Clouds of Conflict: Republican pacifism? Liberal war-mongering?

Our topic this time is war. Who seems hell-bent to start one… while accusing their opponents of the same thing. 

Rightists are accusing liberals of ‘seeking war with Russia’… while liberals helplessly watch the right foment war with Iran.

== The war they want ==

As I’ve been warning for a year, a US-Iran war has long been a centerpiece of Putin-Murdoch-Trump plans. Moreover, GOP presidents almost always go to war mid-way through their first terms, especially when – as we now see – they are desperate for a distraction.

Is a US-Iran war ‘winnable’? Look at a map! After all the silly-useless-made-for-TV tomahawk pips are done, there is only one end-game to such a conflict. It ends with Vladimir Putin extending the Russian umbrella to deter Yankee aggression, making Iran a protectorate, giving the Kremlin what's been a core Russian dream for 300 years. Geopolitically, no other outcome is even remotely possible. Look... at... a... map.

Who wins? Maximally Putin, but also every tyrannical power, from Trump and Murdoch to the Iranian mullahs (who get the perfect excuse for their mis-governance and a rationale to crush their democratic modernist youth). But above all Vlad, who gets an Iranian satrapy and high oil prices. Who loses? Look in a mirror. 

How might it start, in the wake of Donald Trump’s direct attack in the Iranian economy? Already, Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats are stepping up harassment attacks on a U.S. fleet that -- since we achieved energy independence under Obama -- no longer has any sane reason to be in the Straits of Hormuz, except to draw an attack. 

All it will take is a spark. So be familiar with these terms. Look them up. Know them. Teach them to your neighbors.

"Reichstag Fire."

"Gleiwitz Incident."

"Tonkin Gulf Incident."

"Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction."

“Remember the Maine!”

“And the Lusitania!”

“But believe Hitlers, because they can be trusted! As in the Munich (Helsinki) ‘deals.’” 

(Or when "dealmaker" Two Scoops gave Kim Jong Un everything on his wish list, and in return got empty promises that soon vanished in smoke. The U.S. and its staunchest ally are harmed, as in every trumpian deal.)

Oh, then there’s a phrase "the lying press" ~ or ‘lugenpresse’ as Goebbels put it. (Showing where Rupert Murdoch gets his ideas.)

Tell your neighbors to be ready for the coming trumped-up provocation event.

Ask them – in advance -- if that would suffice to be their "red line."

== A pot, accusing a new kettle ==

Oh, but accusations of war fever fly both ways! The latest riff from the murdochian right is that any hostility toward the Russian mafia-oligarchy boils down to liberal ’war-mongering’. 

Even participating in NATO and ANZUS and other mutual defense treaties - that deterred aggression and kept the world’s greatest peace for 70 years - is now tantamount to fomenting World War Three.

“Better Russian than Democrat” said the T-shirt at a recent Donald Trump rally. This enlightening article compares Moscow's current cozy support of the US radical right to their 1930s subversion via the American far-left. There are no essential differences. Indeed, some of the very same men are using some of the very same methods against us, as they did back when they wore hammer-and-sickle pins and sang the Internationale. This time, though "it’s not a proletarian revolution. Instead, it’s a kleptocratic coup d’état: The modern Kremlin project seeks to undermine Western democracies, break up the E.U. and NATO, and put corrupt relationships rather than the rule of law at the center of international commerce."

Again, there is one demographic that will make all the difference in coming months — ten million or so decent-conservative neighbors who are not racist jerks, or science haters, yet who remain loyal to the GOP/confederacy out of habit, or by mainlining doses of uncut Hannity.

Losing just ten million from his fragile coalition is Rupert Murdoch’s (and Putin’s) worst nightmare. So peeling away just a couple is your mission. Yes, yours. Moreover, you’ll never know which insanity might be the last straw, letting you pry one or two of these “ostrich republicans” out of the madness. This “liberal war-mongering” thing is just loony enough that it might turn the trick.

        

Only here’s an irony! As we’re about to see, “liberal war-mongering” is not a new riff. Nor is it 100% without historical justification.

== Democrats were soft on communism? ==

For starters, Republicans can claim zero credit for “containing communism” during the Cold War. Sure, they hated the left, diving into wild, divisive and hallucinatory crazes like McCarthyism. But starting with Taft, Dewey, Dirksen and onward, the actual GOP objective was isolationism. Some even said: “Let Stalin have Europe, and good riddance.”

When it came to acting assertively to counter Soviet aggression, that was almost entirely Democrats, beginning with George Marshall, Dean Acheson, Harry Truman and so on. In fact, vigor for containment of Leninism was especially propelled by the US labor movement and the AFL CIO. As I show in my article: The Miracle of 1947.

Yes, Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan went along, though the latter two were zealous in seeking to make deals favorable to despotic leaders. And yes, the dems eventually went way too far in their eagerness to “contain,” falling for what we now know to be a well-planned trap in the quagmire of Vietnam. I’m not saying every Democratic reflex was executed wisely!

But what’s clear is that the GOP’s tendency toward isolationism and contempt for allies is nothing new. And they get no credibility or credit for the generally better world that emerged across the American Pax.

== Who benefits from war? ==

Look at the postings out there! Propelled by Kremlin-basement trolls and spinoffs from Fox News, the latest sally is for confederates to accuse America’s “deep state” - the FBI, civil service, intelligence agencies and U.S. military Officer Corps - of fomenting strife with Russia in order to make profits selling weapons!

Seriously. The very same guys yammering for war against Iran, and who quagmired us into Iraq and Afghanistan, are now the peaceniks denouncing any hostility to Russian aggression as motivated by War Profiteers!  (And many lefties are falling for it.)

Except… well, there’s a rub.

During the first World War, yes, there was some political manipulation of warring powers by spectacularly evil munitions makers, since that's what had to be replaced on the battlefield as massive numbers of shells were expended. But today's munitions are far more efficient. Contracts to replace a couple of hundred tomahawks ain't squat, nor worth risking damage to the home nation's policy and health. Nor worth the risk of getting caught.

Look at who actually benefited from the last three trumped-up GOP wars, in Iraq then Afghanistan, then Iraq again. It was not military contractors like Northrup, who do best with peacetime projects aimed at high-tech preparedness. (Note: levels of measurable military readiness are always better during democratic administrations. That’s always. And yes, I mean always.)

The only beneficiaries from those recent GOP wars were (1) the Saudis, of course, and (2) Bush-Cheney family companies that got sweetheart, no bid, logistics contracts to build giant U.S. bases filled with mess halls and video arcades, air conditioning and runways. Halliburton, Bechtel etc. made off with tens of billions in corrupt, “emergency” overcharges. (Along with the $12 Billion in raw cash bills that Cheney flew into Baghdad, never to be seen again.) And note this: our military folks hated all of it! But they saluted and obeyed.

There was a corrupt “deep state,” all right, but it was the GOP.  It was the Bush-Cheney clan. It was Fox.

Liars, cowards and scoundrels

== Defectors and clingers….  and a truth teller who can go to hell ==

Top GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, long a vocal critic of Trump, sees his party as cowardly and "irredeemable" for not standing up against the president. There are dozens of such adults who are saying they’ve had enough. Alas, almost none of them are in the right’s political caste.

Mitt Romney – for his own benefit – spent a year trying to get “moderate republicans” like John McCain and Susan Collins and the rest to join in a conference to save their party, the way the Democrats saved theirs in what I call the “Miracle of 1947.”  Alas, Romney failed to find more than three grams of cojones among all of them, and now he has shrunk back from the challenge, too, sucking up to the Trumpists. We’ll get no help from such cowards.

And there’s backpedaling and lying hypocrisy on the rise. Take Ralph Reed who was always among the smartest of the fanatics pushing us hard into a dark age. His recent missive declares that the countless, volcanically-vile personal faults of Donald Trump are irrelevant:

“I said the same thing in the 1990s when I argued strongly against attacks on Bill Clinton’s character. In my book “Active Faith,” I wrote: “I have always deliberately confined my criticism of Clinton to public policy issues, not his character or moral shortcomings” and “If Bill Clinton is a sinner, he is no worse or less than you or me.” That was not a popular position at that time in my community, but it is one that I felt very strongly about then, and I feel the same way about President Trump.”

Oh, how charitable and all-forgiving! And spectacularly hypocritical and openly lying, given his earlier words. Here's a quote from Ralph Reed in a 1998 NY Times article. ''Character matters, and the American people are hungry for that message…. We care about the conduct of our leaders, and we will not rest until we have leaders of good moral character.''

Okay, so now his excuse for the pyrotechnically immoral behavior of almost every to GOP official, from Newt Gingrich and Dennis Hastert to the present occupant of the White House is: "Yes, our leaders are deeply immoral... but democrats are the same!"

Half a billion dollars of mostly our money was spent — across 25 years — investigating the Clintons, the most thoroughly probed humans in the history of our species. Half of all subpoenas issued by the lazy-ass GOP Congresses were in futile search of some "smoking gun." In 2001, George W. Bush diverted many agents from counter-terror duties to go through Clinton Administration files... in the run-up to 9/11.

 And after all that, what did we wind up with? A husband fibbed about some third base adult-consensual infidelity in a hallway... and the wife was later caught using exactly the same sort of somewhat improper email system as Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, John McCain, Mike Pence, George Bush and Jared Kushner.

Meanwhile, the GOP, which used to oppose gambling as a vice, is now dominated by casino moguls and slumlords with mob ties. A movement that despised divorce now shrugs when far more of its politicians are on multiple marriages (or caught in sexual perversion) than democrats. Red-confederate America leads the way in STDs, teen sex and pregnancy, domestic violence, gambling, addiction, murder and opioid addiction… and yet continues chanting about how much more moral they are.

Reed knows the chant is unraveling. “It’s about the policies,” he now maintains.  

I know several “ostrich” or residually sane Republicans who fall for this mantra. “My side has gone insane and sunk into turpitude,” admitted one of them to me, just days ago. “But if Trump and Fox are monsters, at least they have good effects.”

Alas, when I ask them to cite actual, measurable positive outcomes from the GOP controlling Congress for twenty of the last twenty-three years, they all stammer and then desperately try to change the subject. Because in all metrics and all ways - even things they should care about, like deficits and the health of entrepreneurial enterprise ... and military readiness(!) - the record of outcomes across Democratic administrations is universally and unambiguously better. 

See this proved, in detail: Outcomes Matter more than Rhetoric.

I repeat this too often, I know. But I will keep doing so, until you - yes you - and others start using it as a powerful polemical weapon: Name a fact profession - from science to law to the military - their cult is not attacking.

Name a strength that won us the Cold War - from alliances & science to citizen cohesion and a confident civil/military serving caste - that is not being systematically demolished by the Foxites.

When these purported ‘anti-communists’ are all chummy with Kremlin lords - just because those ex-KGB agents switched from wearing hammer/sickle pins to orthodox crosses, you know hypocrisy has hit new levels.  When their greatest pals are communist tyrants, you realize this was never about the health of market enterprise, but the revival of a confederate plantation caste.

“By his fruits you shall know him.”  And by his every fruit, we know Ralph Reed is what he’s always been. A lying beast, slouching toward Meggido.

== A man who could always see where this must lead ==

Oh, but they fall into a spectrum, a bestiary. Ralph Reed, while feral-clever enough to be evil, shows no sign of what I (or any star visitor) would call “sapience.” But there are some who I know to be easily as smart and perceptive as I am… or more… who have deliberately chosen treason.

Take the man I call "The Worst American".  George F. Will now asserts that only time spent in the wilderness can possibly save a Republican Party that's been hijacked by monsters. Oh, sure, he's very smart. He can tell that his entire conservative movement could wind up going extinct, if it remains under the control of casino moguls and slumlords with mafia ties, foreign despots, fox-traitors and confederate trogs. His point in this essay (Read it! Show it to your uncles): that only a crushing defeat this fall might force the GOP to re-evaluate and replace ol' Two Scoops in 2020.

Only a pyre that burns today's GOP will let a phoenix rebirth from the ashes. And Mr. Will asserts that rebirth could be dazzling.

He has a point. Democrats frittered away the last two times they retook Congress, allowing the Republicans to come roaring back. So, as a purely tactical move, GOP voters might follow Will's advice to rescue their party, ideally restocking their political caste with fresh voices who aren't crazy, or anti-fact - or beholden to Rupert Murdoch.

Only here's the thing. George Will remains unrepentant that he helped architect this present freak show. His brilliant incantations - like those of the protagonist in Vonnegut's MOTHER NIGHT - helped to keep tens of millions of residually sane "ostrich" republicans loyal to the undead elephant for two extra decades after Dennis "friend to boys" Hastert and his crew destroyed politics in America. For 20 years, Mr. Will cast soothing spells, delaying the arrival of this crisis till the very lives of America and the Western Enlightenment Experiment - hang in the balance.

He continues rationalizing... e.g. that Democrats kowtow to their executives -- an imbecilic falsehood belied by history, including California's Brown administration. Will knows this; he's offering his conservative readers a way to save face. 

But there's nothing left to save. Not when your party is now a cult, waging war against every profession that uses things called facts. Not when each and every strength of the American Pax that won the Cold War is being systematically dismantled or torched.

No. This man gets no forgiveness. Sure, we must welcome every American who returns home to the Union side, in this phase of the Civil War. And if some are turned back toward the light by words issued by George F. Will? Let's make them feel welcome under a very broad tent.

But not him. I forbid it. He might earn a prodigal son's forgiveness from Washington and Lincoln, perhaps in the great beyond. But the Worst American gets no pass from me.

== Speaking of whom… ==

The Nazis, according to this new book - The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic - were above all “a nationalist protest movement against globalization.” Even before the Great Depression brought huge unemployment to Germany, the caprice of the global economy offered an opportunity to politicians who had simple answers. In their 1920 program, the Nazis proclaimed that “members of foreign nations (noncitizens) are to be expelled from Germany.” 

Next would come autarky: Germans would conquer the territory they needed to be self-sufficient, and then create their own economy in isolation from that of the rest of the world. As Goebbels put it, “We want to build a wall, a protective wall.” Hitler maintained that the vicissitudes of globalization were not the result of economic forces but of a Jewish international conspiracy.

And then… more surprises?

This actually appeared on Fox News?  What’s their game? NASA's chilling 30-year-old warning: “We were warned. On June 23, 1988, a sultry day in Washington, James Hansen told the US Congress and the world that global warming wasn’t approaching — it had already arrived.  The testimony of the top NASA scientist, said Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, was “the opening salvo of the age of climate change.” 

"Thirty years later, it’s clear that Hansen and other doomsayers were right. But the change has been so sweeping that it is easy to lose sight of effects large and small — some obvious, others less conspicuous. Earth is noticeably hotter, the weather stormier and more extreme. Polar regions have lost billions of tons of ice; sea levels have been raised by trillions of gallons of water. Far more wildfires rage. Over 30 years — the time period climate scientists often use in their studies in order to minimize natural weather variations — the world’s annual temperature has warmed 0.54 degrees Celsius, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And the temperature in the United States has gone up even more — nearly 0.85 degrees.”  

Are the Kochs and their pals backing off?  Or preparing their case against the inevitable lawsuits?

Nope. As I'll tell in a coming missive, they are preparing freehold redoubts in Patagonia... where they will die at the hands of the very guards they have hired to protect them.  The ones left? Surviving "fact people" will know how to find them and have the ability and means to dig them out, or bury them with their useless gold...

...before we resume upward progress, and mine gold from asteroids.

The Tax Bill: aspects that no one (at all) will discuss.

It seems that the GOP, which has owned every branch of government and lever of power, since January, will at last have an "accomplishment" -  a Tax Bill they admit will add a trillion dollars to the national debt, while offering last-minute gushers for real estate developers, banks, hedge funds, the oil industry, lobbyists and aristocratic heirs…

… all of it without spending a red cent on infrastructure, which would have generated high money velocity and growth, while fixing actual bridges, actual roads we use. 

(Funny how that list describes almost every power broker or politician-owner correlated with this Congress and this White House:  Real Estate developers, Banks, hedge fund skulks, the oil industry, lobbyists and aristocratic heirs… ah, swamp drainage.)

To distract from this raid on our children, the oligarchy offers up more magical incantations of Supply Side “economics,” proclaiming that this time the oligarchs will spend their windfall on R&D and productive capacity and jobs… unlike every single other time, when they spent it all on passive asset bubbles, exactly as Adam Smith predicted, back in 1776.

Smith warned that aristocrats — like the ones our U.S. Founders rebelled-against — tend not to spend infusions of cash on risky capital formation, or research, or factories. Generally 90% of them will plow it into ‘rent-seeking’ assets like stocks or land, where they can passively collect dividends or gains.  (Note that every tax break in this bill favored passive income, not wages you actually earn through work.) 

As in King George’s time, top cronies adjust the laws to favor rent-grabbing assets over innovation, production or work. Smith would be outraged today… but not surprised.

Of course there is an end game to asset bubbles, and that end-game is the elephant in the room! One that, so far, no clever pundit has raised, amid all the yelling over this tax bill... an important aspect of the legislation that matters far more that the petty attacks on higher education and science, or the open war waged upon Blue States. I'll get to this invisible pachyderm, in a moment.

But pause first to congratulate the victors! The same folks who howled that Democrats passed the ACA (‘Obamacare’) in "just a year," holding open, public hearings for just 6 months in just five committees… those same complainers have now passed the biggest tax bill in history with ZERO days of hearings, with scribbled margin notes enacted into law, forging this trillion dollar raid for billionaires in top secret and passing it in the dead of night, amid a festival of lies.

What you fellahs do is evil. It is treason. But you do it very well.

== The real reason for the tax cut - an oligarch exit strategy ==

Critics of the Tax Bill point out that benefits to aristocrats are locked in, while much smaller cuts for working people fade quickly and turn into tax hikes, over a few years. That’s a travesty, of course.  But also a distraction, because we're left with an impression that the biggest change - slashing corporate tax rates - has little to do with the top-rich families of the country.

We're assured corporations will then invest it all in R&D, in new products, in factories and jobs. But...

1) Again, across 40 years, this Supply Side incantation never came true. Ever. Once. The eras of highest U.S. growth, rising wages and middle class health all took place under high tax rates established by the Greatest Generation, in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Except for the JFK rate cuts, every other cut was followed by reduced growth rates.

(See: Comparing the GOP tax plan to what it was like prior to the great depression.)

2) For the 2nd half of the Obama Administration, corporations have been mostly very profitable. They already had tons of cash on-hand, in the USA, to invest in production, jobs or R&D, but those investments declined. Their bulging cash larders were spent instead on dividends and stock buybacks that helped their CEOs to meet performance criteria for their vampiric option plans.

3) Any “competitive disadvantage” from other nations’ lower corporate rates might have been dealt with by negotiating a world treaty balancing such rates. It’s happened before! Sure, negotiations might not work, this time. But there’s no mention of even trying, only a race to the bottom.

4) Those who used to lie - claiming they care about deficits and debt - are suddenly shouting “squirrel!” and pointing offstage.

5) If this Tax bill had anything to do with investment in new products etc., it would have targeted to incentivize R&D, new factories and jobs. Instead, this was left as only a vague, armwaved promise. There is a reason.

== They need an exit from the bubble they created ==

Look across the era since Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations. Every generation of Americans since then has witnessed attempted political and economic putsches by would-be aristocrats gaming the rules so they can get richer without working or producing. Instead, as Smith described, they heap wealth into passive (rent or dividend or capital gains or parasitic-commission bleeding) assets. They do this because it’s far easier than putting “skin” into actually producing goods and services.

They also do this because sweetheart legislation makes it a great deal! But the smart ones know there is a price. 

That price is an ASSET BUBBLE.  We’ve seen many in our lifetimes: commodities, housing, real estate, banking and now a hyper-inflated stock market, with price to-earnings ratios that seem straight from the Twilight Zone. Those who piled their earlier tax largesse into asset bubbles know the great times always end.  

And hence, being clever, they always plan an exit strategy, for when the bubble bursts.

The dream strategy concocted during our previous two bubbles used to be "privatize social security!"  Get every middle class bumpkin to funnel his or her SSI account into stocks during a market peak! Fill equity markets with Greater Fools to sop up bloated assets, so the current (rich) owners can cash-out at top prices. 

That scam was stopped, thank God, just before the last collapse.  Whereupon Republicans suddenly lost interest in privatizing Social Security.  Go figure!

So what's the plan now?

Send hundreds of billions of tax-bennies to already profitable corporations!  Without any requirements or incentives to actually spend any of it on R&D or factories or jobs, members of the inbred, incestuously conniving “CEO caste” of 5000 golf buddies will know what to do, with a nod and wink.

Accelerate their already absurdly massive stock buy-backs!  (There are reasons why this was illegal, during the Greatest Generation.) Break the U.S. budget subsidizing companies to squander their futures, giving money to current stockholders... buying up stock that the moguls know will soon plummet in value.

We stopped their earlier scam, but this time — by skulking in secret and at night — they will get their way.

How can you benefit from this insight?  The wise will wait till the first buy-back crest brings equities to their final peak, then sell. Get out before the middle gets crushed again.

Oh, it may work. Only they are counting on us never noticing. And that could be a mistake.

=== Coda ===

“There are two ideas of government,” William Jennings Bryan declared in his 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech. “There are those who believe that if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”

That was more than three decades before the collapse of the economy in 1929. The crash followed a decade of Republican control of the federal government during which trickle-down policies, including massive tax cuts for the rich, produced the greatest concentration of income in the accounts of the richest 0.01 percent at any time between World War I and 2007. Those disparities were brought to their minimum under FDR and Eisenhower, with tax rates and policies that were ratified over and over by the Greatest Generation.

        

 We need to study them, and how they achieved all that they did in a spirit of moderation and enterprise. Especially, how they veered away from dogmatism and craziness, just when it seemed overwhelming.

One major danger of the right's current madness is that the left might over-react, returning to its own past insanities. The Evonomics site is where calm, rational, brilliant scholars & others reveal how cheaters have betrayed not just the poor and middle class, but also enterprise, innovation, genuine market economics, common sense, national self-interest and even Adam Smith! The articles and studies get better and better, making the clear case that market enterprise works, but only when cheating is tymied. (I've published a few there.) 

If your cousin is one of that vanishing breed - a residually sane Republican - take her to Evonomics and tell her: "Only you can save enterprise capitalism from its age-old foe. Not socialism so much, but feudalism."


Which brings me to my question. You’d have to be deaf and blind not to see the signs of a growing movement of American conservatives who are fed-up... not just with Bannon and Putin and their Trump, but with Rupert Murdoch and the insanity promulgated by Clear Channel Radio. Signs are all there - especially among the Mormons - that vigorous conversations are afoot about holding a convention of Sane American Conservatives.


Here's a parallel event, showing how it happened, in the past. If the dems could do it, why not you guys? 

Hence my question. Surely some of you have been approached by now? By people desperate to save American conservatism, before it is too late?

=====

Addenda:

* In addition to stock buybacks, there are mergers and acquisitions. At one level, this helps to make up for the plummet in industrial R&D -- purchasing small, innovative startups does have its logic, reducing short term risk, passing it over to entrepreneurs. That's fine. But the other half is what three generations of our ancestors fought, tooth and nail, the trend toward monopoly, duopoly or oligarchy in an industry. Anti-Trust laws were there for hard-won reasons that the Baby Boomers may be too stupid to grok.

*  Apparently the tax bill actually makes corporate tax deductions more or less irrelevant. But don't get excited.  The omission will be fixed in conference committee. What matters is: "The biggest consequence could be the research credit, often used by manufacturers, technology firms and pharmaceutical companies."  This is just another part of the War on Science. But more-so, since it directly goes to the jugular of American strength. Putin could not have asked for more.