Revenge of the Chicago School

After the coup that killed Allende and thousands of Chileans, the economy was largely managed by American consultants from the Chicago School, who attempted to create a free market paradise.

It didn't work, and they had to roll back some of the more extreme examples of free market fundamentalism after 12-18 months due to widespread fraud and corruption.

One thing, arguably the single most disastrous "reform", did last and now Chileans are discovering that privatizing their retirement accounts has resulted in their nest eggs being eaten up by excessive fees and poor performance.

Seriously, every time someone tries to implement "Galt's Gulch", this is what happen: Corruption, fraud, incompetence, and instability:

Discontent has been brewing for years in Chile over pensions so low that most people must keep working past retirement age. All the while, privately run companies have reaped enormous profits by investing Chileans’ social security savings.

The bubbling anger boiled over in July when Chileans learned that the former wife of a Socialist Party leader was receiving a monthly pension of almost $7,800 after retiring from the prison police department. That figure dwarfs the average monthly pension of $315, which is even less than a monthly minimum-wage salary of $384.

In a country already battered by widespread political and corporate corruption, this was the last straw.

Hundreds of thousands of people marched through Santiago, the capital, and other cities to protest the privatized pension system. More than 1.3 million people, according to organizers, turned up in August, the largest demonstration since Chile’s return to civilian rule in 1990.

One protester was Luis Montero, 69, whose monthly pension is about $150. Like many Chileans, Mr. Montero has mainly worked informal jobs without a contract at wages too meager for him to save enough for retirement. He still does maintenance work at a school to make ends meet.

………

In 1981, the military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet privatized the old pay-as-you-go pension system, in which workers, employers and the government all contributed.

Under the privatized system, which President George W. Bush hailed as an example to follow, workers must pay 10 percent of their earnings into accounts operated by private companies known as pension fund administrators, or A.F.P.s, the initials of the term in Spanish. The administrators invest the money and charge workers a commission for transactions and other fees. Employers and the government do not make any contributions to the workers’ accounts.

………

The money invested by the administrators bolstered Chile’s capital markets, which stimulated economic growth and yielded reasonable returns. Today six A.F.P.s — half of them owned by foreign companies — manage $171 billion in pension funds, equivalent to about 71 percent of Chile’s gross domestic product, according to the office of the supervisor of the pension funds.

………

A commission on pension reform, appointed in 2014 by President Michelle Bachelet, found that the median A.F.P. pension was equivalent to 34 percent of a retiree’s last average salary (24 percent in the case of women and 48 percent for men). The overall figure rose to 45 percent with supplements from a federally funded safety net established during Ms. Bachelet’s first term in office.………

“The median A.F.P. pension will be equivalent to 15 percent of the last wages,” he said. “When we have an entire generation retiring solely from the A.F.P. system, the picture gets even bleaker. We have to address this problem now.”

………

“The government’s proposals mean more of the same, and don’t solve the real problem,” said Luis Mesina, the secretary general of the Confederation of Bank Trade Unions and the face of the movement opposed to the private pension administrators. “We need to put an end to the A.F.P.s.”

………

Manuel Riesco, an economist with the National Center for Alternative Development Studies, agreed that the funds had done well — for themselves. The money they collect from salary deductions is more than twice as much as they pay out in pensions.

“That’s a huge surplus they will never give back,” Mr. Riesco said. “The state is spending large amounts of the federal budget to compensate for the failure of the private system. And as the population gets older, what do the A.F.P.s do? Reduce pensions even more. It’s a perverse and irrational system.”

This is typical, and under the Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) required by the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), any attempt to fix this would open up Chile to massive liability from the secretive tribunals.

The free market mouseketeer model is broken, and it always has been.

About F%$#ing Time

8 years ago, New York granted Verizon a franchise to deliver broadband on the condition that they offer FIOS service to every household in the 5 boroughs.

Needless to say, Verizon has not done this, instead moving only into the most lucrative neighborhoods.

Finally, New York City has issued a notice of default:

New York City officials yesterday notified Verizon that the company is in default of an agreement to bring fiber connections to all households in the city and could file a lawsuit against the company.

The road to a potential lawsuit has been a long one. In June 2015, New York released an audit that found Verizon failed to meet a commitment to extend FiOS to every household in the five boroughs by June 2014. City officials and Verizon have been trying to resolve the matter since then with no success, as Verizon says that it hasn't actually broken the agreement.

The default letter (full text) sent yesterday by the city Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DoITT) says Verizon has failed to pass all residential buildings in the city with fiber. As of October 2015, there were at least 38,551 addresses where Verizon hadn't fulfilled installation service requests that were more than a year old, the letter said.

"Moreover, Verizon improperly reduced, from $50 million to $15 million, the performance bond required [by] the Agreement on the basis of Verizon's incorrect representations that Verizon had met the prescribed deployment schedule, when in fact it had not," the letter said. City officials demanded that Verizon restore the bond and wants a response within 30 days. The default letter also accuses Verizon of failing to make records related to its provision of cable service available to the city during its audit.

"Officials say they could sue Verizon unless the carrier shows clear plans for stepping up installations," and that the notice is the first step in that process, The Wall Street Journal reported. The citywide fiber agreement lets NYC seek monetary damages from Verizon if it fails to deliver on the fiber promises.

………

Verizon made its citywide FiOS commitment in 2008 in exchange for a cable television franchise. Technically, Verizon is only obligated to provide TV service, but Verizon provides Internet and phone access over the same wires.

Verizon claims it has met the requirement to pass all households with fiber, but Verizon and the city disagree over the definition of "pass." Verizon says its fiber doesn't actually have to be in front of a building in order to "pass" it, as long as it's close enough to buildings that Verizon can provision service without delay. The city's default letter says Verizon hasn't met the agreement since "it has not run fiber immediately in front of or behind each residential building in the City."

Verizon has blamed landlords for not providing access to buildings. But the city's audit report found evidence that Verizon demanded exclusive agreements from landlords that would shut out other providers, in violation of the franchise agreement.

The phone and cable companies are natural monopolies, and their business models are predicated on this.

It's why marked based solutions simply do not work.

Wisconsin, the Wholly Subsidiary of Koch Industries

Documents revealed from the various "John Doe" investigations of Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin show just how corrupt and polluted the Badger state has become:

The pervasive influence of corporate cash in the democratic process, and the extraordinary lengths to which politicians, lobbyists and even judges go to solicit money, are laid bare in sealed court documents leaked to the Guardian.

The John Doe files amount to 1,500 pages of largely unseen material gathered in evidence by prosecutors investigating alleged irregularities in political fundraising. Last year the Wisconsin supreme court ordered that all the documents should be destroyed, though a set survived that has now been obtained by the news organisation.

The files open a window on a world that is very rarely glimpsed by the public, in which millions of dollars are secretly donated by major corporations and super-wealthy individuals to third-party groups in an attempt to sway elections. They speak to a visceral theme of the 2016 presidential cycle: the distortion of American democracy by big business that has been slammed by both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

In a case that is the subject of a petition currently in front of the US supreme court, five Wisconsin prosecutors carried out a deep investigation into what they suspected were criminal campaign-finance violations by the campaign committee of Scott Walker, Wisconsin governor and former Republican presidential candidate. Known as the “John Doe investigation”, the inquiry has been a lightning rod for bitter disputes between conservatives and progressives for years.

In July 2015 the state’s supreme court halted the investigation, saying the prosecutors had misunderstood campaign finance law and as a result had picked on people and groups “wholly innocent of any wrongdoing”. Highly unusually, the court also ordered that all the evidence assembled by the prosecutors be destroyed and later held under seal.

………

Among the new material contained in the documents are donations amounting to $750,000 to a third-party group closely aligned to Walker from the owner of NL Industries, a company that historically produced lead paint. Within the same timeframe as the donations, the Republican-controlled legislature passed new laws making it much more difficult for victims of lead paint poisoning to sue NL Industries and other former lead paint manufacturers (the laws were later overturned in the federal courts).

The John Doe files also provide new insight into the extensive efforts made by allies of Scott Walker to help a conservative member of the Wisconsin supreme court, David Prosser, hang onto his seat in a 2011 re-election. A network of like-minded groups and campaigners channeled $3.5m in undisclosed corporate funds to pay for TV and radio ads backing the judge.

………

In 2015, Justice Prosser refused to recuse himself from a case in which the state supreme court sat in judgment over the John Doe investigation, despite the fact that the investigation focused on precisely the same network of lobbying groups and donors that had helped him hang onto his seat. The judge joined a majority of four conservative justices who voted to terminate the investigation and destroy all the documents now leaked to the Guardian.

Prosser told the Guardian that four years had passed since his re-election before he joined the decision to close the John Doe investigation, over which time any potential conflict of interest had faded.

They have no shame.

H/t Charlie Pierce, who coined the title for this post, as well as the nickname for Gov. Walker.

I Believed That This Is a Well Deserved Instance of Kicking a Man While He Is Down

Parliament has released a report on the decision to depose Muammar Gaddafi by the British and French, and they pillory David Cameron's actions.

I think that it is no accident that this happened months after the former PM announced his resignation:

David Cameron’s intervention in Libya was carried out with no proper intelligence analysis, drifted into an unannounced goal of regime change and shirked its moral responsibility to help reconstruct the country following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, according to a scathing report by the foreign affairs select committee.

The failures led to the country becoming a failed a state on the verge of all-out civil war, the report adds.

The report, the product of a parliamentary equivalent of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, closely echoes the criticisms widely made of Tony Blair’s intervention in Iraq, and may yet come to be as damaging to Cameron’s foreign policy legacy.

Situation has deteriorated since David Cameron’s upbeat visit after Gaddafi fell, with latest administration on the brink

It concurs with Barack Obama’s assessment that the intervention was “a sh%$show”, and repeats the US president’s claim that France and Britain lost interest in Libya after Gaddafi was overthrown. The findings are also likely to be seized on by Donald Trump, who has tried to undermine Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy credentials by repeatedly condemning her handling of the Libyan intervention in 2011, when she was US secretary of state.

(%$ mine)

This has been known for some time, but it is interesting how his former Tory colleagues have been so eager to throw him under the bus, even while half of the Labour party continues to try and shield Tony Blair from the consequences of his even more heinous acts.

Quote of the Day

For more than three decades, macroeconomics has gone backwards. The treatment of identification now is no more credible than in the early 1970s but escapes challenge because it is so much more opaque. Macroeconomic theorists dismiss mere facts by feigning an obtuse ignorance about such simple assertions as "tight monetary policy can cause a recession." Their models attribute fluctuations in aggregate variables to imaginary causal forces that are not influenced by the action that any person takes. A parallel with string theory from physics hints at a general failure mode of science that is triggered when respect for highly regarded leaders evolves into a deference to authority that displaces objective fact from its position as the ultimate determinant of scientific truth.

—Paul Romer, Chief Economist at the World Bank

I think that this is a good description of both the current state of economics and the string theory sect faction in physics.

They both favor mathematical elegance over a coherent model which would provide some of predictive value.

H/t naked capitalism

We're the Phone Company. We Don't Care; We Don't Have To.

After being called out by the press, AT&T, which cut a deal for low internet costs for the poor as a part of its merger with DirectTV, and then specifically avoided upgrading the speed of their networks to avoid offering them discounted service has relented in the face of lots of bad press:

AT&T will stop exploiting a loophole that it used to deny a discounted home Internet service to poor people in areas where it hasn't upgraded its network.

AT&T's purchase of DirecTV came with a Federal Communications Commission requirement to offer Internet service for either $5 or $10 a month to households in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). But AT&T was able to avoid making this discount price available to low-income people in areas where its network doesn't support download speeds of at least 3Mbps.

A broadband advocacy group called the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) asked AT&T to reconsider recently, and AT&T denied the request. But AT&T changed its mind after the NDIA wrote a blog post that was widely shared by news media and fueled criticism of the carrier.

Incumbent carriers can be trusted to the the right thing when they have exhausted every other possibility, I guess.

This is a classic example of a market failure which is not supposed to occur according the the free market mousketeers, but it makes perfect sense:  If you can make more money off of poor service, then you will make more money off of poor service.

Linkage

• Does Chinese Civilization Come From Ancient Egypt? (Foreign Policy) To my mind, this theory is still at a, "Friendly argument over some beer and wings," stage, but it would make for an engaging evening.
• Watch as Bacteria Evolve Antibiotic Resistance in a Gigantic Petri Dish (Gizmodo) Fascinating and horrifying.
• Why Samsung and LG Are Being Sued Over Employee Recruitment (Fortune) Yet another case of tech companies colluding to suppress wages.  Got to love the invisible hand of the market.
• Obama expected to veto 9/11 victims’ bill, White House says (Washington Post) Obama chooses the House of Saud over 911 victims.
• A dealer trainer tried to buy a car; he now calls car dealers 'clueless' (Green Car Reports) All the crap that is said by dealers and their well remunerated allies in state legislators about the how independent dealers are essential for consumer protection are just that: crap.
• DNA Dragnet: In Some Cities, Police Go From Stop-and-Frisk to Stop-and-Spit (ProPublica) Live in obedient fear, citizen.
• Dolphins have a 'highly advanced' spoken language, study finds (Mashable) Not a surprise.

Here is the video of antibiotic resistance:

Wow. This is Repulsive

Former Foreign Secretary for Tony Blair has expressed relief that the whole Brexit blowup has distracted people from his lying to get his country to go to war:

Newly leaked emails show how a key U.K. architect of the Iraq war expressed relief that the “Brexit” vote to leave the European Union would reduce media coverage of the devastating results of an inquiry into the United Kingdom’s role in the the war.

On July 4, former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw emailed former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to discuss the upcoming release of the Chilcot Report– a document detailing the British government’s inquiry. The report probed, among other things, the depth of private British commitment and support for the American-led war in Iraq.

In anticipation of coming press coverage, Straw asked Powell to review a statement in a Word document he drafted. He wrote that the “only silver lining of the Brexit vote is that it will reduce medium term attention on Chilcot — thought it will not stop the day of publication being uncomfortable.”

What a contemptible and narcissistic piece of work.

No Accountability, Ever

Carrie Tolstedt, the former Wells Fargo executive who ran the division that routinely defrauded consumers, retired to copious praise from her superiors and a huge retirement package:

Wells Fargo & Co’s “sandbagger”-in-chief is leaving the giant bank with an enormous pay day—$124.6 million.

In fact, despite beefed-up “clawback” provisions instituted by the bank shortly after the financial crisis, and the recent revelations of massive misconduct, it does not appear that Wells Fargo is requiring Carrie Tolstedt, the Wells Fargo executive who was in charge of the unit where employees opened more than 2 million largely unauthorized customer accounts—a seemingly routine practice that employees internally referred to as “sandbagging”—to give back any of her nine-figure pay.

On Thursday, Wells Fargo agreed to pay $185 million, including the largest penalty ever imposed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to settle claims that that it defrauded its customers. The bank’s shareholders will ultimately have to swallow the cost of that settlement. The bank also said it had fired 5,300 employees over five years related to the bad behavior.

Tolstedt, however, is walking away from Wells Fargo with a very full bank account—and praise. In the July announcement of her exit, which made no mention of the soon-to-be-settled case, Wells Fargo’s CEO John Stumpf said Tolstedt had been one of the bank’s most important leaders and “a standard-bearer of our culture” and “a champion for our customers.”

On Thursday, Richard Cordray, the head of the CFPB, had a different take, “It is quite clear that [the actions of Tolstedt’s unit] are unfair and abusive practices under federal law,” said Cordray. “They are a violation of trust and an abuse of trust.”

A spokesperson for Wells Fargo said that the timing of Tolstedt’s exit was the result of a “personal decision to retire after 27 years” with the bank. The spokesperson declined to comment on whether the bank was considering clawing back Tolstedt’s back pay.

………

What’s more, Tolstedt ran the community banking division of the bank, which included its retail banking and credit card divisions, during the entire period in which the customer abuse was alleged, which goes back to 2011. The CFPB said about three quarters of the unauthorized accounts opened by employees of Wells Fargo were bank deposit accounts. Another 565,000 were unauthorized credit card applications. Tolstedt took over the division in 2008, after Wells Fargo merged with Wachovia during the financial crisis.

………

“This appears to be exactly the situation that clawback provisions were created for,” says Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, a group that lobbies for more regulation of the big banks. “If they don’t apply here, when will they apply.”

(emphasis mine)

So, she presided over a department where fraud was not only rampant, but appeared to be a required employee activity (they fired over 5000 ordinary employees over this) in the division while she presided over it, but no harm, no foul, because she's a senior executive who gets to "Retire" at 56 with a payout of $124,600,000.00.

We really need to start throwing banksters in jail.

Sugar is Evil

I am not referring to Glucose, or Fructose, or Sucrose, but rather the recent revelation that the sugar industry bribed scientists so that they would minimize the impact on heart health:

Back in the 1960s, a sugar industry executive wrote fat checks to a group of Harvard researchers so that they’d downplay the links between sugar and heart disease in a prominent medical journal—and the researchers did it, according to historical documents reported Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

One of those Harvard researchers went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where he set the stage for the federal government’s current dietary guidelines. All in all, the corrupted researchers and skewed scientific literature successfully helped draw attention away from the health risks of sweets and shift the blame solely to fats—for nearly five decades. The low-fat, high-sugar diets that health experts subsequently encouraged are now seen as a main driver of the current obesity epidemic.

The bitter revelations come from archived documents from the Sugar Research Foundation (now the Sugar Association), dug up by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco. Their dive into the old, sour affair highlights both the perils of trusting industry-sponsored research to inform policy and the importance of requiring scientists to disclose conflicts of interest—something that didn’t become the norm until years later. Perhaps most strikingly, it spotlights the concerning power of the sugar industry.

“These findings, our analysis, and current Sugar Association criticisms of evidence linking sucrose to cardiovascular disease suggest the industry may have a long history of influencing federal policy,” the authors concluded.

………

After the review, the sugar industry continued to fund research into heart disease and other health issues. By the 1980s, few scientists focused on the role of sugar in heart disease. The 1980 Dietary Guidelines for Americans emphasized curbing fats and dietary cholesterol to prevent heart disease.

Today, Nestle points out, “the balance has shifted to less concern about fat and much greater concern about sugars.” But, the story should act as a cautionary tale of the potential harms from industry-sponsored studies.

"Potential harms" from "Industry sponsored studies"?

Real harm, time, and time, and time, and time, and time again.

This crap is inherently corrupting, and any researcher that takes industry money should be debarred from federal funding.

Any researcher that takes industry money and does not explicitly and clearly reveal this should be debarred from federal funding for life.

And They Think That This Guy Can Win the next Election?

In his leadership campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, Owen "Oily"^* Smith has now said that if he were elected Prime Minister, he would rejoin the Euro even if it meant completely unrestricted immigration and having to join the Euro zone.

Seriously?

While I understand that those who will be voting in the next leadership election, Labour members, are likely to be more supportive of EU membership than the general public, but when juxtaposed with joining the Euro Zone, which is a Berlin dominated basket case, has to be the stupidest campaign pitch since Damien Thorn ran on a platform of free Syphilis and the apocalypse.

H/t Atrios.

^*I am not making this up. It was his his actual nickname when he was a lobbyist for Pfizer.

Snark of the Day

We are spared an iCar which will stop in the middle of the highway so you can verify your iCloud password despite having no network connection. The Genius mechanics would have told you, "That's how it's supposed to work!

—Duncan "Atrios" Black, on the news that Apple was getting out of the self driving car business.

Seriously?

After swearing out an arrest warrant for Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein, they have followed up by issued an arrest warrant for radio host Amy Goodman for filming the protests and the ensuing brutality of the pipeline's Pinkertons:

So much for the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Despite well-established freedom of the press protections that outline and guarantee the rights of reporters who cover breaking news stories—including confrontations between demonstrators and authorities—North Dakota officials have charged Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman with criminal trespassing after she documented private security personnel’s use of dogs to attack Native American foes of the Dakota Access Pipeline project.

Video footage obtained by Goodman, an internationally respected and frequently honored independent journalist, helped to alert Americans to the tactics being used to stop demonstrations against the pipeline by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their allies. On Friday, the Obama administration halted work on key portions of the $3.8 billion pipeline project—recognizing concerns raised by the tribe and environmental activists.

To quote Tallyrand,^* it is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

The behavior of the pipeline company, as well as the behavior of local and state law enforcement has been abhorrent, and their natural response is to go after the reporter.

I think that contaminants in North Dakota from fracking have melted their so-called minds.

 ^*Again, this is probably not an actually a quote from Tallyrand. It was likely said by Joseph Fouché, but, "C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute," is all too frequently credited to Talleyrand.

Corrupt as Hell, but Completely Legal

I have made mention of Connecticut Governor Mike Malloy's unseemly closeness to Cigna and Anthem while his administration was reviewing a merger between the two insurance behemoths, appointing an insurance company lobbyist to review their merger.

Well, this story just got even more brazenly corrupt:

Facing criticism over his decision to appoint a former Cigna lobbyist to a position regulating Cigna's controversial merger, Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy has sought to distance himself from the merger review. The regulator in question, Katharine Wade, has said she followed all applicable conflict-of-interest rules. But newly unearthed documents detail Malloy's meetings with company officials and with Wade — and also raise new questions about Wade's financial connections to Cigna.

The emails were released to International Business Times in response to a series of open records requests amid a state ethics probe that has helped throw the colossal Cigna-Anthem deal into turmoil. Connecticut has been leading the multistate regulatory review of the deal, which physicians and consumer groups say could raise healthcare premiums for up to 53 million Americans across the country. Soon after the launch of the ethics probe about whether Wade must recuse herself from the regulatory review, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit aimed at blocking the transaction. Connecticut's ethics office is expected to rule on the Wade controversy in the coming weeks.

Malloy has maintained that his state’s merger approval is “an independent decision” by his insurance department and that he has not been involved in the merger review. The documents, though, shed new light on his contacts with the companies and his regulator while that review was proceeding.

One set of documents shows that the governor met with Anthem CEO Joseph Swedish on August 28, 2015. That was two days after Anthem and Cigna executives met with Wade’s agency specifically about Connecticut’s merger review, and the same day Anthem donated $25,000 to the Democratic Governors Association, which backed Malloy’s closely contested election campaigns. At the time, Malloy was already gearing up to lead the DGA in 2016.

Emails previously obtained by IBT show that Malloy spoke with Swedish and Cigna CEO David Cordani the night before the merger was announced. They also show that Malloy’s top economic development official told Cordani the governor’s administration would help Cigna if the company pursued the merger. Calendar items just obtained by IBT show Malloy later met with Cordani in the governor’s office in June of 2016 — three days after Connecticut Common Cause called for the ethics probe of Wade over her ties to Cigna.

………

Another set of documents shows that Malloy met with Wade a few weeks after Anthem announced its bid to merge with Cigna and just days before the transaction was cemented. Malloy met with Wade two more times as the merger progressed. Immediately after one such meeting, Insurance Department visitor logs show Wade met with Amy Lazzaro — Cigna’s lobbyist in Hartford who had previously served as the Connecticut Insurance Department’s chief of staff.

………


Connecticut has suspended its review of the merger, pending the outcome of the federal lawsuit against Cigna and Anthem. But because that case could be settled and the merger could still go forward, ethics regulators decided to continue their review of Wade: She is a former Cigna vice president whose husband works at the company and whose father-in-law has been listed as a company attorney. Emails obtained by IBT suggest that their inquiry into whether Wade must recuse herself from the merger review is focusing specifically on her own agency’s strict conflict-of-interest rules.

The depressing thing is that with recent court rulings on corruption prosecutions, this is all completely legal.

Hoo Boy!

After experiencing significant distress at a 9/11 memorial service, her doctor is saying that she was suffering from both the heat and pneumonia.

Given the regular rumors about her health, we know what the coverage is going to be for the next week:

Hillary Clinton is being treated for pneumonia and dehydration, her doctor said on Sunday, hours after she abruptly left a ceremony in New York honoring the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks and had to be helped into a van by Secret Service agents.

The incident, which occurred after months of questions about her health from her Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, and his campaign, is likely to increase pressure on Mrs. Clinton to address the issue and release detailed medical records, which she has so far declined to do.

Mrs. Clinton was taken from the morning event at ground zero to the Manhattan apartment of her daughter, Chelsea. About 90 minutes after arriving there, Mrs. Clinton emerged from the apartment in New York’s Flatiron district. She waved to onlookers and posed for pictures with a little girl on the sidewalk.

“I’m feeling great,” Mrs. Clinton said. “It’s a beautiful day in New York.”

Mrs. Clinton left in her motorcade without the group of reporters that is designated to travel with her in public. A campaign spokesman, Nick Merrill, indicated that she had returned to her Chappaqua, N.Y., residence sometime after 1 p.m., and Mrs. Clinton was not seen publicly the rest of the day.

Mr. Merrill initially described Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, as feeling “overheated” at the commemoration ceremony.

But just after 5 p.m., a campaign official said Mrs. Clinton’s physician, Dr. Lisa R. Bardack, had examined the candidate at her home in Chappaqua, and Dr. Bardack said in a statement that Mrs. Clinton was “rehydrated and recovering nicely.”

“Secretary Clinton has been experiencing a cough related to allergies,” Dr. Bardack’s statement said, adding that on Friday morning, after a prolonged cough, Mrs. Clinton was given a diagnosis of pneumonia.

Cue the wanktastic explosion of hysterical punditry.

LCS is Raison d'Etre Abandoned, Ships Will Still Be Bought

At the core of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) design was the idea that they would have combat modules that could be swapped out to convert the ships between surface warefare (SuW), mine counter-measures (MCM), and anti-submarine warfare (ASW) versions on the fly.

This was why the US Navy bought them, even though there were much larger, and more expensive, but no more heavily armed than existing corvettes.

In fact, they are the size of frigates, about 3000 tons, but carry a 57mm gun equivalent to the armament of a corvette, which typically displaces around 1500 tons.

There were a number of problems with this, among them the fact that there was no way to make the logistics work without the ship having to return to the United States to make the swap.

So you ended up with a bloated and overpriced ship, and now the USN has admitted that swapping mission modules is never going to happen, but (surprise) they will continue to buy more of these warships:

When the first Littoral Combat Ship launched a decade ago this month, the U.S. Navy expected it to herald a new class of inexpensive, agile fighting ships with a radically new “modular” design — allowing them to swap out bundles of weapons, sensors and crews for different missions.

So if the LCS needed to fight other warships, hunt submarines or search for mines, sailors could quickly install distinct modules for each mission, although only one at a time. Don’t worry, the Navy promised, it’ll work.

It didn’t.

On Sept. 8, the Navy announced that it is effectively abandoning the LCS’ modular concept for 24 of the ships in both the Freedom and Independence-class variants. The initial four ships — which are already in service — will become testing vessels.

………

That means these new, multi-purpose vessels will become … single-purpose vessels.

………

In reality, costs ballooned to more than $500 million per ship — twice the original estimate. They are fast. However, the modules don’t work. Instead of taking a few days at most to replace them, it takes weeks without extremely precise planning. That’s far from assured in peacetime, let alone during a major war.

The 3,000-ton LCS is heavier than first planned — and it’s poorly armed and vulnerable to anti-ship missiles. Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon’s director of operational testing and evaluation, described the LCS in 2013 as “not expected to be survivable” in combat.

But the Navy is still going to buy as many as 40 of theses ships.

Your tax dollars at work.

Why Putin Favors an Orange Clown

Clinton Ehrlich, the, "Sole Western researcher at the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Moscow State Institute of International Relations," observes that the Russian political establishment honestly believes that Hillary Clinton wants to start a war with Russia.

I don't have the direct exposure to the Russian foreign policy establishment, but his assessment of their position rings true to me, not the least because I see Clinton's foreign policy record as showing her to be bellicose in general,  and implacably hostile to Russia specifically:

If Hillary Clinton is elected president, the world will remember Aug. 25 as the day she began the Second Cold War.

In a speech last month nominally about Donald Trump, Clinton called Russian President Vladimir Putin the godfather of right-wing, extreme nationalism. To Kremlin-watchers, those were not random epithets. Two years earlier, in the most famous address of his career, Putin accused the West of backing an armed seizure of power in Ukraine by “extremists, nationalists, and right-wingers.” Clinton had not merely insulted Russia’s president: She had done so in his own words.

Worse, they were words originally directed at neo-Nazis. In Moscow, this was seen as a reprise of Clinton’s comments comparing Putin to Hitler. It injected an element of personal animus into an already strained relationship — but, more importantly, it set up Putin as the representative of an ideology that is fundamentally opposed to the United States.

………

I have been hard-pressed to offer a more comforting explanation for Clinton’s behavior — a task that has fallen to me as the sole Western researcher at the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Moscow State Institute of International Relations. Better known by its native acronym, MGIMO, the institute is the crown jewel of Russia’s national-security brain trust, which Henry Kissinger dubbed the “Harvard of Russia.”

………

Let’s not mince words: Moscow perceives the former secretary of state as an existential threat. The Russian foreign-policy experts I consulted did not harbor even grudging respect for Clinton. The most damaging chapter of her tenure was the NATO intervention in Libya, which Russia could have prevented with its veto in the U.N. Security Council. Moscow allowed the mission to go forward only because Clinton had promised that a no-fly zone would not be used as cover for regime change.

Russia’s leaders were understandably furious when, not only was former Libyan President Muammar al-Qaddafi ousted, but a cellphone recording of his last moments showed U.S.-backed rebels sodomizing him with a bayonet. They were even more enraged by Clinton’s videotaped response to the same news: “We came, we saw, he died,” the secretary of state quipped before bursting into laughter, cementing her reputation in Moscow as a duplicitous warmonger.

As a candidate, Clinton has given Moscow déjà vu by once again demanding a humanitarian no-fly zone in the Middle East — this time in Syria. Russian analysts universally believe that this is another pretext for regime change. Putin is determined to prevent Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from meeting the same fate as Qaddafi — which is why he has deployed Russia’s air force, navy, and special operations forces to eliminate the anti-Assad insurgents, many of whom have received U.S. training and equipment.

………

Another factor that disturbs Russian analysts is the fact that, unlike prior hawks such as John McCain, Clinton is a Democrat. This has allowed her to mute the West’s normal anti-interventionist voices, even as Iraq-war architect Robert Kagan boasts that Clinton will pursue a neocon foreign policy by another name. Currently, the only voice for rapprochement with Russia is Clinton’s opponent, Donald Trump. If she vanquishes him, she will have a free hand to take the aggressive action against Russia that Republican hawks have traditionally favored.

Moscow prefers Trump not because it sees him as easily manipulated, but because his “America First” agenda coincides with its view of international relations. Russia seeks a return to classical international law, in which states negotiate with one another based on mutually understood self-interests untainted by ideology. To Moscow, only the predictability of realpolitik can provide the coherence and stability necessary for a durable peace.

………

In Clinton, it sees the polar opposite — a progressive ideologue who will stubbornly adhere to moral postures regardless of their consequences. Clinton also has financial ties to George Soros, whose Open Society Foundations are considered the foremost threat to Russia’s internal stability, based on their alleged involvement in Eastern Europe’s prior “Color Revolutions.”

Russia’s security apparatus is certain that Soros aspires to overthrow Putin’s government using the same methods that felled President Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine: covertly orchestrated mass protests concealing armed provocateurs. The Kremlin’s only question is whether Clinton is reckless enough to back those plans.

I have one difference with this analysis:  The evidence shows that the coup in the Ukraine was more directly funded by the CIA (and its front the National Endowment for Democracy) and the State Department, not Soros.

Corrupt, But Off the Hook

Former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell will not be recharged for corruption:

U.S. prosecutors on Thursday dropped corruption charges against former Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell and his wife, bringing to a close a case that had tarnished the once-rising star of the Republican Party.

"After carefully considering the Supreme Court's recent decision and the principles of federal prosecution, we have made the decision not to pursue the case further," the U.S. Justice Department said in a statement.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out McDonnell's bribery convictions in a ruling that could make it tougher to prosecute politicians for corruption.

The eight justices, liberals and conservatives alike, overturned McDonnell's 2014 conviction, saying that his conduct fell short of a "official act" in exchange for a bribe as required for conviction under federal bribery law.

This for nearly $200K of gifts.

McDonnell sold his office, and sold his influence, but that is no longer a crime in the United States.

The old adage that the real scandal is not what is legal, but what is legal, applies here.

Linkage

• Physics And Progress Of Low-Frequency Counterstealth Technology (Aviation Week) A nice survey how low frequency radars, phased array radars, and computer power can be used to minimize the benefits of stealth.
• LePage effectively endorses racial profiling in Maine's battle against drug addiction (The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram) There is a reason that Charlie Pierce calls LePage a "Human Bowling Jacket."
• Brain wiring needed for reading isn’t learned—it’s in place prior to reading (Ars Technica) If confirmed, it means that things like dyslexia can be addressed even earlier.
• A Cheaper Airbag, and Takata’s Road to a Deadly Crisis (The New York Times) They use the same stuff that blew up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City.
• This Alarm Clock Sex Toy Will Transform The Way You Orgasm (YourTango) Rule 34, no exception.
• How inmates are organizing a nationwide strike from behind bars (Waging Nonviolence) About bloody time. Prison labor has become a profit center, which is evil.
• Hillary Clinton’s National Security Advisers Are a “Who’s Who” of the Warfare State (The Intercept) Not a surprise. Clinton arguably has the most bellicose rhetoric of Presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan. My prediction: It will end with an arms for hostages exchange.

An interesting history of the failed Russian N-1 Moon Rocket

Please Don't Throw Me into the Briar Patch*

A Mexican senator is proposing that they should pull out of their treaties with the United States if Donald Trump is elected.

This is arguably the best argument I've heard this far for voting for the Republican Nominee, though I would still never vote for him:

A Mexican senator is proposing legislation to empower the government to retaliate if a U.S. administration led by Donald Trump inflicts expropriations or economic losses on his country to make it pay for a border wall.

Republican presidential nominee Trump has vowed to have Mexico fund the planned wall to keep out illegal immigrants if he is elected, and threatened to fund it by blocking remittances sent home by Mexicans living in the United States.

Armando Rios Piter, an opposition senator for the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), will next week present the initiative he hopes will protect Mexicans, and highlight the risks of targeting them economically.

The plan offers a taste of the kind of tit-for-tat measures that could gain traction between the two heavily-integrated economies if Trump wins the presidency at the Nov. 8 election.

In a preliminary summary of the proposal, which also foresees giving the Senate the power to disavow international treaties when the interests of Mexico or its companies are threatened by other signatories, it states:

"In cases where the property/assets of (our) fellow citizens or companies are affected by a foreign government, as Donald Trump has threatened, the Mexican government should proportionally expropriate assets and properties of foreigners from that country on our territory."

The only way for this law to work is if Mexico pulls out of NAFTA.

I consider this a win for everyone, except perhaps for the abusive maquiladoras, big pharma, Wall Street, and subsidized US corn.

I can live with that.

^*By this, I mean, please do this.  This is a reference to the story of how the trickster Brer Rabbit got out of a sticky situation by convincing Brer Fox that he was afraid of being thrown the place where he would be safe.  See also Tar Baby. 

Yet Another Artifact of Failed US Policy

Pyongyang has detonated another nuclear warhead, and it appears to be the largest yet tested, and it also appears that it was a test of further warhead miniaturization:

North Korea said it conducted a "higher level" nuclear test explosion on Friday that will allow it to finally build "at will" an array of stronger, smaller and lighter nuclear weapons. It was the North's fifth atomic test and the second in eight months.

South Korea's president called the detonation, which Seoul estimated was the North's biggest-ever in explosive yield, an act of "fanatic recklessness." Japan called North Korea an "outlaw nation."

North Korea's boast of a technologically game-changing nuclear test defied both tough international sanctions and long-standing diplomatic pressure to curb its nuclear ambitions. It will raise serious worries in many world capitals that North Korea has moved another step closer to its goal of a nuclear-armed missile that could one day strike the U.S. mainland.

………

Hours after South Korea noted unusual seismic activity near North Korea's northeastern nuclear test site, the North said in its state-run media that a test had "finally examined and confirmed the structure and specific features of movement of (a) nuclear warhead that has been standardized to be able to be mounted on strategic ballistic rockets."

………

South Korea's weather agency said the explosive yield of the North Korean blast would have been 10 to 12 kilotons, or 70 to 80 percent of the force of the 15-kiloton atomic bomb the United States dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945. The North's fourth test was an estimated six kilotons.

………

North Korean leader Kim has overseen a robust increase in the number and kinds of missiles tested this year. Not only has the range of the weapons jumped significantly, but the country is working to perfect new platforms for launching them — submarines and mobile launchers — giving the North greater ability to threaten the tens of thousands of U.S. troops stationed throughout Asia.

Here is what I think is the most critical bit of the story:

Diplomacy has so far failed. Six-nation negotiations on dismantling North Korea's nuclear program in exchange for aid were last held in late 2008 and fell apart in early 2009.

The Korean Peninsula remains technically at war, as the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty.

Technically, the US and the ROK are still at war with the DPRK.

What's more the diplomatic conflict is primarily between the DPRK and the US, and the US refuses one-on-one negotiations, because our foreign policy establishment sees any negotiations as a reward.

This is really pretty simple.

Pyongyang is convinced that the US intends to launch a surprise decapitation strike on them, and this is what drives their military and diplomatic activities.

The refusal of the US to engage them directly, or to exchange ambassadors, which was agreed to^* in 1994, reinforces their belief, and provides much of the impetus for their bellicose behavior.

^*Also the supply of a proliferation resistant light reactor, food aid, and a dropping of sanctions.

This is Not a Gaffe, This is Walking the Walk

I am not a fan of the Green Party, I think that they play politics to lose, as a way to assauge liberal white guilty.

I am also not a fan of their current Presidential candidate, Jill Stein, who is winking and nodding at some of the more unsavory aspects of her base, most notably anti-vaxxers.

That being said, the fact that Stein has been charged as a result of her role in the protest against the Dakota access pipeline, which is demolishing holy Indian burial sites, is a plus in my book:

Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate, is facing misdemeanor criminal charges in North Dakota after she spray-painted a bulldozer at a rally protesting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, law enforcement officials said on Wednesday.

Warrants charging Ms. Stein, 66, and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka, with criminal trespass and criminal mischief were issued after several Caterpillar bulldozers were found to have been defaced at the protest, which was held on Tuesday, according to an affidavit prepared by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department.

“Officers were alerted to video that displayed presidential candidate Jill Stein painting the front of one of the Caterpillars with the message ‘I approve this message,’ ” the affidavit said.

The warrants are valid only in North Dakota, said Rob Keller, a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Department, adding that Ms. Stein and Mr. Baraka would be arrested only if they returned to the state.

………

The pipeline project has met with resistance from many who say that it will destroy sacred Native American sites and potentially threaten the quality of the drinking water at a nearby reservation.

I still ain't gonna vote for her, but my disdain for her, and her campaign, is no longer complete.

This is Beautiful

Shorter Matt Yglesias

If that's what Matt stays up at night worrying about, he might need a more news-appropriate hobby, like alcoholism.

—Matt Taibbi on Matt Yglesias

Matt Yglesias, who hasn't been on my blogroll for some time (with good reason), suggested that reporters should not try to get official emails from politicians, because ……… really, because Donald Trump ……… we need to leave Hillary alone:

You may never see a worse case of media Stockholm Syndrome than a recent column by Matt Yglesias at Vox, entitled, "Against Transparency."

Subheaded "Government officials' email should be private, just like their phone calls," the Yglesias piece basically argues that emails shouldn't be covered by laws like the Freedom of Information Act because it's the 2010s, and it's just too darn hard to use the phone if you want to keep something secret while you're on the public payroll.

I'm sure there's no shortage of reporters lining up to take a whack at Yglesias and his treasonous column this week, so I'll keep this short:

………

I get that Yglesias thinks that the Clinton email/Clinton Foundation business isn't a story. But whoever heard of a reporter begging for less access? We're all losing our minds.

It is a beautiful, and well deserved, Fisking.

Read the whole thing.

Oh, You Delicate Flower, You

It appears that the parasitic finance class are very upset that Elizabeth Warren does not kiss their ass:

In just three and a half years in the U.S. Senate, Elizabeth Warren has become one of the most polarizing figures in Congress and among the legislators most hated by members of the financial services industry.

An early proponent of creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — even before she was elected to the Senate — the 67-year-old former Harvard professor also has emerged as one of the most ardent champions of the Department of Labor's fiduciary rule for retirement accounts. She has been a pit bull at congressional hearings, taking on Wall Street interests at every turn, and has had public run-ins with former Finra chief Richard Ketchum and SEC Chairwoman Mary Jo White.

“It is perfectly legal for some brokers and financial advisers to take kickbacks, prizes or even vacations for selling lousy products to unsuspecting customers,” Ms. Warren said at a congressional forum in March 2015, shortly before the DOL proposed rule was released. 

That's the kind of rhetoric Robert Braglia, president of American Financial & Tax Strategies Inc., a registered investment adviser, rejects.

“She's more anti-business than she is pro-consumer,” he said. “She's coming from a place that all “fill-in-the-blank” are bad. Every industry she goes after, she paints with the same broad brush, which is unfair.”

………

“I live here [in Boston] and can't name a single human being in my immediate or extended social circles that likes her, has or would vote for her, or who can even say that they don't loathe her,” Jeremy Cohen, a broker with the Independent Financial Group, wrote in the comments section of an InvestmentNews story the day Ms.Warren took on Mr. Ketchum in a congressional hearing.

………

“She's the bane of most brokers,” said Paul Auslander, director of financial planning at ProVise Management Group. “Most RIAs I talk to … have disdain for Elizabeth Warren, but they find it hard to argue with the fact that she's been a champion of this [fiduciary-duty] effort.”

………

“If you only see the bad, you're going to think that all [advisers] are bad,” said Eric Bishoff, chief executive of Bishoff Financial Group. “To the people in the industry, that's insulting.”

The financial services industry is designed to reward deception and self dealing.

Its denizens see themselves as Galtian ubermenschen who defend capitalism against moochers.

They are the moochers, and they need to get over themselves.

Deep Thought

H/T JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Bigger Third Party Candidate Fail

Proving, as Charles Pierce says, that the Libertarians put the wrong guy at the top of the ticket, Presidential candidate Gary Johnson, drew a blank on what the f%$# Aleppo was:

The Libertarian's 'what is Aleppo' flub comes at a particularly inopportune time for the long-shot candidate.

In a make-or-break moment, Gary Johnson broke.

During an interview in which Johnson would later say he mentally “blanked,” the Libertarian Party presidential nominee on Thursday flubbed a question on the Syrian civil war, asking, “What is Aleppo?”

His fellow MSNBC panelists were agape, as Johnson had just claimed unfamiliarity with a city at the heart of Syria’s ongoing civil war and humanitarian crisis. Johnson spent the rest of the morning on a self-flagellating apology tour, including a brief follow-up interview with Mark Halperin in which Johnson admitted frustration at his answer, an appearance on The View, and a statement of public mea culpa.

Yeah, a mea culpa on The View is going to make this all better.

You have the Green Party candidate with an arrest warrant out against her for vandalism,^* this guy, and I've seen over a dozen Clinton ads this week, and they all talk more about Trump than her.

I have never seen more bizarrely self-destructive Presidential campaigns in my lifetime.

^*Actually, the arrest warrant is for a protest against a pipeline company that is going straight through a sacred Indian burial ground, which is kind of cool.

Third Party Candidate Fail

Evan McMullin, the great white hope of the anti-Trump wing of the Republican party, filed for Presidential elections ballots with a place holder VP who is now his official running mate:

Evan McMullin is running as an independent conservative alternative to Donald Trump. Who McMullin is running with, however, is a bit of a mystery.

In all nine states where he has officially qualified to appear on the presidential ballot, McMullin has listed a “Nathan Johnson” as his vice presidential nominee. McMullin’s campaign won’t provide any more information about Johnson — including which of the thousands of people named Nathan Johnson the campaign is referring to — saying he is only a placeholder until McMullin names an actual running mate.

But in eight of the nine states, top election officials say McMullin’s campaign can’t pull Johnson’s name off the ballot, and that it’s “Nathan Johnson” — not whomever McMullin eventually names as his pick for vice president — that will appear on the ballot.

Yet another Republican who cannot find his ass with both hands.

Linkage

• 3.7-billion-year-old fossil makes life on Mars less of a long shot (USA Today) Space geek time.
• Vice shows how not to treat freelancers (Columbia Journalism Review) Even by the standard of how stringers are treated, it's pretty bleak.
• In 1975, a cat co-authored a physics paper (ScienceAlert) Physics and cats, what's not to love.
• Memory and attention are affected by much lower levels of dehydration than previously thought (The Conversation) Drink up.
• Excess Management Is Costing the U.S. $3 Trillion Per Year (Harvard Business Review2) As an aside, these people, whether in government, academe or business, raise the cost of college, finance, and generally doing business. It is a parasitic class.
• Austerity and the rise of populism (Coppola Comment) The belief in the myth of the "Confidence Fairy", which posits that reducing spending leads to more academic activity, doesn't work, and leads to a nasty turn in politics.
• Exclusive: How Elizabeth Holmes’s House of Cards Came Tumbling Down (Vanity Fair) Theranos appears to have been an exercise in self-delusion and fraud from the beginning.
• Apple introduces iPhone 7 ($649), iPhone 7 Plus ($769), and wireless earbuds (Ars Technica) Apple just disposed of the 3.5mm ear phone jack, they have an adapter, but you cannot charge the phone and use it at the same time, and it's yet another thing that you have to charge. BTW, the new wireless earphone is $150, yet another tax on your Apple fetish.
• Spoof an Ethernet adapter on USB, and you can sniff credentials from locked laptops (The Register) The computer is your friend.

H/T DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for this hilarious take-down of hipsters:

Syria Just Got Worse

Turkey is now looking to seize territory in Syria and call it a buffer zone:

As Turkey marches forward in its invasion of Syrian territory, the true purpose for the initial invasion is becoming more and more clear. While some commentators maintain that Turkey’s recent military adventure is actually coordinated with the Russians and the Syrians, the fruit of Turkey’s labor tells a different story.

For instance, on Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan announced his intention and desire for the creation of a “buffer zone” in Northern Syria that spans over the territory recently seized by Turkish forces and, interestingly enough, also spans the same dimensions of a “buffer zone” called for by numerous military industrial complex firms, “strategy” organizations, and “think tanks” angling for the destruction of the Syrian government.

………

The Turkish invasion is predicated on the basis of “fighting ISIS,” a wholly unbelievable goal since Turkey itself has been supporting, training, and facilitating ISIS since day one. Not only that, but Turkey is arriving in Syria with terrorists in tow since, as the BBC reported, “Between nine and 12 tanks crossed the frontier, followed by pick-up trucks believed to be carrying hundreds of fighters from Turkish-backed factions of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA).” If Turkey was interested in stopping terrorism, why would they lead the charges for more terrorists to enter Syria? Indeed, if stopping terrorism was truly Turkey’s goal, it is capable of sealing the border from its own side without any need for invasion so why the war the party?

Turkey’ interests do not lie in stopping terrorism. Far from it. Turkey’s foreign policy and military decision to invade Syria are based along three lines; its desire for more territory (which it believes was stolen from it long ago), its willingness to continue working with NATO in its attempt to destroy the secular government of Syria, and its concern over the Kurdish expansion.

………

Regardless of the fact that the Anglo-American empire may very well be risking a direct military confrontation with another nuclear power, the NATO forces are intent on moving forward in their attempt to destroy Syria and its government. The major victories by the Syrian military that have taken place in recent weeks as well as the inability of the West’s terrorists to roll back SAA gains have obviously convinced NATO that more drastic measures are needed and that proxies are simply not enough to defeat a committed military supported by its people. Thus, we now see the plan so heavily promoted by Western think tanks and military industrial complex firms being implemented.

Clearly, the Turkish agenda is not focused on combating ISIS. If it was, the Turks would have long ago sealed their borders with Syria as well as ceased their training and facilitation of terrorist groups flowing into Syria from Turkish territory.

………

Obviously, a “buffer zone” and/or a “no-fly zone,” of course, is tantamount to war and an open military assault against the sovereign secular government of Syria because the implementation of such a zone would require airstrikes against Assad’s air defense systems. With the establishment of this “buffer zone,” a new staging ground will be opened that allows terrorists such as ISIS and others the ability to conduct attacks even deeper inside Syria.

So, Erdogan wants to reconstitute a new Ottoman empire, and it looks like NATO is in for the ride.

Who Says that Irony is Dead?

Walmart is selling a canvas of Banksy's "Destroy Capitalism":

Banksy, the favorite socially-conscious graffiti artist of 15-year old redditors everywhere, does not hold a copyright to his work. That’s the unfortunate reality of working anonymously on street corners. His style is one of the most recognizable in the world, but anyone can reproduce his murals on shirts, mugs, hoodies, prints, and everything else offered at all your favorite CafePress stores. I guess you could consider that a micro-commentary on consumerist culture—if you were being particularly annoying.

………

So, Walmart is selling Banksy prints. Not one of those nice, pretty, abstract Banksy prints, either. We’re talking a straight-up DESTROY CAPITALISM joint. Also, in Banky’s usual, irritatingly straightforward symbolism, it’s clear that this piece parodies the marketability of chic socialist values.

That sound you hear is Karl Marx spinning in his grave with sufficient speed to exhibit relativistic effects.

Deep Thought

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Skewered on Morton's Fork

So the choice for people voting in swing states is to vote for an incoherent reality TV star who has declared bankruptcy numerous times, or vote for the candidate courting the endorsement of the worst American war criminal of the 20^th century:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been seeking the endorsement of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and their efforts may pay off, as there are reports that he is expected soon, alongside former Secretary of State George Schultz, to issue a joint endorsement of Clinton.

While those inside the national security community in Washington, D.C., may applaud the endorsement, Kissinger’s legacy of war crimes — from complicity in the 1973 coup in Chile to spearheading the saturation bombing of Indochina — has made him far less popular among human rights observers.

Clinton is well aware of that legacy. As secretary of state, she traveled to areas of the world that were devastated by policies Kissinger crafted and implemented.

It's like a choice between Caligula and Nero. 

Nero is the clear choice, but still ………

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and university president (technically a rector) has been denied entry into the United States:

I have been refused entry clearance to the USA to chair the presentation of the Sam Adams Award to CIA torture whistleblower John Kiriakou and to speak at the World Beyond War conference in Washington DC. Like millions of British passport holders I have frequently visited the USA before and never been refused entry clearance under the visa waiver programme.

I shall apply for a visa via the State Department as suggested but I must be on a list to be refused under the ESTA system, and in any event it is most unlikely to be completed before the conference.

It is worth noting that despite the highly critical things I have published about Putin, about civil liberties in Russia and the annexation of the Crimea, I have never been refused entry to Russia. The only two countries that have ever refused me entry clearance are Uzbekistan and the USA. What does that tell you?

This is profoundly and deeply wrong.

It is also profoundly typical.

There appears to be no end to the mischief and evil that the myth "American Exceptionalism" justifies.

God Bless America.

Busy Maintaining My Blog

I am dealing with a bane of my blogging existence, the truncated feed, tonight.

This is where the RSS syndication feed only hands up the first few lines of the article, meaning that I need to click through.

Well, there are some work arounds, but they most of them have stopped working, probably because of complaints from the websites.

Well I found an open source full text RSS reader, and I've installed it on my account, and pointed my feed reader at the new full feeds.

Unfortunately, it took most of the night, mostly by dint of my own incompetence.

Quote of the Day

A few months ago I realized that 2016 is being directed by Quentin Tarantino

—Melissa Etheridge

From Up and Coming to Basket Case in Under 6 Months

I am referring, of course, to Brazil, which has just removed its president Dilma Rousseff.

As near as I can figure out, it was driven by two things:

• The right wing party that controls the legislature wanted to take power.
• The entire political establishment was attempting to distract people from their own corruption.

Brazil’s first female president Dilma Rousseff has been thrown out of office by the country’s corruption-tainted senate after a gruelling impeachment trial that ends 13 years of Workers’ party rule.

Following a crushing 61 to 20 defeat in the upper house, she will be replaced for the remaining two years and four months of her term by Michel Temer, a centre-right patrician who was among the leaders of the campaign against his former running mate.

In a separate vote, the senate voted 42 to 36 not to bar Rousseff from public office for eight years.

………

Despite never losing an election, Rousseff – who first won power in 2010 – had seen her support among the public and in congress diminish as a result of a sharp economic decline, government paralysis and a massive bribery scandal that has implicated almost all the major parties.

For more than 10 months, the leftist leader fought efforts to impeach her for frontloading funds for government social programmes and issuing spending budget decrees without congressional approval ahead of her reelection in 2014. The opposition claimed that these constituted a “crime of responsibility”. Rousseff denies this and claims the charges – which were never levelled at previous administrations who did the same thing – have been trumped up by opponents who were unable to accept the Workers’ party’s victory.

………

In keeping with her pledge to fight until the end for the 54 million voters who put her in office, Rousseff – a former Marxist guerrilla – ended her presidency this week with a gritty 14-hour defence of her government’s achievements and a sharply worded attack on the “usurpers” and “coup-mongers” who ejected her from power without an election.

Her lawyer, José Eduardo Cardozo, said the charges were trumped up to punish the president’s support for a huge corruption investigation that has snared many of Brazil’s elite. This follows secret recordings of Romero Jucá, the majority leader of the senate and a key Temer ally, plotting to remove the president to halt the Lava Jato (car wash) investigation into kickbacks at state oil company Petrobras.

While Rousseff was in the upper chamber, her critics heard her in respectful silence. But in a final session in her absence on Tuesday, they lined up to condemn her. As in an earlier lower house impeachment debate, the senators – many of whom are accused of far greater crimes – clearly revelled in the spotlight of their ten-minute declarations. Reflecting the growing power of rightwing evangelism, many invoked the name of God. One cited Winston Churchill. Another sang. Another appeared to be in tears.

And the right wingers who seized power are already trying to do their best to f%$# the poor by rolling back social programs.

This is ugly, and I only see this as getting uglier.

Deep Thought

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

I am Both Horrified and Impressed

When Donald Trump said that he would make Mexico pay for a border wall between the two countries.

I figure that he was engaging in classical Trump bullsh%$, but he has now said how this. Specifically, he has said that will hold remittances to Mexico hostage to get concessions:

New Delhi, Beijing, Manila and Paris may want to sit up and take notice. Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump plans to make Mexico pay for the wall:he intends to build on the United States' southern border by cutting off remittances - transfer of money by a foreign worker to his home country - till it coughs up the lolly.

This unprecedented threat - detailed in a two-page memo Donald Trump+ has drawn up - could decimate the Mexican economy, which receives around $24 billion annually in remittances, and is the fifth largest remittance-receiving country in the world. The top four (for whom this should serve as a warning about the methods Trump would consider to settle accounts): India ($ 72 billion in remittances in 2015), China ($ 64 billion), Philippines ($ 30 billion), and France ($25 billion).

The memo, with the subject line "Compelling Mexico to Pay for the Wall," offers an insight into the kind of bare-knuckle tactics Trump will employ to offset what he sees as economic injustice against the United States, including withholding of visas and trade tariffs.

''Our approvals of hundreds of thousands of visas every year is one of our greatest leverage points,'' Trump writes. ''We also have leverage through business and tourist visas for important people in the Mexican economy.''

These remittances would account for about 2½% of Mexican GDP, so it would have a significant impact on the economy, particularly in rural and poor.

Note that I find this course of action, particularly with regard to the secondary effects, money transfer to Mexico would almost certainly go underground, creating a new profit center for various gangs, to be ill advised, but Trump actually does have a plan to accomplish this.  (And that's ignoring the rather dire human consequences of this policy.)

That being said, there is a certain perverse elegance in the plan.

Not The Onion

I have mentioned that this election season has me wanting to live in a cave until it is all over.

It appears that Vladimir Putin has found the current election insanity unsettling as well:

Vladimir Putin blasted both Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s tactics on the campaign trail but refused to publicly take sides in a U.S. presidential race in which he’s been accused of secretly favoring the New York real estate billionaire.

“They’re both using shock tactics, just each in their own way,” the Russian president said in an interview. “I don’t think they are setting the best example,” he added.

We have the two must unelectable candidates engaging in truly awful campaigns.

No matter who wins, the American people lose.

What a Surprise

A school district in Marin County has been stripping resources from largely black schools to funnel them to a largely white charter school. This is a feature, not a bug

Members of the community and school officials will meet Wednesday evening to discuss a scathing report that found a Marin County school district has been funneling resources to a Sausalito charter school away from a nearby Marin City school that’s attended by a majority of black students, potentially segregating the schools in violation of federal civil rights laws.

The focus of the report, authored and issued this month by the state’s Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team, adds to the problems facing the Sausalito Marin City School District, which boasts one K-8 school — Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. in Marin City — and was recently embarrassed when its superintendent resigned after being indicted in February on a felony charge in San Diego County.

In looking at the relationship between the district’s board and Sausalito’s Willow Creek Academy, an independent charter school attended by a majority of white students, investigators found that leaders of the charter school “exercise significant control” over most of the district’s board members, making for a “clearly biased financial arrangement” that benefits Willow Creek Academy.

Students at the underperforming Bayside MLK, meanwhile, continue to fall behind as money is diverted from the school to pay for the charter school.

One of the hidden appeals of the charter school movement that is its implication that they will resegregate public schools.

Once Again, Scalia Makes the World a Better Place by His Absence

The Supreme Court will not allow North Carolina's voter suppression law to be in force for election day. It was a 4-4 tie:

A deadlocked Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to revive parts of a restrictive North Carolina voting law that a federal appeals court had struck down as an unconstitutional effort to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

The court was divided 4 to 4, with the court’s more conservative members voting to revive parts of the law. The court’s brief order included no reasoning.

North Carolina’s law, which imposed an array of voting restrictions, including new voter identification requirements, was enacted by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2013. It was part of a wave of voting restrictions enacted after a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision that effectively struck down a central part of the federal Voting Rights Act, weakening federal oversight of voting rights.

Challenges to the laws have met with considerable success in recent months, and Wednesday’s development suggested that the current eight-member Supreme Court is not likely to undo those victories.

If Scalia were still on the court, it would be gleefully reinventing Jim Crow.