Susan Sarandon: Hillary Clinton ‘more dangerous’ than Trump

By Douglas Ernst - The Washington Times - Friday, June 3, 2016

Hollywood actress and activist Susan Sarandon says former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be a more dangerous U.S. president than Donald Trump — provided she’s not indicted first.

Ms. Sarandon, a supporter of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, told a liberal news outlets this week that Mrs. Clinton’s track record portends a much worse future than anything Mr. Trump might catalyze as commander in chief.

“I believe in a way she is more dangerous,” the actress told The Young Turks on Thursday. “They’re both talking to Henry Kissinger, apparently. … She did not learn from Iraq, and she is an interventionist, and she has done horrible things — and very callously. I don’t know if she is overcompensating or what her trip is. That scares me. I think we’ll be in Iran in two seconds.”

The former “Thelma and Louise” star said voters are being “fed” a message that Mr. Trump is “so dangerous” when his promises on illegal immigration amount to a wall being built.

“I don’t know what his policy is. I do know what her policies are, I do know who she is taking money from. I do know that she is not transparent, and I do know that nobody calls her on it,” the Oscar-winning actress continued.

The activist also appeared on MSNBC on Thursday and predicted Mrs. Clinton would be indicted by the Department of Justice for the secret email server she operated out of her New York home as President Obama’s top diplomat.

“There’s going to be [an indictment]. I mean, it’s inevitable,” Ms. Sarandon said, Salon reported Friday.

The State Department’s inspector general released a report last week saying the Democrat front-runner violated policies on storing official records and did not cooperate with its investigation.

Mrs. Clinton maintains that she did nothing illegal.

Link here.

The fatal expense of American imperialism

The United States has a long history of using covert and overt means to overthrow governments deemed to be unfriendly to US interests, following the classic imperial strategy of rule through locally imposed friendly regimes. In a powerful study of Latin America between 1898 and 1994, for example, historian John Coatsworth counts 41 cases of “successful” US-led regime change, for an average rate of one government overthrow by the United States every 28 months for a century. And note: Coatsworth’s count does not include the failed attempts, such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

This tradition of US-led regime change has been part and parcel of US foreign policy in other parts of the world, including Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Wars of regime change are costly to the United States, and often devastating to the countries involved. Two major studies have measured the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. One, by my Columbia colleague Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard scholar Linda Bilmes, arrived at the cost of $3 trillion as of 2008. A more recent study, by the Cost of War Project at Brown University, puts the price tag at $4.7 trillion through 2016. Over a 15-year period, the $4.7 trillion amounts to roughly $300 billion per year, and is more than the combined total outlays from 2001 to 2016 for the federal departments of education, energy, labor, interior, and transportation, and the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Link here.

Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit

The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy.

That message was heard loud and clear. The institutions and elite factions that have spent years mocking, maligning, and pillaging large portions of the population — all while compiling their own long record of failure and corruption and destruction — are now shocked that their dictates and decrees go unheeded. But human beings are not going to follow and obey the exact people they most blame for their suffering. They’re going to do exactly the opposite: purposely defy them and try to impose punishment in retaliation. Their instruments for retaliation are Brexit and Trump. Those are their agents, dispatched on a mission of destruction: aimed at a system and culture they regard — not without reason — as rife with corruption and, above all else, contempt for them and their welfare.

Link here.

The U.S. is no stranger to interfering in the elections of other countries

The CIA has accused Russia of interfering in the 2016 presidential election by hacking into Democratic and Republican computer networks and selectively releasing emails. But critics might point out the U.S. has done similar things.

The U.S. has a long history of attempting to influence presidential elections in other countries – it’s done so as many as 81 times between 1946 and 2000, according to a database amassed by political scientist Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University.

That number doesn’t include military coups and regime change efforts following the election of candidates the U.S. didn’t like, notably those in Iran, Guatemala and Chile. Nor does it include general assistance with the electoral process, such as election monitoring.

Link here.

What triggers terrorism? Is it Islam, or rather US Foreign Policy and the west’s double standards?

US Northeastern University Political Science Professor Max Abrahms, a terrorism theorist, told Al-Rai: “The U.S. has inadvertently contributed to international terrorism through the failed policy of regime change (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan) since the declared “war on terror”. Un-thoughtful change of regime in Iraq created a power vacuum that was filled by al-Qaida in Iraq and ultimately ISIS. Few Americans understand that removing Gaddafi in Libya created a similar power vacuum that has greatly benefited ISIS among other militant groups. Fewer Americans also understand that arming the “opposition” in Syria helped to significantly support ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra and prolonged the so-called civil war. In these ways, the US counterterrorism strategy has backfired.

A unit in the “FBI counterterrorism division” and FBI special agents across the US involved in “home-grown violent extremism” concluded that US foreign policy is the main motive behind terrorist attacks as a retaliation for the hundreds of thousands killed in the Middle East.

Link here and here.

Americans Are Dying Faster. Millennials, Too

Link here.

War College Podcast: Why nuclear war looks inevitable

By Jason Fields

Several developments have the potential to move the hands of the nuclear doom clock closer to midnight.

A new U.S. nuclear policy has a chance of destabilizing the balance of terror by creating a larger arsenal of smaller weapons.

Why?

Smaller weapons are more tempting to use. The argument for so-called "tactical" nukes is that they would destroy a smaller area and create less fallout, making them more "safe" to use than traditional many-megaton bombs. And that could lead to temptation to use them.

Just as importantly, that could give other nuclear-armed powers the impression that the U.S. would be more likely to use the weapons - a dangerous spiral that could culminate with...the end of the world, literally.

The United States is hardly the only nation adding stress to a system that is always a hands-breadth from tragedy.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin has rattled the nuclear sabre, even threatening to station missiles in annexed Crimea. Pakistan, another nuclear-armed country, is a divided nation with government agencies linked to Islamic extremism and a beef with India. India has a beef with Pakistan and territorial disputes with China.

North Korea is a wildcard with an accelerating nuclear program that may still be getting help from Pakistan - which denies it. Recent tests by North Korea and China's lack of overt response has set U.S. teeth on edge.

In the end, the basic question is whether humanity can have such dangerous toys and not use them.

Incredible as it may seem, at the height of the Cold War the world might actually have been safer, experts say. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had a death wish, and those were clearly the stakes.

And, of course, nihilistic militants have no such qualms.

Link here.

Acceptable Losses - Aiding and abetting the Saudi slaughter in Yemen

By Andrew Cockburn

Just a few short years ago, Yemen was judged to be among the poorest countries in the world, ranking 154th out of the 187 nations on the U.N.’s Human Development Index. One in every five Yemenis went hungry. Almost one in three was unemployed. Every year, 40,000 children died before their fifth birthday, and experts predicted the country would soon run out of water.

Such was the dire condition of the country before Saudi Arabia unleashed a bombing campaign in March 2015, which has destroyed warehouses, factories, power plants, ports, hospitals, water tanks, gas stations, and bridges, along with miscellaneous targets ranging from donkey carts to wedding parties to archaeological monuments. Thousands of civilians — no one knows how many — have been killed or wounded. Along with the bombing, the Saudis have enforced a blockade, cutting off supplies of food, fuel, and medicine. A year and a half into the war, the health system has largely broken down, and much of the country is on the brink of starvation.

This rain of destruction was made possible by the material and moral support of the United States, which supplied most of the bombers, bombs, and missiles required for the aerial onslaught. (Admittedly, the United Kingdom, France, and other NATO arms exporters eagerly did their bit.) U.S. Navy ships aided the blockade. But no one that I talked to in Washington suggested that the war was in any way necessary to our national security. The best answer I got came from Ted Lieu, a Democratic congressman from California who has been one of the few public officials to speak out about the devastation we were enabling far away. “Honestly,” he told me, “I think it’s because Saudi Arabia asked.”

Link here.

War College - Why wars in the Middle East will cost the U.S. trillions more

The United States is at war and has been for more than a decade. Although major combat operations in Iraq in Afghanistan have ended, America still maintains a presence in both and will for years to come. It also funds Syrian rebels, bombs Islamic State strongholds in the region and runs drones from Afghanistan to the Horn of Africa. With America fighting on so many fronts, it’s hard to understand the Pentagon’s strategy or the endgame for the various conflicts. Retired U.S. Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich says it feels that way because it is that way. According to Bacevich, the American military is fighting a war that began decades before 9/11. This week on War College, Bacevich walks us through what he calls America’s War With the Greater Middle East and tells us how it started and why he thinks it must end.

Link here.

The Continuing Retirement Savings Crisis

By Nari Rhee, PhD and Ilana Boivie
March 2015

The key findings of this report are as follows:

1. Account ownership rates are closely correlated with income and wealth. Nearly 40 million working-age households (45 percent) do not own any retirement account assets, whether in an employer-sponsored 401(k) type plan or an IRA. Households that do own retirement accounts have more than 2.4 times the annual income of households that do not own a retirement account.

2. The average working household has virtually no retirement savings. When all households are included— not just households with retirement accounts—the median retirement account balance is $2,500 for all working-age households and $14,500 for near-retirement households. Furthermore, 62 percent of working households age 55-64 have retirement savings less than one times their annual income, which is far below what they will need to maintain their standard of living in retirement.

3. Even after counting households’ entire net worth—a generous measure of retirement savings—twothirds (66 percent) of working families fall short of conservative retirement savings targets for their age and income based on working until age 67. Due to a longterm trend toward income and wealth inequality that only worsened during the recent economic recovery, a large majority of the bottom half of working households cannot meet even a substantially reduced savings target.

4. Public policy can play a critical role in putting all Americans on a path toward a secure retirement by strengthening Social Security, expanding access to lowcost, high quality retirement plans, and helping lowincome workers and families save. Social Security, the primary edifice of retirement income security, could be strengthened to stabilize system financing and enhance benefits for vulnerable populations. Access to workplace retirement plans could be expanded by making it easier for private employers to sponsor DB pensions, while national and state level proposals aim to ensure universal retirement plan coverage. Finally, expanding the Saver’s Credit and making it refundable could help boost the retirement savings of lower-income families.

Link here.

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA

BY CARL BERNSTEIN

How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up

"Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the oldSaturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune.

By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.

The CIA’s use of the American news media has been much more extensive than Agency officials have acknowledged publicly or in closed sessions with members of Congress. The general outlines of what happened are indisputable; the specifics are harder to come by. CIA sources hint that a particular journalist was trafficking all over Eastern Europe for the Agency; the journalist says no, he just had lunch with the station chief. CIA sources say flatly that a well‑known ABC correspondent worked for the Agency through 1973; they refuse to identify him. A high‑level CIA official with a prodigious memory says that the New York Timesprovided cover for about ten CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966; he does not know who they were, or who in the newspaper’s management made the arrangements.

The Agency’s special relationships with the so‑called “majors” in publishing and broadcasting enabled the CIA to post some of its most valuable operatives abroad without exposure for more than two decades. In most instances, Agency files show, officials at the highest levels of the CIA usually director or deputy director) dealt personally with a single designated individual in the top management of the cooperating news organization. The aid furnished often took two forms: providing jobs and credentials “journalistic cover” in Agency parlance) for CIA operatives about to be posted in foreign capitals; and lending the Agency the undercover services of reporters already on staff, including some of the best‑known correspondents in the business."

“One of the things we always had going for us in terms of enticing reporters,” observed a CIA official who coordinated some of the arrangements with journalists, “was that we could make them look better with their home offices. A foreign correspondent with ties to the Company [the CIA] stood a much better chance than his competitors of getting the good stories.”

Link here.

Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs

DECLASSIFIED American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement.

The documents confirm suspicions voiced at the time that America was working aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into a European state. One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.

Link here.

The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s 41-Year U.S. Debt Secret

But Simon, better than anyone else, understood the appeal of U.S. government debt and how to sell the Saudis on the idea that America was the safest place to park their petrodollars. With that knowledge, the administration hatched an unprecedented do-or-die plan that would come to influence just about every aspect of U.S.-Saudi relations over the next four decades (Simon died in 2000 at the age of 72).

The basic framework was strikingly simple. The U.S. would buy oil from Saudi Arabia and provide the kingdom military aid and equipment. In return, the Saudis would plow billions of their petrodollar revenue back into Treasuries and finance America’s spending.

Link here.

From the WSJ - Years of Fed Missteps Fueled Disillusion With the Economy and Washington

Once-revered central bank failed to foresee the crisis and has struggled in its aftermath, fostering the rise of populism and distrust of institutions

By Jon Hilsenrath

In the past decade Federal Reserve officials have been flummoxed by a housing bubble that cratered the financial system, a long stretch of slow growth they failed to foresee and inflation persistently undershooting their goal. In response they engineered unpopular financial rescues, launched start-and-stop bond buying and delayed planned interest-rate boosts.

“There are a lot of things that we thought we knew that haven’t turned out quite as we expected,” said Eric Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. “The economy and financial markets are not as stable as we previously assumed.”

In the 1990s, a period known in economics as the “Great Moderation,” it seemed the Fed could do no wrong. Policy makers and voters saw it as a machine, with buttons officials could push to heat or cool the economy as needed. Now, after more than a decade of economic disappointment, the central bank confronts hardened public skepticism and growing self-doubt about its own understanding of how the U.S. economy works.

For anyone seeking to explain one of the most unpredictable political seasons in modern history, with the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, a prime suspect is public dismay in institutions guiding the economy and government. The Fed in particular is a case study in how the conventional wisdom of the late 1990s on a wide range of economic issues, including trade, technology and central banking, has since slowly unraveled.

Once admired globally for their command of the economic system, central bankers now are blamed by the left and right for bailouts during the financial crisis and for failing to foresee and manage forces suffocating the global economy in its aftermath.

Populist protest movements called “Fed Up,” “End the Fed” and “Occupy Wall Street” lashed out at the bank’s policies, and in the case of End the Fed, its very existence. Lawmakers of both parties want to subject it to more scrutiny or curb its powers.

How Americans rate federal agencies
Share of respondents who said each agency was doing either a ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ job, for the eight agencies for which consistent numbers were available

Source: Gallup telephone polls, most recently 1,020 U.S. adults conducted Nov. 11–12, 2014, with a margin of error of +/-4 percentage points

David Einhorn, founder of the hedge fund Greenlight Capital, cites the fable of the ant and the grasshopper, in which a famished grasshopper begs a thrifty ant for help in wintertime after failing to stockpile food during warmer weather.

“We had the grasshoppers party from 2002 to 2007 and winter came and the Fed bailed them out,” said Mr. Einhorn, referring to financial firms and individuals who lived above their means. “Now the ants are pissed.”

The Fed’s struggles will be on display from Friday to Sunday when it gathers for an annual retreat in Jackson Hole, Wyo. On issues of growth, inflation, interest rates, unemployment and how to fight a recession, basic assumptions inside the central bank’s complex computer models have been upended.

“I certainly myself couldn’t have imagined six, seven years ago that we would be employing the policies we are now,” Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen said to a packed ballroom in New York earlier this year. She lamented the government has leaned so heavily on the Fed to stimulate the economy while tax and spending policies were stymied by disagreements between Congress and the White House.

Many Fed officials believe—and private economists agree—their responses to the crisis helped avert a second Depression, outweighing any unfairness in the bailout process. Fed leaders believe low rates helped, too. “Inflation would be lower and unemployment higher now by noticeable amounts had we not employed those policies,” Ms. Yellen said in March.

Regardless, confidence in the central bank’s leadership has dropped. An April Gallup poll found 38% of Americans had a great deal or fair amount of confidence in Ms. Yellen, while 35% had little or none. In the early 2000s, confidence in Chairman Alan Greenspan often exceeded 70%.

How confidence in the Fed leader has shifted
How much confidence do you have that the Fed leader will do the right thing for the economy?

Note: Percentages may not total 100 due to rounding. Source: Gallup telephone polls, most recently of 1,015 U.S. adults conducted April 6–10, 2016, with a margin of error of +/-4 percentage points

The Fed’s own uncertainty about the economy’s underpinnings is more than a decade in the making and traces back to three key developments that have thrown officials for a loop.

First, officials missed signs that a more complex financial system had become vulnerable to financial bubbles, and bubbles had become a growing threat in a low-interest-rate world.

Secondly, they were blinded to a long-running slowdown in the growth of worker productivity, or output per hour of labor, which has limited how fast the economy could grow since 2004.

Thirdly, inflation hasn’t responded to the ups and downs of the job market in the way the Fed expected.

The shifting financial, productivity and inflation scenarios made it hard to gauge where interest rates belonged even before the financial crisis and are central to Ms. Yellen’s dilemmas today.

She is trying to raise short-term rates, but the economy so far has proved too feeble to absorb more than one small increase from near zero last December. If she waits too long before moving again, she could encourage bubbles. If she raises rates too much, she could cut off a fragile expansion and, in a replay of Japan’s experience, never drive inflation to the Fed’s target of 2%.

“Unfortunately, all economic projections are certain to turn out to be inaccurate in some respects, and possibly significantly so,” Ms. Yellen warned in a June speech. “The uncertainties are sizable.”

How often the Fed’s economic projections missed the mark, and by how much

*Fed estimates reflect the midpoint of central tendency of estimates included in the Fed leader’s twice-annual report to Congress. Central tendency is the range of Federal Open Market Committee participants’ estimates, excluding the three highest and the three lowest. Some periods have more estimates than others, based on how many years into the future the Fed forecast at the time. Estimates have been compared to the most recent reported actual value for each period. The Fed measures both inflation and GDP based on the fourth quarter value’s change from the same quarter a year earlier. Sources: Federal Reserve (forecasts); Commerce Department (actual inflation and GDP)

One window into the Fed’s run of misjudgments is a computer model it uses to calibrate how the economy is likely to respond to changes in interest rates and outside shocks. It is called FRB/US, known as “Ferbus.”

Simulations the Fed did with FRB/US during debates about a possible housing bubble in 2005 and again in 2007 failed to show how a fall in home prices would ripple through the financial sector, freezing credit that was the lifeblood of the economy.

“Assuming that the FRB/US model does a good job of capturing the macroeconomic implications of declining house prices, such an event does not pose a particularly difficult challenge for monetary policy,” John Williams, then a Fed analyst and now president of the San Francisco Fed, said during a debate on the housing boom in 2005.

The model showed the economy could weather a 20% drop in home prices with small increases in unemployment and modest cuts in interest rates.

Ferbus didn’t account for the damage that unstable financial institutions can do to an economy. Unemployment rose to 10%, the Fed cut rates to near zero and then launched programs that ballooned its securities portfolio to more than $4 trillion.

San Francisco Fed President John Williams said that before the financial crisis, Fed models lacked a full grasp of how much risk and leverage had grown in the financial system.

“What was missing to me was the in-depth understanding of how much risk and leverage had grown in the financial system and basically how lacking in resilience the financial system as a whole was to this kind of shock,” Mr. Williams said in a recent interview.

Fed officials say they are alert to the financial system’s risks and have cushioned it by forcing banks to hold more capital. Other entities, such as hedge funds and money-market funds, are more closely watched.

Still, some worry that even with those efforts, continuing very low rates could feed instability by driving investors too heavily into some asset class in search of higher returns.

Mr. Rosengren is worried about booming commercial real estate. “You do have to think about some of the collateral effects that can occur when interest rates are low for a long period,” he said. “Real estate is one of those sectors.”

Richard Fisher, former president of the Dallas Fed, said low interest rates are adding to discontent by forcing consumers to save more to meet their nest-egg needs. The unintended message households get from low rates, he said, is “you’re going to have to save a hell of a lot more before you consume.”

Fed models didn’t pick up on a broader economic slowdown already in train by 2004 because the people running the models also didn’t recognize productivity growth was entering an extended slowdown.

In the long run, an economy can expand only at a rate sustained by the growth of its labor force and the productivity of its workers. During the 1990s, output per hour surged, in part because companies poured money into new technologies and machinery. Many economists assumed the high-tech economy would keep fueling rapid productivity growth, but it didn’t, for reasons economists still don’t fully understand.

In the decade from 1994 to 2003, U.S. output per hour worked rose annually by an average 2.8%. Since then it has grown at 1.3%, including just 0.4% since 2011.

Fed officials, failing to see the persistence of this change, have repeatedly overestimated how fast the economy would grow. The Fed has projected faster growth than the economy delivered in 13 of the past 15 years and is on track to do so again this year.

Private economists, too, have been baffled by these developments. But Fed miscalculations have consequences, contributing to start-and-stop policies since the crisis. Officials ended bond-buying programs, thinking the economy was picking up, then restarted them when it didn’t and inflation drifted lower. Its shifts became a source of uncertainty in financial markets.

A slow-growing economy can’t bear high interest rates, and so the Fed also hasn’t delivered as many rate increases as it said it planned. In June 2015, officials estimated their benchmark short-term rate would exceed 1.5% by the end of this year. It remains below 0.5%.

“They have held out the prospect of tighter money, and that has had a discouraging effect on demand to a greater extent than would have been ideal,” said Lawrence Summers, a Harvard professor and former Treasury Secretary. “They have lost credibility by constantly predicting tightening that, out of prudence, they didn’t deliver.”

For years after the financial crisis, officials attributed slow growth to temporary headwinds, such as banks’ unwillingness to lend. Now they are coming to think the productivity slowdown is the root of the problem, and might not go away.

For James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Fed, uncertainty about the long-run growth and rate outlook led to an about-face.

Fed officials regularly project where they think rates are heading over the longer run. The projection is a signal to the public of how monetary policy is expected to evolve over several years. Unsure about how the economy is behaving and what it means for rates, Mr. Bullard scrapped his forecast altogether.

“We are backing off the idea that we have dogmatic certainty about where the U.S. economy is headed in the medium and longer run,” he said in a paper in June.

Inflation is the third ingredient in the Fed’s self-doubt. For years it has been largely unresponsive to the ups and downs of unemployment, defying the conventional view that inflation rises when unemployment falls, and vice versa. Unemployment surged during the financial crisis, but inflation didn’t fall much, as Fed models suggested it should. And when joblessness fell, inflation didn’t move up much, either.

In offices adjacent to Ms. Yellen, two Fed governors, Lael Brainard and Daniel Tarullo, are lobbying against interest-rate increases because they aren’t convinced by models suggesting inflation will eventually rise.

“Inflation is not at our stated target, not near our stated target, and hasn’t been so in quite some time,” Mr. Tarullo said in a June interview.

Still looming is potentially the biggest reversal of all in the modern conventions of central banking. If another recession hits, it isn’t clear the Fed has the tools available to mend the economy, a subject Ms. Yellen could address in Jackson Hole.

Traditionally the Fed cuts interest rates in a downturn. With its benchmark short-term rate near zero, it can’t be pushed much lower. If recession hits, the Fed will likely resort to unpopular tools used after the financial crisis, including Treasury-bond purchases and more promises to keep short-term rates low far into the future.

“We should be extremely worried,” Mr. Summers said. “We are essentially on a fairly dangerous battlefield with very little ammunition.”

Link here.

From the WSJ - The Federal Reserve Needs New Thinking

Its models are unreliable, its policies erratic and its guidance confusing. It is also politically vulnerable.
By KEVIN WARSH

Aug. 24, 2016 6:03 p.m. ET

The conduct of monetary policy in recent years has been deeply flawed. U.S. economic growth lags prior recoveries, falling short of forecasts and deteriorating in the most recent quarters. This week in Jackson Hole, Wyo., the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City hosts the world’s leading central bankers and academics to consider monetary reform. The task is timely and consequential, but the Fed needs a broader reform agenda.

Policy makers around the world neither predicted nor can adequately explain the reasons for current inflation readings below their targets. So it is puzzling that so many academics are pushing to raise the current 2% inflation target to a higher target of 3% or 4%. In the telling of the economics guild, the Fed’s leaders should descend from the Grand Tetons with supreme assurance that their latest monetary policy invention will remedy the economy’s ills.

The Fed’s leaders should not take the bait. Raising the inflation target is a bad idea being considered at the wrong time for the wrong reasons.

A new inflation target would undermine the Fed’s commitment to any policy framework. It would please the denizens of Wall Street who pine for still-looser Fed policy. And households would be understandably miffed to receive a new lecture on unconventional monetary policy—this one on the benefits of higher prices.

A change in inflation targets would also add to the growing list of excuses that rationalize the economic malaise: the persistent headwinds from the crisis of the prior decade, the high-sounding slogan of “secular stagnation,” and the convenient recent alibi of Brexit.

A numeric change in the inflation target isn’t real reform. It serves more as subterfuge to distract from monetary, regulatory and fiscal errors. A robust reform agenda requires more rigorous review of recent policy choices and significant changes in the Fed’s tools, strategies, communications and governance.

Two major obstacles must be overcome: groupthink within the academic economics guild, and the reluctance of central bankers to cede their new power.

First, the economics guild pushed ill-considered new dogmas into the mainstream of monetary policy. The Fed’s mantra of data-dependence causes erratic policy lurches in response to noisy data. Its medium-term policy objectives are at odds with its compulsion to keep asset prices elevated. Its inflation objectives are far more precise than the residual measurement error. Its output-gap economic models are troublingly unreliable.

The Fed seeks to fix interest rates and control foreign-exchange rates simultaneously—an impossible task with the free flow of capital. Its “forward guidance,” promising low interest rates well into the future, offers ambiguity in the name of clarity. It licenses a cacophony of communications in the name of transparency. And it expresses grave concern about income inequality while refusing to acknowledge that its policies unfairly increased asset inequality.

The Fed often treats financial markets as a beast to be tamed, a cub to be coddled, or a market to be manipulated. It appears in thrall to financial markets, and financial markets are in thrall to the Fed, but only one will get the last word. A simple, troubling fact: From the beginning of 2008 to the present, more than half of the increase in the value of the S&P 500 occurred on the day of Federal Open Market Committee decisions.

The groupthink gathers adherents even as its successes become harder to find. The guild tightens its grip when it should open its mind to new data sources, new analytics, new economic models, new communication strategies, and a new paradigm for policy.

The second obstacle to real reform is no less challenging. Real reform should reverse the trend that makes the Fed a general purpose agency of government. Many guild members believe that central bankers—nonpartisan, high-minded experts—are particularly well-suited to expand their policy remit. They fail to recognize that central bank power is permissible in a democracy only when its scope is limited, its track record strong, and its accountability assured.

The Fed is suffering from a marked downturn in public support. Citizens are rightly concerned about the concentration of economic power at the central bank. Long after the financial crisis, the Fed holds trillions of dollars of assets that would otherwise be in private hands. And it appears to make monetary policy with the purpose of managing financial asset prices, including bolstering the share prices of public companies.

With the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Fed claims the mantle of reform. It now micromanages big banks and effectively caps their rate of return. The biggest banks’ growth in market share corresponds to that of their principal regulator. They are joint-venture partners with the Fed, serving as quasi-public utilities. As the dispenser of fault and favor, the Fed is contributing to the public perception of an unfair, inequitable economic system. Real reform this is not.

Most gathered in Jackson Hole will judge that the Fed’s aggressive actions are necessary and wise. Even if that were true, the Fed finds itself in an increasingly untenable position. Congress will tag the Fed for its failures, and the public will assail the Fed for favoritism for its ostensible successes.

In the best of circumstances, the U.S. economy will accelerate to “escape velocity.” In that event the Fed might get the benefit of the public doubt.

If, as is more likely, the economy is closer to recession than resurgence, the Fed is poorly positioned to respond with force, efficacy and credibility. The Fed is vulnerable. Its recent centennial as our nation’s central bank should not be confused with its permanent acceptance in the American political system.

Link here.

Researchers or Corporate Allies? Think Tanks Blur the Line - NYTimes.com

Think tanks, which position themselves as “universities without students,” have power in government policy debates because they are seen as researchers independent of moneyed interests. But in the chase for funds, think tanks are pushing agendas important to corporate donors, at times blurring the line between researchers and lobbyists. And they are doing so while reaping the benefits of their tax-exempt status, sometimes without disclosing their connections to corporate interests.

Thousands of pages of internal memos and confidential correspondence between Brookings and other donors — like JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank; K.K.R., the global investment firm; Microsoft, the software giant; and Hitachi, the Japanese conglomerate — show that financial support often came with assurances from Brookings that it would provide “donation benefits,” including setting up events featuring corporate executives with government officials, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.

Similar arrangements exist at many think tanks. On issues as varied as military sales to foreign countries, international trade, highway management systems and real estate development, think tanks have frequently become vehicles for corporate influence and branding campaigns.

“This is about giant corporations who figured out that by spending, hey, a few tens of millions of dollars, if they can influence outcomes here in Washington, they can make billions of dollars,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, a frequent critic of undisclosed Wall Street donations to think tanks.
Link here.

Economists Mystified that Negative Interest Rates Aren’t Leading Consumers to Run Out and Spend

"It is apparently difficult for most economists to grasp that negative interest rates reduce the value of those savings to savers by lowering the income on them. Savers are loss averse and thus are very reluctant to spend principal to compensate for reduced income. Given that central banks have driven policy interest rates into negative real interest rate terrain, this isn’t an illogical reading of their situation. Ed Kane has estimated that low interest rates were a $300 billion per year subsidy taken from consumers and given to financial firms in the form of reduces interest income. Since interest rates on the long end of the yield curve have fallen even further, Kane’s estimate is now probably too low."

"Earth to economists: savings and spending may look fungible to you because they are alternative uses for income but they serve very different functions. Once people have put enough away that they have a good reserve for emergencies and enough to have a comfortable retirement, then saving and spending can be regarded as close substitutes. But in the US, with safe income on investments running below inflation levels, and Medicare being actively crapified (for instance, a 70 year old friend with a bad leg break is having to pay for $25,000 of expenses in a rehab facility herself), a retirement-aged couple would need over $3 million in liquid assets to allow for 20-30 years of living expenses and possible medical costs. How many are in that boat?"

Link here.

2016’s States with the Highest & Lowest Tax Rates

Methodology

In order to identify the states with the highest and lowest tax rates, WalletHub’s analysts compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across four types of taxation:

• Real-Estate Tax: To calculate this tax, we first divided the “Median Real-Estate Tax Amount Paid” by the “Median Home Price” in each state. We then applied the resulting rates to a house worth $175,700, the median value for a home in the U.S., in order to obtain the dollar amount paid as real-estate tax.

• Vehicle Property Tax: To calculate this tax, we examined data for cities and counties collectively accounting for at least 50 percent of the state’s population and extrapolated this to the state level using weighted averages based on population size. For each state, we assumed all residents own the same car: the 2016 Toyota Camry LE four-door sedan, 2015’s highest-selling car, valued at $23,070.

• Income Tax: To calculate this tax, we used the percentage of income (middle income rate) spent on income tax from WalletHub’s Best States to Be Rich or Poor from a Tax Perspective report. More specifically, we used the mean third quintile income amount of $53,889.

• Sales & Excise Tax: To calculate this tax, we used the percentage of income (middle income rate) spent on sales and excise taxes from WalletHub’s Best States to Be Rich or Poor from a Tax Perspective report. More specifically, we used the mean third quintile income amount of $53,889.

Source: WalletHub

Overall Rank	State	Effective Total State & Local Tax Rates on Median U.S. Household*	Annual State & Local Taxes on Median U.S. Household*	% Difference Between State & Nat’l. Avg.**	Annual State & Local Taxes on Median State Household***	Adjusted Overall Rank (based on Cost of Living Index)
3	Montana	6.92%	$3,728	-35.37%	$3,561	3
4	Wyoming	7.45%	$4,015	-30.40%	$4,312	2
5	Nevada	7.72%	$4,161	-27.86%	$4,028	7
7	Idaho	8.48%	$4,569	-20.80%	$4,074	5
8	California	8.80%	$4,741	-17.81%	$6,803	33
11	Oregon	9.17%	$4,943	-14.32%	$5,392	34
12	Colorado	9.41%	$5,070	-12.11%	$5,854	15
14	Utah	9.53%	$5,133	-11.02%	$5,802	10
15	Arizona	9.69%	$5,224	-9.44%	$4,878	14
26	New Mexico	10.65%	$5,741	-0.48%	$4,912	20
34	Washington	11.69%	$6,302	9.25%	$7,722	37

Link here.

Dear Brumus . . .

Starship

Blows Against the Empire, 1970

Lyrics: Paul Kantner, Marty Balin, Grace Slick, Gary Blackman

Music: Paul Kantner, Grace Slick



What you gonna do when you feel your lady rollin'
How you gonna feel when you see your lady strollin'
On the deck of the starship
With her head hooked into Andromeda
C'mon Hijack
Gotta get back and ahead to the things that matter
Amerika hates her crazies
And you gotta let go you know
gotta let go you know
gotta let go you know
gotta let go you know or else you stay

Spillin' out of the steel glass
gravity gone from the cage
a million pounds gone from your heavy mass
all the years gone from your age

Hydroponic gardens and forests
Glistening with lakes in the Jupiter starlight
Room for babies and Byzantine dancing astronauts of renown
The magician and the pantechnicon
Take along the farmer and the physician
We gotta get out and down
Back into the future
Beyond our own time again
Reachin' for tomorrow
It's so fine, the starshine

The melting acid fever streakin' thru my mind
makes it ah so difficult to see you
and ah so easy to touch you
i melt with you
feel with you
make love for you
at you
around you
I love you

Dear Brumus, the ship'll be ours and you got to roll with it
And tho' your master's head's blown off you got to go with it
Roll with the natural flow
Like water off a spinning ball
Out - the one remaining way to go
Free - the only way to fall
The light in the night is the sun
And it can carry you around the planetary ground
And the planetary whip of the sun
Will carry you well past Gideon
And the people you see will leave you be
more than the ones you've known before
Hey - rollin' on
We come and go like a comet
We are wanderers
Are you anymore?
The land is green and you make it grow
And you gotta let go you know
You gotta let go you know
You gotta let go you know
Or else you stay

mankind gone from the cage
all the years gone from your age

At first I was iridescent
Then I became transparent
Finally I was absent

Can you believe in no more war?

Jehro ~ Salima

Man, this is good . . .

U.S. military interventions

FROM WOUNDED KNEE TO SYRIA:
A CENTURY OF U.S. MILITARY INTERVENTIONS
by Dr. Zoltan Grossman
The following is a partial list of U.S. military interventions from 1890 to 2014.

and 

A Brief History of U.S. Interventions:
1945 to the Present
by William Blum
Z magazine , June 1999

The engine of American foreign policy has been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, but rather by the necessity to serve other imperatives, which can be summarized as follows:
* making the world safe for American corporations;
* enhancing the financial statements of defense contractors at home who have contributed generously to members of congress;
* preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model;
* extending political and economic hegemony over as wide an area as possible, as befits a "great power."

This in the name of fighting a supposed moral crusade against what cold warriors convinced themselves, and the American people, was the existence of an evil International Communist Conspiracy, which in fact never existed, evil or not.

The United States carried out extremely serious interventions into more than 70 nations in this period.

Links here and here.

How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic

Responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming

Link here.

Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault

The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin

By John J. Mearsheimer

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine -- beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 -- were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president -- which he rightly labeled a “coup” -- was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West. Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics.
Link here.

Goodbye Lenin, Hello Bernanke

Enter Ben Bernanke. In the space of a mere eight years, the former Federal Reserve chief has managed to achieve what Vladimir could barely conceive. He's convinced the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Japan and Europe to embark on a revolutionary journey to completely subvert free market instincts.

Unlike his Russian predecessor, Ben has opted for the calm, congenial exterior of Central Banker from Central Casting, complete with a mogadon monotone designed to lull his audience into a state of torpor.

He's also wisely decided to modify the wealth distribution bit. As western governments have raided the kitty, plunging themselves into an ocean of debt, much of the proceeds have flowed directly into asset markets - stocks, bonds and property - which has helped maintain the flow of wealth towards the wealthy. Brilliant!

=============================================

Even investment banks, having ridden this artificial boom for seven years, have grown wary of the overbearing influence the state on financial markets.

Take this note from Macquarie to clients last week, reprinted by blogsite Macrobusiness:

We believe that the global economy and investors are residing in the twilight zone between an era of relatively free market capitalist economies (with its own set of signals) and a new environment which is likely to be completely dominated by the state.

Who knows where this all will end? Many are concerned that all this Central Bank intervention not only has prolonged the inevitable, but created an environment for a much greater collapse.

Others are starting to think that it all may never end; that we've discovered the elixir of permanent wealth; that given governments have bought all their own debt, they'll just forgive themselves or extend the payment date into the never never.

But even Lenin realized there were limits to revolutionary activity.

Link here.

The Long Con, Mail-order conservatism

And that, at last, may be the explanation for Mitt Romney’s apparently bottomless penchant for lying in public. If the 2012 GOP nominee lied louder than most—and even more astoundingly than he has during his prior campaigns—it’s just because he felt like he had more to prove to his core following. Lying is an initiation into the conservative elite. In this respect, as in so many others, it’s like multilayer marketing: the ones at the top reap the reward—and then they preen, pleased with themselves for mastering the game. Closing the sale, after all, is mainly a question of riding out the lie: showing that you have the skill and the stones to just brazen it out, and the savvy to ratchet up the stakes higher and higher. Sneering at, or ignoring, your earnest high-minded mandarin gatekeepers—“we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” as one Romney aide put it—is another part of closing the deal. For years now, the story in the mainstream political press has been Romney’s difficulty in convincing conservatives, finally, that he is truly one of them. For these elites, his lying—so dismaying to the opinion-makers at the New York Times, who act like this is something new—is how he has pulled it off once and for all. And at the grassroots, his fluidity with their preferred fables helps them forget why they never trusted the guy in the first place.

Link here.

Netanyahu vs. the Generals

Yaakov Peri, a former head of the Shin Bet—Israel’s internal intelligence agency—who has also served as a cabinet member in one of Netanyahu’s governments, told me recently that "some people like to say the security establishment is in fact leading the opposition in this country. I think that's an exaggeration, but there's no doubt that on two issues—Iran and Palestine—the security establishment's professional analysis has consistently contradicted Netanyahu’s policies and statements.”

=======================================

Next came a lengthy interview Diskin provided to a documentary film called “The Gatekeepers.” The film's director, Dror Moreh, set out to interview all the living former heads of the Shin Bet, in order to ask them what they thought were the implications of Israel's decadeslong occupation of the Palestinians. All of them said, each in his own words, that Israel had to make a serious effort to end the conflict. The strongest moment in the interview with Diskin was when Moreh read aloud a quote by Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a famous Israeli intellectual, who warned back in 1968 that if Israel kept the occupied territories, "it will be inflicted with the corruption typical to colonial regimes. The government will constantly have to deal with oppressing an Arab rebellion, and with acquiring Arab Quislings. The IDF will suffer from atrophy and become an occupation army.” Moreh then asked Diskin: "What do you think about this statement, when you look at the state of Israel today?" Diskin looked straight into the camera and said: "I agree with every word of it.”

Link here.

‘I was wrong in my presumption that Israel desired peace’ – Chas Freeman

"With great reluctance, I came to see that, given U.S. enablement, Israel has never been prepared to risk peace with those it displaced from their homes in Palestine. When faced with a choice between territorial expansion and advances toward reconciliation with Arabs, Israel always chooses land over peace. The now-defunct American-sponsored 'peace process'— on which the United States staked its reputation in the Middle East and elsewhere, and which I labored to support—has been revealed to all as part of an elaborate diplomatic deception, intended to provide political cover for Israel’s continued territorial expansion at Palestinian expense."

Link here.

This secret history of ISIS (PBS)

"We created chaos, we abandoned that chaos, we created ISIS.."
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson

Link here.

In the words of former FBI Assistant Director, Thomas Fuentes . . .

“If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.”

Link here.

The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness

"Artificial lights raise night sky luminance, creating the most visible effect of light pollution—artificial skyglow. Despite the increasing interest among scientists in fields such as ecology, astronomy, health care, and land-use planning, light pollution lacks a current quantification of its magnitude on a global scale. To overcome this, we present the world atlas of artificial sky luminance, computed with our light pollution propagation software using new high-resolution satellite data and new precision sky brightness measurements. This atlas shows that more than 80% of the world and more than 99% of the U.S. and European populations live under light-polluted skies. The Milky Way is hidden from more than one-third of humanity, including 60% of Europeans and nearly 80% of North Americans. Moreover, 23% of the world’s land surfaces between 75°N and 60°S, 88% of Europe, and almost half of the United States experience light-polluted nights."

Link here.

"The dark gray level (1 to 2%) sets the point where attention should be given to protect a site from a future increase in light pollution. Blue (8 to 16%) indicates the approximate level where the sky can be considered polluted on an astronomical point of view, as indicated by recommendation 1 of IAU Commission 50 (9). The winter Milky Way (fainter than its summer counterpart) cannot be observed from sites coded in yellow, whereas the orange level sets the point of artificial brightness that masks the summer Milky Way as well. This level corresponds to an approximate total sky brightness of between 20.6 and 20.0 mag/arcsec2 (0.6 to 1.1 mcd/m2). With this sky brightness, the summer Milky Way in Cygnus may be only faintly detectable as a small increase in the sky background luminosity. The Sagittarius Star Cloud is the only section of the Milky Way that is still visible at this level of pollution when it is overhead, as observed from southern latitudes. Red indicates the approximate threshold where Commission Internationale de l’Eclairage (10) puts the transition between scotopic vision and mesopic vision (1 mcd/m2). Also inside the range of the red level, the sky has the same luminosity as a pristine uncontaminated sky at the end of nautical twilight (1.4 mcd/m2) (11). This means that, in places with this level of pollution, people never experience conditions resembling a true night because it is masked by an artificial twilight."

Here's a picture of US light pollution.

Noam Chomsky - Who Rules the World? (pt 2)

"Polk cites a treatise on warfare by Henry Jomini, influenced by Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of Spanish guerrillas, that became a textbook for generations of cadets at the West Point military academy. Jomini observed that such interventions by major powers typically result in 'wars of opinion,' and nearly always 'national wars,' if not at first then becoming so in the course of the struggle, by the dynamics that Polk describes. Jomini concludes that 'commanders of regular armies are ill-advised to engage in such wars because they will lose them,' and even apparent successes will prove short-lived.

Careful studies of al-Qaeda and ISIS have shown that the United States and its allies are following their game plan with some precision. Their goal is to 'draw the West as deeply and actively as possible into the quagmire' and 'to perpetually engage and enervate the United States and the West in a series of prolonged overseas ventures' in which they will undermine their own societies, expend their resources, and increase the level of violence, setting off the dynamic that Polk reviews.

Scott Atran, one of the most insightful researchers on jihadi movements, calculates that 'the 9/11 attacks cost between $400,000 and $500,000 to execute, whereas the military and security response by the U.S. and its allies is in the order of 10 million times that figure. On a strictly cost-benefit basis, this violent movement has been wildly successful, beyond even Bin Laden’s original imagination, and is increasingly so. Herein lies the full measure of jujitsu-style asymmetric warfare. After all, who could claim that we are better off than before, or that the overall danger is declining?'

And if we continue to wield the sledgehammer, tacitly following the jihadi script, the likely effect is even more violent jihadism with broader appeal. The record, Atran advises, 'should inspire a radical change in our counter-strategies.'"

Link here.

Noam Chomsky - Who Rules the World? (pt 1)

"Mainstream parties have been rapidly losing members to left and to right. The executive director of the Paris-based research group EuropaNova attributes the general disenchantment to 'a mood of angry impotence as the real power to shape events largely shifted from national political leaders [who, in principle at least, are subject to democratic politics] to the market, the institutions of the European Union and corporations,' quite in accord with neoliberal doctrine. Very similar processes are under way in the United States, for somewhat similar reasons, a matter of significance and concern not just for the country but, because of U.S. power, for the world.

The rising opposition to the neoliberal assault highlights another crucial aspect of the standard convention: it sets aside the public, which often fails to accept the approved role of 'spectators' (rather than 'participants') assigned to it in liberal democratic theory. Such disobedience has always been of concern to the dominant classes. Just keeping to American history, George Washington regarded the common people who formed the militias that he was to command as “an exceedingly dirty and nasty people [evincing] an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people.”

In Violent Politics, his masterful review of insurgencies from 'the American insurgency' to contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq, William Polk concludes that General Washington 'was so anxious to sideline [the fighters he despised] that he came close to losing the Revolution.' Indeed, he 'might have actually done so' had France not massively intervened and 'saved the Revolution,' which until then had been won by guerrillas — whom we would now call 'terrorists' — while Washington’s British-style army 'was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.'

A common feature of successful insurgencies, Polk records, is that once popular support dissolves after victory, the leadership suppresses the 'dirty and nasty people' who actually won the war with guerrilla tactics and terror, for fear that they might challenge class privilege. The elites’ contempt for 'the lower class of these people' has taken various forms throughout the years. In recent times one expression of this contempt is the call for passivity and obedience ('moderation in democracy') by liberal internationalists reacting to the dangerous democratizing effects of the popular movements of the 1960s."

Link here.

Economists discover people don’t behave rationally

"To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

Adam Smith (1723-1790)

Link here.

The tragedy of ‘foreign policy elites’

"This all started with George Bush the Elder and his 'liberation' of Kuwait. Remember? Let’s be fair: Kuwait is maybe a tiny bit freer than it was before, but it’s still not anything anyone would recognize as a democracy. The Saudis promised that they, too, would transform themselves into a modern democracy, in gratitude for our help in checking Saddam Hussein. The foreign policy elites were all over that one. Some said it was a disaster because we didn’t oust Hussein, and some said it was a disaster because we finally did and the country fell apart. At any rate, it’s been a disaster. More recently, the 'Arab Spring' was supposed to spread democracy across the entire region like a fine Oriental carpet. Didn’t happen. Today the chaos and bloodshed have spread to Syria, and thence, via Turkey, they head to Europe.

Perhaps what’s so remarkable about this terrible recent history is how many countries we have managed to screw up without affecting our own very much. That’s what allows us to give ourselves credit for good intentions, without the need for any beneficial result. Or perhaps what’s so remarkable is that we’re still paying the slightest attention to foreign policy elites."

Link here.

The End of the American Empire

By Charles W. ("Chas") Freeman, Jr

"These American conceits are, of course, delusional. They are all the more unpersuasive to foreigners because everyone can see that America is now in a schizophrenic muddle—able to open fire at perceived enemies but delusional, distracted, and internally divided to the point of political paralysis. The ongoing “sequester” is a national decision not to make decisions about national priorities or how to pay for them. Congress has walked off the job, leaving decisions about war and peace to the president and turning economic policy over to the Fed, which has now run out of options. Almost half of our senators had time to write to America’s adversaries in Tehran to disavow the authority of the president to represent us internationally as the Constitution and the laws prescribe. But they won’t make time to consider treaties, nominees for public office, or budget proposals. Politicians who long asserted that “Washington is broken” appear to take pride in themselves for finally having broken it. The run-up to the 2016 presidential election is providing ongoing evidence that the United States is currently suffering from the political equivalent of a nervous breakdown.

Congress may be on strike against the rest of the government, but our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines remain hard at work. Since the turn of the century, they have been kept busy fighting a series of ill-conceived wars—all of which they have lost or are losing. The major achievement of multiple interventions in the Muslim world has been to demonstrate that the use of force is not the answer to very many problems but that there are few problems it cannot aggravate. Our repeated inability to win and end our wars has damaged our prestige with our allies and adversaries alike. Still, with the Congress engaged in a walkout from its legislative responsibilities and the public in revolt against the mess in Washington, American global leadership is not much in evidence except on the battlefield, where its results are not impressive.

Diplomacy-free foreign policy blows up enough things to liven up the TV news but it generates terrorist blowback and it’s expensive. There is a direct line of causation between European and American interventions in the Middle East and the bombings in Boston, Paris, and Brussels as well as the flood of refugees now inundating Europe. And so far this century, we’ve racked up over $6 trillion in outlays and future financial obligations in wars that fail to achieve much, if anything, other than breeding anti-American terrorists with global reach."

Link here.

The Source of America's Wars – Kristol Clear

More on neocon warmongering and deception.

The Occupation of the American Mind

Link here.

And commentary on the movie from Real News Network here.

Let’s End America’s Hopeless War for the Middle East

"The United States plunged militarily into the Middle East out of the mistaken belief that the privileged status that Americans take as their birthright was at risk. Way back in 1948, George Kennan, State Department director of policy planning, noted that the United States then possessed 'about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population.' The challenge facing U.S. policymakers, he believed, was 'to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.' The overarching aim of American statecraft, in other words, was to sustain the uniquely favorable situation to which the United States had ascended by the end of World War II.

A half century later, that strategy succeeded and the Soviet Union collapsed. But the passing of the Cold War period left our massive national security apparatus underemployed while rendering obsolete the policy underlying postwar U.S. military policy—energetically preparing for global war in order to prevent it. The armed services and their various clients came face to face with a crisis of the first order. With the likelihood of World War III subsiding to somewhere between remote and infinitesimal—with the overarching purpose for which the postwar U.S. military establishment had been created thereby fulfilled—what exactly did that establishment and all of its ancillary agencies, institutes, collaborators, and profit-making auxiliaries exist to do?

The Pentagon wasted no time in providing an answer to that question. Rather than keeping the peace, it declared, the new key to perpetuating Kennan’s position of disparity was to 'shape' the global order. Shaping now became the military’s primary job. In 1992, the Defense Planning Guidance drafted under the aegis of Paul Wolfowitz spelled out this argument in detail. Pointing proudly to the 'new international environment' that had already 'been shaped by the victory' over Saddam Hussein the year before, that document provided a blueprint explaining how American power could 'shape the future.'”
Link here.

Russia Prepares for a Big War: The Significance of a Tank Army

"All this time the Russians told us that that NATO’s relentless expansion, ever closer, was a danger (опасность) although they stopped short of calling it, as they did terrorism, a threat (угроза); “dangers” you watch; “threats” you must respond to. NATO of course didn’t listen, arrogantly assuming NATO expansion was doing Russia a favour and was an entitlement of the “exceptional nation” and its allies.

It is important to keep in mind with the everlasting charges that Russia is "weaponising" this and that, threatening everyone and everything, behaving in an "19th century fashion",invading, brutalising, and on and on, that its army structure and deployments do not support the accusations. A few independent brigades, mostly in the south, are not the way to threaten neighbours in the west. Where are the rings of bases, the foreign fleet deployments, the exercises at the borders? And, especially, where are the strike forces? Since the end of the USSR they have not existed: as they have told us, so have they acted.

They planned for small wars, but NATO kept expanding; they argued, but NATO kept expanding; they protested, but NATO kept expanding. They took no action for years.

Well, they have now: the 1st Guards Tank Army is being re-created."
Link here.

What 2 countries received 75% of the total US foreign military financing?

Why, 2 countries that shouldn't be getting a dime.

"According to the U.S. State Government 2013-2015 Foreign Assistance report, an estimated $5.9 billion was spent on foreign military funding alone in fiscal year 2014. This is equivalent to 17% of the estimated $35 billion spent on total global aid discussed in our previous article. U.S. foreign military aid to countries ranged from $200,000 to $3.1 billion. Of the top 10 recipients, two countries received 75% of the $5.9 billion. Take a look on the map below to see who is getting the most foreign military financing from the U.S."

Link here.