilitary force. For example, the Los Angles School District Police got a MRAP (mine resistant vehicle) and 3 grenade launchers.

Schools need grenade launchers now? James Madison said in 1787:

A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home…

Today, Americans own enormous numbers of weapons. Pew Research reports that the number of guns in the US is between 270 and 310 million, or roughly one for each of us. But, estimates are that about 37% of us actually own all the weapons.

So, today on the 13th anniversary of 9/11, we need to ask each other: What are we to make of a country in which:
• Local police are militarizing
• Citizens continue to arm themselves
• The federal government tramples on our Bill of Rights

Let’s think about what has been won and lost so far in the War on Terror. And let’s think about what remains of our social fabric. Is it as strong as that slurry wall? Will it hold when attacked? Do we still have that same problem-solving genius that built a slurry wall that was strong enough to survive attack?

Is America still built to last?

Coalition of the Willing? An Editorial

Why are the media so willing for America to go up against ISIS? Why are the media letting John McCain go on endlessly, and why are they acting as if Lindsay Graham is the second coming of Douglas MacArthur?

Our post-Cold War American politicians can’t do the intellectual heavy lifting that connects policy to strategy. They are incapable of articulating a realistic vision of the political ends that are the desired outcome of a decisive use of military force.

US foreign policy in the Middle East for nearly a century has been based on one simple principle: Maximize the security of the delivery of fossil fuels from the region to the US. The corollary: While we’re doing that, let’s make sure to maximize the profits of the big corporations that benefit from the oil trade, and the corporations that make big profits by getting America to defend the oil companies.

“I listen to the commanders on the ground” isn’t strategy. And strategy shouldn’t be formulated by the military. They have the operational role, but strategy should be based in the hands of our elected officials. Let’s see what Commander-in-Chief Obama says about our strategy for the Middle East on Wednesday. We shouldn’t second-guess the strategy BEFORE it is promulgated, we can wait to do that.

Since the administration and nearly everyone else on Earth agrees that ISIS is a threat to at least some degree, the questions are:
• In what way is ISIS a threat to America’s security? To what extent are they a threat?
• What do we want the political end state to be in the ME if/when the threat of ISIS is contained, diminished or destroyed?
• What is it worth for America to accomplish this outcome in light of our other, competing, American interests, in the region and globally?

Once we answer those questions, Mr. Obama can give our military leaders definitive policy guidance. The Generals in turn can then give the administration the best possible advice on how military force could secure our aims, or how to use it in conjunction with other elements of national power, such as diplomacy, economic coercion or covert operations.

Moving forward, as McCain, Graham, Rubio and others want, without answering these questions, is another exercise in flailing about, hoping that using sufficient force opportunistically will cause good geopolitical things to happen.

It is important to see that ISIS is different from Al-Qaeda. ISIS focuses on the near enemy, the Iraqi and the Syrian Governments and their supporters, while Al-Qaeda focuses on the far enemy (think 9/11). That should be a pointer for our strategy. The US only attacked ISIS when the Kurdish oilfields were threatened. The message should be that ISIS can do whatever they want in northern Iraq and Syria − once they step out of their box they will get slapped hard.

We should ask if a militant and backward-looking form of Islam is what the people living in Islamic countries want. They are the ones who have to contend with the Muslims who financed the growth of militant Islam, and the Imams who preach it. The citizens in Muslim countries also have to take responsibility for their actions. They can’t just point at the Russians and Europeans and Americans and say “you made us do this.” There is some culpability among the Western powers, but we didn’t suggest, or encourage, Sunnis and Shiites to kill each other. That was a decision made by Muslims, some of whom are in power because of actions by the US.

Solving the problem presented by ISIS is primarily the job of the countries that have common borders with Syria and Iraq. We have a role, but it isn’t our problem to solve. The US and its European allies do not possess the wisdom, or the will, or the tools to fix whatever it is that ails much of the Islamic world.

This is the principal lesson that the long Iraq war taught us. The direction of our future ME strategy lies in recognizing that fact.

No doubt, ISIS poses a danger. But for the US and Europe, the present danger is negligible. Regional powers such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran are both more directly threatened and far better positioned to deal with it. Offering indirect assistance might be helpful, however, the US would be better served simply to butt out. We’ve done enough damage.

Let’s ask some final questions on the way to developing a new ME strategy.

First, if it’s unacceptable to have an antidemocratic Sunni fundamentalist regime that routinely beheads people, denies women basic human rights, and uses oil money to support worldwide terrorism – what are we doing about Saudi Arabia?

Second, nobody’s saying that it’s fine for the ISIS lunatics to form a Sunni caliphate. But the regional powers who should able to and interested in stopping ISIS: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel, Iran, and Egypt must do the heavy lifting. Some have even participated in making ISIS what they are today. Let them clean it up.

If ISIS defeats its local opponents, and then truly threatens the world, there’d be sufficient reason to step in.

But so far, it has not.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – September 7, 2014

It seems that we have nearly reached peak moron, but since WWIII ain’t gonna start itself, Mr. Putin and the guys at ISIS are trying to do what they can to move us in that direction:

NATO is happy to get back to an enemy it understands:

Putin wants peace with Ukraine, now that he owns about 1/3 of the country:

Turning to domestic news, on Monday, the Senate will vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. The Democracy for All amendment, Senate Joint Resolution 19, allows governments to distinguish between people and corporations. It won’t pass in the House, so the Koch Brothers will be free to continue marching the Country toward Fascism.

The public finally got behind the issue of personal privacy when nude celebrity photos were hacked from the cloud:

And the fight we really want to win goes on:

Finally, RIP Joan Rivers:

The Irony Burns at Burning Man

If you have never been to Burning Man, your perception is likely of a white-hot desert filled with 50,000 stoned, half-naked hippies doing sun salutations while techno music thumps through the air and a big wooden statue of a man gets torched on the penultimate night. From the New York Times:

….let’s go over the rules of Burning Man: You bring your own place to sleep (often a tent), food to eat (often ramen noodles) and the strangest clothing possible for the week (often not much). There is no Internet or cell reception. While drugs are technically illegal, they are easier to find than candy on Halloween. And as for money, with the exception of coffee and ice, you cannot buy anything at the festival. Selling things to people is also a strict no-no. Instead, Burners (as they are called) simply give things away. What’s yours is mine. And that often means everything from a meal to saliva.

That is what it was like 10 years ago. Not anymore. As the desert week of art, sunburns and egalitarianism has grown, it sold out all available tickets. Scalpers ran up ticket prices, and the demographics began to shift upwards. People went from spending the night in tents, to renting RVs, to building actual structures. More from the NYT:

We used to have RVs and precooked meals, said a man who attends Burning Man with a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs…Now, we have the craziest chefs in the world and people who build yurts for us that have beds and air-conditioning…Yes, air-conditioning in the middle of the desert!

The NYT reported that his camp includes about 100 people from the Valley and Hollywood start-ups, as well as several venture capital firms. And while dues for most non-tech camps run about $300 a person, he said his camp’s fees this year were $25,000 a person. A few people, mostly female models flown in from New York, get to go free, but when all is told, the weekend accommodations will cost the party goers over $2 million.

So, starting today, San Francisco will resemble a ghost-town, with empty Google buses and Starbucks gone quiet as the city’s tech community descends on the Nevada desert. And this year, there is a Burning Man Traffic Mitigation Plan. All vehicles entering Black Rock City will need a $40 vehicle pass, and only 35,000 such passes are available.

Imagine: The wealthy icons of Tech partying with hipster representatives of the 99% who buy their products. Guess that means we can hate the multinationals who are working inversion deals to pay fewer taxes, but shame on you for hating Apple, Google and Microsoft. They go to the desert with the rest of us.

Now, gentrification is inevitable in any city. This is just another gentrification of large, public events. Think about South By Southwest (SXSW), the film, interactive, and music festival and associated conferences that take place early each year in March in Austin, Texas. First held in 1987, now it has corporate sponsors. Same with Coachella, the music festival that began in 1993 at one of the Wrongologist’s favorite places, the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. (We go in January for an annual dog show, not for polo or the music festival in March).

These radical, egalitarian things morph into an amusement for the 1% just like the Hamptons, Jackson Hole, Ibiza or private islands. Its radical spending, and radical conspicuous consumption instead of the ideal of Burning Man, which is self-expression. Now, the ticket revenue is $20.4 million, ($300 x 68,000 tickets). There are no vendors allowed to set up inside the event but there are plenty of rich dudes on the inside ready to monetize and network.

In the words of Cyndi Lauper, “Money changes everything!” You know that’s true for Burning Man, since a featured guest speaker this week is Grover Nordquist, noted tax hater. It is doubtful that he would have attended this in earlier years, when it was a collection of just the naked 99%. Jon Stewart commented on Grover’s visit:

#TDSBreakingNews Grover Norquist is going to Burning Man. Thinking anti-tax message will resonate better if delivered in a neon thong.

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) July 30, 2014

Burning Man is organized around 10 Principles. Here is number 3: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.

Can you imagine what they could have done to Woodstock had it become an annual event?

This year, how about a huge moving sculpture of Burning Man jumping the shark?

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 24, 2014

Here at Casa Wrong, we see the end of summer coming. It’s a sad time most years, but not now. Today, August HAS TO DIE! Here’s why:

• Foley was beheaded
• Instead of “back to school”, this August it is “back to Iraq”
• Russia invades Ukraine, says it’s for humanitarian reasons
• The Ebola epidemic continues to grow
• The reason why a teen in Ferguson is dead remains unresolved
• Hamas and Israel seem willing to fight to the death
• We still don’t know who shot down the MH17 over Ukraine
• Mitch McConnell says he’s willing to shut down the government again

August brought home that every pillar that has supported international order is tottering, if not yet collapsing. That means the UN, NATO and a strong, unified America. The “what’s wrong” list could be much longer, but what would be the point? August must die. On to humor.

ISIS or IS or ISIL, it’s a cancer:

James Foley is the most recent in a long line:

And in Ferguson news, don’t shoot is everyone’s mantra:

In domestic ~~warfare~~ policing, mindset should be first, not last:

Mayor Daley, 1968: “The police are here to preserve disorder”:

Don’t you feel safer knowing she’s off the streets?

https://twitter.com/stevenjhsieh/status/501492139197759488

You can read about this 90 year old Ferguson demonstrator here

The Crook Who Took America off the Gold Standard

Forty years ago on August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace rather than face Impeachment. Millions of words have been written about his crimes and misdemeanors. Some efforts at rehabilitation of his image occurred over the last week.

One thing we shouldn’t forget is that Nixon took us off the gold standard.

When Nixon entered office in 1969, America had been part of the international monetary system known as Bretton Woods since the end of World War II. Bretton Woods committed the US to backing every dollar overseas with gold. Thus, foreign countries had the right to exchange their dollars at the rate of $35 per ounce. All other currencies were fixed to the dollar, and the dollar was pegged to gold.

Nixon appointed Arthur Burns as Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1970, with instructions to ensure easy access to credit since Nixon was going to run for reelection in 1972, and wanted a growing economy to help his case. Bloomberg Business Week says he gave Burns some blunt instructions: “You see to it, no recession”.

Despite Nixon’s instructions to Burns, the US went into recession in 1970, triggering a rise in unemployment to 6% (imagine that!), which was the highest level since the Korean War. The recession should have curbed inflation, but it didn’t. Burns was stumped. Business Week quotes Burns’ diary:

What the boys around the White House fail to see…is that the country now faces an entirely new problem—sizable inflation in the midst of recession…The rules of economics are not working the way they used to. Prices were going up even when factories stood idle—a seeming refutation of the economic rules.

Despite growing inflation, Nixon pressured Burns to further loosen monetary policy, driving even more inflation. Domestic inflation was mirrored overseas. Foreign governments bought dollars to continue their growing exports to the US, leaving their central banks filled with greenbacks. Meanwhile, America’s gold holdings dwindled to $10 billion, about half its 1960 level.

The gold standard now existed in name only, since foreign banks held far more dollars than the US held in gold at $35/ounce. This left the US dollar vulnerable to a run.

In 1971, Nixon appointed John Connally as Treasury Secretary. Connally asked the White House financial team for options to control inflation and solve the possible run on the dollar, while keeping the domestic economy growing. Burns wanted price controls; he also thought the US should devalue the dollar against gold (that is, raise the gold price above $35). Undersecretary for Monetary Affairs Paul Volcker believed this would be ineffectual, as other countries would simply devalue their currencies by the same percentage. Volcker thought the US should temporarily halt gold-dollar convertibility.

On August 12, 1971 Britain demanded that the US guarantee $750 million. The next day, Nixon summoned his advisers to Camp David to agree on a plan. The plan had two essential points. First, America would stop converting dollars to gold. Second, to combat inflation, US wages and prices would be frozen for 90 days.

On August 15, 1971 Nixon announced the plan that unilaterally terminated convertibility of the US dollar to gold, effectively bringing the 25-year Bretton Woods system to an end. This was called the “Nixon Shock”. The gold standard was abandoned, and the previously fixed exchange rates of the world’s major currencies began to float.

Many conservatives argue that we should return to a gold standard. Would that help or hinder the world economy?

A terrific economic history of the Great Depression is the 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World” by Liaquat Ahamed. Ahamed says that the gold standard was the principal cause of the depression. His thesis is that tying the amount of currency a country has in circulation to the amount of gold it holds becomes a strait jacket. The problem is that if you have a gold standard, your money supply is fixed by the amount of gold available. When economic activity exceeds the value of a country’s gold holdings, trade and economic growth are stifled, or you devalue your gold, causing inflation.

Of course, because of Bretton Woods, you couldn’t devalue your gold. So Nixon, an economic conservative, took two unthinkable steps in order to get re-elected. He implemented wage and price controls, and ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold.

Taking the world off the gold standard has facilitated the unprecedented economic growth of the past 40 years, since trade has grown much faster than the growth in world’s physical stock of gold.

Nixon’s price controls didn’t do much. The Consumer Price Index rose 4.4% percent in 1971, and 3.1% in 1972. When the controls were phased out in 1973, inflation rose to 6.2%. It was a shocking 11% in 1974.

So, as in all things Nixonian, there was a little good along with a lottta bad.

When Nixon said the words “I will therefore resign”, it felt to the Wrongologist that years of anti-war protesting had come to fruition. Ford, our first appointed President, then promptly pardons Nixon, and the merriment was stopped dead in its tracks.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 10, 2014

On Sunday, we reach for humor and less seriousness, but lately, the cartoons aren’t funny, they tend toward the ironic, or are downright scary. Maybe that is understandable, since we are back in Iraq. ISIS is now as bad as or worse, than Al-Qadea, which might be good news for the Wrongologist’s defense stocks!

Why is the Iraqi government outgunned by a rogue group of thugs?

Anyone?…Bueller?

Expanding “Arabia” to the wider Islamic world, we Americans have been on very sandy ground, from Kabul to Baghdad to Benghazi. And, like quicksand, we can’t escape:
• We’re working with Iran in Iraq, but against them in Israel and in Syria
• Iran is working with Palestinians in Israel, but against them in Syria
• Turkey a member of NATO, supports Hamas against Israel, but is against Assad

Nations in the Middle East are frequently allies on one front and enemies on the other. Somewhere in that paradox is the solution. Now that we are out of Afghanistan, will we have to fight the new terror group of the month, or the new terror group of the year? Can we be the police department to the world, yet keep our social contract and our domestic freedoms intact?

Military recruiters are about the same the world over:

T.E. Lawrence – Britain’s “Lawrence of Arabia”, warned that Arabia is not a hospitable place:

Iraq didn’t stop being a cesspool when we left;

Reingagement is a tough equation to solve:

In other news, the leaders of Africa came to DC to hear our new pitch:

Finally, Jim Brady died this week. The Wrongologist’s company was a vendor to the Brady Center, and played a very small part in building public support for the Brady Bill:

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Geopolitics