Wrongo and Ms. Oh So Right have left the country. No, not in protest about the letter the #47 Traitors sent to Iran, but for a few days in Costa Rica.
We will have occasional Wi-Fi connectivity and probably less frequent ambition to take on the great issues of the hour, so don’t expect much while we are in a nation where 12% of its land area is comprised of national parks.
Actual, thought-out writing should resume on Sunday, March 22.
Good Morning America, as you head off to your day, it is sad to report that America remained dysfunctional over the weekend.
It’s ok to be stressed out on Mondays. However, it was said better by the Bangles, who had a hit in 1984 with “Manic Monday“. The song was written by Prince. Here they are in 2010:
Consider these examples of our dysfunction:
Dysfunction #1: Bibi has a Boehner: Can you name another point in American history where the Speaker of the House of Representatives invited a foreign leader to speak to Congress as a rebuke to the US president? Probably not, although Sam Rayburn, the Democratic Speaker during the Truman Administration invited General Douglas Macarthur, who had recently been fired by Truman, to address a joint session in 1951.
Speaker Boehner’s idea is that Netanyahu’s speaking to Congress on Iran will help the Republicans pass increased Iranian sanctions. This could undermine Mr. Obama’s current negotiations of a game-changing deal on nuclear weapons with Iran. Would the Republicans want to do that? Yes, they would. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) a member of the Senate Armed Services and Select Committee on Intelligence acknowledged last week that ending negotiations with Iran was “very much an intended consequence” of a new sanctions bill. Surprise, surprise!
Dysfunction #2: Hedge Fund guy Steven Schwarzman says more money is not necessarily a fix for ailing American public schools, instead he touts using unemployed to help defray school costs:
If you can get unemployed people that cost nothing, that can have this dramatic difference, that costs nothing. I love things that cost nothing that have great results. Imagine if you laid on technology and other types of things, you could really set the world on fire with this type of stuff.
Doesn’t this sound suspiciously like another way to say, “Let them eat cake?” And this guy is investing in a private education company. And more than a third of his firm’s investment pool is money from public pension plans — that is, the retirement money of people like public school teachers.
Dysfunction #3: The Deep South has the country’s highest death rate of newly diagnosed AIDS cases, according to new research. Researchers at the University of North Carolina, Duke University, and the Centers for Disease Control analyzed the diagnosis and death rates of HIV and AIDS patients in nine states in the Deep South, including: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. They account for 49% of America’s AIDS deaths, despite comprising 37% of US population.
Why is the South on the wrong side of every social policy issue?
Dysfunction #4: Bob Dylan is giving away 50,000 copies of his new album to AARP Magazine readers. There may have been no better songwriter in the history of rock and roll, but does this mean that Dylan’s fans are really, really old? Now that the AARP is his target market, should Dylan retire?
Dysfunction #5: Your Thought for the Week:
Someone, somewhere, sometime, somehow, needs to address the dysfunctional myth that we shouldn’t tax the “job creators”. The myth is that a profitable company takes its profits and decides to hire some folks because, you know, they have this extra money just sitting there.
This is not reality. If a company needs or wants to hire people, then they do it during the year, in hopes that the new hire will contribute to the company and to its success. The owner/employer then pays that person a salary, gives them a desk, and a computer, or whatever they need to perform in their new job. By paying those newly incurred expenses the company reduces its taxable income, since these are fully deductible business expenses.
And if the person (or persons) hired are successful, they may help increase the firm’s profits and taxes by more than was spent in the hiring process. Is it so horrible to think that a company may have hired people and, together, they were so successful that now, profits have grown so much that the taxes due actually rise?
How did it become un-American to pay the taxes that keep America running?
“The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.“ – George Carlin
“I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.” – Shirley Temple
“What I don’t like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day.” – Phyllis Diller
The Wrongologist blog is now officially on a holiday schedule. There may or may not be posts between Christmas and New Year’s Day. We hope that those of you who had to travel arrived safely and will return safely, and we wish you a good holiday break!
Here’s to a better 2015, when we return hopefully refreshed, ready, willing and able to deal with all of the world’s crap problems as they come at us. Wishing you the absolute best for 2015! Your parting gif includes a few more Christmas tunes.
Here is “Silent Night, a Montage” by The Temptations, recorded in 1980 by Berry Gordy. Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffin had left the group by the time this was recorded. It’s still great:
Here is “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey:
Let’s close with John Lennon’s “Happy Christmas (War is Over).” It was recorded in October 1971, with Phil Spector. The children singing in the background were from the Harlem Community Choir:
And, so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong
And so happy Christmas
For black and for white
For yellow and red ones
Let’s stop all the fight
When you open your gifts today and then when you eat your dinner, think of those who are struggling. Think of those displaced by war. Think about what we can do to change all that. Let those thoughts guide you through 2015 and beyond.
This is the week in 1949 when Duane Allman was born. He died in 1971 in a motorcycle accident. He was best known as a founder of the Allman Brothers Band, but before he was an Allman Brother, Duane was a session musician at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals Alabama. While working there in 1968, he met Wilson Pickett and suggested that he cover “Hey Jude”, then starting up the charts for the Beatles. Pickett didn’t like the idea, neither did the owner of Fame, the great Rick Hall. But, Allman convinced both of them to record “Hey Jude“:
Many people cover the Beatles. The fact that so many can “take a sad song & make it better” only goes to show the songwriting ability of the lads from Liverpool. This brings us to “The Art of McCartney”, released this week, with a huge group of artists covering McCartney songs. Until a few days ago, you could stream the entire album, but now there are just a few official videos that are up on YouTube.
While covers can be great, they mostly disappoint the Wrongologist. Performers are often too self-conscious (or in less-than-great voice) to really deliver the goods on someone else’s great song. So, instead of more covers, let’s close with a live performance of McCartney and Bruce Springsteen in Hyde Park in London in 2012 doing “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Twist and Shout”.
This delivers the goods. It is about 9:40, so settle in:
See you on Sunday.
“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need” – Rolling Stones
Democrats seriously suck at politics. On the other hand, you can fight the opposition, you can fight the media, you can fight the money, and you can fight vote suppression.
But, idiocy is damned near invincible. And sadly, idiocy is pretty well distributed across party lines:
After a massacre on par with the catastrophic election of 2010, 2014 proves that you hold elections with the citizens you have. Democrats didn’t accept that reality. As the Wrongologist said on November 3rd:
The Democrats have no closing argument. The great tragedy of the Democrats is that they still believe politics is about competing sermons.
They ran to the right, distanced themselves from the Obama agenda, and hoped that their ground game would bring them victory. It didn’t, and it’s not going to be easy to get the same quality of GOTV effort that Obama got in 2008 and 2012, after coming up so short this time. If you look at the political map, what you see is red and purple counties in suburban and rural areas that taken together, in low turn-out elections, are now equal to anything that solidly blue urban areas can muster. This problem prevents any Democratic effort to undermine the ability of Republicans to successfully gerrymander secure districts.
Are establishment Democrats who are now on their way to their lucrative post-political careers, going to have the will to fight for anything before they go? Beltway Democrats have a lot to answer for. And one question is whether the Democratic Party is more than a regional party that can win in only a few coastal states. Their political infrastructure has now mostly gone to seed. Here is a modest program for improvement:
1. The old guard leaders must go. The Democratic caucus should throw out the entire leadership team and start over. Why would any candidate want to brand themselves with the organizations run by Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Debbie Wassermann-Schultz, Steve Israel, and whoever it was that allowed Democratic Senate candidates to run this year’s content-frees campaigns?
2. They should look at the political landscape: People are discontented. Why? In part, because incomes haven’t risen in 15 years. What did Democrats do in response? Nothing. What did voters do? They voted enmasse for the party that has done everything possible to keep their incomes down. Apparently, any change was better than more of the same inaction.
3. They need to listen to constituents. The current bunch are over-manipulative, over-controlled, and fools for the money. Over the past 30 years, the Wrongologist has met with Governors, Senators and Congress people to push policy ideas. But today, what mostly comes out of those meetings (if they will take them) are platitudes and polite put-downs.
4. They need to realize that good Ideas can come from the people: The purpose of Occupy Wall Street was to drive the 1%-99% inequality idea. It gained traction. Everyone knew it was true, but Democrats could (or would) not operationalize any policy from the idea. They let the bankers off the hook, while mildly pushing tax reform and the Minimum Wage. Maybe what we saw last night was the “Revenge of Occupy”.
People tend to believe what Republicans say about Democrats, instead of what Democrats actually say about themselves. Their peer-pressure techniques block out reasoned political conversation. This has the effect of isolating people, and convincing them that everyone around them believes Republican-speak, and that to cross that line will result in personal approbation, or possibly, social excommunication.
Allowing this to continue has been the greatest failure of Democratic leaders.
The problem is that people either don’t know what the Democrats and the Republicans stand for, or don’t really care. Based on the Pew poll of voting types, nonpartisans have no idea who runs what in Congress.
If we can get voters to understand what Republicans are for and what Democrats are for, there could be Democratic majorities even with the level of turnout we saw yesterday. This is “branding”, and Democrats have to stop letting the R’s do it for them.
Look, we’ve made surprising progress on some issues in the past 6 years. The gap is with connecting the winning issues to the winning candidates. Unless the Democratic Party changes, it is a casket for progressive ideas and candidates.
Sources:
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:
(This is the third column about US foreign policy. The other two columns are here and here.)
The past two columns have argued that our foreign policy does not employ any non-military strategies in areas where we compete with other nations or where there is local or regional conflict.
We have an insular view of our competition. We tend to see Vladimir Putin as a military strategist, massing his troops on the border of Ukraine, rolling over Crimea, providing the missiles to shoot down civilian airliners. Some, or all of that may be true, but Mr. Putin is a busy man who also uses soft power and commercial power. China, our great Asian competitor, follows a similar strategy to Russia’s.
We could learn a lot from our competitors. Last week saw Russia and China making soft power and commercial initiatives in South America. The Economist reports that Brazil’s President Rousseff hosted Mr. Putin, and China’s Xi Jinping as part of a summit of the BRICS group of emerging countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
While in South America, Mr. Putin also visited Cuba where he announced plans to re-open an intelligence base. Russia also agreed to write off 90% of Cuba’s $35 billion Soviet-era debt. Putin then went on to pitch the export of Russian nuclear technology to Argentina and a $1 billion anti-aircraft missile defense system to Brazil.
Mr. Xi met with the leaders of CELAC, a club of all 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries. In Venezuela he met with officials regarding China’s $50 billion in oil-backed loans. Chinese trade with the region has grown more than 20-fold in this century:
China has become a big investor, trading partner and lender in the region. While Latin America’s ties with China are far more recent than those with Russia, they are also much more important. Russia, which had made major inroads into Latin America in the 1960’s and 1970’s is now playing catch-up in many countries, and is closest to Venezuela.
By contrast, the US has a history of attempted and successful overthrows of governments, and meddling that have kept South America suspicious of our motives for decades. We have diplomatic problems with Brazil stemming from the NSA’s tapping of Ms. Rousseff’s personal mobile phone. We are deeply involved in a debt default to private US hedge fund lenders by Argentina, which was heard by our Supreme Court, who found in favor of the lenders not the country. We continue to view Cuba through a Soviet-era lens. The region no longer looks only to the United States and Europe.
While the BRICS countries were in Brazil, they agreed to establish a New Development Bank (NDB) at their summit meeting. The NDB will have a president (an Indian for the first six years), a Board of Governors Chair (a Russian), a Board of Directors Chair (a Brazilian), and a headquarters (in Shanghai). They also created a $100 billion Contingency Reserve Arrangement (CRA), meant to provide additional liquidity protection to member countries during balance of payments problems.
The BRICS wanted a vehicle that matches their rising economic strength, and they wanted a bigger voice than they have in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Although the BRICS are one-fifth of the global economy, they are just 11% of the votes at the IMF. The BRICS bank/CRA could challenge World Bank-IMF hegemony. The new bank’s partners already lend more than the World Bank, which made $52 billion in loans last year, while China made loans of $240 billion and Brazil made $88 billion.
The WaPo Monkey Cage reported that Mr. Putin extolled the NDB and CRA as a way to prevent the “harassment” of countries whose foreign policy clashes with America or Europe (like his annexation of Crimea, perhaps?). They also observed that Mr. Xi Jinping sees a geopolitical role for the BRICS as part of his push to set up a new alternative to US ‘hegemony’. Mr. Xi has a vision of China as a leader of the non-aligned nations, a concept first developed in the 1950s. He says this despite taking an increasingly militarized stance on disputed maritime borders in Asia.
Taking a step back, China and Russia are seeking economic dominance of huge swaths of the world, while the US is trying to maintain its current dominance of the same swaths.
And one way China and Russia attempt to do this is through trade, investment and lending, while the US uses military and currency dominance. One major issue in the next decade or two will be whether the dollar can remain the world’s reserve currency. Although at this moment there is no contender in sight, the BRICS’ NDB and CRA could be the first step in China and Russia’s grand plan.
How we respond with soft power, how well we solve our domestic economic problems will go very far towards determining whether the US can blunt the geopolitical challenges from China and Russia.
Guns ain’t gonna get it done.
TGIF. We head into the weekend with music. Except today, when the musician, the late Ritchie Havens, delivers the spoken word at a favorite Georgetown undergrad hang for the Wrongologist, The Cellar Door.
If you ever saw him live, Ritchie Havens was a force of nature. This is from the Wrongologist’s eulogy:
Havens took his teeth out to sing. Apparently he cared more about how he sounded than how he looked. If you have that much talent, you don’t need teeth. He just sat there with his guitar and sang his songs. He didn’t have a persona, he had no guile.
Havens was also political. Often at concerts, he told the story of being an avid
follower of comic book superheroes, especially, Superman, who fought for
“Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” Here he is explaining just how incongruous the concept (was) is:
See you on Sunday!
The Wrongologist has been silent the past few days. We were busy porting the site to WordPress. Our previous blogging software is no longer supported, and was in fact, discontinued on June 25th.
We hope you like the new look and feel. Comments on the changes would be very helpful. Previous posts have been imported to the new site, but formatting for previous posts was far from perfect, so please excuse the changes in fonts, line spacing and curious page breaks that appear in some posts.
One issue is that those who subscribed to the Wrongologist via email must re-subscribe, since we were unable to export that list.
What’s Wrong Today:
Here is some perspective from two former presidents on the possibility of our returning to war. First, from Gerald Ford, speaking about Vietnam, at Tulane University in April, 1975: (h/t to Rachel Maddow writing today in the WaPo)
And the money quote is from Thomas Jefferson:
So it is with Mr. Obama and the Middle East. He has the wolf by the ears. Some of our erstwhile allies on the Arabian Peninsula are encouraging a radical Sunni uprising in Iraq, and in Syria. It’s part of a regional, sectarian war, and we should have no interest in furthering the violence on either side. Bush’s team empowered Iran with the destabilization of Iraq. Then, Mr. Obama’s decision in Syria helped push our Sunni allies (Saudi Arabia, and Turkey) to go all-in with AL-Qaeda types in Syria. Let’s take another look at a map of the Sunni-Shia divide that we posted about a year ago:
Since the 1930’s when we first recognized Saudi Arabia, we have tried to straddle the fence with our choice of allies in the Middle East. Turkey (NATO member) is Sunni. So is Saudi Arabia. Our enemy AL-Qaeda is Sunni. Our “enemy” Iran is Shia. Our “ally” Iraq is Shia. So what did we think would happen when we deposed Sadaam’s minority Sunni government and replaced it with a majority Shia government in Iraq?
Since Assad has fought ISIS (Sunni) to a standstill, they have now moved part of their operations into Iraq to further inflame the regional situation, so that the US will be required to intervene, something that Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Oil States and neo-con supporters of Israel have been advocating for some time.
Today, we have no real allies among the Muslim states in the Middle East. So, do we stay on the sidelines or do we go in with both feet? Mr. Obama, on Face the Nation:
That doesn’t sound like in with both feet. Mr. Obama went on to say:
Yet, neo-cons think that ISIS is a perfect tool for two American goals. First, they think ISIS helps in the removal of Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, something which would make Israel very happy, since it would weaken Iraq’s connection to Iran.
Second, ISIS could be an excuse for American air attacks. If ISIS could be forced back into Syria by American jets, it could create an opportunity for Assad to continue to do the dirty work for both America and Iraq.
Andrew Bacevich, in an interview with Bill Moyers, took down the neo-cons, particularly Dick Cheney and Robert Kagan:
Bacevich calls out the neo-cons, specifically, Kagan: (brackets by the Wrongologist)
He goes on to say we look for easy solutions: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)
We have been engaged in the Muslim world at least since 1930’s, based largely on the assumption that projecting American military power could somehow “fix” this part of the world, or at least secure our access to its oil resources.
So, we now have a track record to review. We intervened militarily in Lebanon in 1982. In Somalia. In Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. And Yemen.
Has the region become more or less stable? Has it become more democratic? Is there less anti-Americanism? The answer to all of the above is no. So, it is time to recognize that US military intervention in the Middle East has failed as a primary means of US policy.
Despite all the testosterone running rampant in Washington, we are not going to meet our goals by simply bombing more Muslims.
The events unfolding in Iraq right now require a debate around the question, “what should we do about Iraq?” The nation-state of Iraq was never a particularly good idea, but it plodded along for most of the 20th-Century with a series of kings and dictators at the helm. President George W. Bush ended that Iraq, and it is very doubtful that it can be saved.
Neither Iran nor the US has an interest in a protracted civil war in Iraq. And both the US and Iran have an interest in greater stability in this region. More from Bacevich: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)
All efforts should be focused on creating a negotiated settlement and new boundaries rather than preserving Syria and Iraq as coherent nation-states. It is unlikely that they will ever be coherent nation-states again.
We need a new approach to our participation in the Sunni-Shia divide, one that keeps America from intervening again. Shortly after Mr. Obama was inaugurated, he went to Cairo and gave a speech that proposed a new beginning in the Middle East, a new beginning of US relations with the Islamic world.
Whatever happened to that President Obama?