Monday Wake Up Call – Page 31

Monday Wake Up Call – Rule of Law Edition

While America celebrated the Labor Day weekend, we overlooked an extremely important decision by a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Last week, they issued a sweeping decision in the Federal Trade Commission v ATT, that drastically restricts the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) consumer protection authority over companies that offer “common carrier” services (e.g., telephone services, mobile data, and internet services) whether or not these services comprise their core business. Moreover, since no other federal agency has the necessary scope of regulatory authority over this area, if this decision stands, significant activities of such companies would become largely unregulated.

As the WaPo reports:

The ruling could wind up giving Google and Facebook — not to mention other companies across the United States — the ability to escape all consumer-protection actions from the FTC, and possibly from the rest of government, too, critics claim, unless Congress intervenes.

A little history: The FTC had brought an action against ATT over the adequacy of the company’s consumer disclosures regarding its data throttling plan, by which ATT intentionally reduced the data speed of customers to whom it had sold unlimited mobile data plans:

In 2007, ATT became Apple’s sole wireless provider for iPhone.
In 2011, ATT began reducing the speed at which unlimited data plan users received data on their smartphones.
Under ATTs data throttling program, unlimited data plan customers were throttled for the remainder of a billing cycle once their data usage during that cycle exceeded a certain threshold.

So the FTC filed suit against ATT. The FTC’s argument was that ATT was not providing an “unlimited” service, which is what subscribers thought they were buying. After signing up the initial subscribers, ATT changed to tiered plans, under different contracts. And ATT neglected to inform the original customers – the ones who thought they’d purchased an unlimited plan – that they weren’t getting what they paid for.

But the FTC lost. To understand the complicated legal issues and why the FTC lost, you can read all about it here.

The implications are huge. The decision means that any company that creates or purchases either a phone company or an internet service provider (ISP) can escape federal consumer protection regulations entirely. This is particularly important for individual privacy and security matters, since the FTC currently is trying to impose comprehensive privacy and data security regulations on ISPs, and this decision may hamper that effort. After all, big data has been collecting for years now and there is so much data on millions, if not billions of people, the population are starting to understand the risks of their data security with many big companies.

The court decided that the FTC lacks authority to regulate common carriers. So, no matter how egregious the company’s conduct– even for false, deceptive, misleading practices, the FTC would be unable to do anything about it. Nor, at the moment, can any other federal agency.

The ATT case concerned regulation of advertising. But, since the court’s decision rejected outright the FTC’s claim to be able to regulate any activities of companies deemed to be common carriers, it is not limited to deceptive advertising alone. Facebook and Google already gorge themselves on your personal data and the decision prevents the FTC, the agency that has a track record of regulating privacy issues, from exercising any oversight of these activities (provided that Facebook and Google make the appropriate acquisitions or otherwise position themselves to qualify as common carriers).

So it’s time to wake up America! The steady erosion of your privacy and consumer protection rights continues under the flag of “the rule of law”. In the REAL world, the wealthy and powerful are often above the law. The Wall Street banking cartels committed mortgage fraud, foreclosure fraud, and securities fraud. They laundered money for terrorists and drug cartels. They rigged interest rates. Aside from stockholders paying token fines, no human was prosecuted for these massive, organized criminal activities.

Let’s groove to “I Fought the Law”, written in 1958 by Sonny Curtis of the Crickets, and later popularized by the Bobby Fuller Four who had a top-ten hit with it in 1966. It was also recorded by the Clash in 1977, and Green Day in 2004. In 1989, during the US invasion of Panama, the US military blasted loud rock music—including the Clash’s version of “I Fought the Law“, to pressure Manuel Noriega to surrender.

The guitar riff in this Bobby Fuller version sounds positively Hollyesque:

After this decision against the FCC, maybe in 20 years, instead of saying “he got railroaded”, we’ll be saying “he got telecommed”.

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

Know Your Constitution – Monday Wake-Up Edition

Colin Kaepernick, quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers refused to stand for the national anthem at 49ers preseason game vs. the Green Bay Packers on Friday.

Like most Americans, Wrongo stands with hand over heart during the playing of the national anthem. But, for most Americans, playing of the national anthem is largely a ritual, and like most rituals, its true meaning has become vague, with many people simply going through the motions.

Until someone like Kaepernick won’t play along with the ritual. He was protesting what he thinks are wrongdoings against African Americans and other minorities in the US by the police:

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.

Not surprisingly, some of the reaction to Kaepernick’s silent protest was…not so silent. Nor was it particularly reasonable, or rational. You can imagine the “love it or leave it” crowd’s twitter comments, baked with a generous helping of racism.

But, for those that know anything about the US Constitution, he is exercising his right as an American citizen. As such, his actions are by definition patriotic, for they’re a celebration of what it means to be an American. This tweet captured the right spirit:

While refusal to participate in the anthem can call one’s patriotism into question, standing for the National Anthem never has been a requirement. Most stand as a sign of respect for the country they love, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

To insist that others respect this custom in the same way you do, is to deny them their constitutional rights.

Sometimes free speech can be objectionable, or even offensive to some. Perhaps it’s time we all reconsider what the National Anthem actually means, and the rights and freedoms it celebrates.

So wake up you faux patriots, you blind Exceptionalists! To rouse you from your slumbers, here is the Boss with “Born in the USA”:

Some only hear lyrics discussing economic destabilization, political gridlock, and hollow national pride. St. Ronnie Reagan mistakenly tried to make the song’s message into a jingoist anthem, but the Boss would have none of that.

Perhaps the true meaning of the song is as an anti-war song and a patriotic song, with the message: “Remain proud to be an American, despite some of our terrible actions at home and abroad.”

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

Where Republicans Are Coming From – Monday Wake Up Edition

(There will be limited blogging until 8/25, as Wrongo and Ms. Right visit Glacier National Park. Keep your tray tables in the upright and locked position while we are away.)

One of Wrongo’s earliest memories, a fragment, was riding in the car with my parents. When I asked where we were going, my mother said: “To elect Mr. Dewey president.” That was 1948. And here is a graphic example of what civic-minded Republicans were doing in Pittsburgh in 1949:

Vote Republican

The photo was taken by Charles “Teenie” Harris, and is in the archives of the Carnegie Museum of Art. It is part of a show of his work that opened on Aug. 13. Pittsburgh was Harris’s home town.

Note the predator’s clutching fingers. Note the long nails that Americans imagined that their Japanese enemies had in WWII. Note the blackface doll carried by the little white girl. While many Blacks in the north still voted for the Party of Lincoln in 1949, this billboard was in many ways a “dog whistle” for the white community of Pittsburgh.

The billboard was part of the Republican Party’s “informed debate” in Pittsburgh’s mayoral election in 1949. Their message was that the streets were not safe for women and children. This, at a moment in American history when we were not suffering lots of crime. In fact, there was a drop in homicides in the immediate post-war period.

There was pushback against the billboard, even among Republicans, in fact, the Pittsburgh Outdoor Advertising Co. refused to honor their contract to put up 100 copies of the image once they saw it. They had to be forced to do so by a local judge, who called the picture “a shocking example of bad taste.” Within a week of the billboard’s appearance, however, the Republicans themselves decided to replace it with a less offensive image. From Blake Gopnick at Artnet:

Back then, at least, a Republican candidate could realize he’d crossed a line and decide to step back from it.

That’s much too much to ask in 2016. Of course today, the Republicans would say the way to make that child safe would be to give her a gun and tell her to lock and load.

So another Monday morning wake-up for the GOP. To help them join the rest of us in the real world, here are Belle and Sebastian with “Olympic Village, 6am”. As we start the second week of the Olympics, the focus shifts to track and field, and so does this video:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

(H/T: LGM)

WTF Is It With Cellphone Cameras?

The NYT had an article last Thursday about a suicide rescue on the George Washington Bridge by a bicyclist. Julio De Leon, 61, was biking home from work across the GW Bridge when he saw someone about the jump off the bridge and into the Hudson River. From the NYT:

Then he saw it: a dog in the pathway, tethered to a rail. “This is something unusual, and I looked to my left, and I saw the guy,” Mr. De Leon said.

“Read the Constitution” – A Trump Wake Up Call

By now, most have seen the short speech that packed a wallop by Khizr Khan at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The speech by Mr. Khan was one of the most difficult/beautiful/gut wrenching 15 minutes of this long campaign season.

When Khan pulled his copy of the Constitution out of his pocket and waved it at Donald Trump, it was only a matter of time before the Pant Load responded. You can count on the Donald. Trump said:

If you look at his wife, she was standing there…She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe, she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.

Khan shot back on CNN’s”State of the Union” :

For this candidate for presidency to not be aware of the respect of a Gold Star mother standing there, and he had to take that shot at her, this is height of ignorance…

Trump then went on to say that he had made a lot of sacrifices by, ya know, hiring people and stuff. That led to a twitter storm carried on the hashtag: #TrumpSacrifices. While there are many funny tweets, Paul Begala, CNN commentator and advisor to a pro-Clinton Super PAC, wrote:

Once survived an entire weekend at Mar-a-Lago with just one can of hairspray.

Or this, Wrongo’s favorite:

Rob Woodyard tweet

OMG, THAT’s what Trump wants to get out of this: He wants to be Kevin Spacey with a comb-over!

Thank you, Khizr Khan for reminding our country that we are founded on what should be a sacred document that lays out how we should live in a society based on justice. And thanks for the sacrifice of your son Humayun, lost while taking part in an ill-advised war:

Humayun Khan

Donald Trump needs a wake-up call for his shocking lack of knowledge of the US Constitution. Let’s start with a list from the WaPo that shows Trump doesn’t know the Constitution:

He wants to “loosen” libel laws, so he could more easily sue news organizations who write “nasty” articles about him. There are centuries of First Amendment jurisprudence that would restrict his ability to do this.
He’s said he would push military commanders to go further than water boarding, even though it has been banned by federal law.
Many scholars believe Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims would be struck down as unconstitutional (due process, equal protection, religious freedom, etc.).
He insisted on “Meet the Press” earlier this year that the 14th Amendment does not guarantee birthright citizenship.
His attacks on Judge Gonzalo Curiel over his Mexican heritage show his lack of respect for an independent judiciary.
Trump has at times suggested that he might somehow be able to initiate the prosecution of Hillary Clinton over her emails if he’s elected. In March, asked about the kind of Justice he’d name to the Supreme Court, he said he’d:

Probably appoint people that would look very seriously at [Clinton’s] email disaster because it’s criminal activity.

A signal he doesn’t understand the role of each branch.

To help wake up the Donald, here is a hip hop tune about the Constitution by Smart Songs, an organization that provides kids and teachers with positive, educational hip hop, to help make learning fun. We chose this because Trump needs to start with an elementary education about the US Constitution, and work up from there:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

Our National Trauma Wake Up Call – July 11, 2016

It didn’t take long after five dead officers in Dallas, victims of a racially motivated killer, for some on the right to say “Its Obama’s fault”, or “Its Black Lives Matter’s fault”.

Here is a sentiment that you would hope that all Americans can agree on:

FireShot Screen Capture #100 - EM Simpson-page-001

From Evan Osnos:

It is a vision at the heart of the modern gun movement: the more that society makes the threat of violence available to us, the safer we will be. In forty-eight hours this week, the poisonous flaw in that fantasy has been exposed from multiple angles…

Wrongo hasn’t seen the videos, and hasn’t checked deeply into the circumstances, but he can’t seem to keep these incidents at arm’s length:

The Baton Rouge incident seems to have been the result of panic among the police who shot the victim repeatedly, even though the victim was pinned down on the ground.
The Minnesota shooting of a man halted for a traffic violation, who informed the policeman that he was armed and had a permit for concealed carry of a firearm, again may have been the result of fear and/or panic by the cop. The victim was shot several times while trying to pull his identification from a pants pocket.
The attack on Dallas police, in which five policemen died, and seven were wounded, seems to be a racially motivated revenge killing by a black shooter.

Needless to say, we need people on both sides of the Black/Blue Lives Matter argument to stand down. Cooler heads need to prevail. There are probably many cops who are not in possession of the nerves of steel needed for their jobs in 2016. Policing America today is no cakewalk. Everybody has a gun, most people are angry, and many have very low points of frustration.

FWIW, these violent episodes are partly a reflection of the larger struggle reflected in our national politics. There is a palpable dissatisfaction with how our country operates. The accumulation of money and power by people controlling our institutions has brought us an elite that no longer operates in the best interests of the population at large.

Some of this frustration and anger is played out with gunfire, and guns are everywhere.

The past week shows clearly that America’s police and America’s black citizens are at odds. During the day or so after Baton Rouge and Minnesota, there was an opportunity to step back and perhaps discuss what we might have learned from these killings. But the shooter in Dallas muddied the bigger picture, making revenge the story in our national news.

Leonard Pitts, Jr. in the Miami Herald quotes former NYC Mayor John Lindsay at another time of racial division:

This is a drifting, angry America that needs to find its way again.

This week feels like a sea change. Until now, neither killings by police, nor killings of police have been happening at unusual rates. This feels completely different, but we won’t be sure for a while.

July 4, 2016

Independence Day 2016. And 240 years later, where are we?

COW Our Sad Fourth

Our founders were willing to die for an idea. They wanted home rule, not a local dictatorship run by a representative of an English King. There were spirited debates around the ideas that founded our Republic, and there were those who worked hard to keep the rule of the King in place.

So are the contentious debates of today just more of the same? Here is a small taste of Sebastian Junger’s new book, “Tribe”: (pg. 124)

Today’s veterans often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country, they’re not sure how to live in it.

He goes on:

It’s hard to know how to live for a country that regularly tears itself apart along every possible ethnic and demographic boundary.

On the front lines, GI’s know their buddies are different in all sorts of ways, but they set aside their differences and form units that transcend differences, often heroically. Yet, in 2016 America, on a different set of front lines, our politicians amplify differences, going so far as to regularly accuse rivals of deliberately trying to harm their country.

Our society is at war with itself. Depending on their ideology, people speak with complete contempt about the rich, the poor, the educated, or the foreign-born. They express the same contempt for the president, and again, depending on their ideology, the entire US government.

That’s a level of contempt we have usually reserved for enemies in a time of war. But now, we apply it to our fellow citizens. Contempt is particularly toxic because it implies that the attacker has a position of moral superiority, and through that, has the agency to attack another.

So, on our most patriotic day, put down that hot dog, and ask the question: How do we unify a secure, wealthy country that is now playing a zero-sum political game?

Time to wake up, America! And to help with that, let’s dance around the room with a little rockabilly by Elvis Presley. Elvis was treated with contempt by some in the 1950s, but it was mostly silent, and by the Silent Generation, who thought they were protecting their kids from rock & roll.

Take a listen to “Good Rockin Tonight”, and remember Scotty Moore, the original guitarist for Elvis, who died last Tuesday. He was not just our last living link to the King (assuming the King is really dead), he was the force behind Elvis’s early singles. Scotty is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

His reverb-drenched rockabilly guitar was the driver in the originally drummer-less trio of Elvis, Scotty and bassist Bill Black:

COW Elvis and Scotty

Rolling Stone ranks Scotty Moore No. 29 on its list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time, saying “The playing was so forceful that it’s easy to forget there was no drummer.”

Keith Richards has said:

Everyone else wanted to be Elvis. I wanted to be Scotty.

Here are Elvis, Scotty and Bill on “Good Rockin Tonight”:

Brexit: Better for the Pant Load or for the Pant Suit?

Around here, Monday means a wake-up tune. We should have Brexit breakup music, but instead of song, we need to watch this video by Mark Blythe, a Scottish political scientist, and a professor of international political economy at Brown University, about the logic behind voting for Brexit:

Blythe makes more sense in 5 minutes about the EU, why Brexit happened, and some implications for the US, than the entire journalistic class has said using millions of words over the past few days. At 4:01, he says, “As I like to say to my hedge fund friends, the Hamptons is not a defensible [military] position.”

Let’s take a quick look at a few conclusions of the Brexit vote:

Rust cities and towns largely voted to Leave
Wealthy cities favored Remain
Rural areas that have not seen much immigration had seen a lot of austerity
Older voters wanted to return to the prosperous 1970s-1980s, regardless of whether that is realistic

Demographically, the most striking difference in voting was between young people and older people. A YouGov poll showed:

18-24: 75% voted for Remain
25-49: 56% voted for Remain
50-64: 44% voted for Remain
65+: 39% voted for Remain

So younger voters wanted to keep the option to be citizens of a larger economic unit, where they might find more and better job opportunity, while older voters wanted out of the EU for a variety of fact-based and fear-based reasons. On either side of the Atlantic, it’s a mistake to think that people know all the facts before they decide. From Seth Godin:

There are two common causes of uninformed dissent…The second (quite common in a political situation), is the tribal imperative that people like us do things like this. No need to do the science, or understand the consequences or ask hard questions. Instead, focus on the emotional/cultural elements and think about the facts later.

Our first Brexit lesson is that America has a huge base that is angry, scared, and possibly, more than willing to jump into the abyss. Sober analysts warned Britons that pulling out of the EU would be an economic and security debacle. But, as Matthew d’Ancona of The Guardian observed:

They heard the warnings, listened to experts of every kind tell them that Brexit meant disaster, watched the prime minister as he urged them not to take a terrible risk…And their answer was: Get stuffed.

Our second Brexit lesson is that nativism, anti-immigration fervor, and elite-bashing are potent tools.

There was a definite scent of “Make Britain Great Again” running through the Leave campaign. The Leavers urged Britain to “take control” of its borders. While we point at Mexico, they pointed at Turkey, which they said would flood the UK with immigrants, even though Turkey may never be a member of the EU.

You can call it racism, you can blame it on the “market” or, you can blame it on the economic circumstances created by the political elites steering the ship.

This resonates in the US because foreigners are a source of marginal cheap labor that corporations use to bludgeon our working class. That anger is partly justified. However, it is misdirected, because people only believe what they want to believe, and because it’s easier for working people to blame foreigners than to blame themselves for repeatedly electing an economic elite that just keeps playing them over and over.

Brexit is an important wake-up for the US presidential election. Britain’s uprising against the European Union is the sort of populist victory over establishment politics that could easily happen here. As the NYT said on Sunday:

Mrs. Clinton shares more with the defeated “Remain” campaign than a similar slogan — her “Stronger Together” echoing its [Remain’s] “Stronger In.” Her fundamental argument, much akin to Prime Minister David Cameron’s against British withdrawal from the European Union, is that Americans should value stability and incremental change over the risks entailed in radical change and the possibility of chaos if Donald J. Trump wins the presidency.

Hillary urges potential voters to see the big picture, while promising to manage economic and immigration upheaval, just as Mr. Cameron did. She is also a pragmatist battling against nationalist anger, cautioning that the turmoil after the Brexit vote underscored a need for “calm, steady, experienced leadership in the White House.”

But we are not the UK, and today, the ABC/WaPo poll has Hillary is up by 12 points, although we still have miles to go before 2016’s election night.

We will have future columns covering our neo-liberal policies, their impact on the American people, and their implications for 2016, over the coming days and weeks.

Monday Wake Up Call – June 6, 2016

We know that D-Day was June 6, 1944, but what does the “D” in D-Day, stand for?

Apparently, this is a frequently asked question by visitors to The National WWII Museum. But the answer isn’t simple. Disagreements between military historians and etymologists about the meaning of D-Day abound. Here are two explanations:

In Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, Ambrose writes:

Time Magazine reported on June 12 1944 that ‘as far as the U.S. Army can determine, the first use of D for Day, H for Hour was in Field Order No. 8, of the First Army, A.E.F., issued on Sept. 20, 1918, which read, ‘The First Army will attack at H-Hour on D-Day with the object of forcing the evacuation of the St. Mihiel salient.’ (p. 491)

In other words, Ambrose reports the D in D-Day stands for “Day.” But In Paul Dickson’s War Slang, he quotes General Eisenhower:

When someone wrote to General Eisenhower in 1964 asking for an explanation, his executive assistant Brigadier General Robert Schultz answered: ‘General Eisenhower asked me to respond to your letter. Be advised that any amphibious operation has a ‘departed date’; therefore the shortened term ‘D-Day’ is used.’ (p.146)

It’s an enigma wrapped inside of a mystery. A continuing enigma is the lack of accountability by both our elected officials and our state and national bureaucrats. Today’s travesty was reported in the UK’s Guardian:

Despite warnings of regulators and experts, water departments in at least 33 cities used testing methods over the past decade that could underestimate lead found in drinking water.

These tests are taken annually and sent to the EPA in Washington. The 33 offending cities were in 17 different states. Of the cities, 21 used the same failed water testing methods that were used in Flint MI. Additional findings:

Michigan and New Hampshire advised water departments to give themselves extra time to complete tests so that if lead contamination exceeded federal limits, officials could re-sample and remove results with high lead levels.
Some cities denied knowledge of the locations of lead pipes, failed to sample the required number of homes with lead plumbing or refused to release lead pipe maps, claiming that would be a security risk.

Since the Flint water crisis erupted last year, school districts from coast to coast have stepped up testing of fountains and sinks. From Newark to Boston to Detroit, city after city has reported elevated levels of lead in the water of some educational buildings. The Portland OR schools have the problem and the school district has been aware of it for years. But the federal government doesn’t actually require most schools to test, so few do.

Apparently, the federal EPA has known since 2001 that its testing guidelines were weak. They are working on “long-term revisions” to its lead and copper rule, which are expected in 2017. Or sometime.

From Ian Welsh:

No regulator worth its salt, who is doing their job, could have missed entire States and large cities cheating, because any regulator worth its salt does its own audits and testing.

Republicans do not see this as a problem. Yes, there have been apologies, but no federal funding to remediate the problem. In fact, Fitch Rating Service estimates that capital costs to replace the nation’s lead water service lines could exceed $275 billion.

Republicans expect Mr. Market to take care of issues like this, once we privatize our water supply.

After all, aren’t invisible hands already cleaning the lead from the brains of America’s children?

It’s the miracle of market self-regulation.

Time for a wake-up call for all who think that business as usual is acceptable for our aging infrastructure, and in the case of our water supply, our poisonous infrastructure. Let’s look back to a time when America could do great things, even if it cost real dough. In 1977, we sent the Voyager I and II interstellar satellites off into space with a record of the things we thought made Earth unique. The music we sent was picked by Carl Sagan. This link lists all of the music we sent into the cosmos. One of his picks was by Blind Willie Johnson, “Dark Was the Night”, which has no lyrics, but creates a mood of loneliness. Here is “Dark Was the Night”:

This song will likely last longer than the human race. It’s doubtful that Blind Willie ever thought THAT was gonna happen.

What isn’t gonna happen is that our politicians decide on their own to be accountable to the rest of us.

Monday Wake-up Call – May 23, 2016

The subject of the day is the continued saber-rattling by our military. Recently, two retiring US Generals made goodbye speeches indicating that Russia is the biggest threat facing America. As Crooked Timber said:

Russia? Really? I guess there ain’t no money in ISIS and Al Qaeda. You don’t need strategic bombers, huge mechanized armies and aircraft carriers to fight them.

Equally disturbing are the concurrent mind games being played in the military strategy establishment. Take the RAND Corporation. RAND has run numerous war games which pit Russia against NATO in the Balkans. Their conclusion is always the same: If Russian tanks and troops rolled into the Balkans tomorrow, outgunned and outnumbered NATO forces would be overrun in under three days. Scary!

RAND argues that NATO has been caught napping by a resurgent and unpredictable Russia, which has begun to boost defense spending after having seized the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine and intervened in support of pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine. In their report RAND said:

The games’ findings are unambiguous: As currently postured, NATO cannot successfully defend the territory of its most exposed members…

Underlying this, is the insanity of the geopolitical outlook that dominates the national security lobby in Washington. The same day as the RAND report was released, Defense Secretary Ash Carter unveiled plans to add more weapons and armored vehicles to pre-positioned stocks in Eastern Europe. The new $3.4 billion plan (that’s the annual cost folks) adds another brigade to the mix, but the soldiers would be based in the US, rotating in to Europe for a few months at a time. So, that’s politically acceptable, assuming the next president can find the money.

But, Carter’s commander in Europe, Gen. Philip Breedlove, commander of US European Command, released on his blog that there is no:

Substitute for an enduring forward deployed presence that is tangible and real. Virtual presence means actual absence.

Lots of agreement between these boys.

And, in an article in Politico Mark Perry discussed the testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee of a panel of senior Army officers, in which they claimed that the Army is now in danger of being “out-ranged and outgunned” in the next war that the Army is in danger of becoming “too small to secure the nation”. Yikes!

While their testimony made headlines in the major media, Politico reported that a large number of former senior Army officers, rolled their eyes:

That’s news to me…Swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles? Surprisingly lethal tanks? How come this is the first we’ve heard of it?

The unnamed General went on: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

These guys want us to believe the Russians are 10 feet tall. There’s a simpler explanation: The Army is looking for a purpose, and a bigger chunk of the budget. And the best way to get that is to paint the Russians as being able to land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time…What a crock.

All of this is political fodder for Obama’s critics in Congress who complain that the President isn’t taking us into the next war fast enough.

So it’s time we all wake up to this maneuvering behind our backs. Maneuvering that is designed to have us spend waaay more money on defense, because, Putin.

To help you wake up, give a listen to a rarely-heard tune by Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, “Ye Playboys & Ye Playgirls Ain’t a Gonna Change My World”, recorded live in 1963 at the Newport Folk Festival, when Dlyan was still a folk singer, two years before he would be booed off the main stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival:

Put in context of the times: Dylan was being called the “Voice of a Generation”. Seeger adds an endorsement of the fed-up young artist who was already one of the key singers of topical songs in the sixties. For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can listen to the tune here.

Sample Lyrics:

You insane tongues of war talk
Ain’t a-gonna guide my road,
Ain’t a-gonna guide my road,
Ain’t a-gonna guide my road.
You insane tongues of war talk
Ain’t a-gonna guide my road,
Not now or no other time.

Please remember what Voltaire said:

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

THAT has always been the strategy of the military-industrial complex. Arguing over defense budgets, equipment procurement, force strength, is pointless.

Today, the money is just not there to do much more for the military.

The critical debate must be how to fix the economy, which drives the size and strength of our military.

And ultimately, our national security.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Monday Wake Up Call

Monday Wake Up Call – Rule of Law Edition

Know Your Constitution – Monday Wake-Up Edition

Where Republicans Are Coming From – Monday Wake Up Edition

WTF Is It With Cellphone Cameras?

“Read the Constitution” – A Trump Wake Up Call

Our National Trauma Wake Up Call – July 11, 2016

July 4, 2016

Brexit: Better for the Pant Load or for the Pant Suit?

Monday Wake Up Call – June 6, 2016

Monday Wake-up Call – May 23, 2016