Month: June 2022 Page 2 of 3

On June 18, 2022

Use comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Ukraine KIA 500-1,000 a Day

On June 16, 2022

And that’s what Ukraine is willing to admit to.

Up to 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers are being killed or wounded each day in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, with 200 to 500 killed on average and many more wounded, a top Ukrainian official said on Wednesday.

In the initial attack, Russia took heavy casualties. They didn’t expect the Ukrainians to really fight, don’t seem to have taken into account the amount of fortifications built in the East since 2014 and were very sparing with artillery and air power. Since then, however, they have engaged in grinding attrition warfare. They have air superiority, more missiles, and far more artillery. They also have far more reserves, and their supply lines aren’t interdicted by hostile air forces, so they easily rotate units in and out of the front.

The result of this is that Ukraine is now taking much higher casualties than Russia and will have a higher killed/injured ratio as well. If they’re willing to admit up to 1K a day, I’m betting it’s at least double that.

Russia is advancing slowly, but they are taking ground, and they seem in no rush. Once they conquer Donbas and Luhansk, the question is whether their primary pivot is to Odessa or to Kharkiv. (I’d say taking Odessa does more harm to Ukraine, as Russia could then easily close off Ukraine’s entire coast, but Russia may want Kharkiv more.)

The other thing to bear in mind is that once Donbas and Luhansk are conquered, most of the rest of Ukraine is not nearly as heavily fortified, except in the sense that all cities are natural fortifications, and that Ukraine is essentially a flat open plain. Advances may speed up a fair bit, though the post Cold-war Russian army (as with most armies) isn’t really suited to breakthroughs and blitzkrieg warfare, as like other modern armies it is organized around brigades which don’t really have the mass and men necessary.

As I have long noted, barring an economic/logistical collapse which seems extremely unlikely, there was never any way that Russia was going to lose the conventional stage of any war with Ukraine. They have a far larger military, and it’s not, actually, crap.

The decision of when to stop the Ukraine war is Putin’s. If he is seen to lose the war, he will lose power and almost certainly wind up dead along with his family, so he won’t end the war until he has a victory, and, as he controls the more powerful military force, he can choose to win.

The longer Ukraine puts off making peace, the worse the terms are likely to be.

As for a guerilla war, my guess is that Russia will take parts that are primarily Russian, and anyone who is pro-Ukraine will be encouraged or forced to leave. Nasty ethnic cleansing, but it is one of the ways you break insurgencies. (They may not even have to do very much, though, considering how many have fled the war. Just don’t let them come back if they aren’t pro-Russian.)

The longer-term consequences are harder to forsee beyond the obvious stuff like Russia now being a junior Chinese ally and Europe now being a much firmer US satrapy. There’ll be a famine, there’s going to be a recession (caused as much by the political and central bank response as the war and sanctions), and so on. Europe won’t recognize whatever Russia takes, and there’ll be a festering sore, probably for decades.

But, bottom line, Russia is winning and will keep winning. The only thing that could change that would be direct entry by NATO, and that would probably lead to nuclear war.

From 2010: The Unvarnished Truth About the US

On June 15, 2022

Twelve years ago, I wrote this post. I don’t see anything since then has changed to make it wrong, and I think it’s worth reading still — especially for those who weren’t with me 12 years ago.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time, and in light of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited corporate money into the political system, I think it’s time.

Yesterday’s decision makes the US a soft fascist state. Roosevelt’s definition of fascism was control of government by corporate interests. Unlimited money means that private interests can dump billions into elections if they choose. Given that the government can, will, and has rewarded them with trillions, as in the bailouts, or is thinking about doing so in HCR, by forcing millions of Americans to buy their products, the return on investment is so good that I would argue that corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to buy out government – after all, if you pay a million to get a billion, or a billion to get a trillion, that’s far far better returns than are available anywhere else.

And no politician, no political party, can reasonably expect to win when billions of dollars are arrayed against it.

The one faint hope is that politicians in the Senate will panic, know they have ten months to do something, and ram something through. Of course, that will only be a stopgap measure, until the Supremes overthrow it, but in the meantime, maybe Dems will get serious about the Supreme Court and stop rubber-stamping radical right-wingers like Alito and Roberts.

That is, however, a faint hope.

Given the US’s complete inability to manage its economic affairs, and its refusal to fix its profound structural problems, whether in the financial system, the education system, the military, concrete infrastructure, technology, or anything else, I cannot see a likely scenario where the US turns things around. The US’s problems in almost every area amount to “monied interests are making a killing on business as usual, and ologopolistic markets and will do anything they can to make sure the problem isn’t fixed.”

Even before they had the ability to dump unlimited money into the political system, they virtually controlled Washington. This will put their influence on steroids. Any congressperson who goes against their interests can be threatened by what amounts to unlimited money. And any one who does their bidding can be rewarded with so much money their reelection is virtually secure.

This decision makes the US’s recovery from its decline even more unlikely than before — and before it was still very unlikely. Absolute catastrophe will have to occur before people are angry enough and corporations weak enough for there to even be a chance.

So, my advice to my readers is this.

If you can leave the US, do. Most of the world is going to suffer over the next decades, but there are places which will suffer less than the US: places that have not settled for soft fascism and are refusing to fix their economic problems. Fighting to the very end is romantic, and all, but when you’re outnumbered, outgunned, and your odds of winning are miniscule, sometimes the smartest thing to do is book out. Those who immigrated to the US understood this; they left countries which were less free or had less economic hope than the US, and they came to a place where freedom and opportunity reigned.

That place, that time, is coming to an end. For your own sake, and especially for the sake of your children, I tell you now — it is time to get out.

I am not the only person thinking this. Even before the decisions, two of my savviest American friends, people with impeccable records at predicting the US meltdown, told me that within the next few years they would be leaving.

There’s always hope, and those who choose to stay might stop this terminal decline.

But you need to ask yourself, seriously, if you are willing to pay the price of failure, if you are willing to have your children pay the price of failure. Because it will be very, very steep.

Ways Capitalism May Be Destroyed

On June 13, 2022

In the classical Weberian model of the rise of capitalism, one of the preconditions is that all three factors of production — land, labour, and capital — must be available in markets. (Capital, in this context, is not just money, but includes capital machinery and other non-labour/land inputs.)

If land can’t be bought, there is no capitalist takeoff. This was the case in most of Europe during the Early and High Middle ages: The vast majority of land was held by nobles, and most of the rest was handed down through families or as church property and not available for purchase.

If labour can’t be bought or rented, then you don’t have workers. For most of the Early and High Middle ages, the majority of people were serfs or otherwise tied to the land. There were some free cities, especially by the High Middle ages, but the people in them constituted a distinct minority.

And finally, for most of the Early and High Middle ages, lending money for interest was a sin. It happened anyway, but it was a very risky business, with huge margins.

Another necessity is calculable law and relative safety. When you can’t be sure if a noble will seize your land, if bandits or nobles will plunder your shipments, or suddenly raise tariffs and fees, or will repudiate loans, you can’t run a long-term business. In these situations, merchants (not shopkeepers, but the bigger ventures) were gambles, as in the old saying “my ship has come in.” High returns, very high risk, and a preference for high value luxury goods.

Because these are the pre-requisites for capitalism as a dominant and hegemonic system of production and a political ideology, ending any of these will also end capitalism.

If labour, capital, or land stops being widely available in the market, if people have other options to make a living for example, and don’t need or want wage labor, or if land cannot be bought, or if capital goods and money aren’t readily available, or law or banditry or taxation becomes too capricious, then capitalism will come screeching to a halt.

What scenarios can we imagine where this might happen? I’ll offer some in the future, but think it through a bit yourself.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 12, 2022

By Tony Wikrent

On June 12, 2022

The Money Trail to the January 6 Attack on the Capitol Is Ignored in Last Night’s Public Hearing

by Tony Wikrent

Oligarchs’ war on the experiment of republican self-government

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, June 10, 2022 [Wall Street on Parade]

As we watched the two-hour public hearing on the critical facts uncovered by the House Select Committee on the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, we kept waiting to hear a discussion of the money trail that facilitated this attack. That discussion never came. And yet, big expenses were involved: dozens of buses were rented; signs advertising “Stop the Steal” were on the sides of some of those buses; food and lodging had to be paid for, in or around expensive Washington, D.C.; and, now, lawyers have to be paid to represent those indicted for brutalizing police on January 6 or destroying and/or stealing government property….

But the question that any good investigator of an unsolved crime scene must ask is this: who benefits from this crime? And to understand who, besides Donald Trump, would be the chief beneficiaries of a coup that installed Trump for an illegitimate second term as President, one has to follow the money trail. That money trail leads to Charles Koch, the billionaire Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in the world….

One of the Koch front groups that played a major role in the 2016 election that put Donald Trump in the White House in the first place was Freedom Partners. (It quietly shut down in 2019 after the press started reporting on its role.) When the group was still active in 2018, we had taken a hard look at its Board of Directors. We found that all but one of its Board Members was a current or former Koch company employee. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, Freedom Partners ended up with 12 of its former employees working in the Trump Administration….

To handle any legal pushback, Koch Industries’ law firm, Jones Day, sent 12 of its law partners to staff up key positions in the Trump administration on the very day Trump was inaugurated. Jones Day has since removed the press release it issued at the time but you can read the reporting on it at the American Bar Association Journal….

According to the TrumpMarch.com website, which was sponsored by Women for America First, its “Coalition Partners” for the January 6 event at the Capitol included the Rule of Law Defense Fund; the Tea Party Patriots; and Turning Point Action, among others. The TrumpMarch.com website has since been taken down but it was captured on January 2, 2021 (give the page a little time to load) by the Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine.

Rule of Law Defense Fund is the dark money arm of Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), a group that was raising millions of dollars from corporate felons in order to elect the highest law enforcement officers at the state level. (See our in-depth report of January 14, 2021.) According to IRS filings made by RAGA, it has received $511,400 from Koch Industries and a subsidiary since 2014….

Another of the Coalition Partners, Turning Point Action, Tweeted that it was “honored to help make this happen, sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” The Tweet was first reported by DailyDot.com.

Turning Point Action is a dark money group that does not report its donors to the Federal Election Commission. However, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, its sister group, Turning Point USA, has received $610,000 from Donors Trust since 2017. Charles Koch’s footprints are all over Donors Trust, another dark money group, as we exclusively reported in 2010. (See Koch Footprints Lead to Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive.)

#1 charge: “Illegal parading

Lambert Strether [Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-9-2022]

“Here is the chart of the charges under which they were convicted (there’s no legend, but orange seems to sentenced, and grey not yet sentenced:”

Graph

“The #1 charge: “Illegal parading.” Illegal parading?”

Did I experience aghastitude on “1/6″™? No.

Lambert Strether [Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-10-2022]

TW: I don’t agree with Strether’s argument that the events of January 6 2021 are not as terrible as Democrats, liberals, and the anti-Trumpers argue they are, but I think Strether is absolutely correct in his conclusion that what is driving these three groups of people is their sense of entitlement.

Did I experience aghastitude on “1/6″™? No. The Winter Palace in 1917 this was not. And what if that guy, instead of being a right-winger in a Trump hat, had been a union guy with a giant inflatable rat? I would have been cheering him on! Finally somebody stood up! What’s really driving the liberal Democrats — and, I suppose, Never Trump Republicans — is that deep down they think Capitol Hill is their space, democracy is “our” democracy, norms are their their norms, and that they will be comfortable again when the “insurrectionists” are rooted out and purged. But it’s not, it’s not, they’re not, and they won’t be. They lost their minds in 2016 for the same reasons, and never did manage to find them again, party leadership and PMC base together.

Insurrection is a crime (18 U.S. Code § 2383). So how come Merrick Garland charged the vast majority of the “insurrectionists” with illegal parading?

TW: The assault on the Capitol and attempt to stop the certification of Biden was a serious, seditious assault on the rule of law, posing a dire threat to republican self government. But a serious investigation of this threat would focus, as Pam and Russ Martens assert, on the funders. But that would be a threat to the powers that have transformed USA from a republic to a plutocratic oligarchy, and which own both the Republican and Democratic parties.

The Roots Of The January 6 Riot

Joel Warner, June 10, 2022 [The Lever]

“At its core, the January 6 insurrection was the weaponized manifestation of virulent anti-government sentiment in a putatively democratic country where a majority has not trusted its own government for two decades… The ideological crusade against government has always been a part of American politics. But it really began coalescing in modern form in the late 1970s when conservative demagogues, moguls, and business interests began building a movement to demonize public institutions…”

So as the horrors of January 6 become prime-time TV viewing, let’s not forget that the attempted coup wasn’t a political fluke whose danger has come and gone. The origins of the Capitol attack were a long time coming — and those who helped it along are still flush with corporate cash.

“Americans’ Views of Government: Decades of Distrust, Enduring Support for Its Role”

[Pew Research Center, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-9-2022]

“Americans remain deeply distrustful of and dissatisfied with their government. Just 20% say they trust the government in Washington to do the right thing just about always or most of the time – a sentiment that has changed very little since former President George W. Bush’s second term in office.”

Graph

“We’re Misunderstanding What Caused Jan. 6”

[FiveThirtyEight, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-10-2022]

Open Thread

On June 11, 2022

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Smiling at Death

On June 10, 2022

I don’t know what happens after death. I have two friends who have died and lived again to report. One says there was nothing, another had a classic near death experience. After reading a lot of case studies, I’m inclined to believe that reincarnation is fairly common (why everyone should have the same post-death experience is beyond me), but certainly it could be that death is the END, or one goes to the happy hunting grounds, or any of a number of any other possibilities.

What I do know is that when you die, you have to leave a lot behind. Everything you’ve owned, your physical body, and all the people, though perhaps some will rejoin you later. I rather suspect that, if oblivion isn’t what happens, that on losing the physical body you will also undergo some significant changes to personality, memory, and perception. (One advanced spiritual teacher told me that when you die, your physical life seems like a dream. I don’t know if they were full of it or not.)

But forget all the stuff about what may or may not happen. For sure, we’ll be leaving a ton of things behind.

When I was in my 20s, I spent three months in the hospital, and then a few years recovering. The hospital stay was so awful, including days of screaming, more dry vomiting than I can count, and complete inability to move for almost a month, that after I got out I swore that I’d never let it happen again.

I was very close to death for a few weeks while in that hospital, and the doctors actually didn’t think I’d make it. I had plenty of time to contemplate it, and when I came out I had no fear of death, because I knew that truly awful things happen in life.

Something changes when you face your mortality, not for an instant, but over a period time. I had to do it again later when I had heart problems (serious enough that I couldn’t catch my breath sitting down), and so I’ve done this more than once.

Add in my meditation training and something odd happened: I find the thought of death soothing. When I think something bad will happen or something bad does happen, I remind myself that, like Socrates, I’m human and therefore mortal, and I’m going to die one day. If I lose something, odds are it was something I was going to lose anyway.

And then I ask myself, “Am I scared of death?” and the inevitable reply is a chuckle, because the idea is absurd to me. Maybe there are hells and worse things can happen, but I know for sure that really, really bad things happen here.

And then, perhaps, I think back. The happiest year or two of my life were when I was around five, living on the beach with my grandmother and mother. I had virtually nothing then except clothes and a place to sleep: no possessions I cared about except a tiny heart-shaped booked my grandmother gave me in which she had written a story.

Happiness requires very little; remove misery, and happiness should bloom.

So when I’m anxious or scared, I move on to the ultimate anxiety or fear, and I find it empty, and then perhaps I keep it in mind for a time, and, for me, that is a near sure cure for anxiety.

Death can be your friend and your teacher. You’re going to have to face it one day; perhaps if you face it now, and ask yourself if you can be okay with losing all the things it takes, it can help you be free and happy.