Boeing continues its downward spiral

The plight of Boeing continues to fascinate me. Dad's cousin was a machinist / toolmaker for them from the 1940s to the early 1970s—from the B-29 to the 727. One Sunday afternoon I listened to him explain the problems of producing the tooling for the 727's tail section. Not only did the tail carry important control surfaces, the designers had run a third jet engine through the middle. Not surprisingly, making all this work required fabricating some complex shapes out of high-strength aluminum alloys. This was before computerized milling machines so these tools were built with slide rules, micrometers, Bridgeport mills, and a whole lot of skills. The resulting aircraft exceeded every important performance projection by at least 5%, thousands were made, and there are still people who argue it was the fastest subsonic airliner to ever fly.

My brother-in law was the guy who specified for Boeing which welding method would be used for every part that would be joined using heat. For every potential operation, he would test several welding methods, X-ray the results, and then break the weld to see how much load it would take. His results became part of Boeing's institutional memory. Any time folks needed to weld up a landing gear, or whatever, they could check to see what methods had been certified. My brother-in-law had not gone to engineering school but he was so good at what he did, he was given a "field promotion" to engineer by the company (along with the increased pay grade.) Such was the "old" Boeing.

According to his account, old Boeing began to die with the merger of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas on Aug. 1, 1997. The value of the transaction was $16.3 billion. McDonnell Douglas had been on the ropes for awhile and their senior management had turned to the Wall Street sharpies for "help"—the kind of help that stressed share prices and political connections to the Defense Department over the real work of building quality airplanes. These folks came to Boeing in the merger and began an assault on the company's engineering culture. On February 9, 2000, Boeing's engineers actually went out on strike—egged on, no doubt by the designated management fool / Wall Street darling named Debbie Hopkins who wondered aloud, "Just why does Boeing need engineers anyway?" I don't know Debbie, maybe it's because punching a hole through the air at nearly 600 mph is really hard to do. Maybe it's because without engineers, Boeing does not exist.

Anyway, shortly after the SPEEA strike was settled, my brother-in-law quit in disgust and found a peaceful job teaching non-ferrous welding at a Tacoma community college where he worked into his late 70s. Debbie was soon fired but her work was done. The rot at Boeing soon showed up in airplanes that had serious quality issues. I did a post in 2013 about the troubled Dreamliner and now the 737max fleet is grounded.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

The Dreamliner is grounded

If anyone ever needs a lesson in what happens when Predators take over a Producer company, Boeing will do perfectly.  In it's glory days, Boeing pretty much defined a Producer company.  Engineers ran the show.  The company would occasionally bet the farm on a breakthrough product.  There was a sense of pride you could feel the moment you passed through the plant gates.  And people who knew aircraft were often fanatically loyal to their output (It's Boeing or I'm not going.)  Yes, there were other companies that made large aircraft but sensible people would often ask "Why?"  Boeing was so sure about its products that for decades, it only had one salesman.  One was plenty because everyone knew what buying from Boeing meant.

And then it started to unravel.  In 1997, Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas, a company that had lost its airplane-making chops and had become just another cost-plus supplier hanging off the big Defense Department teat.  Boeing also had significant ties to the defense industry but were babes in the woods compared to the sharpies from McDonnell Douglas.  Soon the sharpies were ensconced in senior management at Boeing and the rot began to set in.  The open assault on Boeing's engineering culture came out into the open during the SPEEA (Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace) strike of 2000.  The cordial atmosphere between the engineers that designed Boeing's products and the engineers that managed the company was broken.  Management even moved the headquarters to Chicago from Seattle to show the divorce was final.

Once the Boeing Producer / engineering culture had been trashed, the chance for breakthrough, industry-defining projects was trashed as well.  The Dreamliner, which was not even that revolutionary to start with, became an expensive, ongoing fiasco that demonstrated the truth of the most famous sign carried during the SPEEA strike "No nerds, No Birds."  And so now, after several years of delays and $Billions of cost over-runs, the few Dreamliners that have been delivered are grounded.  The problem isn't even an aerospace problem but rather faulty lithium batteries.  If the Predators of the "new" Boeing management were actually capable of feeling shame, they would be resigning en mass. Yeah, that's going to happen (NOT)!

It's payback time, folks

There are moments when I simply cannot muster the energy to be a "good sport." Whenever I think about how this country just wasted 2+ years playing an ultra-corny version of spy vs. spy,  I literally want to see heads roll. It was not just the non-stop lying, it's that the lies were so stupidly unbelievable. And for extra fun, these lies were retailed by some of the writers I have read over the years on sites I once visited regularly—The Guardian, Smirking Chimp, Crooks and Liars...

Karma can be a bitch. Smirking Chimp is having trouble paying the bills. The Guardian will have serious problems recovering from Luke Harding's crazed book Collusion. Ms. Russiagate hoaxer, Rachael Madcow has taken a serious hit to her ratings.

I could be talked out of demanding the return of the guillotine, I guess, if we could all agree to stop listening to these partially developed minds stuck in their "tell me a story" phase of intellectual development. Personally, I am stunned that in a country of 315 million souls we cannot come up with the few thousand functioning adults necessary to organize a government.

Bob Mueller is 74. He probably won't be with us much longer. Writing his epitaph won't be easy. It difficult to say nice things about someone who knew his "investigation" was utter BS yet wasted the lives of the nation for years while he tried to come up with a reason to not tell us he had no case.

Robert Mueller Is in Serious Legal Trouble - Here's Why

James Howard Kunstler, 5/10/19

For the Progressive Democratic “Resistance” (PDR), post-Modernism is in full flower. They have ruled objective reality inadmissible. There are only stories — his story, her story, they’s story, zhe’s story, and you must believe them because they come out of lived experience — for instance the lived experience of having lost a sure-thing presidential election to a cartoon character with zero political experience, and then having lost the grand inquisition to oust him. For the PDRs, the metaphysical concept of reality refers to some land of dark make-believe over a distant horizon where numbers supposedly add up (ha!) and the actions of persons are said to entail a strange cosmic condition known as consequence.

Now that the Mueller Investigation has concluded empty of charges — despite two-plus-years of sedulous effort by fiercely dedicated antagonists of its target — everything about it, including the sacred Mueller Report, begins to emit odious vapors like unto a rump roast that has laid uncovered in a pantry for three weeks, attracting the attention of flies. The PDRs might think twice about a closer examination of all that festering material. What they’re liable to find is evidence of how slovenly and dishonest it was and how the revered legal maestro in charge of composing it may well be subject to charges himself of obstructing justice and malicious prosecution.

Information emerged over the weeks since the Mueller Report’s release that Mr. Mueller and his team knew unequivocally that the Special Counsel’s mission and the FBI operations that preceded it were based on concocted political bullshit supplied by Mrs. Clinton and her network of flunkies and fixers, ranging throughout the permanent DC bureacuracy (a.k.a. the Swamp), to outposts in foreign intel services and the political kitty-litter box known as Ukraine. Mr. Mueller must have suspected this from the outset, but knew for sure by the summer of 2017, and omitted to advise the American public that he had uncovered a fraud. Rather, he rode on the back of that fraud for two years, as if touring a political landfill on a donkey, leaving the public to stew in anxious hallucinations.

What else did Mr. Mueller do, or omit to do? He never engaged US government forensic computer analysts to examine the DNC servers at the heart of RussiaGate story. Rather, he allowed the conclusions to stand of a company called CrowdStrike, hired by the DNC itself to supposedly investigate the theft of emails, especially those of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. (See Craig Murray’s commentary on all this.) Mr. Mueller never bothered to interview the one person who might have known exactly who supplied the purloined emails to Wikileaks, namely Julian Assange. Mr. Mueller also did not bother to interview several dozen retired Intel Community computer experts, led by William Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA, who determined that the hack was accomplished by direct download by an insider onto a flash drive.

What could possibly be the explanation for these blunders. Well, we’re going to find out in the months ahead. The DPR chairs of various House committees have threatened to ask Mr. Mueller to testify. Bring it on, I say. He sure has some ‘splainin’ to do, if not in those venues, then in a more than a few grand juries that will be convened to assess the actions of his confederates-at-law from every hummock and gator pool in the Swamp. These various parties may also seek to understand why Mr. Mueller omitted to mention the now reeking Steele Dossier in his 444-page report, and why in his 20-plus page recounting of the oh-so-crucial Trump Tower meeting he never disclosed that the two Russians present were on the payroll of Hillary contractor FusionGPS, and met with its principal, Glenn Simpson before and after the meeting. It does give off a scent of “colluding with Russians,” except obviously the odor came from the wrong direction.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared yesterday that we are in a constitutional crisis. You’re darn tootin’ we are, but it’s not coming from the flaccid threats of legal imbecile Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who wants to prosecute the Attorney General, Mr. Barr, for refusing to make public grand jury records in the Mueller report — since the law requires Mr. Barr to not disclose the material. The crisis she mis-identifies is the coming indictment of so many supposedly untouchable and hallowed public figures, up to and including the former president, Mr. Obama, and the former heads of CIA, Mr. Brennan, and Director of National Security, Mr. Clapper, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the sainted Mr. Mueller, a whole posse of former Intel Community subalterns, and an unholy host of creeping, crawling, and flying swamp creatures from Glenn Simpson to the shyster lawyers at DNC law firm Perkins Coie, to the errand boys at the Cable News Networks, Wash-Po and The New York Times who trafficked in leaked perfidious documents — that the cumulative institutional damage will destroy public confidence in constitutional government per se.  more

I want apologies from the Russia-bashers

In 1972, I went to Leningrad. This was the age of Brezhnev—scary, dark, humorless USSR. Just getting off the boat was about all I could muster. To make matters worse, the Israeli Olympic team was taken hostage the morning we were scheduled to go on our very first Intourist guided tour. I spent the morning going from fretful to scared shitless. Once the bus got underway, I began to notice things I thoroughly disapproved of. The trucks were ugly and belched thick black smoke. Consumer goods were an insult to the Instinct of Workmanship. Construction sites were a disaster. But beneath the seediness of 70s Leningrad was an undeniable reality—this was the Imperial Capital of Peter the Great. This is one of the most beautiful cities on earth—a city where over one million died of starvation during the Siege rather than surrender it to the Nazis.

It took most of the day, but I came to the conclusion that if they had better political and economic systems, this would easily be the richest country on earth. Considering USSR had to be built twice (Stalin's industrialization and then post WW II reconstruction) they weren't doing so badly even in 1972. Then came the Harvard boys to teach the Russians neoliberal "capitalism." Caused nearly as much damage as the Nazis.

Here's the mess the son of Leningrad / St. Petersburg Vladimir Putin inherited from Yeltsin in 1999:

    ▪    The country was deeply in debt to the scum like IMF and World Bank?
    ▪    The Harvard boys had created such an economic catastrophe that life expectancy was falling, whole industries lay in ruins, the former Russian middle class was reduced to selling heirlooms in the winter cold, their savings had been wiped out, the best and brightest had emigrated. (For what Jeffrey Sachs inflicted on Russia makes him a walking advertisement for bringing back crucifixions.)
    ▪    The oligarchs who had seized the best Russia had to steal escaped with their loot—mostly to London where they triggered a bubble the real estate speculators love so much.

Add to this list of great headaches, he has had to deal with: NATO encirclement, international slander, the Banderite-fascist coup in Ukraine. Of course he had to move on Crimea. The Red Army lost around a half-million folks trying to defend and then retake Sevastopol during WW II. Crimea is REALLY important for Russia and so he had to remake economic and foreign policy to deal with the fallout of keeping Crimea Russian.

In the meantime, Russian aerospace is back on its feet. The military fights with pride and professionalism. The things Russia has been good at, they are good at again—figure skating, ballet, etc. Putin is still wildly popular. He has rebuilt relationships with China. He has opened elite schools so Russian education is again world-class. Russia became the world's leading exporter of grains last year—all GMO-free.

The list is nearly endless. And why not. He has at least 40 IQ points on any politician we have in USA and was given one of those elite educations that the commies could do so well. He is so fluent in German he holds press conferences in Germany in German. He holds 3 hour press conferences for the international media without notes. He has done something that anyone examining the wreckage of 1999 would not have predicted—he has restored pride in a people who not long ago were just drinking themselves to death.

What I find so amazing is his willingness to brush off some of the most ridiculous slanders and provocations. I was raised around pacifists so am pretty conversant with the dilemmas and contradictions of this practice. I would give Putin a solid B+. Turns out it is pretty easy to be a pacifist when armed with nukes ;-) Or maybe it really is the Orthodox church. I don't know much about those folk beyond the fact they have incredibly ornate churches and their male glee clubs have amazing basses. Reportedly Putin's mother was very devout and baptized him as a baby. Whatever. It's just that under Putin, most of the damage those barbaric Bolsheviks inflicted on this element of Russian culture has been repaired or rebuilt—reportedly over 40,000 churches have been rehabbed since the end of Bolshevism.

I have not been thrilled by the mindless Russia-bashing we have had to endure these last 2.5 years. Most of it unbelievable lies. And while I detest the liars who have reintroduced the unholy practice of red-baiting, I am even more distressed by the endless stream of self-identified "progressives" who bought into the Russiagate hoax. Robert LaFollette was a real Progressive—was the party's presidential candidate in 1924. He tried to keep USA out of the insanity of WW I thereby ruining his career as a Senator. So no, anyone who was cheerleading a restart of the Cold War and McCarthyism is most certainly NOT a progressive.

The Leisure Class amuses itself

The following is from the Caucus99percent site. This is where all the good writers from Daily Kos went after it became abundantly clear in 2016 that Kos had no tolerance for the Progressive / Populist / New Deal wing of the Democratic Party and went out of his way to annoy the Bernie Sanders supporters.

The Russia Hoax sickens me. I have precious little tolerance for these sorts of maneuvers but this is worse than even the 1950-60s. My problem is that I have seen Russia, read her literature, listened to her music, and marveled at her playwrights.

And Ice Hockey—it's damn easy to follow the game in Minnesota and watched when Herb Brooks spent six seasons at the University of Minnesota reverse-engineering the hockey theories of Anatoly Tarasov—the supreme genius of Russian hockey. His efforts were rewarded when he coached a bunch of college kids to a Gold Medal in 1980 beating the top ranked teams in the world to do it—vs Czechoslovakia 7-3, USSR 4-3, Finland 4-2. Their only blemish was a 2-2 tie against Sweden who had the utterly awesome Pelle Lindbergh in net. Tarasov himself, who through bureaucratic Soviet stupidity was no longer the coach of the Big Red Machine, recognized that Brooks was his peer. How can such a relationship NOT be a good thing? And yet 39 years later we are being told that our diplomats are criminals if they even talk with their peers in Russia—thanks for nothing Russia bashers.

For me, the Russians are fellow people of winter and I find it exceeding difficult to watch politicians and news media defame these people for some cheap political advantage. They have suffered through great hardships over the last 150 years, and I find it disgusting to watch an ignorant weasel like Adam Schiff look into the camera and tell us easily refutable lies about one of the great cultures in history.

Moreover, the world is facing a climate calamity. Time is running out quickly. Our tax money should be spent of remediation, NOT on some exercise of "who can tell the biggest whopper and get away with it."

If You Have Been Playing "THE RUSSIA HOAX" at Home, along with Our Studio Audience, You'll Want to Grab this Clue!

World faces 'impossible' task at post-Paris climate talks

Now comes the fun part. As the evidence for climate change continues to pile up, some of the more enlightened among us are beginning to wonder, "Just how big is the problem? And how much will this really cost to fix?" Of course, these are exactly the questions that should have been asked in 1988 when James Hanson provided us with his rocket science version of how bad it already was. Too bad the evidence had to be overwhelming to get to where we should have been in 1988.

Lots of folks dare call it treason

Trump really laid a turd in the punch bowl when he announced to the world that he trusted the word of Vladimir Putin over his own "intelligence" experts on Russiagate. The defenders of the conventional wisdom will be shaking with rage over that one for a long time—with "Progressives" leading the charge. Robert LaFollette (one of the founders of the Progressive movement) had his political career destroyed because he voted in the Senate against the USA entry into WW I. Pretty sure he would not have approved of the current war-mongering lynch mob.

For a guy with a reputation for lying, this was as close to the unvarnished truth as we have heard from a USA president since at least Carter. The Empire runs on lies—can't let any honesty creep into the conversation. And I am not sure what came over Trump but I'll chalk it up to Finland—the Nordics are notoriously honest and uncorrupt so maybe the air helped.

Because there is absolutely no hard evidence to back up the Russiagate claims, I always assumed that the backers of the narrative would eventually see the light and sheepishly re-enter a world where evidence still means something. But it hasn't happened yet and the unfounded accusations have been going on for almost two years.

Flat earth believers

Tony sent me this link. He probably thought I needed help getting going. He understands the "value" I put on folks who spread pure nonsense. Actually, the flat earth crowd doesn't even enter my radar because unless they are employed setting airline routes, it hardly matters what folks believe about the shape of the earth.

However, the sort of "thinking" that goes into this quite-common behavior is downright dangerous. And it is sadly not confined to the lunatic fringe. As pointed out below, this sort of thinking is quite common in the social sciences—Michel Foucault claimed that what the author wrote was nearly irrelevant compared to the power relationships that impacted his writing. Pontius Pilate had a French philosopher asking "what is truth?" I went through a period where the ability to quote Foucault was a sign of intellectual seriousness.

Because I had formulated my facts-as-building-blocks approach to epistemology before I had ever heard of Foucault, I pretty much dismissed him as another typical Leisure Class thinker. If you live in a world where being right or wrong is not terribly important, you tend to skip over learning the skills an aero engineer must learn to design something that punches a 550 mph hole in the air and the biggest problems for the passengers are crying babies and bad food. Anyway, Michel, there are many writers who are scrupulously concerned about being absolutely accurate—some even go so far as to provide illustrations.

This is just another way to avoid doing homework.  IF you know the science or other important facts, coming to a conclusion about the accuracy of another's testimony is routine. If you do not have the background to evaluate the information, you must fall back on judging the speakers based on his or her dress, hairdo, necktie, sexual history, political party, etc. Or the power arrangements.

That's the problem with climate science. The folks collecting data on the front lines have no doubts about whether climate change is real. The rest of us must either evaluate the data from second-hand sources with the required scientific (high school chemistry) background or else from random decisions based on sociology, rumor, or slander. In this way, the climate doubters have managed to stalemate an incredibly important public debate even though the facts are overwhelmingly against them.

The power of conventional wisdom

One of the smartest men I know once assured me that the "Zeitgeist cannot be changed—that's what makes it the Zeitgeist." OK. Except I know better. I grew up in the world created by the Keynesians of the Ken Galbraith variety. I watched it just disappear in the wake of the 1973 Arab oil embargo to be replaced by people who believed in ideas that supposedly had been forever discredited by the Great Depression. I still gasp at the sheer audacity of it all. It helped immeasurably that we had become a land of historical illiterates (The United States of Amnesia--Gore Vidal) so forgetting economic history was a trivial problem. And so the Zeitgeist changed from the Keynesians to the Monetarists in an historical eye-blink. Maoists become central bankers. And no, I most certainly do NOT believe all this happened by accident.

Even so, this was much easier than anyone could have imagined (or at least me.) The family business was running a church where I learned just how difficult it is to get folks to change their minds. Turns out well-funded think tanks can change quite a few minds. Jason Hirthler lays out a believable explanation for how and why this happened. Interesting reading.

Peak Fracking

Kunstler has a habit of speculation about the future with at best, partial information. But on this subject, he is spot on! Shale oil is a mirage. It is a secondary recover scheme that only works when there is plenty of money financing this crazy difficult / expensive scheme. In many cases, shale exploration does not even cover the investment in purely energy terms so eventually, even the hot money boys will find something else to do.

Of course, none of this is especially new. I knew folks in 1960s oil patch North Dakota who could have predicted that the long-term outcome for such scheme was non-producing wells.

Enjoy Kunstler at his most informative.

Oh goody—another dirty climate conference

Someday soon, humanity must make organizing and attending climate conferences a capital crime. These things are worse than useless but they grind on because the folks who like these sorts of things are convention planners. It's what they do. This year's climate extravaganza is being held in Bonn Germany. No one knows why or what they hope to accomplish. An estimated 23,000 people are descending on a tiny little backwater that is obvious ill-equipped to handle them—belching thousands of tons of CO2 on their sacred journeys of self-importance.

If anyone suggests that anything important could be accomplished with video-conferencing, the face-to-face crowd reacts in horror. According to them, those who would eliminate these conferences are the worms of humanity—the introverts. Since the only legitimate way to call these conferences a success would be the ability to point at falling CO2 levels, and that clearly has not happened after 23 years of conferencing, a sane person would try something else. But these folks cannot even progress to video conferencing. And since few or none of them seem willing to grapple with the problems of progressing from legislating outcomes to funding outcomes, we can assure ourselves that no meaningful progress will happen anytime soon.

Climate change is a Producer Class problem that will only respond to Producer Class solutions. Climate conferences are extreme manifestations of Leisure Class behavior. Pretty much explains why they are useless. After all, useless is the primary goal, the heaven, of the Leisure Class.

The end of Wolfgang Schäuble's evil madness?

Wolfgang Schäuble does not have a fan club around here because he is such a perfect neoliberal. (The list of my criticisms can be found here) But he has been accepted / praised in Germany because he has been the enthusiastic face of the German financial establishment. And what an ugly face that has been. Even by German standards, he is especially homely. If someone was casting a play and needed a devil to scare little children, he would be perfect. And I am pretty certain the Greeks whose lives he was destroying had no problem thinking of him as evil personified.

But the neoliberalism he was pitching was certain to be harming the German economy as well because it is an economic philosophy that causes a great deal of collateral damage. So it is with some pleasure I note that one of the more enlightened of the German economists, Heiner Flassbeck, has produced a stunningly accurate critique of Schäuble's crackpot mismanagement. Unfortunately for the Germans, the neoliberal bench is very deep. There are probably thousands of economists spread over all the political parties ready to make Schäuble look like a kindly old man. But the fact that he has been eased out as the FM may mean that there are corners of the German economic establishment who at least have questions about the "wisdom" of neoliberalism. It is 25 years too late but a turnaround must start somewhere.

Ken Burns tries to explain Vietnam

It turns out there IS something worse than being historically illiterate and that is being historically misinformed. Ken Burns is a master of historical misinformation and his latest effort on Vietnam is truly ghastly. What a tragedy! I often claim that this country's failure to come to terms with that horrible and expensive adventure in late-stage colonialism pretty much explains the decline of this once pretty-interesting nation.

Take, for example, the horror that was Agent Orange. Some "genius" came to the conclusion that because the Viet Cong were so good at hiding out in their native jungles, the "solution" was to remove the jungles. And so 21+ MILLION gallons of the most toxic herbicide ever invented was sprayed on that poor nation killing wide areas of native foliage. Agent Orange was so dangerous that the folks who merely loaded it onto the airplanes used for spraying suffered long-term health effects including having children with birth defects.

Of course, compared to the suffering inflicted on those poor people on the receiving end of all that spraying, the damage to the USA troops was trivial. There are areas of Vietnam where serious birth defects are almost "normal." That does not make the pain suffered by the young mothers who must cope with these cruel reminders of some genius's chemical warfare any easier.

There was a small burst of interest in the problems caused by Agent Orange when they began to surface in the affected veterans. But seriously, the subject has not even begun to be treated on anything but the most superficial level. For me, any serious thinking on Agent Orange would include a comprehensive examination of the wasted genius that led to this horrible war crime. In order for Operation Ranch Hand (the cutesy name for the largest deliberate environmental catastrophe in recorded history) to succeed, thousands of engineering hours were spent designing and building a fleet of aircraft that could haul large loads of heavy liquid poison, designing a herbicide so lethal it could kill jungles, figuring out how to manufacture 21+ million gallons of the stuff, and delivering this massive load of poison to the other side of the planet. It took a lot of people who studied very hard to learn difficult and complex subjects to pull off this feat—people who otherwise looked and acted like regular middle-class citizens who would do things like coach Little League baseball.

Think about this for awhile. Star students are taught the most brilliant scientific facts Enlightenment thinking can produce and then are put to work designing and executing an ethical and environmental disaster. You tell me how this cannot seriously degrade a culture. When I discovered how involved my university was with such ventures, I just wanted to run away from the academic world. My epiphany came the day I discovered that my "favorite" PolSci professor had a big contract to help design the Phoenix Program—a nasty little operation of torture and assassination targeting the rural males of Vietnam for the "crime" of being educated.

I sort of understand why Ken Burns is so diligent about telling small stories while ignoring the big ones. Most probably it is because his worldview cannot even comprehend the big stories. And that goes double for the tote-bag crowd that watches PBS. Plus he gets paid large sums of money to create a kiddie version of history. The problem I have with little Kenny's kinderspiel is that people who are historically curious wind up being more ignorant for watching his efforts.

America's Russia-gate Obsession - Sign of a Failing Nation

Can the people pushing Russia-gate possibly believe their own BS?? Was anyone so asleep during junior high math that they could believe that a $200,000 Facebook ad buy could swing an election where billions were spent on political persuasion? But the even bigger question is, How much damage can be done by the exposure of such massive stupidity on the international stage? While USA is clearly still the biggest bully in the neighborhood as measured by its willingness to spend so much money on weapons systems and soldiers in uniform, there are a LOT of ways to exercise power. Unfortunately for USA, these alternate methods rely heavily on the ability to convince the rest of the world that competent people are in charge. Between Donald Trump's inability to organize an effective government and the Democrats willingness to push the absurd storylines of Russia-gate, the illusion that USA is run by wise and virtuous people is taking massive hits below the waterline.

The imperial apparatus looks like it is in the process of collapse. The examples of this collapse are numerous but for me, the biggest sign of the loss of imperial power is the overdue attack on the petro-dollar.  So long as petroleum is traded in dollars, the USA can print as many dollars as it wants without fear of inflation because the world is effectively on an "oil standard." With the petro-dollar, multi-billion monthly merchandise trade deficits are essentially harmless. The petro-dollar advantage is so great that oil countries that attempted to opt out of the system—like Libya and Iraq—soon found themselves being destroyed by USA military aggression.

So now the Chinese and Russia have banded together to make war on the petro-dollar. Russia has a massive resource base while China has become an industrial superpower. Both have nukes and neither likes being pushed around. But probably the deciding factor in their decision to move against the petro-dollar now are the obvious demonstrations that USA is being run by badly-educated, misinformed, wildly-incompetent, fools. Ken Galbraith used to say that successful revolutions are usually a matter of someone kicking in a rotten door. Hard to imagine a door more rotten than one composed of Trump and those buffoons who are pushing the hoax that is Russia-Gate.

A “Meathead” foreign policy?

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, I actually celebrated with champagne. I almost never drink anything alcoholic so this was WAY out of character for me. But I wanted to celebrate in a socially conventional fashion because I really thought the Cold War was over and we could FINALLY have "normal" relations with Russia. By that time, I had already begun to understand that USSR was absolutely critical to the history of the 20th century because it was the Red Army that defeated the Germans in WW II—almost single-handedly. Besides, they are, like me, a people of the North and it is quite easy to feel a kinship with such people when it is -20° F—like it gets several times a winter in Minnesota.

So it is with horror that I look on at this latest wave of Russia-bashing. It makes no sense to me at all. This is especially true because Russia is mostly innocent of all the charges leveled at them. In over a year of relentless lying, the backers of the warmongering have offered zero evidence to back their claims. This insanity reached a new low last week when a video, starring Morgan Freeman (the Driving Miss Daisy chauffeur) and produced by Rob Reiner (the guy who starred as the Meathead in All in the Family) appeared on YouTube. In it, Freeman assured us that we are at war with Russia.

Warfare, for the Russians, is a calamity that killed 27 million people and reduced large sections of their country to rubble. Relationships between USA and Russia are strained these days but they are a LONG way from that. The Reiner-Freeman production is so preposterous, that I, like many, considered it a spoof. But since it has become quite obvious that Reiner-Freeman are indeed serious, I probably should start taking these madmen more seriously.

Below are two essays on this current gruesomely evil outburst of Russia-bashing. Both were written by Americans—one from the left and the other the right. I am far from sure either are completely accurate but goodness knows, I am trying to understand this utterly irrational phenomenon. Mostly, I just hope it goes away with the perpetrators feeling shame. That is probably a bit much to hope for because fools who would do this sort of thing define shameless.

Do the Leisure Class pundits know how anything works?

It's a damn chore to keep track of the Predator Class economic arguments. Which is why I am so grateful that Bill Black takes the time and effort to do those ugly chores. That the banksters are a gang of thieves is no surprise. After all, Veblen's core definition of the Leisure Class is that of the people who fasten themselves on the backs of the productive segments of society through force and fraud in the often successful attempt to get something for nothing. These people contribute nothing to society yet fancy themselves extra-smart because by their definition, cunning is the nearest synonym to human genius they have.

The great scene in Wall Street where Gekko gives his "Greed is Good" speech was hardly original. After all, the whole point of Leisure Class intellectualism is to come up with justifications for plunder. But what made that movie moment interesting is the number of movie-goers who actually thought that speech was wise, bordering on profound.

There are many who believe that such as Gekko should be accorded positions of leadership in democratic societies. Wrong! When the casinos are run by greedy crooks, the rest of us don't much care. It we don't want to do business with such people, we simply don't enter their establishments. But when those same greedheads start messing with the affairs of state, then what they do becomes everyone's business. And if these people decide that some easy money can be made by deindustrialization, the whole economy staggers. And if these people decide to rip off the system by deferring maintenance, sooner or later bridges start to fall down.

And if there is a crying need for massive infrastructure upgrades to avoid the calamities of climate change and the greedheads decide this is something we cannot afford, why then the necessary investments will not be made and the planet heats up to the point where human life becomes essentially impossible. Dangerous racket you got there, greedheads.

Who murdered the peace movement?

In the essay below, Paul Craig Roberts asks a damn good question, "Who murdered the peace movement?" when discussing the current runaway warmongering in official Washington. As someone who spent a significant fraction of my life before 30 involved in various forms of the peace movement, I'd like to take a crack at that one.

• Peace movements are automatically the weaker party. It is a thousand times easier to gin up the warlike animus than to teach folks (especially young men) that no one wins wars and that everything from sex to the economy is much better under conditions of peace. Peace movements are only successful when there are highly intelligent and charismatic leaders (like Bertrand Russel) who can make the peace arguments. It also helps to have religious movements (Quakers, Mennonites) that can do the heavy lifting of training successive generations of young men why the peace arguments are superior.
• The antiwar activities associated with the Vietnam War were notoriously empty intellectually and ideologically. In my experience, a minimum of 95% of the young men who participated in the antiwar movement were merely trying to keep their own asses safe. The day after the first draft lottery I had occasion to visit the Quaker-run Twin Cities Draft Information Center. The place was empty except for the lone woman who had shown up to unlock the doors. 2/3 of their "clients" had gotten their good news and didn't need the help of the dreary folks who liked to stress the moral illiteracy of the warmongers.
• After Vietnam, the military types learned their lessons on how to avoid the influence, such as it was, of the peaceniks. With their all-volunteer forces and a well-thought-out strategy of spending their money in every congressional district, they would never again lose a political battle over any war they wanted to start. After the last great unsuccessful peace marches opposing the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the peace types realized their situation was utterly hopeless and pretty much gave up.

That's what murdered the peace movement. Which is sort of ironic when one considers that the peaceniks have ALL the good rational arguments. But in the face of the unrelenting propaganda that the warmongers have at their disposal, even people who know and fervently agree with the outcome-based facts of a peace philosophy find it just a whole lot easier to shut up and fume at the unrelenting stupidity of those who still believe that warfare solves anything.

Stone on USA "intelligence"

As hurricane Harvey dumped up to 52" on parts of Texas, our elected officials ponder the grave and soul-searching question "Is my hatred for Russia pure enough." The latest sanctions bill against Russia passed the Senate 98-2. That folks is the Gulf of Tonkin vote. 2% is also about the percentage of folks with a minimal clue compared to the 98% sheep who will believe almost anything and must follow their emotions because their intellects were never properly developed. I mean, seriously, are their any sentient Americans who want to risk nuclear war over Crimea, or Syria, or Iran. And yet the vote was 98-2.

And of course, while we fight over Confederate-era statues and other forms of utter irrelevance, the big problems like climate change go unaddressed. This is absolutely insane. And Oliver Stone and Paul Craig Roberts cannot figure out why there is so much insanity. Of course, they are part of the awareness 2% so they cannot intrinsically understand.

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)