The Lowest Common Denominator

"To provide a slightly different perspective, consider the three tables below, which highlight the magnitude of government and personal debt burdens on an absolute basis as well as per household and as a percentage of median household income."

Link here.

To My Fellow Plutocrats: You Can Cure Trumpism

Yet, I find myself in deep disagreement with almost everyone I talk to about Trump and Trumpism. I firmly believe that Trump, by himself, is not the problem. Indeed, the left’s maniacal focus on Trump confuses cause with effect. Yes, Trump is a manifestation of a serious civic sickness. But treating the symptom by removing Trump won’t cure the disease, even if it temporarily makes us feel better. No, to heal the body politic we must confront the disease itself.

The real threat to our republic is an alarming breakdown in social cohesion, and the cause of this breakdown is obvious: radical, rising economic inequality, and the anger and anxiety it engenders. The truth is that over the span of decades, American lawmakers (at the behest of economic elites like us!) have enacted policies that have depressed wages, stoked economic insecurity and exacerbated cultural angst and social dislocation. At the same time, a tiny minority of mostly urban elite (again, us!) have benefitted obscenely from our growing economic, political and legal power.

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I believe that we in the American political and economic elite face an extraordinarily inconvenient but undeniable truth: Our country will not get better until our fellow citizens feel better; and they will not feel better until they actually do better. And this is the hard part for many of you: The American people will not do better until they are actually paid more.

And they won’t be paid more until we change the way we manage our economy. This is the stark, simple fact at the heart of our ailing political system. Nothing is going to get better until we enact laws and standards that persuade or oblige every business to pay every worker a fair, dignified and livable wage. Everything else, from Trump on down, is a distraction or a lie.

Link here.

When Israel Attacked USS Liberty

Israeli pilot to IDF war room: This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?

IDF war room to Israeli pilot: Yes, follow orders.

Israeli pilot to IDF war room: But sir, it’s an American ship - I can see the flag!

IDF war room to Israeli pilot: Never mind; hit it.

Link here.

Humorous Charts and Graphs Show What Being an Introvert Is All About

Boy, did this resonate!

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For those of us that are extroverted, the world of introverts feels pretty foreign.  This is partially because we don’t feel the same way that they do, and partially because it is often hard to understand the difference.  Well, it just got a little easier with this great charts and graphs that – while hilarious – are very honest to help the world understand the complex but important world that introverts live in.

For those who are introverted, this is like a gift from heaven.  We can share this with friends who have never understand the “big deal” about the term introvert, so that maybe they’ll understand when you have those days that Humorous Charts and Graphs Show What Being an Introvert Is All Aboutyou don’t always want to talk or hang out.  They’ll see it as a “oh, okay, you’re introverted today” instead of a “you’re rude” thing.  It can make the difference sometimes.  Educate yourself and have a laugh at the same time.

Link here.

The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift Is Blowing Up in the World's Face

The bottom-feeding amorality of the sorts of people who sponsored the right-wing press, and the crummy nature of the products and services sold, shows exactly who was supposed to be consuming it: suckers. Or, more specifically, trusting retirees, with a bit of disposable income, and a natural inclination to hate modernity and change—an inclination that could be heightened, radicalized, and exploited.

The grown-up Republicans in Washington, meanwhile, still existed in their own genteel bubble of misinformation—they convinced themselves that the occupation of Iraq would be over and done with in a few easy months—but the major figures in the Bush administration, and its allies in Congress, were not men who got the majority of their news from “Free Republic” and Alex Jones. They put their faith in a fairly traditional conservative orthodoxy: That you can use the levers of power to quietly enrich your friends and their firms, while pleasing the masses with some combination of tax cuts, loud proclamations of religiosity, and a modest, popular war or two.

But the complete and inarguable disaster of the Bush administration—a failure of the conservative movement itself, one undeniable even to many consumers of the parallel conservative media—and his abrupt replacement by a black man, caused a national nervous breakdown among the people who’d been told, for many years, that conservatism could not fail, and that all Real Americans agreed with them.

Link here.

How Middle-Class America Got Fleeced

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, middle-class Americans looked forward to a future of wealth and leisure. If you were a small business owner, or an engineer, or a lawyer at a small firm, you might not have expected to be rolling in it, but you probably didn’t think things would go so badly awry.

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But along with real productivity, the neoliberal age saw plenty of grift and middle-class wealth extraction. In the book, “Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception,” Nobel prize-winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller said that all free-market economies are accompanied by some amount of consumer error, simply because sellers are always exploring every possible method of parting people from their money.

Link here.

U.S. Military Spending: The Cost of Wars

The charts and tables in this section summarize the actual and projected cost of U.S. wars as reported for the OCO accoun—drawing heavily largely on earlier work by the Congressional Research Service.

• The Department of Defense's OCO costs of the Afghan conflict since FY2001 will rise to $840.7 billion—if the President's FY2018 budget request is met. They will be $770.5 billion for Iraq.
• The total costs for all OCO spending between FY2001 and FY2018 will be in excess of $1,909 billion. Given the costs omitted from the OCO budget, the real total cost will almost certainly be well over $2 trillion, even using OCO data as the only costs of the wars.

These latter estimates update a series of earlier CRS analyses, one of which noted that, "Other observers and analysts define war costs more broadly than congressional appropriations and include estimates of the life-time costs of caring for OEF/OIF/OND veterans, imputed interest costs on the deficit, or increases in DOD’s base budget deemed to be a consequence of support for the war…Such costs are difficult to compute, subject to extensive caveats, and often based on methodologies that may not be appropriate…"

Three alternative cost estimates are also summarized in this section.

• One by Lina J. Blimes puts the total cost at $4 to $6 trillion by end FY2016.
• A related estimate by the Watson Institute puts the cost at $4.8 trillion through FY2016.
• A third estimate, by Neta Crawford, puts costs at more than $4.8 trillion through FY2017, plus more than $7.9 trillion in cumulative interest on past appropriations, or more than $12.7 trillion.

It is important to note that separate work by Todd Harrison of CSIS in assessing the overall OCO account—Enduring Dilemma of Overseas Contingency Operations Funding, Transition45 Series, January 11, 2017—states that both Congress and the Obama administration moved items from the base budget to the OCO budget as a way of circumventing the BCA budget caps. Roughly half of the OCO budget ($30 billion) is now being used for programs and activities that were previously funded in the base budget. These issues are discussed in more detail later in this study.

If these alternative estimates—and many others—are taken into account, it is all too clear that the United States now has no official estimate of the cost of its wars. Further, without such an estimate, there is no credible basis for either Executive Branch or Congressional review of the budgets and plans for such wars, much less of the ability to effectively execute given strategies, and provide credible indicators of the cost effectiveness and progress of key elements of military and civil activity.

Link here.

Threat Perceptions

"Moscow seeks to promote a multi-polar world predicated on the principles of respect for state sovereignty and non-interference in other states’ internal affairs, the primacy of the United Nations, and a careful balance of power preventing one state or group of states from dominating the international order."

You might say that this is a statement of the blindingly obvious, but what is interesting is what it doesn’t say, that is anything on the lines of “Russia is an aggressive, imperialist power bent on invading her neighbours, restoring the Soviet empire, and destroying the existing international system.” The statement that Russia supports the “primacy of the United Nations” and a “balance of power” in order to maintain the “international order” is quite a striking riposte to the often-repeated claim that Russia seeks to overthrow “the rules-based global system.”

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"Russia also has a deep and abiding distrust of U.S. efforts to promote democracy around the world and what it perceives as a U.S. campaign to impose a single set of global values. Moscow worries that U.S. attempts to dictate a set of acceptable international norms threatens the foundations of Kremlin power by giving license for foreign meddling in Russia’s internal affairs. … Moscow views the United States as the critical driver behind the crisis in Ukraine and the Arab Spring and believes that the overthrow of former Ukrainian President Yanukovych is the latest move in a long-established pattern of U.S.-orchestrated regime change efforts, including the Kosovo campaign, Iraq, Libya, and the 2003–05 “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan."

Link here and here.