The Wrongologist – Page 236 – Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

The Steady Erosion of Due Process Rights

Do the incarcerated lose the right to email privacy when they are institutionalized? Last week, the NYT reported on a case where prosecutors were reading the email correspondence between a prisoner and his lawyers. But this wasn’t a case at GITMO, it was at a federal prison in Brooklyn, NY.

The extortion case against Thomas DiFiore, a reputed boss in the Bonanno crime family, encompassed thousands of pages of evidence, but even as he was sending daily emails to his lawyers:

…federal prosecutors informed Mr. DiFiore last month that they would be reading the emails sent to his lawyers from jail, potentially using his own words against him.

The Times says that federal prosecutors around the country have begun reading prisoners’ emails to their lawyers. The issue has spurred court battles over whether inmates have a right to confidential email communications with their lawyers — a question on which federal judges have been divided.

All defendants using the federal prison email system, Trulincs, have to read and accept a notice that communications are monitored. So prosecutors point out that defendants are forewarned. Defense lawyers say the government is overstepping its authority and taking away a necessary tool for an adequate defense. Prosecutors say there are other ways for defense lawyers to communicate with clients; defense lawyers say the other methods are very inefficient.

In Brooklyn and across the country, the issue is being decided case by case.

The Times reports on a case In Georgia, in which a man named Jared Wheat used Trulincs email to work on ads for a banned weight-loss product. The FTC used the emails as part of a successful contempt case, arguing he violated a permanent injunction barring him from making unsubstantiated weight-loss claims.

Mr. Wheat’s lawyers said the trade commission’s request for the emails was illegal. Federal regulations allow mail sent to prisons to be marked as privileged:

…and email, particularly in the 21st century, has effectively replaced US Postal Service mail for most communications, and this court should not treat it differently than traditional mail.

But judge Charles A. Pannell Jr. of the US District Court in Atlanta, ruled in 2012 that by using Trulincs, Mr. Wheat “consented to the monitoring and thus had no reasonable expectation of privacy.”

That’s like saying that by using the space in prison for in-person meetings with lawyers, the prisoner “consents” to eavesdropping. A prisoner has a right to communicate with his lawyer, and the burden should be on the prison to see that the right to the confidentiality is preserved through each avenue of communication provided by the prison as much as it is through other avenues.

In the DiFiore case, his lawyer, Steve Zissou, tried to persuade a judge to stop prosecutors from monitoring his client’s emails:

Regardless of whether such communications qualify for protection under the attorney-client privilege, the government’s decision to read our communications with our client is entirely inappropriate.

The judge overseeing that case, Allyne R. Ross, ruled last Thursday that the government was allowed to review the emails. She wrote:

The government’s policy does not ‘unreasonably interfere’ with Mr. DiFiore’s ability to consult his counsel.

In the case of another Brooklyn-based prisoner, Syed Imran Ahmed, a surgeon accused of Medicare fraud who is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the decision went another way. In Dr. Ahmed’s case, the judge, Dora L. Irizarry, ruled against the government last month, barring it “from looking at any of the attorney-client emails, period.”

She seemed to take particular offense at an argument by a prosecutor, F. Turner Buford, who suggested that prosecutors merely wanted to avoid the expense and hassle of having to separate attorney-client emails from other emails sent via Trulincs. The government was not otherwise interested in the contents of those messages, he said. From Judge Irizarry:

That’s hogwash…You’re going to tell me you don’t want to know what your adversary’s strategy is? What kind of a litigator are you then? Give me a break.

Communications between lawyer and client should be privileged no matter the form of communication. It is disturbing to see Americans asleep at the wheel as our civil liberties over the past decade have eroded with little resistance.

So, the crux of the matter is that if the law is denied to some, we are all at risk.

The majority who say that they “have nothing to hide” do not understand this. They do not understand that for democracy to be worth its salt, it must defend the rights of everyone, in particular, those with whom we disagree, those who live differently from us, or who think differently from the majority.

America as we know it can easily survive without everyone having access to assault rifles, but it cannot survive without everyone having access to due process.

As go our due process rights, so will go our democracy.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – July 27, 2014

A corporatist meme took a face plant this week. Bloomberg Business Week charted CEO pay vs. stock market return, based on data supplied by the executive compensation consultants, Equilar. It shows that there is very little correlation between CEO pay and company performance.

Equilar ranked the salaries of 200 highly paid CEOs against their company’s stock market return, and the scattering of data looks mostly random, implying that CEO performance appears to have little to do with CEO compensation. The graph plots the relative ranking of 2013 stock market return against the relative ranking of 2013 CEO total compensation. If you go to Bloomberg, the chart below is interactive. You can hover over a dot and see information on the CEO and company.

Bottom line: there’s essentially no link between how well CEOs perform and how well they are paid:

Based on this, it seems that corporate boards are unable to predict how well their chosen CEO candidate will do once on the job, since the trend line, which didn’t plot in this screen capture, shows that the correlation is ~1%. That explodes the myth that a primary metric used by company board compensation committees to justify CEO pay is stock market return.

CEO pay isn’t the government’s business, but corporate governance is. When governance is based on something other than what shareholders are told, it is worth a look.

In other news, the immigration issue continued, with Texas Governor Perry’s grandstanding. He was joined by many in Congress and in the media, some of whom wanted to be sure that the Texas National Guard was armed against the threat implied by children illegally crossing our border.

Lady Liberty’s meditation on immigration is lost in the noise:

An alternative strategy might build sympathy for the kids’ plight:

In Obamacare news, courts made two opposite decisions using the same facts:

It was another week of some Advising but very little Consenting:

The loss of MH17 brought no new facts, just grandstanding here as well:

Gaza, along with Ukraine, show how missile use has changed in 45 years:

Friday Music Break – July 25, 2014

Today we say hello and goodbye to Black 47. The band got started in 1989 by Larry Kirwan and Chris Byrne. Its name comes from the traditional term for the summer of 1847, the worst year of the Great Irish Famine. They developed a niche, playing a combination of traditional Celtic music infused with Rap and other contemporary rock genres.

B47 is an unblinkingly political band, playing rock ‘n’ roll based on Irish roots, with songs covering topics from the Northern Ireland troubles to US civil rights, Iraq and urban unrest in contemporary New York.

Heart, intellect and a high value on freedom, is what Black 47 is all about. The Wrongologist has been a fan since the early 1990’s. The group will amicably disband on November 8, 2014, exactly 25 years after their first gig in the Bronx.

Right after 9/11, Black 47 appeared regularly at Connolly’s Pub in Manhattan, playing what Kirwan has described as intensely emotional shows in order to provide fans who had lost loved ones an outlet for their grief and loss. Those shows were channeled into their album New York Town.

But let’s go back to an earlier time. Here is “Green Suede Shoes” off their 1996 album of the same name:

Lastly, here is “Downtown Baghdad Blues” from their CD IRAQ. IRAQ came out in 2008 and was popular with troops serving in Iraq and it was written in part, from soldiers’ letters:

Here are the first and last stanzas of Downtown Baghdad Blues’ lyrics:

Got a buddy in Najaf, he’s playing it straight
Prays to the Lord Jesus Christ every night
Got a homey in Samarra goin’ up the wall
Every time he hear an Islamic prayer call
Me, I don’t care much for Jesus or Mohammed
They don’t stop bullets to the best of my knowledge
Later for the both of you, catch you in eternity
Hopefully, towards the end of this century

I didn’t want to come here, I didn’t get to choose,
I got the hup, two, three, four Downtown Baghdad Blues.

Mission accomplished, yeah, up on deck
Got no armor for my Humvee, left facin’ this train wreck
Shia don’t like me, want Islamic Revolution
Sunni say civil war is part of the solution
Maybe someday there’ll be peace in Fallujah
McDonald’s on the boulevard, Cadillac cruisin’
I’m tryin’ hard to keep this whole thing straight
But will someone tell me what am I doin’ here in the first place?

What Can America Learn from its Competitors?

(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.

Can We Learn from Our Middle East War?

Yesterday, the Wrongologist wrote that we do not have a non-military response to any foreign geopolitical problem, that we fail to recognize what is defeating us, or why things are happening that are beyond our control.

Andrew Bacevich has an article in Notre Dame Magazine, entitled: “Lessons From America’s War for the Greater Middle East” that opens the door to understanding how to begin to make things better. He makes the point that for well over 30 years, the US has been engaged militarily in various parts of the Islamic world, and no end to that involvement is in sight. Bacevich asks:

What is the nature of the military struggle we are waging?

After 9/11, we called it the Global War on Terror. Bacevich says we should be calling it America’s War for the Greater Middle East. The original premise was that the Islamic world poses a growing threat to vital US national security interests, and the application of hard power would enable the United States to check those threats and thereby preserve the American way of life. Bacevich points out:

At the time President Carter declared the Persian Gulf a vital national security interest — that was the literal meaning of the Carter Doctrine — he did not intend to embark upon a war. Nor did he anticipate what course that war was going to follow — its duration, costs and consequences.

What Carter and his presidential successors found in the ME caused them to initiate a sequence of military actions that collectively should be called a war. The dots connect. Seemingly disparate events such as the Beirut bombing in 1983, the “Black Hawk Down” debacle of 1993 and the Iraq invasion of 2003 (plus others) form part of a single narrative. Acknowledging the existence of that narrative — seeing America’s War for the Greater Middle East as a whole — is a prerequisite to understanding where we are today. From Bacevich:

Let me state plainly my own overall assessment of that war. We have not won it. We are not winning it. And simply pressing on is unlikely to produce more positive results next year or the year after

Bacevich lists “10 lessons” we should take from the “Middle East War” if we are going to make our future different from the past. Let’s review a few:

First, the center of gravity:

The center of gravity refers to the factor upon which a war’s outcome ultimately turns. It could be a valuable terrain, an army or a city. Bacevich says that Carter and George H. W. Bush thought the terrain was the desert. But the key terrain in the ME War is urban, and people are this war’s center of gravity. That means we can’t just kill adversaries, but we must influence urban populations to succeed. When American soldiers venture onto this key terrain they are alien intruders. They arrive in cities like Baghdad or Kabul as heirs to a Western civilization that has seldom furthered the well-being of Muslims.

The phrase “Anglo-American” for us, conjures up glorious memories of a partnership forged to free a continent gripped by Hitler. Islamic residents of the Middle East inevitably see “Anglo-American” purposes as a desire to conquer.

Sixth, the US military system:

9/11 revealed defects in America’s approach to raising its military forces. Notwithstanding the virtues of a professional military, notably durability and tactical prowess, the all-volunteer army has failed. It encourages political irresponsibility. It’s undemocratic. It turns out to be exorbitantly expensive. And it hasn’t won a war.

It makes the relationship between the US military and US society dishonest. Rhetorically, we “support the troops”, but the support is seldom more than skin-deep. As authorities in Washington commit US forces to wars that are unnecessary, or ill-managed, or unwinnable — Americans seem close to indifferent. The bungled rollout of Obamacare generated both public attention and outrage, while a bungled military campaign would only elicit shrugs.

Our reliance on professional soldiers relieves citizens of any responsibility to contribute to the nation’s defense. Can that be a good thing?

Seventh, the political economy of war:

Washington’s appetite for waging war in the ME has exceeded the willingness of young Americans to volunteer for military service, and the ability for the standing army to continue the fight for 12+ years. This has created a gap: Too much war, too few warriors.

This gap has created an opening for profit-minded “private security firms” in the war zone. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, contractors ultimately outnumbered uniformed military personnel. The results have fallen well short of being satisfactory. Waste and corruption have occurred on a colossal scale — so much so that the Pentagon is literally unable to say where all the money went. War has always created opportunities for some people to make money. America’s War for the Greater Middle East has become a means for many private firms and individuals to get rich.

Ninth, our regional allies:

The longer America’s War for the Greater Middle East drags on, the more apparent it becomes that Washington has done a lousy job of picking allies. Consider Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, for example. The United States seeks to reduce the prevalence of violent Islamic radicalism. The governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia actively promote it. It’s time to stop pretending otherwise.

Then there is Israel. US interests and those of the Jewish state have diverged. To ensure the security and well-being of its citizens, Israel vigorously employs its military muscle to preempt perceived threats and ensure Israeli control of vital terrain and resources.

The chief US interest in the region lies in promoting stability. Anything else falls into the category of “nice to have.” In that regard, the US has an interest in responding to the grievances of the Palestinian people. Yet the government of Israel will respond to those grievances only on Israeli terms. In the meantime, the persistence of those grievances provides either a genuine cause of, or a pretext for, anti-American and anti-Western attitudes across much of the Islamic world.

When it comes to waging the War for the Greater Middle East, Israel belongs in the same category as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan: As allies, all three are unhelpful.

Bacevich closes by saying:

Does the Islamic world pose a problem for the US? You bet, in all sorts of ways. But after more than three decades of trying, it’s pretty clear that the application of military power is unlikely to provide a solution

His Tenth issue is religion. But, he has a simplistic view of the role of religion in the failure of our military strategy for the Middle East. Read his comments and then draw your own conclusions.

The solution, if there is one, must be found by looking beyond the military realm. If we were for example, to become the primary supplier of humanitarian aid to the displaced people in the Middle East, we could position ourselves as a positive force for change among many millions of Muslims, not just another country in a long line of infidel conquerors.

Read his entire article here.

Did 9/11 Change Everything?

“He didn’t know what was defeating him, but he sensed it was something he could not cope with, something that was far beyond his power to control or even at this point in time comprehend.” –Hubert Selby Jr.

The Wrongologist has changed the blog’s “Quotes We Like” sidebar to add the quote above. The quote is from Selby’s Requiem for a Dream. He also wrote Last Exit To Brooklyn. These are two gritty American novels of their time and place. Exit was published in 1964 and presents a view of 1950’s Brooklyn NY. Requiem was published in 1978. Both were made into movies. Selby died in 2004.

In a Salon article in 2000, Selby is quoted about Requiem:

The dream I’m referring to in the book, of course, is the great American dream: prosperity, property, prestige, etc. And the fact that it’ll kill you dead. Striving for it is a disaster. Attaining it is a killer. It takes many forms, and the results are not happy. It’s not a feel-good thing

Selby continues:

‘Requiem’ is about the cancer of that dream…Of course, there are a lot of people who are successful who work very hard. They’re not all George W. Bush. But the point is they’re misguided. That’s not what life is about. We believe, probably more than anywhere, that life is getting all this material stuff. It’s a case of misguided ambition and desire

We can take this further. Today, America doesn’t know what is defeating it. America senses that it can’t cope, that there are things happening that are beyond our control or comprehension:
• We can no longer solve our domestic problems
• We are powerless to deal with the Malaysian airline disaster in Ukraine
• We can’t resolve the tri-partite struggle in Iraq
• We can no longer restrain Israel in its non-proportional response to Hamas
• We are no longer on the same side as our long-term Middle East allies, Saudi Arabia and Egypt
• We can’t figure out a non-military response for China’s initiatives throughout Asia

In fact, we no longer have a non-military response to any foreign problem. The power strategies that we employed throughout the 1950’s, continuing down to the end of the Soviet Union no longer work. Back then, we played chess, moving pieces across the board. We used whichever proxies or allies were at hand, we overthrew elected governments, thereby violating our own ideology. We supported and installed dictatorial governments. We promised freedom and prosperity, while helping to deliver hegemony, based on our military intervention, or the threat of it.

Today, we have no answers, only posturing from all of our leaders. We have become the kind of people who criticize, not the kind of people who can solve problems.

We are no longer king-makers in the third world, the neo-conservative approach of use of military power cannot stand in the face of asymmetric warfare and the devastating superiority of IEDs to up-armored military vehicles.

From Ian Welsh:

Deny the fruits of western ideology to those who reach for them, and of course they will turn against you. Pervert them even within your own countries by undermining your own democratic principles and by concentrating wealth and income in the hands of a few, while impoverishing the many; make it clear that modern neo-liberal capitalism doesn’t spread prosperity to even the core nations, and you have set up one of the preconditions of not just hegemonic collapse, but of internal collapse of a civilization

And here is Welsh’s money quote:

People who do not believe in the genuine goodness of what they are fighting for, hardly fight for it at all

That is what we see in Iraq. More importantly, that is what we see in America. Today, no one believes in the genuine goodness of what they are fighting for, be they job-hunting Millennials, unreconstructed 1960’s liberals, or today’s money-grubbing Republican and Democrat politicians.

When you no longer know how to solve problems, you turn to what is easy. You buy the next shiny object, you live through the lives of the rich and famous. Snark and incivility replace facts and discussion.

There was a display in the 9/11 Museum that showed a piece of debris about 3’ high by 6’ wide and 12’ long. It was rusty and seemed to be sedimentary in nature, visibly comprised of metal, concrete, and wires. It is actually part of 5 floors of the Trade Center, compressed by weight and softened by intense heat. Nothing of the desks, computers, phones and people are distinguishable in this artifact. The Museum calls it a “composite”. It brings home the destructive power of the falling towers on 9/11:

Photo is from before the “composite” went on display

After the Towers’ fall, the news media said that 9/11 changed everything, and we believed it. But changes to our view of the world, and its view of us, had started long before that. We stopped learning about geopolitics in the 1960’s, substituting false analogies and military aid to local strongmen for true knowledge of how to change the world.

Since then, we have been compressed by the heat and weight of events we cannot understand. If you think about it, our decline after 9/11 came because we panicked, spent all of our money on pointless wars, and gave up our core values in the name of an illusion of safety, and pure vengeance.

So, yes, America doesn’t know what is defeating it. America senses that there are things happening that are beyond its control or comprehension.

But these things are knowable, and fixable. Hopefully, by Americans.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – July 20, 2014

“No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.” ― Edward R. Murrow

Your aspiring blogger visited the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan yesterday. It was very moving and quite crowded. A striking thing was remembering how uniform the reactions of other countries were. They all felt badly for America, many offered help.

Our citizens were very united, showing sympathy for the families of the people lost on that day, working together to search for possible survivors, supporting George Bush in his attack on Iraq.

We are paying a huge price around the world for invading Iraq and Afghanistan. We no longer have the sympathy of the world, many nations no longer trust us, and quite a few have become our enemy. Our overreaction to 9/11 here at home, from the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to the Patriot Act, to the rampant excesses of the NSA, to the financial disaster of going to war while we cut taxes, have left us divided at home. Our foreign policy is reactive, while we have no domestic policy.

The Museum is displaying a brick from Osama bin-Laden’s Abbottabad compound:

Makes you wonder what ELSE they brought back from the mission. In other news, nobody likes Dick Cheney’s bloviating about the Middle East:

The Malaysian Airliner disaster hurts the world, just like 9/11 did:

Keeping score in the Israel – Palestinian war:

What are we learning this time?

There were domestic issues to think about, like Obama’s transparency:

Friday Music Break – July 18, 2014

Tommy Ramone died last Friday, and now there are no more founding members of the Ramones. Most of their contemporaries—the Clash, Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, Television, Blondie—still have living members. Key players from forebears like the Stooges, the New York Dolls, the MC5, and the Velvets are still here, but not Lou Reed. A few Beatles, Beach Boys, and all of the Stones are alive.

Although the Ramones had a great sense of humor, they were no joke. The Ramones were not art rock, or overblown like Yes and Genesis, they were originals. The Ramones never had a hit. But now, their music is played in stadiums, and even babies wear their t-shirts.

Credit Hilly Kristal, founder of CBGB’s for giving them a place to play. The Ramones reminded us that two minutes was long enough for a song, and that first and foremost, rock should be fun. From Bob Lefsetz:

They emerged fully-formed, their debut opened with the legendary ’Blitzkrieg Bop’ and segued into ‘Beat on the Brat,’ that’s what you do with a baseball bat…

And then came their masterpiece, “Rocket To Russia“. “Rockaway Beach” could have been a Beach Boys tune. That album also had “Sheena is a Punk Rocker”. Rockaway Beach was an early haunt for the young Wrongologist. And on “Road To Ruin” was the band’s apotheosis, “I Wanna Be Sedated.”

Here is “I Wanna Be Sedated”:

And a bonus, “Rock ‘n Roll High School” from the album, “End of the Century“, arranged by Phil Spector:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQFEo5pj-V8

What’s The Matter With Kansas?

“Masquerading as a man with a reason
My charade is the event of the season
And if I claim to be a wise man
Well, it surely means that I don’t know” – Kansas, 1976

The state, not the group. In 2010, Republican and former US Senator, Sam Brownback was elected governor on promise of restoring the state’s economy. In 2012, he signed a massive tax cut into law, arguing that it would be a big boost the economy. Eventually, he hoped to eliminate individual income taxes entirely:

I think we can, I really do…The experiences in some other states have been that when you cut income taxes, your sales tax increase more than makes up for your income tax cut

Supply-side economics was the basis of his optimism. Tax cut proponents like economist Arthur Laffer insist that if you cut taxes deeply enough, the resultant boom in economic activity will boost revenues. It’s magic, painless. It’s what every politician wants. And Sam Brownback and the Kansas legislature went all-in: In 2012, the Kansas legislature:
• Cut individual tax rates by 25%
• Repealed the tax on sole proprietorships and other “pass-through” businesses
• Increased the standard deduction

In 2013, the legislature cut taxes again, passing a measure to gradually lower rates even more over five years. By 2018, the top rate, which was 6.45% in 2012, will fall to 3.9%. The Center on Budget & Policy Priorities (CBPP) has a nice summary of the tax changes.

So what happened after all those tax cuts? Revenues collapsed. Kansas reported that it took in $338 million less than expected in the 2014 fiscal year and would have to dip heavily into its reserve fund. From June, 2013 to June, 2014, all Kansas tax revenue plunged by 11%. Individual income taxes fell from $2.9 billion to $2.2 billion and all income tax collections plummeted from $3.3 billion to $2.6 billion, a drop of more than 20%. Keep in mind that these are actual year-over-year declines in revenues, not projected shortfalls in revenue. They come at a time when the national economy is recovering, and most other states are enjoying increases in tax collections. The cuts, largely benefiting the wealthy, cost the state 8% of the revenue it needs for schools and other government services. As the CBPP noted, that’s about the same economic effect as a midsize recession.

Yet, there were excuses from Brownback in the past few weeks:

It’s the price of creating jobs

Since the first round of tax cuts, Kansas job growth has lagged the US economy. So has Kansas personal income. While more small businesses were formed, many of them were individuals taking advantage of the newly tax-free status by redefining themselves as businesses, now allowed under the Kansas tax code. Kansas’ non-partisan Legislative Research Department estimates Brownback’s tax cuts will cost the state $5 billion in lost revenue by 2019. To put that in perspective, Kansas currently has an $8 billion annual budget.

As a result, Moody’s cut the state’s debt rating in April for the first time in at least 13 years, citing the tax cuts and a lack of confidence in the state’s fiscal management.

Kansas is required to balance its budget every year, so when its surplus runs out, further spending cuts will be necessary. The declining revenues have necessitated extensive cuts in state education funding, according to the CBPP.

Brownback is up for reelection, but given the problems with his economic program, he is having trouble in the polls. A recent poll by PPP shows that Brownback’s approval rating has plummeted. In the most recent poll of the race, Democrat Paul Davis leads Brownback by 6 points.

You don’t cut revenue based on a theory. If you cut revenues, you cut your expenses by the same amount. You don’t gamble on possibilities, you make sure you will be fiscally sound. By cutting revenues and hoping for a large return because a THEORY says it should happen, means Brownback was gambling with the future of the State of Kansas.

Has Brownback never heard the adage: “Don’t gamble what you cannot afford to lose?”

Some of those old adages are pretty sensible, while some governors are not.

Bigger Threat: ISIS or Congress?

What is behind the fear of ISIS in the West? The ISIS crisis in Iraq and its parallel in Syria challenges both governments as well as the status quo in the Middle East. But why would people believe that this band of fighters is an existential treat to the West? Attorney General Eric Holder shared his alarmism yesterday that the threat from ISIS is:

…more frightening than anything I think I’ve seen as attorney general

ABC News headlined “See the Terrifying ISIS Map Showing Its Five-Year Expansion Plan,” with the black flag of the Caliphate spreading like spilled crude oil across Africa, Central Asia, the Balkans, and Spain.

Lt. Gen. Joseph L. Votel, head of the Joint Special Operations Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week:

There’s risks to allowing things just to try to resolve themselves, particularly when there are interests that could affect our country…

All of this jowl-shaking goes on while the Obama administration is tumbling to the fact that there is no on-the-ground military option for us. According to a classified report leaked to The New York Times, our top brass believe:

That only about half of Iraq’s operational units are capable enough for American commandos to advise them if the White House decides to help roll back the advances made by Sunni militants in northern and western Iraq over the past month

Since Iraq’s political deadlock doesn’t look like it will be broken anytime soon, the US can’t take Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-sectarian side in a war against Iraq’s Sunnis without real repercussions from the billion Sunnis around the world.

But how serious is the ISIS threat? Most estimates say they have a core of perhaps 10,000 soldiers and maybe another 10k of new recruits. They are fighting the Syrian Army, Iranian-backed militias, the YPG, the Peshmerga, Al Nusra Front, the Free Syrian Army, in addition to the “Iraqi army” and Iraqi Shiite militias.

Let’s remember that we couldn’t hold Iraq with 168,000 troops, and the most advanced military equipment on earth. So the chance that ISIS can seize or even temporarily hold portions of Baghdad with some fraction of 10,000 is zero. From Gary Brecher at Pando News:

ISIS is about as scary as your neighbor’s yappy Shih Tzu: all noise and no teeth. Let’s just sober up, for Christ’s sake, and remember we’re talking about a half-assed Sunni militia that couldn’t face up to Assad’s mediocre Syrian Arab Army and still hasn’t found a way to occupy Sunni Iraqi towns that were outright abandoned by the [Iraqi] Army

ISIS is spread quite thin, but the Pentagon’s report says that Iraq’s armed forces and security apparatus are so badly run, so infiltrated with Iranian-backed Shiite militiamen and informers from ISIS, that there isn’t much of an opening for greater US involvement. The report is based on the findings of six teams of American Special Operations forces who were tasked with assessing the Iraqi Army that America trained and equipped at a cost of more than $25 billion.

Yet, in a show of cognitive dissonance, James Dubik, the retired Army Lt. General who oversaw the training of the Iraqi Army in 2007 and 2008, said that Iraq’s security forces could make gains against ISIS even if only half its divisions were effective, but that an advisory effort was very important:

Even if half was whipped into good enough shape, that would be enough to turn the tide

At a July 3rd Pentagon news conference, General Dempsey noted that, while Iraqi security forces were capable of defending Baghdad, they were not capable on their own of launching a counteroffensive and reversing the ISIS gains. So today, the three factions—Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shia Arabs—are holding their own, consolidating their turf, not trying very hard to occupy the other groups’ territories.

This is an existential crisis for America?

Did we liberate Iraq, or did we destroy it? If we destroyed Iraq, are we responsible for restoring the infrastructure to its previous capabilities? Taxing ourselves to restore Iraq might teach us that we shouldn’t attack countries that are not threatening us, but we can’t afford to pay that bill.

We have the most advanced military in the world, there is no real second place to us in military might. Yet as a nation, we are failing ourselves. We are down the global ladder when it comes to healthcare, public education, repairing our infrastructure and providing social services. We can’t get out of our own way on policy because of our divided politics. We are the global leader in incarcerating our own citizens.

Why do we look at ISIS and say that they are our existential threat?

Like Pogo said: “we have met the enemy, and he is us”.