The Wrongologist – Page 205 – Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Waiting for the Great Trumpkin

Today, we focus on this from the WaPo’s Marc Fisher who profiles the kind of people who support Donald Trump and finds they are mostly older white men and women:

The way Joe McCoy sees it, the last time America was great was when Ronald Reagan was president, when people played by the rules. No, it was in the ’70s, Holly Martin says, when you could depend on Americans to work hard. No, to find true American greatness, Steve Trivett contends, you need to go back to before the Vietnam War, ‘when you could still own a home and have a good job even if you didn’t have a college education.’

Fisher says this demographic resonates with the Donald’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again”. And even if they don’t agree on exactly why, they do accept Trump’s contention that the US has become “an economic wasteland” and that it is “committing cultural suicide.”

The premise behind “Make America Great Again” is that while the country is no longer great, it can be great again, and Trump is the can-do billionaire who can make that happen.

This can be difficult to watch, like a slowly-developing accident on the freeway. People seem so easily misled, and they say such unsophisticated things about immigration, about Putin and Syria, about our economy, about the threat from Muslims who live in America.

But do we have good Party establishment choices in the 2016 election? No, voters don’t have good, clear choices, despite the unprecedented number of candidates.

Republicans made their voters a bunch of promises over the past 10 years, some of which they had no hope of keeping, and others which they had no intention of actually delivering. It’s also clear that the Republican “Establishment” is frustrated with the Republican candidates, and their supporters who actually expected the Party to be more effective. That’s why so many Republican voters have no interest in Jeb Bush or Scott Walker, and it’s clear that the GOP Establishment misunderstands their own base.

So, Donald Trump appeals to many Republicans as someone who’s pretty effective at holding the media’s attention and driving the national conversation. Someone who looks to be a better bet to actually shake things up and make possible a few things that currently look impossible.

It might be a GOP Hail Mary pass, but what’s the alternative?

For Democrats, Hillary Clinton looks like the candidate who’s “turn” has finally come. She is a product of their “establishment” as much as Jeb Bush is of the GOP’s.

And is it really all that different that the progressive left looks to Bernie Sanders to create a “revolution” in the political climate, making a progressive America possible? Sanders may be more of a Hail Mary pass than Trump.

Since both parties suck and won’t work together, many on both sides are looking for an anti-establishment Messiah to lead them to the political Promised Land. What makes this risk seem worth it is that, while folks understand they’re inviting chaos, they feel our politics are already chaotic. So, people think “What’s the difference?”

And it’s hard to argue with them. American politics feels like a metaphor of Easter Island: Some of us spend our lives trying to get new trees to grow, while the majority are happy to keep chopping down the old ones as fast as they can.

Trump is saying if we vote for him, he’ll make it all better. And if you read Senator Sander’s stump speech, you’d know he is saying he can’t do it alone, that people have to get together and organize to effect change.

That is “a substantive difference” between these two “insurgents”.

That’s why Bernie Sanders’ use of the Democratic Socialist label is disorienting. It shakes people out of their normal process enough to wonder how he thinks he could possibly win. He can’t.

And the mainstream media and both party establishments say: “things really aren’t as bad as they’re made out to be.” They hope that in the end, most voters will agree with their sentiment, and vote for their establishment candidates.

But voters have spent decades lowering their expectations (in Wrongo’s case, except for a short-lived upswing in 2008). Screw that. People need to raise their expectations. Because lower expectations and the “what did you expect” attitude is essentially giving permission for poor results.

We need to expect MORE, demand more.

Because it’s better to have high expectations with the risk of disappointment, than it is to have low expectations that guarantee more of the same old stuff.

Monday Wake Up Call – November 2, 2015

From the WaPo:

Keith Moore, a 40-year-old military veteran recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder in Oklahoma, remembers the day last year when he sold off a chunk of his pension.

He had left the military after 21 years of service, because his disabilities — PTSD, arthritis and other injuries — made it difficult to work. But the transition to civilian life came with a different struggle: the need to provide for his family and pay the same bills with only half the paycheck.

The article says that Moore was two months behind on rent and 10 days from his next paycheck. He saw a TV ad for Future Income Payments, an Irvine, CA company that buys pensions in exchange for a lump sum of cash. The company said it had worked with military personnel and government workers. Moore called them. More from WaPo: (brackets and emphasis by the Wrongologist)

The next day, a company representative…explained that he [Moore] would receive a $5,000 cash advance for selling part of his pension. In exchange, Moore would have to pay the company $510 a month for five years, a total of $30,600.

If it were a typical loan, that would amount to $25,600 in interest — a rate of 512%.

Can you say deceptive and predatory?

We are ending year seven of our recovery from the Great Recession, but the recovery has largely benefited those at the top of the income ladder, while bottom-feeders like these pension advance companies work to profit from poverty, charging more than 500% annual interest.

This is particularly egregious when companies target income streams that are riskless since they are backed by the federal government.

But these are not treated as loans by the pension advance companies. They are treated as an installment “sale”. The pensioner sells the income stream to the pension advance firm, rather than making a loan against the future payments, which would be subject to usury laws.

Some will say that Mr. Moore entered into a dumb deal, that he is a victim of his own personal choices.

Others could say that view makes you an apologist for loan sharking. Following the argument to its logical conclusion, any fraud or con game should be legal under the premise, “the victim should have known better“.

Some in the government are looking into the grift: In a 2014 report, the GAO identified 38 companies that offered pension advances. At least 30 of them were affiliated with one another in some way. The Senate Special Committee on Aging held a hearing on the issue last month, and reported that only two states, Missouri and Vermont; have laws regulating pension advance companies. If 30 operators are really one company, why can’t states or the Feds regulate this?

So, it’s past time for state and federal regulators to wake up and look carefully at pension advance firms. To help them rub the sleep from their eyes, here is Minus the Bear, an American indie rock band from Seattle, with their tune “Knights”:

Sample Lyrics:
I owe you, don’t I?
A little light today but tomorrow
Oh, tomorrow

This usury’s so typical
A piece of you for a piece of me
It’s hard-coded
A piece of you for a piece of me

Is it really a sin if we both come out even?

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – November 1, 2015

A Republican debate, a new Speaker of the House, boots on the ground in Syria, the World Series, not to mention Halloween. Quite the week. Did you set your clocks back?

This tweet pretty much sums up the Republican debate poutrage:

Rubio had a good debate. Suddenly, people see him as taller:

GOP Halloween:

Now that Paul Ryan is Speaker, it will be a wild ride:

Ryan will try to be first with the leash:

Uncle Sam whistles past America’s foreign policy graveyard:

NY Mets World Series tix are pricey:

What’s The Strategy Mr. Obama?

From The Atlantic:

Defense Secretary Ash Carter says the US will step up its operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, including through ‘direct action on the ground.’

Carter captured the strategic incoherence that is the essence of our current Middle East policy.

And isn’t sending our uniformed military into Syria to support forces in open rebellion against the Syrian government an act of war? What will we say when a non-NATO country invokes this same precedent, say, in the Baltic States, or on Philippine territory?

We seem to be relying on the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). The AUMF is our legal excuse to justify any plan for more intervention in the ME. It is a catch-all, because it allows the US to go after whoever we dislike. The relevant passage from the AUMF says that the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Our new ME policy backs ISIS in Syria, but fights it in Iraq. This is a flawed strategic position. It puts US soldiers at risk of direct confrontation with Russian forces, instead of by proxy, which would be bad enough. From Sic Semper Tyrannis: (Brackets and emphasis by the Wrongologist)

In Syria, the [Def Sec]Carter/[General]Dunford/WH “team” proposes to insert US Green Berets into YPG Kurdish controlled areas northeast of Aleppo as instructors, coordinators, advisers and air controllers. The Turkish Air Force has been busy bombing these same Kurds the last few days to prevent them moving west along the border to seal it against IS transit of the border from Turkey…Question – what will happen when Turkey kills some US soldiers?

We are doing this because we have been outplayed by Russia in Syria. The US (and Obama’s) dilemma has nothing to do with the alleged Obama fecklessness. It has everything to do with the US having to cope with the second order effects of the destruction of Iraq.

Iraq is America’s cardinal sin, and we will suffer its consequences for a very long time.

The US cannot have a coherent ME strategy as long as it remains loyal to its traditional ME allies/clients Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel. Successive administrations have maneuvered the US into a position where we can’t extricate ourselves from the policy goals of these “client states”, even when we know their goals are detrimental to US interests.

These alliances have placed the US in a foreign policy straitjacket. Obama wants to wriggle free. He wants to accept the changes in the regional balance of power that have emerged as a result of the destruction of Iraq, but our allies/clients both resent, and oppose them.

The simple fact is that the US is dependent on the consent of these allies/clients for the use of their overseas bases. The Turks have leveraged that need with the denial of use of Incirlik Air Base until their demands were met. We should expect the Saudis and Qataris play the same card.

The Obama administration understands that the US is losing its grip on the region and its politics. We try to operate against that, despite having allies/clients that have different objectives than we have, allies who have diametrically opposing narratives of recent events and very different policy goals.

That means the “allies” resist our plans, while we compromise with them, and work to meet their preconditions. This is precisely because the US has configured our Empire in a way that means these allies aren’t “client states” at all: They are “customers” for our military suppliers, and everyone knows that The Customer Is Always Right.

In the end, even assuming a rational strategy and stellar execution, the regional balance of power in the ME has fundamentally changed, and the US must adjust.

This new move by the Obama administration means that America is on a track to just continue wandering around in the ME. That will continue until we are again bloodied on the ground, and fade away…or stumble into WWIII.

We let the genie is out of the bottle. Now it is time to deal with it.

See you on Sunday.

You Say You Want a Revolution

The Nation describes Bernie Sanders’s “Political Revolution”: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

When Sanders speaks of that political revolution, he is asking Americans—especially younger Americans like the crowds of Iowans in their teens and twenties who packed the Sanders bleachers in Des Moines’ Hy-Vee Hall for the Jefferson-Jackson dinner—to believe that electoral politics might actually change something. Sanders knows that won’t happen unless people who are frustrated and disengaged and disenchanted see him as a candidate who is distinctly different from the rest.

For Sanders, “Political Revolution” means a protracted, grassroots effort to fix a broken political, economic and social system. He says it will take millions of people to get involved and then stay mobilized after the election to bring about a political revolution.

That’s what Bernie Sanders’s campaign is all about.

So, if you agree that our politics is broken, shouldn’t we actually be working to fix the underlying problems? Without something that looks like a “political revolution”, fixing these problems is difficult if not highly unlikely. Consider the following:

• Capitalism as an economic engine has created unheard of levels of wealth, but since the 1980s, that wealth only accrued to those at the very top.
• Democracy is in trouble, because Capitalism needs a plutocratic system of government to operate.
• Democracy gets in Capitalism’s way because the interests of the people are not congruent with the interests of the corporations. They are often in direct competition.
• In order for corporations to keep their preferred position in this conflict of ideas, the voice of the people must be weaker than the voice of the corporations. Hence, Shelby County vs. Holder, Citizens United and the soon-to-be decided Evenwel v. Abbott.

Democrats say “vote for us because we’re not as crazy as the Republicans” (even though they actually support the same corporate interests). The Dems will also offer you a few social policy crumbs that you should enjoy on your way to becoming the big losers in our latest Gilded Age. And those crumbs will expire when Republicans control all three branches of government.

The last political revolution began when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. That revolution has continued through two Democratic and two Republican administrations, for more than 35 years.

• It resulted in higher taxes for the middle classes which paid for lower taxes on the wealthy.
• It reversed progress toward voting rights, racial equality and equal rights for women, progress that was made in the 1960s and 1970s
• It has prevented universal health insurance.
• It led to increased terrorism and endless war.

So, it’s been a wild success! And it’s still going strong under its second Democratic president.

Bernie’s “political revolution” is to attempt to turn Democrats back to being the party of the people, to give Capitalism a conscience. The theory goes, if Democrats embraced Bernie’s point of view, people will vote in large numbers. If they vote in large numbers, change will come.

This is the fight Bernie is leading.

But Bernie has no real chance at the nomination, and if he got it, there is a high probability he’d lose the general election in a blow-out. And since he’s not doing the things he needs to build a constituency in Congress, or it other down-ticket races, his populism is unlikely to translate into a movement. America has to hit rock bottom for that to happen, and we’re not there yet.

OTOH, Hillary doesn’t seem to have a plan to win the House or Senate in 2016 either.

But the fact that it is unlikely that he can win doesn’t mean that Bernie and his supporters shouldn’t fight for his policies. He has already forced Hillary to recant a few illiberal positions. And his pursuit of right-leaning white working class voters could help forge a new populist coalition down the road. Poor white folks have been clinging to the GOP for the past forty-odd years, and they are still poor, and getting poorer.

They might be willing to embrace his populist economic message even while they hold their noses when they hear his social justice views.

So, when you hear about Sanders’ political revolution, it doesn’t sound so much like a revolution as a return to policies that had been in place for much of the 20th century, those policies that began during the FDR era.

What Sanders describes is a political restoration, not a revolution.

Little that he proposes is radical from the point of view of where the country was in the 1970s.

Back before the Regan revolution began.

Monday Wake Up Call – October 26, 2015

From the NYT:

The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said on Friday that the additional scrutiny and criticism of police officers in the wake of highly publicized episodes of police brutality may have led to an increase in violent crime in some cities as officers have become less aggressive.

Comey is lending his support to a meme called the “Ferguson Effect”. As the “Ferguson Effect” theory goes, police have slowed down enforcement due to public scrutiny, which has led to more crime, including homicides. In the absence of tough policing, chaos reigns.

Ever since Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, MO last year, people across the country have taken to the streets to protest police brutality and the mistreatment of black men and women. At the same time, police officers and pundits began arguing that demonstrators are jeopardizing community safety, pointing to rising violent crime rates.

This theory for the uptick in violence in some cities is partly based on a cherry-picking of violent crime data, since some increases actually occurred BEFORE the Ferguson demonstrations, and in general, the data are unclear. We know that far more people are being killed in America’s cities this year than in many years. And to be clear, the increases are largely among people of color, and it’s not cops that are doing the killing.

Most of America’s 50 largest cities have seen an increase in homicides and shootings this year, and many of them have seen a huge increase. These are cities with little in common except being in America—places like Chicago, Tampa, Minneapolis, Sacramento, Orlando, Cleveland, and Dallas.

So something big is happening, but what? Comey thinks he knows, and in Chicago, he floated the same idea as Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently floated, that cops are not doing their job because people have started taking videos of police interactions with their smart phones.

Here is snippet of what Comey said:

I spoke to officers privately in one big city precinct who described being surrounded by young people with mobile phone cameras held high, taunting them the moment they get out of their cars. They told me, ‘we feel like we’re under siege and we don’t feel much like getting out of our cars.’…I’ve been told about a senior police leader who urged his force to remember that their political leadership has no tolerance for a viral video.

If Comey’s impression both of the Ferguson Effect, and the role of cameras is correct, cops have stopped doing the job we pay them to do because they’re under amateur surveillance.

If Comey’s right, what he’s describing is the chilling effect of surveillance, the way in which people change their behavior because they know they will be seen on camera. That the Director of the FBI is making this claim is more striking, since the surveillance cops are undergoing is targeted, and by the public. It is not the total government surveillance (such as the use of small planes and stingrays to surveil the Baltimore and Ferguson protests), which both the FBI and NSA use in inner cities.

Comey can’t have it both ways. Since he said in Chicago that surveillance has a “chilling effect”, that it makes cops feel under siege, maybe he should consider the implications of what he is saying about surveillance by his own agency and the NSA of all Americans.

If the targeted surveillance of cops is a problem, isn’t the far less targeted surveillance conducted on Americans a much larger problem?

And why can’t Americans hold two diametrically opposed ideas in their minds at the same time? We love the police, and want them safe. But, the real problems in US law enforcement have to be addressed.

And why does Comey imply that we need to accept a trade-off between a brutal police state and weakened policing? Why can’t we have civilized police who focus on getting the real bad guys, instead of choking a man to death for selling loose cigarettes?

So, wake up Mr. Comey! Show us data that support your feelings, or get in line with the data we have. To help you wake up, here is Humble Pie doing “30 days in the Hole”, from their 1972 album, “Smokin’”. The song was featured in “Grand Theft Auto V”:

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

America’s “Fill in the Blanks” Middle East Policy

(There will be no further posting until Monday 10/26, since Wrongo and Ms. Oh So Right are attending a weekend family reunion)

We have been talking about our failed strategy in the Middle East for several days. Here is a great observation by Tom Englehardt that summarizes our all-too-true ME reality:

Sometimes I imagine the last 14 years of American war policy in the Greater Middle East as a set of dismal Mad Libs. An example might be: The United States has spent [your choice of multiple billions of dollars] building up [fill in name of Greater Middle Eastern country]’s army and equipping it with [range of weaponry of your choosing]. That army was recently routed by the [rebel or terrorist group of your choice] and fled, abandoning [list U.S. weaponry and equipment]. Washington has just sent in more [choose from: trainers/weaponry/equipment/all of the above] and [continue the sentence ad infinitum]. Or here’s another: After [number, and make it large] years and a [choose one or more: war, air war, drone assassination campaign, intervention, counterinsurgency program, counterterror effort, occupation] in [Greater Middle Eastern country of your choice] that seems to be [choose from: failing, unraveling, going nowhere, achieving nothing], the [fill in office of top U.S. official of your choice] has just stated that a U.S. withdrawal would be [choose from: counterproductive, self-defeating, inconceivable, politically unpalatable, dangerous to the homeland, mad] because [leave this blank, since no one knows].

Englehardt’s blog, TomDispatch, has an important article by Peter Van Buren, a 24-year veteran of the State Department, who spent a year in Iraq. The article is entitled: What If They Gave a War and Everyone Came? − What Could Possibly Go Wrong (October 2015 Edition)

You should read it all, but here are some extensive quotes:

In March 2003, when the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq, the region, though simmering as ever, looked like this: Libya was stable, ruled by the same strongman for 42 years; in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak had been in power since 1983; Syria had been run by the Assad family since 1971; Saddam Hussein had essentially been in charge of Iraq since 1969, formally becoming president in 1979; the Turks and Kurds had an uneasy but functional ceasefire; and Yemen was quiet enough, other than the terror attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Relations between the U.S. and most of these nations were so warm that Washington was routinely rendering “terrorists” to their dungeons for some outsourced torture.

Soon after March 2003, when U.S. troops invaded Iraq, neighboring Iran faced two American armies at the peak of their strength. To the east, the U.S. military had effectively destroyed the Taliban and significantly weakened al-Qaeda, both enemies of Iran, but had replaced them as an occupying force. To the west, Iran’s decades-old enemy, Saddam, was gone, but similarly replaced by another massive occupying force. From this position of weakness, Iran’s leaders, no doubt terrified that the Americans would pour across its borders, sought real diplomatic rapprochement with Washington for the first time since 1979. The Iranian efforts were rebuffed by the Bush administration.

There hadn’t been such an upset in the balance of power in the Middle East since, well, World War I, when Great Britain and France secretly reached the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which, among other things, divided up most of the Arab lands that had been under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Because the national boundaries created then did not respect on-the-ground tribal, political, ethnic, and religious realities, they could be said to have set the stage for much that was to come.

And more:

What if the U.S. hadn’t invaded Iraq in 2003? Things would undoubtedly be very different in the Middle East today. America’s war in Afghanistan was unlikely to have been a big enough spark to set off the range of changes Iraq let loose. There were only some 10,000 America soldiers in Afghanistan in 2003 (5,200 in 2002) and there had not been any Abu Ghraib-like indiscriminate torture, no equivalent to the scorched earth policy in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, nothing to spark a trans-border Sunni-Shia-Kurd struggle, no room for Iran to meddle. The Americans were killing Muslims in Afghanistan, but they were not killing Arabs, and they were not occupying Arab lands.

And finally: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

The invasion of Iraq, however, did happen. Now, some 12 years later, the most troubling thing about the current war in the Middle East, from an American perspective, is that no one here really knows why the country is still fighting. The commonly stated reason — “defeat ISIS” — is hardly either convincing or self-explanatory. Defeat ISIS why?

What are we doing in the ME?

Why are we doing it?

What end state do we want?

Reframing Jeb’s “He Kept Us Safe” Framing

This week, Jeb Bush said that his brother George W. had “kept us safe” when he was president. And given opportunities to walk that back, he doubled-down on the message. Donald Trump didn’t let him get away with that. Paul Campos at Salon:

For years, W. got a pass from his party. Questioning him meant questioning our foreign policy. Those days are over.

Campos asks us to imagine that the Republican presidential primary race is a Thanksgiving dinner, and that Donald Trump is the crazy old uncle who says outrageous things that embarrass everyone at the table. Sometimes those things are embarrassing because they are not true.

But occasionally, Uncle says something that’s embarrassing, precisely because it’s true.

The Donald’s tweaking of Jeb Bush’s W. kept us safe claim falls into the latter category. Trump’s mockery is justified. On its face, Jeb’s claim about W. is analogous to Exxon boasting about its record of keeping the Alaskan coastline “mostly free” from oil spills.

The meme of “he kept us safe” uses the technique that sociologists call “framing.” Wikipedia calls framing a process of selective influence over the individual’s perception of the meanings attributed to words, phrases or memories.

The cultural frame that the Republican Party has so successfully managed to build up since the days of Ronald Reagan says that Democrats are weak-kneed appeasers and pacifists, while the GOP is the party of Big, Bad, War Daddy figures, who deal with foreign threats with realism and ruthlessness.

You might think it would be impossible to fold the 9/11 terrorist attacks to this frame, but you would be wrong. Such is the power of this pre-ordained narrative that, when America suffered a terrorist attack under a Republican president, this inconvenient fact was magically disappeared down a collective memory hole for huge numbers of Americans.

Jeb’s defense of his brother repeats years of GOP messaging. The idea that George W. Bush kept the nation safe from terrorism is something that Republicans repeated constantly when he was in office, and since. The core of the argument was that W. shouldn’t be held responsible for the terrorist attack, even though his administration was warned about it in advance, because he only had nine months to do something about it, and al Qaeda was already around at the time he took office, (i.e. al Qaeda should have been taken care of by Clinton).

The power of this frame is evident if we use a thought experiment: Imagine that the 9/11 attacks happened during Obama’s first term. If 3,000 Americans had been murdered on US soil by foreign terrorists nine months into the Obama administration, no one would claim that Mr. Obama had “kept us safe,” because the claim wouldn’t be supported by any equally powerful Democratic cultural framing. Instead, the political fallout would have been Benghazi x 750!

Or, you could imagine Mr. Obama sending US troops into a civil war in Lebanon, and 241 of them being killed in a terrorist bombing ordered by Iran. And, imagine if a few years later, that it was senior members of Obama’s administration, not that of Ronald Regan, who were discovered sending Iran weapons in exchange for hostages. Democrats would still be paying for that at the polls.

Framing explains why Republicans give Jeb’s older brother a mulligan on terrorism, to the point where it was their family member Crazy Uncle Donald who had to state the obvious.

It’s understandable that, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, almost no one wanted to consider assigning responsibility for the attack. Fourteen years later, we no longer have an excuse not to, and that applies especially to today’s GOP presidential candidates, including Jeb Bush.

Now, everyone is ducking and covering. To assign some responsibility to the Bush administration for letting 9/11 happen could lead to uncomfortable questions of what we knew, when we knew it, and what we did with that knowledge.

Undressing the 50 year Big, Bad, War Daddy perception that supports/excuses W.’s Iraq adventure could represent an existential threat to the GOP in 2016, particularly if the attack comes from the Right instead of the Left.

That is why it’s a strategic imperative for them to pursue Benghazi-gate to the end, even if it’s off a cliff.

If the War Daddy framing is lost, they could be left touting Reagan’s winning in Grenada.

And how would Republicans spin THAT as this country’s finest hour?

Why Are Neocons So Afraid of Russia?

Russia moved rapidly to prop up the Assad regime. They bombed the so-called “moderates” who were waging a war of attrition against Assad’s army. With air support from Russia, Assad’s army is trying to retake territory seized this year in Idlib and Hama Provinces by insurgent groups that include the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front, and American-backed units.

So, we countered, saying that Russia was killing our guys on the ground:

‘Our guys are fighting for their lives’ said the official, estimating up to 150 CIA-trained moderate rebels have been killed by the Russians.

“Our guys”? The unnamed DC official is referring to the CIA mercenaries who are fighting under al-Qaeda’s command. If the CIA is so concerned about the fate of its “assets”, then all it has to do is to order these moderate head chopper clowns to withdraw back to Turkey or Jordan.

The predominantly neo-con US Foreign Policy elite sees the reemergence of Russia along with the emergence of China, to the status of superpowers as a zero sum game. Therefore, specific, event-limited multi-polar cooperation with these global competitors is considered impossible.

What irritates Washington more than anything else is a display of Russian military prowess that we thought was relegated to 20th century history. Moreover, Russia showed up and started shooting with impressive speed and efficiency. Note that Russia didn’t require that the local military undergo multiple years (and $ Billions) of military training in order to get busy. In addition, they created an active coalition with Iranian and Hezbollah forces who coordinate action on the ground in real time with the Russians and the Syrians.

Russia has given Syria an air force, which we couldn’t do effectively in Afghanistan or Iraq, because their armies, despite all of our training, are weaker than Syria’s.

All of this has enraged the neo-cons and the media. They cannot believe Russia’s temerity, or that Mr. Obama has allowed the US to look weak and feckless. But weakness should be understood, since the US strategy has no clear goals, and is increasingly incoherent. We have a hodgepodge of “allies”, all with competing and often diametrically opposed agendas.

It is not so much a question of which US ally is the most dependable, but which is the least duplicitous.

While we mount a PR campaign to denigrate Russia’s motives, we are simultaneously taking steps to impede their efforts in Syria by arming Assad’s enemies, setting up a likely proxy war with possibly, more than one adversary.

Why are we doing this? We can never underestimate the extent to which the neo-con foreign policy elite believes in American Exceptionalism. It sustains a collective and individual need to appear to win today without giving a thought to tomorrow.

So what do we really have to fear from Russia?

• Russia has a GDP smaller than Italy’s. In fact, its GDP is about a tenth that of the US.
• Its population is currently about 143 million, but this is projected to fall to less than 130 million by 2050. That would be less than the 2050 population of any two of: France, Germany, or the UK.

Basically, Russia has a small window through which it can conduct force projection in the ME. Unless things change drastically, that window will effectively close sometime within the next 10-20 years. So, maybe we shouldn’t be so afraid.

But, they seem committed to using smarts, deep understanding of the local situation, and detailed planning to achieve their goals, while the US uses tactical thinking and blunt force.

And the US needs to remember that it was a Sunni force that became al-Qaeda. It was al-Qaeda that attacked the US. The simple fact is that the direct descendants of Al Qaeda (AQ) in Iraq are Al Nusra (AN) and ISIS. These are the people we are backing inside Syria, even as we attempt to fight ISIS in eastern Syria and northern Iraq.

Russia is forming an alliance of Shia nations, including Iraq. They will ultimately tackle ISIS.

The US tries to square the circle, attacking the Sunni ISIS, while considering most Shia nations as enemies.

Sunnis comprise the largest anti-Assad forces in Syria. Therefore, if the Assad government fell, it would fall to Sunni Jihadists. We should understand if that is what our government is wishing for: Russia beaten. The Syrian government shattered. The flags of ISIS, AQ and AN flying over Damascus.

That is a nihilist viewpoint, and a prescription for endless war in the ME. The neo-cons may want that, but the rest of us, not so much.

What has happened to America’s foreign policy is a form of dementia brought about by an almost complete disregard for truth, honor, decency or honesty by the neo-con elite and many others in the political class.

Our wrongheaded Middle East policy is but a symptom, the neo-con dementia extends throughout our society and our economy.

Monday Wake-Up Call – October 19, 2015

Page A21 of Friday’s New York Times carried the news that our budget deficit for the fiscal year that ended on September 30th was $439 billion, or $44 billion less than the prior year, and nearly $1 trillion less than its peak during the Great Recession. Oh, and it equaled just 2.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The Wall Street Journal reported that the budget shortfall was 9% lower than last year, and at its lowest level since 2007.

If the “paper of record” buries this story, don’t expect to see it on the nightly news, or the Sunday bloviator shows. Yet, it was not very long ago that the media was obsessed with the budget deficit, egged on by Republicans who returned incessantly to Talking Points 101 from their slash Social Security and Medicare playbook . The WSJ provides a history of recent deficits:

The surplus on the top graph occurred during the Clinton administration. That would be about the same time that “spending” began exceeding “revenue” on the second graph.

The budget deficit is less of a problem than it has been since 2007, and since our economy is larger, it is also even less as a share of US GDP. Indeed, at 2.5% of GDP, our current deficit is less than the average of the past 40 years. The increase in tax receipts from higher tax rates, an improving economy (and stock market), combined with marginal cuts in federal spending (the Sequester) have all helped drop the deficit by almost 75% from its 2009 high.

So the deficit is falling, but the total debt of the US government is still increasing.

The debt is the total amount of money the US government owes. It’s the amount borrowed to cover all the deficits over the years. When the fiscal year ended on September 30, the US government owed $13.124 trillion to the public (a measure that includes Treasury securities held by the Federal Reserve.) To see the current tally, see the Treasury’s “The Debt to the Penny and Who Holds It” website.

To increase our debt, we have to increase the debt ceiling. But, once again, Congress can’t agree to increase the debt ceiling unless the Tea party faction of the Republican Party can score a few political points about Medicare, Social Security and Planned Parenthood.

Why does the Beltway media continue to fall for the Republican trope that they are the fiscally prudent party? We now have 35 years and five Presidents of proof that Republican Presidents spend like teenagers with their parents’ credit card.

But the “meh, so what?” emoji from the Beltway media after we cut $1 trillion from the deficit is truly disappointing. So today’s wake up is for the media who think that cutting the deficit is a low value target for our collective consciousness.

Today’s Wake Up is “For What It’s Worth”. Even though it is associated with Vietnam and Kent State, it isn’t an anti-war song. It was written about the “Sunset Strip riots” in November, 1966. From Wikipedia:

On one evening, 1,000 demonstrators gathered to protest against the enforcement of the curfew laws. Although the rallies began peacefully, trouble eventually broke out among the protesters and police. The unrest continued the next night and periodically throughout the rest of November and December forcing some clubs to shut down within weeks.

Here are Buffalo Springfield with “For What Its Worth”:

50 years later, this song is still relevant. That speaks to the song’s genius.

Unfortunately, we can’t say the same for our media and politicians.

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