THE JOURNAL URGES US TO FIGHT ON BOTH SIDES IN SYRIA: BELLUM GRATIA BELLI?

9/17/14

In its lead editorial this (Wednesday, 9/17/14, page A14) morning, the Wall Street Journal urges the Obama Administration to lift the siege on Aleppo by bombing Syrian President Bashar Assad’s airfields.  This would put the United States, explicitly, on both sides of the Syrian conflict and clearly on one side of the larger Sunni/Shiite conflict in the Middle East.  Who but someone who urges us to fight a war for the sake of fighting a war would urge such an insane policy?

Even dedicated non-interventionists like yours truly can see some merit in a bombing campaign against ISIS, ISIL, the Islamic State, or whatever it is being called today, especially after this especially cold-blooded group of terrorists has beheaded two Americans and one Brit.   We don’t like our country putting its considerable proboscis where it doesn’t belong, but we also can’t see our country standing idly by while its citizens are tortured, killed, and otherwise abused.  

But I have also urged caution, reminding members of the War Party, and its most stentorian voice at the Wall Street Journal, that only a few months ago, they were urging the United States to bomb Syria in support of the Syrian rebels, the most salient group of which was, and is, ISIS.  (See, for example, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ON THE ISLAMIC STATE:  “I WAS FOR IT UNTIL I WAS AGAINST IT”?,  8/21/14, MORE ENLIGHTENED THINKING FROM WASHINGTON: LET’S FIGHT IN BOTH IRAQ AND SYRIA!, 6/25/14)  A military campaign against ISIS, however, would put us on the side of Mr. Assad, a guy that the Journal and its fellow neocons were urging us to oppose only a few months ago.   Fighting ISIS thus would have the implicit effect of our fighting on both sides of the Syrian Civil War.  Only the geniuses at the State Department and other bastions of deep thinking foreign policy formulation in Washington would put us on both sides of a war.

Now the Journal, by urging the Obama Administration to bomb Syrian airfields and take other steps to lift the siege of Aleppo, is advocating explicitly placing us on both sides of the Syrian Civil War, fighting both the Assad regime and its most powerful and visible opponent, ISIS.

The rationale the Journal provides for getting us on both sides of the Syrian conflict is that

Sunnis will not support the campaign against Islamic State if they think our air strikes are intended to help the regime in Damascus and its Shiite allies in Beirut and Tehran.

This might indeed be the case, though we could, by the intensity and targeting of our air campaign, show the world that our objective, and only objective, is to rid the world, to the extent we can, of a group of extremists who have committed what ought to be the worst of sins on the international stage, i.e., the cold-blooded killing of American citizens.  But I digress.

More to the point, though, is that while the Sunnis may misinterpret an effort solely directed against ISIS as our taking the sides of the Shiites in Syria and in the larger Middle East, what will be the reaction of the Shiites if they see us fighting explicitly on the side of the Sunnis in Syria?  Perhaps they will take solace in that we are supporting the Shiite dominated government in Iraq, but I wouldn’t bet on it.  

The larger point is that it’s easy to see how byzantine the politics of the Middle East are and the best policy is to stay as far away from such intrigue as we can, limiting our involvement to making it clear that killing and torturing American citizens will not go unanswered.

One suspects, though, that the neocons, their manifesto writers at the Wall Street Journal, and the rest of the War Party in Washington care little for either the complexities of the Middle East or the rationalizations they provide for military action there.  Their sole, or at least their paramount, goal in urging us to bomb both the Assad regime and the Islamic State that opposes it is to get us involved in a war, any war…doing so is good for the “defense” contractors who keep War Party members comfortably ensconced in their Washington, D.C. sinecures.  And what could be more important than that?

“…LIVIN’ ON MONEY THAT I AIN’T MADE YET…”

11/15/13

The New York Fed came out with its quarterly report on consumer debt yesterday.  Conventional thinkers are nearly overjoyed at the news that total consumer debt increased by $127 billion, or 1.1%, for the third quarter, the fastest pace since 2008. 

Some of this increase in debt came about because of fewer mortgage foreclosures and bankruptcies during the third quarter.  As regular readers know, it was bankruptcies and foreclosures, or nice ways of describing stiffing one’s creditors, that provided Wall Street economists an opportunity to wax joyful about the “deleveraging” and “balance sheet clean-up” that the American consumer was “achieving.”  Now that we are stiffing fewer of our creditors, it seems that debt outstanding is going up.  The obvious suspicion, therefore, is that debt in any realistic sense has been going up all along but that a trail of sorry creditors was masking our continuing propensity to take on debt in order to achieve the “lifestyle” we are somehow entitled to simply by virtue of living in the United States of America.

Other observations arise from the New York Fed data.   First, those who think that taking on more debt to excrete away more money on stuff we don’t need is the key to our economic recovery, while being overjoyed at the increase in debt levels, are sullen and down-in-the-mouth that credit card debt is barely growing; it was up $4 billion, or 0.6%, in the third quarter.  Though we would prefer actual decreases in credit card debt to mere slowings of its increases, those of us who are so benighted as to think that we have to learn to save money again see this slowdown in revolving credit accumulation as a favorable development.   Perhaps our sanguinity is poorly placed.   Just as I was reading about the slowdown in the growth of credit card debt, I heard an ad on the radio from a mortgage broker who was preaching the fiscal soundness of refinancing one’s credit card debt by taking out mortgage debt.   One wonders how much the return of the popularity of this game of financial three card monte had to do with the slowdown in the growth of total credit card outstanding in the third quarter.  More importantly, one sees the return of the highly popular dinner out financed with a thirty year mortgage as yet another reminder of the people’s short memories and another sign of financial trouble down the road.

Second, the widely advertised big culprit in the increase in consumer debt is the increase in student loans, which passed $1 trillion last quarter by increasing $33 billion, or 3.3%.   Mark my words:   this surge in student debt, and the growing acceptance of student debt as something one takes on in the perfectly normal course of one’s life, is not only an enormous financial problem for the borrowers and for the economy on a whole, but it is speeding us down the road to making higher education yet another “free” entitlement.  

There are some who ascribe to the Obama Administration enough Machiavellian cunning to believe that the whole defecation show that ObamaCare has become is just a ploy to get the American people to throw up their hands and beg for a single payer health system as a solution to the intentionally inflicted maladies the Affordable (Says who?) Care Act has thrust upon them.   Whether yours truly gives the Obamaites such credit is open to question.  But I can easily see the growing, and increasingly unrepayable, pile of student debt as a Machiavellian way of getting the government to pay for college by simply forgiving the debt, thereby stiffing those of us who made the sacrifices, and choices, necessary to pay for our own kids’ education.   That’s government for you.

Third, even though student debt is supposedly the most salient source of increasing consumer debt, people don’t mention that car loans outstanding went up even more on a percentage basis, or by 3.8% to $845 billion.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  nearly all the prosperity we are seeing in the auto business and in the auto stocks has been manufactured by the Fed.   Other than housing, what industry benefits more from engineered interest rates than the automobile business?   All this talk of pent-up demand is largely nonsense.   Yes, the fleet is old but one can drive a modern car hundreds of thousands of miles with little difficulty.   What we call pent up demand would stay pent up were it not for the cheap financing Ben Bernanke’s War on the Elderly has provided for new car buyers.   Auto sales are a bubble that would burst quickly if the low interest rate elixir is ever removed.   This is, of course, yet another reason that the Fed cannot let rates normalize, on either the long or short end, any time soon, but that is another conversation. 

THE IRS, THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, AND THE CONSERVATIVES: LESSONS FROM WHAT SEEMS LIKE YESTERDAY

5/13/13

The IRS’s apparent efforts to target for intense scrutiny conservative groups’ applications for 501(c)(4) status, which the IRS refers to as merely “absolutely inappropriate” and for which the White House disavows either knowledge or responsibility, are indeed troubling for the citizenry.  They also ought to be troubling for the Obama Administration if it has any historical perspective.

Let me start by perhaps belaboring the obvious.   No one should be, and certainly yours truly is not, criticizing the IRS for going over 501(c)(4) applications with the proverbial fine toothed comb.   There have been a lot of games played with the tax exempt 501(c)(4) designation, and the taxpayers have no business subsidizing the political efforts of anybody.  Neither you nor I should be forced to subsidize someone else’s political efforts.  In fact, it would be great if the prohibition on use of taxpayer funds to advance political causes were expanded and more rigorously enforced.  The problem in this instance arises because it appears and, indeed, the IRS has admitted, that it has not been even-handed in its scrutiny of  501(c)(4) applicants; it has singled out conservative groups for outright harassment while at least apparently giving more liberal groups something of a pass, at least on a relative basis.

The White House denies any knowledge of the IRS’s lack of even-handedness in this affair.  It claims that neither it, nor the IRS’s most senior leadership, knew about these shenanigans.  This essentially boils down to a Clintonesque “It’s a matter of what ‘senior leadership’ means,” but I digress.   Since it has become, at least in recent decades and probably long before then, a part of the politician’s job description to lie at least as easily as s/he tells the truth, one can be excused for not believing the Obama Administration in this instance, among others.  

Whether the Obama Administration knew of, or was behind, the IRS’s seeming jihad against the right, the Administration is clearly aware of appearances here (not good) and should have some historical perspective.

Those of us who are old enough to remember Watergate will recall that, almost until the very end, neither the break-in nor the cover-up was a subject of great interest to the average American; note that President Nixon was reelected in an unprecedented landslide in the very thick of at least the early stages of the scandal.   Of course, those who hated Nixon (Some people just couldn’t get over Helen Gahagan Douglas, others couldn’t get around Nixon’s ostentatious ersatz anti-Communism, still others just didn’t like the man, and often for good reason, but I digress.) thought Watergate was a very big deal, even in its incipient stages.  Those who loved Nixon (Some actually believed the man was a conservative, others admired Nixon’s formidable intellect, but few simply loved the man, but, again, I digress.) thought Watergate was a big deal because they saw the dust-up over Watergate as an assault on the foundations of American conservatism and/or American life.  But most people thought that the Watergate affair and the often hysterical reactions it elicited were just part of the games politician play.  People had other things to worry about, like the economy and Vietnam.

All that changed when, in the process of the Watergate investigations, we heard Nixon on the tapes say that he wanted to “use the IRS to get back on our enemies.”  Then Watergate hit home for every American.   Since every American feared, and still fears, largely unjustifiably, the IRS  (The IRS doesn’t make the tax laws; the people we elect make the tax laws.  The IRS simply enforces the tax laws and is usually not as unreasonable and unyielding as some would have you believe, but that is grist for another mill.), the fear that the dreaded letter from the IRS could arrive in the mail should s/he run afoul of the Administration in power sent chills up spines across the country.    Simply put, Watergate hit home when it became clear, in Nixon’s own voice, that the president was willing to use the seemingly omnipresent IRS to torment his enemies.   The rest is history.

If the Obama Administration is behind the IRS efforts to target conservative groups, Mr. Obama is in big trouble.  If the Obama Administration was, as it contends, ignorant of the IRS’s machinations and finds them reprehensible, it better make that clear…and quickly.   The IRS remains, rightly or wrongly, many people’s bogeyman, the closest thing we have in our country to the knock on the door on the middle of the night that occupies the nightmares of residents of totalitarian countries.