Mexico: For the record. Suspected members of the Sinaloa drug trafficking cartel warned that they would kill 135 people after security forces seized 134 tons of marijuana last week in Tijuana, Baja California state, Milenio reported today, 25 October. The warning was made over a police radio frequency late on 24 October reportedly minutes after gunmen killed 13 patients at a drug rehabilitation center in Tijuana.
Phi Beta Iota: This kind of indiscriminate mass murder in retaliation for what are relatively minor interdictions suggests that on the one hand, both the US and Mexican government have not only lost all control of the territory for which they are responsible for providing good order and public safety and security; but also that neither government has an effective intelligence capability to guide operations in detail. We are reminded of how long it took to hunt down one man in Colombia, Pablo Escobar. A MAJOR obstacle is the recalcitrance of the US secret intelligence community with $75 billion or more being applied to produce “at best” 4% of what is needed, to reinvent itself and engage in M4IS2: multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information-sharing and sense-making. The El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) is a massive failure precisely because it embodies all of the handicaps of the past and none of the advantages of the present.
One out of every 34 Americans who earned wages in 2008 earned absolutely nothing — not one cent — in 2009.
The stunning figure was released earlier this month by the Social Security Administration, but apparently went unreported until it appeared today on Tax.com in a column by Pulitzer Prize-winning tax reporter David Cay Johnston.
It's not just every 34th earner whose financial situation has been upended by the financial crisis. Average wages, median wages, and total wages have all declined — except at the very top, where they leaped dramatically, increasing five-fold.
A recent article in Christian Science Monitor on military health care costs identified, in microcosm, the battle we face in the coming years in defending the military community’s sunk investment in its future.
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After citing all DoD’s arguments that it’s being “eaten alive” by “unsustainable” military health care cost increases, the reporter had the courtesy of quoting me on the other side of the argument:
“’There’s a fundamental difference between social insurance programs open to every American and military benefits earned by decades of service and sacrifice,’ said Steve Strobridge, director of Governmental Relations for MOAA.
“What Mr. Strobridge raises here is a moral issue: Should the military be treated differently than nonmilitary America when it comes to pay and benefits? The armed forces put their lives, limbs, and mental health on the line for the safety of the country, or they potentially do. On a practical level, you need strong benefits to recruit and maintain a strong, all-volunteer military.”
And then came this kicker:
“But here’s another moral angle: Sacrifice goes with the territory of being in the armed services, and the military budget needs serious cutting. Should sacrifice not also extend to the defense of the nation’s financial health if it’s in critical danger?”
And there’s the problem. Sacrifices already endured are assigned no value. It’s the budget shrug: “They volunteered, didn’t they?”
Every 15 years or so, that indifference leads to cuts that eventually wreck retention — and then national leaders have to pull out all the stops and spend even more to solve the military manpower crisis they refused to prevent.
The real issue is, “How much is it worth for the country to be able to defend itself?”
Phi Beta Iota: With all due respect to MOAA, the real issue is NOT “what price defense” but rather “how best to defend.” There are three simple solutions to the military and and benefits problem that do NOT require reductions:
1. Restore the universal draft including immigrants and including a mid-career “sabatical” between military and private sector. This bonds the nation–one boot camp, three choices: Armed Forces, Peace Corps, Homeland Service.
2. Establish Constitutional honest government tht does not lead the Republic into elective wars for ideological and private reasons on the basis of (most recently) 935 documented lies. The same honest government can be expected to end the acquisition of things we do not need (e.g. missile defense in Poland, J-22, new nuclear submarine) at costs we cannot afford.
3. End the fiction that future Medicare costs re unfunded. They are only unfunded because a corrupt Congress in cahoots with a corrupt Administration (both parties) has forbidden price negotiation. The minute we restore honest government current and future Medicare costs come down to 1% (ONE percent) of what we pay now.
Thomas Jefferson: A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry.
Russell Ackoff: Stop trying to do the wrong things righter; do the right things.
Robert Steele: The truth at any cost reduces all other costs.
Philip Crosby wrote a seminal book (Quality is Free) in which he argued that it's cheaper to build things right the first time than it is to fix them later. Obvious now, but heresy in Detroit 1980. Quality quickly became not just a better way to manufacture, it became a marketing benefit as well. Not only was quality cheaper to make, it was cheaper to sell.
I'm struck that we need a new book, call it Efficiency is Free.
It's cheaper to build carpets that don't create poison gas than it is to do the easy thing and let people suffer later. It's cheaper to build an 8 passenger car that gets 30 miles per gallon than it is to suffer the consequences of the 12 mile per gallon Suburban. It's cheaper to design smaller, lighter and recyclable shipping containers once than it is to buy and hassle with billions of foam peanuts in the long run.
So why doesn't everyone do this? For the same reason the quality revolution took a full generation to take hold–it costs more right now. It takes planning right now. It requires change right now.
Right now will always be difficult. But efficiency is still free.
Phi Beta Iota: A deeper understanding is achieved by embracing the “true cost” meme including ecological economics and bio-mimicry as well as the precautionary principle. All of this comes down to the design of human life so that it is “efficient” (i.e. non-toxic of itself and the rest of the Earth). That starts with a strategic analytic model leavened with integrity in its application. Ethics is how civilization is made efficient.
You can only hope that the very preliminary peace efforts in Afghanistan bear fruit before long. But for evidence that the United States is letting its claim to greatness, and even common decency, slip through its fingers, all you need to do is look at the way we treat our own troops.
The idea that the United States is at war and hardly any of its citizens are paying attention to the terrible burden being shouldered by its men and women in uniform is beyond appalling.
Bob Herbert
We can get fired up about Lady Gaga and the Tea Party crackpots. We’re into fantasy football, the baseball playoffs and our obsessively narcissistic tweets. But American soldiers fighting and dying in a foreign land? That is such a yawn.
I would bring back the draft in a heartbeat. Then you wouldn’t have these wars that last a lifetime. And you wouldn’t get mind-bending tragedies like the death of Sgt. First Class Lance Vogeler, a 29-year-old who was killed a few weeks ago while serving in the Army in his 12th combat tour. That’s right, his 12th — four in Iraq and eight in Afghanistan.
I believe Obama's schtick during his campaign for president was to subtly encourage his adversaries to impale themselves of the horns of their own contradictions. This kind of strategy can be particularly effective in the all-important moral dimension of an election, or indeed, any other kind of conflict. To be sure, Obama had the help of widespread disgust with Bush, as well as an exquisitely timed, terrible financial meltdown, but the parallels in his campaigns against Hillary Clinton and John McCain suggest he had an instinctive feel for gaining leverage by using what reformers in the Pentagon called the Motherhood and Mismatch, or M&M, strategy. (See my CounterPunch essay on that theme.) But to date, his strategy for governance has failed utterly to live up to that brilliance. He blew at least two stunning opportunities that seemed designed in heaven for a decisive M&M strategy. He capitulated to a morally bankrupt establishment by bailing out the banksters and then caving in to the insurance companies on health care reform.
Obama now has a third opportunity, and like his campaigns against Clinton and McCain, it is partly the result of his own making, be it accidental or deliberate. As Ira Chernus shows in a persuasively argued 19 October essay, Israel's hypocrisy in the so-called peace process has reached stunning proportions. The Palestinians are going out of their way to accommodate Israel in the so-called peace talks, but each time the Palestinians sell out their patrimony by caving in to a new Israeli demand — like recognizing Israel as a Jewish state as opposed to recognition of Israel per se, the Israelis up the ante by inserting poison pills aimed at queering any deal — like saying that settlement expansion in East Jerusalem will not be part of a settlement freeze because East Jerusalem is a part of Israel, a claim not recognized by international law, the United States, or Europe, and then acting as if Israel is the injured party.
The Taliban have rejected formal contacts with Kabul and dubbed the process “futile propaganda”. They have repeatedly vowed not to engage in any negotiations until all foreign forces leave Afghanistan.
Ordinary Afghans are suffering the most. The conflict has killed and wounded thousands over the past few years, according to the UN.
The government has dropped the term “moderate Taliban” which it used in previous peace efforts: President Karzai has invited all Taliban, including their reclusive supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, to peace talks.
However, Washington has rejected a role for Mullah Omar in the peace process.
“I can’t imagine Mullah Omar playing a constructive role in Afghanistan… Our focus on Mullah Omar, from a US standpoint, is based on his complicity in support of al-Qaeda that led to the plot of 9/11,” Philip J. Crowley, assistant secretary in the US State Department, told reporters on 14 October.
Phi Beta Iota: Over the past decade we have observed that at the political level, the US Department of State is next to worthless for two reasons: it does not know the truth of any matter, it simply parrots ideologically designed phrases; and it is consequently incapable of speaking truth to power. The US Government is broken and bankrupt beyond imagination.
