Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: September 2019 Page 2 of 3

Should NATO Exist? Will It?

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On September 20, 2019

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One of Trump’s constant cries is that American allies aren’t spending enough on their militaries and that the US is, thus, carrying them.

While there is a temptation to scorn this argument because it was made by Trump, it has a fair bit of truth to it, as Matt Stoller suggested today:

The American military umbrella is a bad deal for America and a good deal for our “allies.” Japan gets protected channels to Middle Eastern oil, for free. Germany gets protection from Russia, for free. They all export to us at terms unfavorable to our own industries/middle class.

The problem with this is that it is, well, true.

And that Europe “needs” America for defense against Russia is absurd:

Let us be clear, the EU’s population is 508 million. When the UK leaves, it will be 447 million.

Russia’s population is 143 million.

The EU minus Britain has a GDP of 18.1 trillion (purchasing power parity), Russia has an economy of 3.5 trillion (ppp). Germany alone has a GDP (ppp) of four trillion.

If Europe “needs” the US, it’s because it can’t be bothered to raise a proper army. That’s all. It is genuinely free-riding.

Chinese and American flags flying together

But then NATO is a large part of why Russia is a “threat”. The expansion of NATO, which Bush Sr. promised Gorbachev would not happen, is a large part of why Russia has armed up.

It’s not clear that NATO should even exist. Its purpose was to resist the Warsaw Pact and the USSR, neither of which exist. Russia has a lot of nukes, and is relatively strong militarily, but it is no USSR and has no grand alliance facing NATO. It is not a threat unless terribly mismanaged. (Which, I suppose, it has been.)

Disband NATO. Let the Europeans take care of their own defense, or lay prostate before the Russians as they choose.

Japan is a trickier proposition. What American military presence there does is simple enough: It prevents Japan from needing its own nuclear weapons. The same is true of American bases in South Korea. Leave and those two countries have to nuclearize or become Chinese satrapies (and Japan will need a much larger navy).

It’s also worth noting that the US didn’t start protecting “Japan’s oil.” The US needed foreign oil too; it is only recently, under Obama, that the US has again reached petrocarbon self-sufficiency and is able to say, “We’re protecting other people’s oil.”

WWII was won by the powers who had access to more oil. Generals and admirals at the time understood the war was, to a large extent, about oil.

America may not need foreign oil now, but it did for decades and that is why it protected maritime oil trade.

In general, however, a US withdrawal from its forward bases will be a good thing. A rebalancing of trade will also be a good thing, though it will hurt as it happens (Trump is not doing it well). Deliberately offshoring and outsourcing the US (and Britain’s) industrial base led, more or less directly, to Trump and other social ills. It created a group of people who have lost for 40 to 50 years. Their parents had better lives. They had better lives. They know it. You cannot lie to them with BS statistics and pretend otherwise.

So they are willing to vote for and support anyone who seems like they will wreck a system which doesn’t serve them. Maybe what happens will be worse, but what’s happening right now is shit.

This is not contradicted by Trump’s support from red-state elites. They are also scared, because they also know their situation is precarious and that power and wealth has flowed away from them. And they rule over Hell. It isn’t always better to reign in Hell.

So the world is changing. It was changing before Trump: The Trans-Pacific Partnership was intended to be a trade bloc AGAINST China.

Note carefully Stoller’s hostility to China. It is constant. The American elite is finally reorienting. They don’t see Russia as a primary threat. They’re moving away from caring about the Middle East as they now have enough oil of their own and see a post-oil future coming. They know the rising great/super power is China.

They want to reorient their alliances against China. The price of keeping NATO will be keeping China OUT. When Germany said they wanted to do more business with China, Stoller was angry and said it was an argument against NATO. No Huawei, no China.

The world is very likely to divide into trade blocs–probably two, maybe three.

China rises. The US moves to protect its position.

Great power politics continue, as they ever have.

There is no end to history, save an end to humans. Only fools ever thought so.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Cruelty and Stupidity of Trumpian Homelessness Rhetoric

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On September 18, 2019

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From a study by his officials:

In the report, “The State of Homelessness in America,” even shelters get some of the blame for increasing the number of people who are homeless. The argument: Some people would be able to find their own housing if they were turned away from shelters.

“While shelters play an extremely important role in bringing some people off the streets, it also brings in people who would otherwise be housed, thus increasing total homelessness,” the report states.

So tiresomely stupid. Shelters are shitholes, and unsafe, and most people hate them. Many homeless people refuse to sleep in them, and even die of exposure. They are simply too dangerous.

Or:

homelessness could be dramatically reduced by slashing restrictions on housing construction and being less tolerant of people sleeping on the streets.

In which case, more condos which poor people couldn’t afford would be built. Developers don’t want to build for poor people in “world cities,” it’s just that simple. It’s a market failure, and there are solutions; simply slashing regulations won’t do it as the current market preference is for expensive homes and apartments.

As for being less tolerant of people sleeping on the street: What? These fucktards think more than a tiny minority of the homeless want to sleep on the street? It’s a positive choice they make?

The sheer stupidity and blind ideological thinking is tiresome.

As study after study has shown there are two ways to get the homeless housed: Give them money or give them homes. For those with the most mental and physical problems, some social assistance is also needed. But if you want people housed, house them.

That requires housing which they can afford (or the government can afford) to pay for for them. That doesn’t mean luxury condos.

This isn’t rocket science. It’s been studied repeatedly. We know what works. The question, as always, is whether we care enough to bother.

I mean, rich people need more tax cuts and subsidies. You can have that or take care of poor people.

That’s the choice, and Trump is on the wrong side of it.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

 

 

And They Made a Desert: 80 to 90% Drop in Nutrients in Food

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On September 17, 2019

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Stumbled across this lovely chart the other day.

Nutrient Decline from Challenges in the Diagnosis of Magnesium Status

The core fact that most people, including the folks in the “best every world” Panglossian movement (like Pinker), don’t seem to understand is that even if they were right (questionable), the prosperity we have is based on burning down our own house.

“Sure is hot! Hottest it’s ever been!”

Yup. Sure is.

We have vastly reduced our supplies of various non-renewable resources. We have destroyed many species, leading to a loss of biodiversity, which may threaten food chains. In addition, every species we kill is one whose genetic code is lost to us, and we won’t even know what treasures we have lost when we genuinely become able to safely make direct genetic changes.

We have used up large amounts of sinks–places we can store pollution and excess production. We have run down aquifers so much that many of them will never recover. We have poisoned ground water. Fish stocks are down eighty to ninety percent as well, and the Great Barrier Reef is dying. It will not be saved.

And yes, we have destroyed the nutrient value of the soil (where we haven’t just let it blow away), so much so that eighty to ninety percent of some nutrients are missing. No wonder we have a vast incidence of chronic disease that our grandparents and great-grandparents didn’t: We’re effectively starving, while getting fat off of empty calories.

The Industrial Era has been the Era of Locusts. We think we’re rich, but most of what has been happening is that we’re consuming resources far faster than they can be replaced. Meanwhile, we’re poisoning ourselves and the earth; shattering ecosystems which we do not know how to repair (or even understand), and altering Earth’s climate cycle (we should be moving towards an Ice Age).

This is crazed behaviour. This is the behaviour of children who have no self-control at all. Even when we know what we are doing is destructive, we keep doing it, like some kid gorging on cake ’til s/he pukes.

The super-optimists are fools. Yes, it is possible we’ll get out of this, but it’s not possible if we keep telling ourselves that the hole we’ve dug is no big deal. “Why can’t I see the sky anymore, Papa?”

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

How Important Is the Drone Attack on the Saudi Oil Field?

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On September 16, 2019

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As you’d expect from the title, both more and less than it seems.

The impact on oil prices is not that big a deal, despite the screaming. If they were to, say, wind up at $75/barrel for a few months, well the last time we had prices that high was…less than a year ago. It’s possible this will push us into a long-delayed recession, but if it does, that recession was going to happen anyway.

If Trump acts like an idiot and attacks Iran, of course, this will turn out to be a big deal. Otherwise, it isn’t a big deal, in and of itself.

Nor should anyone be crying for the Saudis. Assume it is true the attack was launched by Yemeni Houthis with some Iranian support. Remember that Saudi Arabia has been bombing and deliberately starving Yemen for years. They’re at war, and if the Houthis have a bit of support from Iran, what of it? Saudi Arabia itself has supported many organizations which have attacked other nations, possibly including Al-Qaeda and 9/11.

If you bomb the shit out of a country, and they manage to get in one hit against you? Boo-hoo.

Nor should the US care, as Saudi Arabia is a terrible ally who has done more harm to American interests than any other “ally” in the world, with the only possible exception of Israel.

This isn’t a US problem–and it shouldn’t be their war, and they should stop helping Saudi Arabia hit Yemen. But I guess the Sauds have always been good to the House of Trump, so perhaps there will be a war, on behalf of Trump hotels.

That aside, as I have written a number of times, drones are, and were always going to be, a weapon of the weak, and it is becoming harder and harder to defend against them. The US military was incredibly stupid to develop them, because ultimately they remove part of the monopoly of force from powerful countries. A world in which air strikes require jets that only a few countries can build, and which are expensive, large, and easy-to-find is a world which is much more favorable to great powers.

Instead, we have the cost of a somewhat-effective air force and assassination force dropping through the floor. Soon, these things will be routinely used by very small governments and non-state actors to kill their enemies; specific, named enemies, just as the US has been doing for a couple decades now.

This is going to get ugly.

It’s not all bad, taken from a longer point of view. Ages where elites can easily be killed tend to concentrate elite minds. In some places, that will lead to even worse police states, but the other way to solve the issue is to make people’s lives pretty good. People with pretty good lives tend to have better things to do than engage in political violence.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 15, 2019

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On September 15, 2019

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by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

Strategic Political Economy

The Oligarch Threat
Tamsin Shaw, August 27, 2019 [New York Review of Books]

The bigger picture… was the way in which the Cambridge Analytica story opened a window onto a new constellation of international billionaires, corrupt politicians, and war profiteers who were apparently amassing enormous power. That story isn’t only about technology, data, and psychographic profiling; it’s also, at root, a story about the consequences of entrenched economic inequality, the privatization of essential public assets and government functions, including even national security, and the challenge to conventional foreign policy posed by the bargains being struck between international kleptocrats….

In both Britain and America, there exists a class of billionaires who seek to become oligarchs and a corresponding class of government officials who want to become billionaires. Since 2008, when the financial markets’ development of complex and ill-regulated derivatives led to a credit crisis and crash that erased huge sums from the fortunes of the global ultra-rich—with Western tycoons like Rupert Murdoch and Sheldon Adelson, and Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska among the biggest losers—the world’s billionaires have been moving away from a commitment to free markets. Learning from the banking bailouts and the socialization of moral hazard, they have instead embraced an ambition to build lasting monopolies that enjoy both official and unofficial forms of state support.
….
The United States has its own versions of the oligarchs, albeit ones who made their money legally rather than through the criminal enterprises for which many Russians have been indicted by American prosecutors or sanctioned by the federal government. As I’ve previously written, the oligarchs of Silicon Valley managed to establish their extraordinary monopolies—viewed by the state as a form of soft power as well as an essential national security asset in a world of cyber-conflict—only because that entire sector received huge injections of venture-capital funding from the military and intelligence agencies. In this case, too, the astronomical profits are largely untaxed and held off-shore….

This international billionaire class is also establishing and using private intelligence and influence agencies like Cambridge Analytica to help them manipulate national and international politics. It’s well known that the Koch brothers have their own such agency (called i360), but other billionaires have firms whose names we don’t even know. That’s not to say there’s a grand conspiracy of global elites or coordinated centralization of power for mutual advantage. But what these messy conflicting interests do have in common is that they are all working against liberal-democratic institutions. The free-market dream of being liberated from government authority, once an article of faith for the billionaire class, has turned into the oligarchs’ dream of coopting, or even usurping, government authority in pursuit of profit.

….one of the most ambitious of America’s would-be oligarchs, Erik Prince. He is a private military contractor, formerly of Blackwater; his present company, the Frontier Services Group, has backing from the Chinese government and a Hong Kong billionaire named Johnson Ko, the company’s executive director. Prince’s meetings on behalf of the Trump team were arranged by a former Blackwater colleague who is now an adviser to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, George Nader. Nader, who is currently in federal custody in Virginia as an accused child sex trafficker, claims that Prince was sent as an emissary for Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, to the notorious Seychelles meeting with Dmitriev and Bin Zayed.

  …. Mueller’s main finding, a “sweeping and systematic” campaign of interference by Russia in the 2016 election, has simply reinforced the idea that the United States and Russia are combatants in a fairly traditional form of political warfare. Mueller’s report and testimony had no impact in exposing the multilateral business deals—here involving American, Russian, Saudi, Israeli, Qatari, and Emirati actors—that bypass national interests, official foreign policy, international regulations, electoral laws, and even ordinary market pressures.

[Daily Maverick, via Naked Capitalism 9-12-19]

The UK security services targeted The Guardian after the newspaper started publishing the contents of secret US government documents leaked by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013.

Snowden’s bombshell revelations continued for months and were the largest-ever leak of classified material covering the NSA and its UK equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters. They revealed programmes of mass surveillance operated by both agencies.

According to minutes of meetings of the UK’s Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee, the revelations caused alarm in the British security services and Ministry of Defence.

Spontaneous Resistance

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Open Thread

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On September 14, 2019

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As usual, feel free to use the comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Brief Notes on the Democratic Primaries

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On September 13, 2019

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Bernie Sanders

The polling is all over the place, but generally Biden is in first place, with Sanders or Warren in second. In early primary states, it’s generally Biden, but only slightly ahead of Sanders.

The clear truth about Biden is that he’s senile and gaffe-prone. Even if you like his politics (which, obviously, I don’t), this is the case. He’ll be a bad candidate in the general–I think Trump will eat him alive. Yes, Trump is senile also, but Trump is channeling some genuine anger and hatred, whereas Biden is channeling his elite entitlement, along with “Can’t we go back to Obama?” My suspicion is that the first wins.

As for Sanders and Warren, whichever one isn’t doing well in the early primary rounds had better drop out fast and endorse the other, otherwise it’ll be Biden.

All that said, who the hell knows? Things change and perhaps one of Biden’s senior moments will get through to people and they’ll realize that he’s no longer all there.

I prefer Sanders over Warren. Warren wants to save capitalism, she’s been very clear on that. Markets aren’t working well, and she wants to fix them. That’s her raison d’etre, that’s why she was a Republican most of her life, and why she switched her party to Democrat: Republicans were fucking up markets. She’s clearly said, for example, that she wouldn’t nationalize utilities, which is actually an extreme position among market disciples; many would say these are natural monopolies and should be owned by government.

This isn’t to say Sanders is anti-markets. He isn’t going to replace them or any such thing, he’s just a social democrat. He’ll modify them, make them more democratic, put more under public control, and so on.

He also seems the most credible on strongly tackling climate change. One might say that makes him a “must vote.”

As I’ve said before, I trust Sanders more. He’s been very consistent over the years, he’s not going to take oligarchs’ money even after the primary (Warren’s position), and he doesn’t think things were substantially “okay,” even in the 80s. (They weren’t, or we wouldn’t be here.) None of this is to say he’s perfect; he’s bad on some people’s key issues and not great on foreign affairs.

He’s still, in my opinion, better for ordinary people than anyone else, including Warren.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Remembering 9/11

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On September 11, 2019

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I was working that day, in an office. Everything ground to a halt, and management gave up and opened an auditorium with a large screen playing the events as they happened.

After it was all clear, I turned to a co-worker and said “Jesus, I hope they don’t attack the wrong people.” He thought the idea was absurd.

Well, we all know how it turned out.

Most of the attackers were Saudi citizens, and it still smells to me like a Saudi operation. Certainly, if any country was going to be attacked, it should have been Saudi Arabia, the source of the poison which has corrupted Islam throughout the world.

As for the US, its soul was always rotten, but after everything Bush Jr. did–his re-election in 2004 was sickening– Americans knew, and enough of them were OK with it.

The US did change after 9/11, however; the Patriot Act was vile, evil, authoritarian, and almost no one voted against it. The war in Iraq was a simple war crime, and every senior person involved in it is guilty of the same crime that most of the Nazis were hung for at Nuremburg. I’d include everyone who voted for the enabling act, myself.

If the 2000 election theft hadn’t happened, 9/11 likely wouldn’t have happened, and even if it had, the aftermath wouldn’t have been as bad. Plus, Gore would have worked on climate change.

It’s all a clusterfuck, and it started with Bush v. Gore and 9/11.

Oh, and Bin Laden won. He got the US to do things that weakened it badly. That’s what he wanted.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

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