McCoy on the CIA

McCoy is a Yalie who not especially surprisingly got involved with the intelligence services. Skull and Bones is at Yale and the bright and well connected often join forces to become what has lately come to be called "the deep state." McCoy is not well-connected but as can be seen from his beautiful writing, he is obviously very bright. This combination has often led to some scathing outsider critiques and McCoy's here is a doozy.

I have two comments on his expose:

• McCoy is appropriately outraged that during the Vietnam War, the CIA moved so much heroin into South Vietnam that an estimated 34% of USA forces became regular users. Well yes, wartime profiteering in hard drugs probably doesn't have a lot of support. But I had a neighbor in St. Paul who was one of those users. He was a poor farm kid from northwest Minnesota who had managed to get a degree in French from a St. Paul college. The army turned him into a translator who was assigned to get information from captured Viet Cong. The guys doing the actual interrogation were South Vietnamese army but he was in the room when the torture took place. He never really recovered from that experience and halfway through his tour, the army realized their mistake and reassigned him to Saigon where he spent the rest of his time making sure the hookers with USA clients got their regular shots. This wasn't much of an improvement as he became witness to another wartime-related form of human degradation. Soon he was consuming the readily available heroin. His favorite method involved a regular cigarette that had been soaked in a heroin bath and dried. He reported that the advantage was that he could consume his drugs in the presence of his commanding officers and no one seemed to notice because they looked and smelled like normal cigarettes. In his opinion, heroin was the only reason he survived Vietnam without going insane and committing suicide. So strange as it may sound, getting smack to USA troops may have been one of the more virtuous acts in CIA history.
• McCoy has done us all a serious service by telling us what some of our taxpayer money has been spent on. On the other hand, one can only wonder at what might have become of such a talented person if he hadn't wasted his life chasing the bad guys. It is MUCH better than being one of the bad guys, of course, but in the end it is still just mostly Leisure Class silliness.

The total triumph of the idiot classes

The absolute WORST feature of Identity Politics is that it trivializes everything. There are BIG problems like climate change, the fact that folks with schoolyard bully mentalities have access to doomsday weapons, the general collapse of the biosphere, and the reality that the global economy is being run by sociopathic lunatics. Yet there are those who believe that I should be most concerned about the sort of statuary found in obscure parks in mainly the Old South. Now I understand that this sort of symbolic posturing is about all most people can muster as a public gesture. And I know it is WAY beyond the abilities of your typical mainstream journalist to write about anything more complex or important than transgender bathrooms. But sooner or later, we must address the big problems or humanity will cease to exist on the third rock from the sun.

Perhaps the best example of a culture run by excessively trivial dimwits is the current outbreak of Russia-bashing. To listen to these cretins, we are supposed to hate the Russians because they annexed Crimea after the anti-Russian coup in the Ukraine. The Crimeans, who have considered themselves part of Russia since Catherine the Great, wanted to rejoin Russia so badly that their vote to become part of the Russian Federation was well over 90%. Crimea was also Russian by virtue of a LOT of spilled blood. Between the Nazi invasion, the siege of Sevastopol, its surrender and the pitched battles to recapture it, the Red Army and civilians, mostly Russian, lost over 500,000 in the battles for Crimea during the Great Patriotic War. That's more than the totals for all of WW II for the French, British, and USA combined. The idea that Russia was going to give up Crimea over a chickenshit coup in Kiev is beyond preposterous. Yet Crimea is reason #1 given for the current round of Russia-bashing.

Neoliberalism—the catastrophic idea that won the day despite being wrong about everything

1973 turned out to be the major economic watershed year for most people alive today. Because that was the year that the pro-growth assumptions of the Keynesians were run out of town.  I was in college when it happened. It was a college known for its Keynesian perspective. The head of the economics department, one Walter Heller, had been JFK's top economic advisor and liked to brag that he taught the principles of Keynes to the President of the USA. In fact, almost anyone who ever had Heller for a class, or had even just met him professionally, had heard this boast. I actually enjoyed his JFK stories because he told them to illustrate the point that even "mere" politicians could understand a set of ideas that had a well-deserved reputation for being difficult.

The University of Minnesota had been "Keynesian" since Alvin Hansen became a full professor in 1923. Actually, calling Hansen a Keynesian is more than a little bit misleading. The USA midwest had only recently been settled so there was a constant stream of political agitation for an economics that represented the world views of people who were attempting to claw a civilization out of some very empty places. Hansen grew up in Viborg South Dakota among people who were attempting to grow row crops and other agricultural pursuits on grassland that had never been plowed. For such people, economic plans that emphasized development were the only ones that would possibly interest them. He studied these ideas under Richard Ely and John Commons at the University of Wisconsin—another new and developing state. So Hansen already was a believer in pro-growth economics long before Keynes ever published his General Theory in 1936.

That Hansen was obviously a "Keynesian" before he ever heard of the man was not unique to him. Marriner Eccles, hands down the best central banker the USA has ever had, was "accused" of being a Keynesian because of his guidance of the Fed during the Roosevelt years. No less a figure than Ken Galbraith called Eccles the most important Keynesian in the land. And yet Eccles claimed to his dying day that he had never read Keynes. For men like Hansen and the Mormon from Utah Eccles, calling them Keynesians was merely a label used by lazy academics and journalists who weren't about to go to the trouble of understanding why folks from frontier settlements might have independently developed pro-growth economic ideas.

Below is a Guardian article that explains how the feudal / imperialist economics came roaring back when the Keynesians faltered in 1973. Their story is about the battle of ideas between Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. My story is that the Keynesians lost because by 1973 their profession had far too many Leisure Class hacks (like Paul Samuelson) and far too few giants like Hansen and Eccles who understood the importance of the Producer Classes and their interests (no matter how they were labeled).

I have written about Hansen and the USA "Keynesians" before:

Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Frances Perkins and the fight for decent working conditions

Wednesday, August 6, 2014
Heiner Flassbeck on the search for an enlightened capitalism

Sunday, November 6, 2011
Waking up to the relentless idiocy of neoliberalism

Neoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world

The word has become a rhetorical weapon, but it properly names the reigning ideology of our era – one that venerates the logic of the market and strips away the things that make us human.

Stephen Metcalf, 18 August 2017

Last summer, researchers at the International Monetary Fund settled a long and bitter debate over “neoliberalism”: they admitted it exists. Three senior economists at the IMF, an organisation not known for its incaution, published a paper questioning the benefits of neoliberalism. In so doing, they helped put to rest the idea that the word is nothing more than a political slur, or a term without any analytic power. The paper gently called out a “neoliberal agenda” for pushing deregulation on economies around the world, for forcing open national markets to trade and capital, and for demanding that governments shrink themselves via austerity or privatisation. The authors cited statistical evidence for the spread of neoliberal policies since 1980, and their correlation with anaemic growth, boom-and-bust cycles and inequality.

Neoliberalism is an old term, dating back to the 1930s, but it has been revived as a way of describing our current politics – or more precisely, the range of thought allowed by our politics. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, it was a way of assigning responsibility for the debacle, not to a political party per se, but to an establishment that had conceded its authority to the market. For the Democrats in the US and Labour in the UK, this concession was depicted as a grotesque betrayal of principle. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, it was said, had abandoned the left’s traditional commitments, especially to workers, in favour of a global financial elite and the self-serving policies that enriched them; and in doing so, had enabled a sickening rise in inequality.

Over the past few years, as debates have turned uglier, the word has become a rhetorical weapon, a way for anyone left of centre to incriminate those even an inch to their right. (No wonder centrists say it’s a meaningless insult: they’re the ones most meaningfully insulted by it.) But “neoliberalism” is more than a gratifyingly righteous jibe. It is also, in its way, a pair of eyeglasses.

Peer through the lens of neoliberalism and you see more clearly how the political thinkers most admired by Thatcher and Reagan helped shape the ideal of society as a kind of universal market (and not, for example, a polis, a civil sphere or a kind of family) and of human beings as profit-and-loss calculators (and not bearers of grace, or of inalienable rights and duties). Of course the goal was to weaken the welfare state and any commitment to full employment, and – always – to cut taxes and deregulate. But “neoliberalism” indicates something more than a standard rightwing wish list. It was a way of reordering social reality, and of rethinking our status as individuals.

A German (DW) update on climate change

Climate change is a BIG issue around here—not that you would know it from the paucity of reporting on the subject. My excuse is that there is more than enough evidence of climate change—and far too little on the subjects of how we got to this place where almost everything everyone does only adds to the problem. Turns out that the technological problems caused by the total domination of fire-based economies is almost trivial compared to the cultural expressions that support them. So much so that any suggestion that the world must move to fire-free societies is greeted as the most radical form of madness imaginable—even though such an assertion is utterly true.

But since not a lot is getting accomplished towards this necessary goal, we still need reminders of how serious the problems caused by a warming planet really are, and that ignoring these problems will not make them go away. This little reminder from DW must do for today. After all, we simply must get back to the "serious" problem of where we site monuments to Confederate War "heroes." (NOT)

Donald Trump confronts the War Party

David Stockman is the sort that can easily inspire conflicting emotions. He is obviously very bright—he was the boy wonder head of Reagan's Office of Management and Budget who soon got into trouble by pointing out that Reagan's budget numbers were, at best, a hoax. Worse he explained it all to William Greider who wrote up the story in the Atlantic. As history so often reminds us, telling the truth is a hazardous occupation and Stockman's venture into honesty quickly transformed him from Rising Republican Star into a political pariah overnight.

While brazen honesty is an admirable and often amusing trait, it does not transform Stockman into a political genius. While his analysis is often excellent, it is usually colored by the same neoliberal assumptions that have led both major political parties (and most of the world) dangerously astray. So when he gets things wrong, he does so in boringly predictable ways.

But being a neoliberal on economics does not necessarily make someone a warmongering neoconservative—it certainly does not in the case of one David Stockman. In the following he writes about what he believes motivates the attempted establishment coup against the constitutionally elected government currently under way in Washington.

Impeaching Trump is going to be a lot harder than impeaching Bill Clinton for a sex scandal—mostly because both houses of congress are controlled by the Republicans. While not all Republicans are Trump supporters, all can remember how easily he dispatched the field in his run to the White House. Voting to impeach Trump would anger a wide slice of their political base and since elections are often won with slim margins, few wish to find out just how angry their base would get.

And yet the war on the Trump administration continues in spite of its seeming futility. Many, myself included, wonder why anyone would bother trying to remove this man from office. So the following explanation offered by David Stockman—that Trump's real "crime" is that he has threatened the War Party (a powerful group that has mostly gotten its way along with the lion's share of the state's wealth since at least 1916) actually makes a lot of sense.

China and rare earths

Perhaps THE most annoying thing about the economics profession is that they are extremely bright people with extraordinary math skills who unfortunately know absolutely nothing about the real economy. That they could makes excuses for selling off the crown jewels of USA industrialization for pennies meant beyond any doubt that they had absolutely NO way to accurately value those crown jewels. The biggest single reason is that economists, as a group, are techno-cretins. Any tool more complex than a fork is borderline magical and having to assemble something from IKEA is an "ordeal" (yes I have actually heard one of these geniuses use the word ordeal).

So today's lesson is about how USA economic leadership never figured out how to value rare earths and what a serious problem that will be if we ever get serious about building the post-petroleum society. I think the time has come to make such abject stupidity a capital crime.

Sanctions—economics at its most destructive

Using economics to destroy is perhaps the sickest manifestation of the dismal "science." This is mostly because sanctions only really work when the target is weak. As the world is fast finding out, the Russians may no longer be a superpower but they still have the tools to counter a few sanctions. In fact, the economic adjustments forced on the Russian Federation with the latest round of sanctions may have done their economy a world of good. They have discovered that lots of folks want what they can make, grow, and sell.

The Russians have also discovered that their own economic weapons are quite effective. European agriculture is still staggering from the loss of their Russian markets while Russian agriculture is arguably doing better than at any time in the past century. And as Tom Luongo points out below, their presence in the market for the fuels that run the world's nuclear power plants is quite significant.

But lost in all the discussions of who can do what to whom is the fact that all these sanctions and counter-sanctions diminish everyone's economic possibilities. Building the sustainable civilization will be an act of cooperation—NOT confrontation. And the biggest loser of all is very likely the USA—the biggest sanctions bully on the block.

Elon Musk on education

Producer Class superstars are sort of a freak of nature. The overwhelming majority of folks who become rich and famous are resolutely Leisure Class. There are a multitude of reasons for why this is so but mainly it's because the Leisure Classes hold all the cultural levers.

Ask yourself, When was the last time you saw a movie or TV series starring an engineer or someone who builds skyscrapers (as compared to lawyers or cops or soldiers)? When was the last time you saw a competition between student architects or solar designers (as compared to football players or musicians)? Who controls the real levers of economic power—scientists or financial players?

Our schools reflect this reality. Math and science whizzes tend to be social outcasts while the captain of the football team dates the captain of the cheerleading squad. Of course, that sort of thing is forgivable and understandable. What is not so forgivable is that the academic curriculum is designed and administered by folks who absolutely cheer for all things Leisure Class.  So even if they don't know why, budding Producer superstars are going to hate such an environment. In the clip below, Elon Musk admits that he HATED school—which is odd when you consider how much he obviously loves learning.

The general public quite likes their Producer Class heroes so we shouldn't waste much time feeling sorry for the man. But even so, he has a problem—he has five sons he would like to see educated to higher levels with less pain than his own experience. People who love to learn shouldn't hate school. So he decides to create his own school. He hires a certified teacher who agrees with his goals and methods to run it. And then he invites a few other children to join in the fun.

There are some recognizable features of his school. For example, he has eliminated grade levels thereby recreating the best feature of the one-room school. Some of his innovations aren't really that odd when you think about them. For example, Musk believes that when kids understand why they should learn something, all the other problems of motivation disappear. Well, duh! But ask yourselves, when did any teacher ever give you a believable reason for learning something (beyond, you need this to get into a good college, that is)?

Musk's most prominent Producer Class feature is a nice little habit of saying, "I just want to be useful" whenever confronted with the inevitable "What motivates you?" sort of question. Hard to top that response as a refutation of the ultimate goal of total uselessness that seems to rule the Leisure Class. Apparently he wants to assign usefulness as the goal of his school. To me it sounds like a heaven for those who enjoy learning.

The clip below is from Chinese television. It covers more than his school but the school conversation is in the first three minutes.

The Circular Economy—still one of the great ideas

One of the lightening bolts of insight that staggered me as a man in his 30s was the idea that because there is no "away" the throwaway society is ultimately doomed by simple physical reality. It is quite impossible to dig up raw materials to be sent on a journey to the landfills forever. Either you run out of resources or you run out of places to store the waste, or both. The only way out of this dilemma is to make products so they can be reprocessed into new things when the time comes for the original product to be replaced.

Yeah.

This is one of those ideas that would require about a million times more effort, cost, and inventiveness to do than to dream up. After all, not only are most things designed and built without the slightest consideration for disposal, large numbers of products are designed to be disposed of after only one use. Designer junk, if you please. I once gave a talk at 3M, a company that has made their primary mission the production of designer junk. I chose to talk about design for disassembly, and other proposed schemes to create a less wasteful world. The assembled 3M folks were not amused. Needless to say, I wasn't asked back.

The idea of the circular industrial society is still one of the better notions to have crossed my mind so I included it in Elegant Technology. It can be found in Chapter Ten: Do Producers Have a Plan? Of course, no one ever reads a book to Chapter Ten so I might as well have never written it at all. But when I saw someone discussing this idea the other day under the title The Circular Economy That Could Save Countries Thousands, Reduce Waste (reprinted below) it made my heart glad. But first, I have decided to reproduce the section from my Chapter Ten called Closing the Loop. I hope that you readers will understand why this was the idea that made me believe a sustainable world was possible. I also hope no one minds that this was first written in 1985.