Rebecca Long-Bailey, the shadow business secretary, and John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, want big companies to give employees a 10% stake in their business and a seat on their boards.
They plan to renationalize rail, water, energy and Royal Mail, increase corporation tax and the minimum wage, and extend workers’ rights.
Corbyn proposes sheltering the homeless and forcing homeowners to sell their homes to renters at a “reasonable” price, set by the government.
Look to Venezuela for what happens when countries renationalize industries and seize private property for the “good of everybody”.
Corbyn’s Brexit plan is to negotiate a deal with the EU, then hold a referendum on it.
The Guardian Live Blog reported this morning: John McDonnell has announced a radical Labour plan to commit £400bn of investment to what he called the twin crises of the climate emergency and social deprivation, saying “future generations would never forgive us.” if rapid action was not taken.
Centrist Johnson
Johnson is a centrist in most aspects. He supports more government spending, but let’s instead call it investment.
I cannot come up with any proposal of Johnson that one could remotely be called “radical right”, yet that is how Eurointelligence labeled Johnson this morning while also discussing Watson standing down as a Labour MP.
As an American journalist put it yesterday, quoting Yeats, the centre does not hold. Tom Watson is probably not the last centrist Labour MP to leave the political scene. What we find particularly depressing is that Watson’s new ambition in life is to become a level 2 gym instructor and fitness book author. The UK’s political centrists – pro-European Tories and Labourites have completely snookered themselves in the last 10 years. Their mass exodus from the centre has left the UK with a choice between the hard left and the hard right.
Faulty Definition of Centrist
The centrists in Eurointelligence’s view are those who wish to kowtow to the asinine policies and procedures of the EU, having no national say.
Johnson genuinely wants to work out a good free trade deal. If he can’t do that, he is willing to walk away.
With Remain on one side and Hard Brexit on the other, Johnson’s position isn’t radical, it’s centrist. So are his proposals for spending more money.
Eurtointelligence is half-right. Corbyn an extreme-left radical so much so that in the last two days, two prominent Labour MPs are actively promoting Johnson.
Former Labour MP Ian Austin Urges Voters to Back Johnson
“There’s only two people who are going to be prime minister on December 13. Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson. And I think Jeremy Corbyn is completely unfit to lead our country. Completely unfit to lead the Labour party,” said Austin, adding “The Labour party’s been poisoned with anti-Jewish racism under his leadership and it is a complete and utter disgrace.”
Ian Austin, Labour MP of 14 yrs says Corbyn:
💥 “completely unfit to lead our country”
💥 “economic policies would make our country worse”
💥 “put businesses & jobs at risk”
💥 “Brexit policy is a complete fantasy”
💥 “always picks our country’s enemies”
When such a widely respected Labour MP as @IanAustin1965 warns the nation that the Labour Party is now in the grip of a takeover by a hard left cabal of Corbyn McDonnell McLuskey Momentum, driving out moderates with toxic anti-Semitic Neo-Marxist extremism, we should all listen: https://t.co/ERD5BiN0AT
Former Labour MP John Woodcock Urges Voters to Back Johnson
Today, former Labour MP John Woodcock joined the Corbin-bashing party.
“The choice to keep Jeremy Corbyn away from Downing Street, to stop him getting his hands on the levers of national security and defence has to be to vote Conservative in this election and that’s what I’ll be doing as well,” said Woodcock.
Eurointelligence accurately commented this morning: “We are less interested in global polling than in micro-level intelligence in these elections, because we are seeing massive regional swings.”
In the pact, the parties agree to stand aside in more than 60 seats to avoid splitting remainers’ vote
My first thought was ho-hum so what? Without Labour, it’s mostly meaningless.
This morning I read this claim on the Guardian Live: Unite to Remain press conference this morning it was claimed that “at least 44” of the 60 seats covered by the Lib Dem/Green/Plaid Cymru pact were winnable.
My immediate thought was how many did they hold already and how many were Labour seats.
The Guardian Live answered my question this afternoon.
in an interview on the World at One, Prof Sir John Curtice, the leading elections expert, said that in practice he thought the pact would result in remain parties winning only around six more seats than if the three parties had been competing against each other.
…
He said just over one in three of the 60 seats were already held by one of the three pro-remain parties, or by Labour, which is committed to a referendum with remain as an option. And he said that in some of these seats, and in some seats where the Lib Dems were not far behind the Conservatives in 2017, the Greens did not stand anyway two years ago.
…
Curtice said that, by standing down in Beaconsfield, the Lib Dems and the Greens might also help Dominic Grieve to hold the seat, following his loss of the Conservative whip.
The net might be four or five, or even less. I envision a scenario in Wales in which it’s possible that vote-stripping by the Lib-Dems from Labour hands the seats to the Tories.
Let’s now turn to regional battles where the election will be won or lost.
The chart looks ominous for the Tories, but it isn’t. They are poised to pick up seats.
Compared to 2017, the Conservatives are down 4%. But they could still end up taking seats off Labour on current polling, as the Labour vote share has dropped 16% over the same period. Most of those leaving Labour are heading over to the Lib Dems, who are up 10%.
This drop means Labour will have a battle to hold marginal seats such as Battersea, or Kensington, which it won by just 30 votes in 2017.
In further bad news for the party, most Londoners do not hold Jeremy Corbyn in high regard. Just one in five (20%) think he’s doing well as Labour leader, compared to over three times that number (65%) who think he’s doing badly. Even amongst those who voted for the party at the last election, more now think he is doing badly (56%) than well (32%).
UK London Polls
Only two lines matter, the top and bottom.
In 2017, Labour got a whopping 54.5% of the London vote to 33.3% for the Tories.
With only 33.1% of the vote vs 54.5% for labour, the Tories managed to get 21 out of 73 MPs. Liberal Democrats rate to pick up a few seats and the Tories perhaps as many as 10 under the current polling math.
Spotlight Wales
Wales looks remarkably similar to London except there are three polls to consider.
In the 2017 general election Labour got 48.9% of the vote to only 33.6% for the Tories.
Daimler To Slash 10% Of Management Amid Global Auto Industry Bust
Daimler AG will slash 10% of its top management, or about 1,100 leadership positions, in the near term, as the global economy continues to grind to a halt.
German daily newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, first broke the story of the sweeping cost reduction program Friday morning, citing a letter distributed by administrators of the carmaker’s works council.
“The works council was recently informed by management about the personnel and financial situation of the company,” works council chief Michael Brech told employees. “Talks have begun, there are no results yet.”
Brecht sent an email to 130,000 Daimler employees about upcoming job cuts on Friday morning.
He said CEO Ola Kallenius had outlined a “concrete figure” on the cuts earlier in the week, along with a more comprehensive cost reduction program that will shield the company from a downturn in the global auto industry.
Kallenius has warned about the global auto bust, now underway for two years, has impacted auto sales of Daimler in large auto markets like China, North America, and Europe.
“Management never misses an opportunity to draw attention to the poor financial situation of our company,” Brech told employees.
The global auto bust is what’s helping spur a vicious synchronized global slowdown.
The reaches of the auto market go deep, with long supply chains and large consumption of raw materials, textiles, chemicals, and electronics. The industry is home to millions of jobs, and last year, the sector shrank for the first time since the global financial crisis.
As shown in the chart below, demand for global vehicle sales has plunged, something that has undoubtedly spurred Daimler to batten down the hatches before the worldwide trade recession begins.
Brecht noted the internal struggles of the company was one of “extreme uncertainty, and even anger” — he also said the cost reduction program hadn’t been enacted on managerial positions since the 2008 financial crisis.
On October 3, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled in a judgment that Facebook can be ordered by national courts of EU member states to remove defamatory material worldwide:
“EU law does not preclude a host provider such as Facebook from being ordered to remove identical and, in certain circumstances, equivalent comments previously declared to be illegal. In addition, EU law does not preclude such an injunction from producing effects worldwide, within the framework of the relevant international law which it is for Member States to take into account.”
The ruling came after the Austrian politician Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, chairman of Die Grünen (The Greens) party, sued Facebook Ireland in the Austrian courts. According to the Court of Justice of the European Union:
“She [Glawischnig-Piesczek] is seeking an order that Facebook Ireland remove a comment published by a user on that social network harmful to her reputation, and allegations which were identical and/or of an equivalent content.
“The Facebook user in question had shared on that user’s personal page an article from the Austrian online news magazine oe24.at entitled ‘Greens: Minimum income for refugees should stay’. That had the effect of generating on that page a ‘thumbnail’ of the original site, containing the title and a brief summary of the article, and a photograph of Ms Glawischnig-Piesczek. That user also published, in connection with that article, a comment which the Austrian courts found to be harmful to the reputation of Ms Glawischnig-Piesczek, and which insulted and defamed her. This post could be accessed by any Facebook user.”
The judgment has brought concern among free speech organizations. Thomas Hughes, the executive director of ARTICLE 19, a non-profit organization that works on “protecting the right to freedom of expression around the world,” said:
“This judgment has major implications for online freedom of expression around the world.
“Compelling social media platforms like Facebook to automatically remove posts regardless of their context will infringe our right to free speech and restrict the information we see online…
“The ruling also means that a court in one EU member state will be able to order the removal of social media posts in other countries, even if they are not considered unlawful there. This would set a dangerous precedent where the courts of one country can control what internet users in another country can see. This could be open to abuse, particularly by regimes with weak human rights records.“
“The judgment means that Facebook would have to use automated filters to identify social media posts that are considered to be ‘identical content’ or ‘equivalent content’. Technology is used to identify and delete content that is considered illegal in most countries, for example, child abuse images. However, this ruling could see filters being used to search text posts for defamatory content, which is more problematic given that the meaning of text could change depending on the context. Although the ruling has said only content that is essentially the same as the original unlawful post should be removed, it is likely that automated filters will make errors”.
The judgment “undermines the long-standing principle that one country does not have the right to impose its laws on speech on another country,” Facebook commented in a statement.
“It also opens the door to obligations being imposed on internet companies to proactively monitor content and then interpret if it is ‘equivalent’ to content that has been found to be illegal.”
The ruling “essentially allows one country or region to decide what internet users around the world can say and what information they can access,”said Victoria de Posson, senior manager in Europe at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, an industry group that includes Google and Facebook as members.
The judgment does indeed appear to be opening up a Pandora’s Box for the ever-shrinking space for free speech in Europe and potentially worldwide, although it is still unclear at this point, how the judgment might affect free speech worldwide.
Government efforts in Europe to censor free speech have long been ongoing: in Germany, the controversial censorship law, known as NetzDG, which came into effect on October 1, 2017, requires social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, to censor their users on behalf of the German state. Social media companies are obliged to delete or block any online “criminal offenses” such as libel, slander, defamation or incitement, within 24 hours of receipt of a user complaint. Social media companies receive seven days for more complicated cases. If they fail to do so, the German government can fine them up to 50 million euros for failing to comply with the law.
The new judgment from the Court of Justice of the European Union, presumably, could mean that a German court could order what it deems to be illegal content, or its equivalent, under NetzDG to be removed in other EU member states that do not have a similarly draconian censorship law.
France is looking to adopt a similar law to that in Germany: In early July, France’s National Assembly adopted a draft bill designed to curtail online hate speech. The draft bill gives social media platforms 24 hours to remove “hateful content” or risk fines of up to 4% percent of their global revenue. The bill has gone to the French Senate. Again, if the bill becomes law, the judgment from the Court of Justice of the European Union could mean that French courts would be able to demand that Facebook remove what the courts consider illegal content or its equivalent under French law.
The judgment from the Court of Justice of the European Union, in other words, appears to give EU member states unprecedented power to determine public discourse online — to determine what citizens can and cannot read. It naturally remains to be seen exactly how the judgment will be interpreted in practice by national courts of the EU member states, but the prospects now look even bleaker for the future of free speech in Europe.
Global policy planners intend to deliver replacements for both dollar hegemony and fossil fuels. Plans may appear uncoordinated and in their early stages, but these issues are becoming increasingly linked.
A monetary reset incorporating state-sponsored cryptocurrencies will enable exchange controls to be introduced between nations by separating cross-border trade payments from domestic money circulation. The purpose will be to gain greater control over money and to direct its investment into green projects.
The OECD will build on current tax disclosures to make everyone’s income and capital known to governments and therefore readily taxable, money destined to kick-start economic growth. Under the guidance of supranational organisations, governments will redirect investment into green technology. The objective, particularly for Europeans, is to neutralise Russia’s increasing dominance of the global energy market by becoming carbon neutral by 2030.
But perhaps as Robert Burns put it, “the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley”. They are based on Keynesian fallacies, but cannot be ignored.
Introduction
There appear to be policy areas being driven by statist responses to events, encouraging global institutions to take on a coordinating role. It means deeper levels of centralised planning by unaccountable bureaucrats. Assuming their plans continue to gain credence, we could end up with a dystopian world where supranational bodies direct individual governments to conform. We are already on this road to perdition. The OECD has coordinated attempts by governments to restrict the freedom of their citizens to avoid taxes by forcing over a hundred jurisdictions to automatically supply information on the financial affairs of every citizen, irrespective of nationality and where they reside.
By doing so, it has removed the necessity for governments to moderate their tax demands for fear that individuals will move their money out of reach. Information on private affairs are now exchanged automatically by banks, lawyers, financial advisors and accountants, without the individual’s knowledge. As a result of the introduction of the OECD’s common reporting standard, the organisation claims that over $85bn of additional tax revenue has been raised. The intention is to raise more, much more.
This has been the OECD’s mission for some time, leading the way for other supranational organisations to carve out roles for themselves. Ones that come to mind are the IMF, which with a green agenda intends to prioritise investment funding for alternatives to fossil fuels both directly and indirectly through the World Bank and the regional development banks. Subsidiary roles are likely to be played by other UN divisions, useful for binding emerging market nations to the plans.
Central banks acting in concert could have a new role of coordinating a monetary reset, which as we can deduce from Mark Carney’s speech at Jackson Hole in August is already being discussed. We shall start by looking at the state of current monetary policies, their failure, and the drive to replace them with something else, before addressing the energy question.
The monetary problem
There are two categories of folk who think everything to do with economics and money are not much to worry about; the disinterested public and the investment management community. Their livelihoods depend upon it. Another category, libertarians, Austrian economists, bitcoin fans, gold bugs and readers of and contributors to agglomerating sites such as ZeroHedge have views ranging from sceptical to downright catastrophic. Not known to many is another, the most important category, which is very worried indeed, and that is governments and their central banks.
These are the people quietly talking about a big-picture reset, those that know the post-Breton Woods fiat dollar system is no longer fit for purpose. They see escalating debt, interest rates failing to stimulate, and economic stagnation. They see a mismatch between international trade and the use of the dollar as a global settlement medium. They don’t talk about it much, to do so would frighten us, the lowly ruminants.
I was ruminating on this recently after Max Keiser, of the Keiser Report on RT, asked me what I thought of Mark Carney’s speech at Jackson Hole in August about a global monetary system to replace the dollar. I replied something about Carney about to retire, and presumably feeling slightly freer to express the concerns which he must share with his friends at the Bank for International Settlements, and various other monetary panjandrums who have observed the obvious: their cosy world of money-printing doesn’t work, is unlikely to ever work, and must be reformed to give them more control.
Since then my thoughts have turned to the reset problem in a broader sense. The assumption must be that time is available for such an event to be planned, or at least pre-planned as an insurance policy against monetary failure. In either event, it is putting the cart before the horse, because when a credit crisis hits it invariably takes the authorities by surprise, and it looks increasingly close in time. The priority will not then be monetary evolution but economic and financial rescue.
That point having been made, from the central bankers’ point of view, what is to be done? The obvious answer is to rig the game by changing the rules. As Keynes said, when the facts change, he changed. That way, they think they might dispose of the failing system and replace it with an updated one that suits their policy purposes better. With a bit of luck, declining confidence in the old will be replaced by a new paradigm, something that will allow them all, politicians and central bankers, to claim success for saving the Western world from a potential monetary crisis.
The problem is they don’t know how to do it, and they don’t yet know what the new paradigm will be. There is no unity on the matter, because for the Fed and the US Government it involves an unacceptable loss of monetary and political power. The Chinese, in partnership with the Russians, want to do away with the dollar, while the Europeans are leading themselves to a socialist dystopia at odds with Trump’s America, while being frightened of the Russian bear in the east.
This is why influencers like Carney can only hypothesize about a new monetary set-up involving a reduced role for the dollar. Central banks are exploring cryptocurrencies. It is reported that seven out of ten of them are researching the possibilities. That won’t save fiat currencies, but it might give central banks greater control over how their fiat currencies are used. Perhaps they think a state issued cryptocurrency can replace unadorned fiat. But then that raises two issues: if the existing fiat is failing it is likely a new state-sponsored cryptocurrency risks having a credibility problem from the outset and even if the public does accept it, its future issue will have to be strictly limited and the cycle of bank credit properly addressed.
But get it right and markets could be tamed, the logic goes. And somehow, a global cryptocurrency-based monetary system for international trade could replace the failing post-Bretton Woods monetary system reserved on the US dollar. For policy makers, it is becoming an urgent question, as a reading of Carney’s Jackson Hole speech makes clear.
Specifically, in his speech Carney identified the existence of a global liquidity trap nullifying interest rate policy with three elements: a global savings glut tied up in dollars, a reduction in the scale of sustainable cross border flows and “fattening of the left-hand tail and increasing the downside skew of likely economic outcomes”. This last element of gobbledegook appears to translate into an acknowledgement of the failure of current interest rate policy to stimulate economic recovery, which cannot be admitted in plain English.
Carney’s problem, besides the veiled admission of policy failure, is he ignores the fact that America needs increasing quantities of foreign dollar ownership to fund its escalating budget deficit, without which the dollar fails, and term interest rates will soar. If he and his cohort push policies intended to redeploy funds that are otherwise destined for the dollar and US Treasuries, they will face strong opposition from the US Treasury and being based on the dollar, the likely collapse of the whole fiat edifice.
As for a reduction in cross border flows, that is a function of falling cross-border trade, not money. The reason cross-border trade has collapsed is because of the US-Chinese trade spat and its knock-on effects. Even if we pass on the gobbledegook of his third point, it is difficult for an independent observer not to take Carney’s speech as indicative of desperation, ivory-tower economic error or both.
Being based on Keynesian macroeconomic beliefs, we can take the evidence of economic error for granted, particularly since these beliefs have consistently failed to deliver any credible solution. It is the element of desperation we must explore further. If Carney feels a sense of desperation (and his speech reeks of it) then his fellow central bankers will as well. But instead of just abandoning failed policies, a bridge is required towards a new set of policies, a monetary reset. And it will almost certainly involve a greater suppression of the role of markets and an increase in state control over money and how it is used.
For central bankers, there is a fear that the emergence of a competing private sector crypto-payments system, even linked to a basket of fiat currencies, will challenge national currencies. They would have to be pretty dopey not to see that Bitcoin in particular is educating the masses about the moral fraud behind the expansion of fiat money. The challenge will be to come up with a credible alternative, completely under the control of a few major central banks. But first, the purpose of a state-backed cryptocurrency must be settled.
For every nation other than America, evolution from the failing post-Breton Woods monetary system is about reducing the role of the dollar in trade settlement and freeing up capital needlessly tied up in dollars. Before the invention of cryptocurrencies, this would presumably have been achieved through a combination of an evolutionary process and increasing use of currency swaps to enhance liquidity, particularly in euros and renminbi, to replace the dominance of dollars in reserve balances.
The facilitation of foreign trade appears to be the role most likely to be destined for a state-issued cryptocurrency. Initial swap lines of state-sponsored cryptocurrencies would be proportionate to the trade between existing currency blocks. It could then be deployed for trade settlement, which would require it to be made available to commercial banks. We then have two currency versions: an existing fiat currency which circulates domestically and a separate blockchain based currency reserved for international use. With an onshore and offshore version, there can be two interest rates suitably set for their applications, so long as arbitrage routes are severely restricted, with the offshore version trading at a premium.
Old hands in Britain will be familiar with the basic concept, before Margaret Thatcher removed exchange controls. To monetary planners, there are several perceived benefits from such a scheme, particularly for the Eurozone. By separating trade settlement from domestic currency circulation, de facto currency controls are introduced, permitting access to the state crypto currency to non-domestic trading entities and banks, while denying its use in the domestic economy. Importantly, the expansion of bank credit would be retained for the domestic currency only, managed through a two-tier interest rate policy.
Any investment in foreign currencies would require the payment of the premium that applies on the crypto version of the currency. The prospects of an international run against a currency such as the euro would recede, as the existing liquidity for international trade is replaced by a centralised, highly managed, trade-related cryptocurrency.
For policy makers at the ECB it must be a tempting solution if it can be made to work. It would give them greater monetary control overall, and they could attempt to stimulate the Eurozone economy by deploying deeper negative rates without the fear of a failing exchange rate.
From America’s point of view these moves or anything like them will almost certainly be strongly resisted. They need foreigners to buy dollars to fund the budget deficit. And they are now experiencing the flaws of US isolationism and Trumpian trade policies, which are already leading to a contraction and potential reversal of foreign flows into US Treasuries.
China would be an interested observer of these developments. She has been planning to issue a cryptocurrency of her own, which could allow her to internationalise a crypto version of the renminbi more rapidly than it has managed with its existing renminbi. Russia has already ditched the dollar for geopolitical reasons and is trying to gain control over the energy market from a moribund OPEC.
To summarise, discontent with the post Bretton Woods monetary system and the disproportionate role of the dollar are likely to be the reasons why so many central banks are looking at cryptocurrency solutions. But as stated at earlier in this article, it assumes pre-planning, those best-laid schemes of mice and men, are not overtaken by events.
Crypto and gold
There can be little doubt that monetary policy is descending towards crisis, and a major bank failure could even occur in the next few months. If we find ourselves facing another Lehman moment, the priority will be to stabilise markets first, and then currencies as needed at a time of widespread negative interest rates and bond yields.
As insurance against such an event, the majority of central banks retain physical gold as part of their reserves. In Europe, Germany France and Italy hold significant quantities of gold which the monetary authorities at the ECB might in theory wish to deploy as the backing for a common cryptocurrency. But this is unlikely to be a preferred option, because central banks always retain their gold reserves (leasing aside) and only use them for monetary purposes as a last resort.
To re-introduce gold backing would deny all credibility to neo-classical macroeconomic theory, which relies on achieving an inflation target consistent with maximising employment. Given the need for a rapid expansion of global money supply as a policy response to the next credit crisis or to finance escalating government debt, the purchasing power of state-issued currencies will almost certainly decline while that of gold will rise. A currency credibly linked to gold would therefore also rise, assuming it acts as a proper gold substitute. A gold standard fixed at the current rate of $1500 would be seen as strongly deflationary if gold goes any higher.
It is therefore probably true that no Western central bank would contemplate such a move in current economic conditions. If, in time, a credit and systemic crisis threatens the destruction of unbacked state currencies, and the event causes conventional thinking in the central banking community to discard inflationism, that would be a different matter. But that is far from the current situation.
In any event, a far higher gold price would be required to fix fiat currencies sustainably to gold. Even China, which has been accumulating physical gold and encouraging its people to do so as well, is too hooked on monetary and credit expansion as the principal means of driving its economy to contemplate such a move for its own economy. However, the accumulation of gold reserves by many of China’s Asian trading partners suggests some sort of gold backing for a cross-border settlement medium is likely instead of delivering physical gold, and this is where China’s plans for a new state-sponsored cryptocurrency may eventually be heading.
The conflict over energy
As is the case with the global monetary system, global energy markets face enormous change with both the EU and supranational organisations, such as UNCTAD, the UN’s conference on trade and development, pushing a policy of dropping carbon fuels for green alternatives. Furthermore, the original agreement whereby Saudi Arabia agreed to sell its oil for dollars, giving US banks control over monetary surpluses from all OPEC’s oil sales, is no longer appropriate because the energy world has radically changed since that deal was struck in 1973.
That agreement has been the central plank to the dollar’s role as a reserve currency. Since 1973, the Soviet Union has collapsed and under President Putin, Russia has emerged as the largest exporter of oil and gas combined. Furthermore, as America’s victories in the Middle East are proving to be only pyrrhic, Russia’s influence is spreading across the region, forming alliances with Iran, Turkey and Syria. China is the region’s most important energy customer, and with its silk road projects is also increasing its influence on the region.
America’s response to these developments is lacking focus. It now has precious little real business in the region other than arms supplies, and under President Trump America has become isolationist. Furthermore, Trump wished to disengage militarily from the region, while the intelligence and military establishment wanted to increase their commitments. The gaps in US policy have been quietly exploited by Russia and China to great effect.
The EU sees US leadership failing while the Russian beast to its east are getting stronger. The lessons of Russia wielding power over Ukraine by cutting off energy supplies have been noted: energy security is a long-term threat to the EU and Russia is on the verge of controlling Middle Eastern supplies as well. Furthermore, the lessons of China’s economic successes through non-democratic government control will also have been noted as something for European statists to emulate.
The EU’s response to the energy threat from Russia has been to adopt a radical green agenda without reservation. Despite about 98% of transport and logistics being delivered by diesel and gasoline, some member states in the EU are banning the sales of internal combustion engines as motive power from as soon as 2030. This accelerated path to zero emissions will require massive investment. Clearly this is being viewed as economically stimulative at a time of declining optimism over the general economic outlook.
These views are articulated in UNCTAD’s Trade and Development Report 2019, Financing a Global Green Deal[iii]. The authors argue that internationally coordinated action between governments pursuing reflationary monetary and fiscal policies, while restricting international capital flows, will generate the economic growth and capture the resources to finance the investment. The charts below are indicative of their thinking, and are copied from Page 56 of the report.
This is one of several examples in the report. Here, it is argued that a combination of higher minimum wages and increasingly progressive rates of taxation to redistribute wealth to lower earners leads to greater economic growth, in this case by boosting consumption of the masses at the expense of the few. It’s pure Keynesianism.
Similar arguments are made for increasing government spending on goods and services and increasing spending on welfare to further boost consumption. More extensive use of capital controls to restrict destabilising investment flows and to make them available for green investment instead are recommended (pp. 125-129). Central banks are encouraged to direct quantitative easing in favour of green investment, and through regulation impose higher risk margins on bank exposure to fossil fuel related investments and loans (pp. 153-156).
It amounts to an extension and escalation of failed inflationist policies, but the underlying point is it transfers free markets to statist management on a global scale not seen before. The ambition is for a few supranational organisations, not accountable to anybody, to act as an informal world government. It also accords fully with how central banks are likely to restructure their currencies
Welcome to Dystopia.
Conclusion
Failing monetary policies and the accelerated disposal of carbon-based in favour of carbon-neutral energy provide the foundations for a dystopian future. Together, they are excuses for yet greater inflationism and the rapid socialisation of national economies and private capital.
Clearly, a number of supranational bodies expect to coordinate these policy areas above the heads of individual governments. A monetary reset will replace a failing dollar-based system, and failing economies will be boosted by state-directed green investment.
Given that a significant cyclical credit and systemic crisis is overdue, its occurrence will have a major effect on how matters actually proceed. People who value individual freedom and privacy, those horrified by Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, could find themselves wishing for an even more radical outcome: the complete destruction of the fiat currency system and of the whole statist command-and-control apparatus.
Pentagon Official Warns China Exporting Killer AI Drones To Middle East
US Defense Secretary Mark Esper warned during a speech on artificial intelligence at the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence public conference Tuesday (Nov. 05) that China is exporting a series of “next-generation drones” to countries in the Middle East, reported Flight Global.
“Beijing has made it abundantly clear that it intends to be the world leader in AI by 2030,” Esper said. “While the US faces a mighty task in transitioning the world’s most advanced military to new AI-enabled systems, China believes it can leapfrog our current technology and go straight to the next generation.”
Middle East countries banned from purchasing advanced US drones due to a weapons embargo are increasingly gravitating towards Chinese defense manufacturers.
The drone sales are supporting China’s expansion across the Middle East, which is home to many strategic US military bases, as well as, future and current routes for Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.
“As we speak the Chinese government is already exporting some of the most advanced military aerial drones to the Middle East, as it prepares to export its next-generation stealth UAVs when those come online,” Esper said. “Also, Chinese weapons manufacturers are selling drones advertised as capable of autonomy, including the ability to conduct lethal, targeted strikes.”
China’s AI killing drones are more frequently ending up in the skies above Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Nigeria, Yemen, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates.
Chinese drone exports to the region have risen in the last decade, cutting into the US’ market share, something that has angered the Pentagon.
Esper didn’t explicitly point out which AI killing drones were in question. However, the CASC Rainbow is the most popular Chinese drone that is currently being exported to the Middle East.
This week marks the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Decades later, the wall remains a symbol of the violence employed by socialist states, and a reminder that the egalitarian workers’ paradise of East Germany was so hated by its residents that the state had to build a wall to keep residents in.
It is ironic, then, that only a generation later, Americans are becoming increasingly enamored with socialism. According to a recent Gallup poll, 43 percent of Americans say socialism is a “good thing.” It’s unclear how many of those respondents can actually define socialism. Some believe socialism to simply be policies that promote equality. Others define it using the more historically orthodox view: government ownership of the means of production.
There is no doubt, however, that a vocal and not-insignificant minority – of the sort represented by Jacobin magazine, for example – advocates for the total destruction of capitalism.
When American democratic socialists who want to “smash capitalism” say they like “socialism,” of course, they are likely to add that they don’t want the sort of socialism they had in East Germany. They want kindly, happy, well-lit socialism. Not the gray, dour, socialism of the Eastern Bloc.
I have no doubt this is indeed what they want, although that’s what the founders of East Germany and the Soviet Bloc thought they would get too.Many of them no doubt truly believed they were leading the way to a kinder, gentler, more equal society.
After all, up until the 1980s, the socialists of the Eastern Bloc were still entertaining the idea that they could deliver a higher standard of living to ordinary people than could the “decadent” economies of the West.
In 1959, of course, Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev literally debated whether the West or the Communist world could deliver the best kitchen appliances to the general public.
Obviously, the West won that debate, although many Western socialists failed to get the memo. Right up until the end (of the Soviet Bloc) the highly influential American economist Paul Samuelson maintained that communist economies worked perfectly well. As David Henderson noted in 2009:
Samuelson had an amazingly tin ear about communism. As early as the 1960s, economist G. Warren Nutter at the University of Virginia had done empirical work showing that the much-vaunted economic growth in the Soviet Union was a myth. Samuelson did not pay attention. In the 1989 edition of his textbook, Samuelson and William Nordhaus wrote, “the Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.”
As it turned out, the socialist economies — designed to deliver an easier life to consumers and workers — were really vehicles of impoverishment, not to mention environmental degradation.
A Lasting Legacy of Poverty
To this day — thirty years after re-unification — the standard of living is lower in the parts of Germany that were once part of East Germany. In 2014, for example, the Washington Postreported how East Germany has lower levels of disposable income, high unemployment rates, and is generally less prosperous. This in turn has led to the old East Germany having fewer young people, many of whom move west for better jobs. Fortune‘s Chris Matthews went on to observe “If you look at statistics such as per capita income or worker productivity, they also point to the large disparity in economic development between east and west.”
And Claudia Bracholdt further notes: “Today, Germany’s east has many structural problems similar to those of countries like Greece and Spain, though on a much smaller scale.”
During the Cold War, numerous opponents of Communism pointed to Germany as the perfect example of how soviet-style communism destroyed economic prosperity. But that was then. Nowadays, the East German regime is gone, and Germany is, relatively speaking, one of the most market-oriented economies on earth. Eastern Germany shares a government with western Germany. So, why is eastern Germany still poor compared to its western German neighbors?
The answer lies in the fact that even though the legal and political systems in eastern Germany are the same as in the West, the East suffers from the fact that it lost out on decades of capital accumulation and growth in worker productivity while under the boot of the Soviets.
The German case offers the most excellent comparison of course, because prior to World War II, western and eastern Germans enjoyed similar political systems for many decades. Moreover, the western and eastern Germans were similar both ethnically and culturally. Thus, the comparison allows us to focus on regime differences in the age of the Cold War.
We can look beyond just the East Germans as well. We might ask ourselves, for example, why Poland, with its Western orientation and long tradition of parliamentary and decentralized governments remains so relatively poor.
The same might be said of the Czech Republic as well, where the principal city, Prague, was once the second city of the Austrian Empire and was a center of European wealth and culture. The Czechs too, have never regained their relative place in terms of European wealth.
Part of the explanation lies in the fact that the legacy of an abandoned political system can live on for decades even after regime change. As Nicolás Cachanosky has observed in the context of South American regimes:
Institutional changes … define the long-run destiny of a country, not its short-run prosperity. … For example, as China opened parts of its economy to international markets, the country started to grow, and we are now seeing the effects of decades of relative economic liberalization. It is true that many areas in China continue to lack significant freedoms, but it would be a much different China today had it refused to change its institutions decades ago.
Clearly, the fact that the old Eastern Bloc countries have moved toward liberalization has set those countries on a path toward greater economic prosperity. That by itself, however, cannot put it on a par with countries that never suffered the effects of decades of communism.
Smash Capitalism: And Replace it With What?
The experience of the Eastern Bloc should serve to inoculate us against the idea that a market based system can be replaced wholesale, and that a decent standard of living can still be achieved.
It is one thing to advocate for a five-percent increase in government spending on the pension system. It’s another to advocate for the nationalization of the banking sector or — even worse — expropriating every major industry. Yet, the smash-capitalism crowd thinks they want the latter.
But the US isn’t as far from the socialist end of the spectrum as many think. After all, the United States is itself already far down the road of the typical Western welfare state. Contrary to the persistent myth that the United States is some sort of laissez-faire free-for-all, the US welfare state in terms of social spending is already comparable to that of Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. If the Netherlands is “socialist,” then so is the United States.
Yet we’re being told the US needs to just move a little more to left to be like its European “peers.” Except the US is already there. So how much further must it be moved in the direction of even more government control of its economy?
The socialists give no answer beyond “we’ll let you know when we get there.”
But it is not necessary to completely destroy capitalism to ensure a less prosperous future. That is, we need not become a clone a East Germany to share at least a share of its fate. Suffice it to say, the further a regime move in the direction of the “egalitarian” states of the old communist world, the worse the impoverishment will be.
According to research recently published by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, there are seven countries in the world whose external loan debt to China surpasses 25 percent of their GDP. Three (Djibouti, Niger and The Republic of the Congo) are located in Africa, while four (Kyrgyztan, Laos, Cambodia and the Maldives) are in Asia.
Yet, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, the world map of debt to China amassed through direct loans (excluding debt holdings and short-term trade debt) shows that a majority of countries heavily in debt to China are in Africa, but that Central Asia and Latin America follow close behind.
While China’s overseas lending is coordinated by the country’s centralized government, it is often poorly documented, which the researchers of the paper were trying to change.
They found that debt by direct loans started to grow immensely only around 2010 and that loans by China often come at higher rates and with shorter grace periods for the receiving country than comparable loans from the OECD or the World Bank.
The authors also caution that countries heavily in debt to China are at risk of defaulting.
In the 1970s, a lending boom which consisted of similar contracts offered by U.S., European and Japanese banks had led to this outcome for a number of developing countries which were trying to improve their infrastructure, according to the research.
Meanwhile, external debt to China through portfolio holdings is concentrated in developed nations and passes the threshold of 10 percent of GDP for Germany and the Netherlands. It amounts to between 5 and 10 percent of GDP in the U.S., Canada, France, the UK and Australia.
First, all the way back in 2005 — more than a half decade before the war began — CNN’s Christiane Amanpour told Assad to his face that regime change is coming. Thankfully this was in a televised and archived interview, now for posterity to behold.
Amanpour, it must be remembered, was married to former US Assistant Secretary of State James Rubin (until 2018), who further advised both President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Washington was “actively looking for a new Syrian leader” looong before the civil war in Syria began pic.twitter.com/3wOrtl29Od
“Mr. President you know the rhetoric of regime change is headed towards you from the United States… They’re granting visas and visits to Syrian opposition politicians,” Amanpour told Assad in a 2005 CNN interview.
Next, a surprisingly blunt assessment of where Washington currently stands after eight years of the failed push to oust Assad and influence the final outcome of the war, from the very man who was among the early architects of America’s covert “arm the jihadists to topple the dictator” campaign.
Myself and others long ago documented how former Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford worked with and funded a Free Syrian Army commander who led ISIS suicide bombers into the battlefield in 2013.
How is it that Robert Ford, one of the architects of the Islamist insurgency in #Syria and a man who tirelessly campaigned for the Al-Qaeda tied Ahrar Al-Sham to replace the Assad government, is now being so realistic and actually talking sense? (Interview Oct 10, 2019) pic.twitter.com/0ZWrndjbWK
Amb. Ford has since admitted this much (that US proxy ‘rebels’ and ISIS worked together in the early years of the war), and now admits defeat in the below recent interview as perhaps a reborn ‘realist’.
And finally, not everyone is as pessimistic on the continuing prospects for yet more US-led regime change future efforts as Robert Ford is above. Below is an astoundingly blunt articulation of the next disturbing phase of US efforts in Syria, from an October 31 conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
“The panel featured the two co-chairs of the Syria Study Group, a bi-partisan working group appointed by Congress to draft a new US war plan for Syria,” The Grayzone’s Ben Norton wrote of the below clip:
She made it a point to stress that this sovereign Syrian land“owned” by Washington also happened to be “resource-rich,” the “economic powerhouse of Syria, so where the hydrocarbons are… as well as the agricultural powerhouse.”
At a US gov-funded think tank, this official who oversaw Congress’ Syria Study Group outlines the continued regime-change strategy.
She says the US military “owned” 1/3rd of Syrian territory, including its oil/wheat-rich region. And the US is trying to block reconstruction funds pic.twitter.com/NIEJ9elxhs
With images now circulating of Trump’s “secure the oil” policy in effect, which has served to at least force pro-interventionist warmongers to drop all high-minded humanitarian notions of “democracy promotion” and “freedom” and R2P doctrine as descriptive of US motives in Syria, the above blunt admissions of Dana Stroul, the Democratic co-chair of the Syria Study Group, are ghastly and chilling in terms of what’s next for the suffering population of Syria.
We are “preventing reconstruction aid and technical expertise from going back into Syria,” she stressed in her statement.
America is not finished, apparently, and it’s likely to get a lot uglier than merely seizing the oil.
China Auto Sales Fall 6% In October As Global Auto Recession Shows No Signs Of Slowing
China has been spearheading the global recession in the automotive industry and, as one more month has come to pass, there are still no signs of the bleeding letting up.
As the U.S. and China continue to grapple with solving “Phase 1” of the allegedly upcoming trade deal, pressure remains on the automobile industry globally. For October, China retail passenger vehicle sales were lower by 6% year over year to 1.87 million units, according to the Passenger Car Association. October SUV retail sales also fell 0.7% y/y to 853,130 units.
Additionally, individual OEM data for China for October has also started to trickle in. Names like Toyota, Nissan and Mazda all posted low single digit drops for the month, while Honda was able to squeeze out a positive month.
Nissan announced on November 6 that it sold 139,064 units in October in China, reflecting a 2.1% y/y decrease in sales.
October sales of the 7th-generation Altima, Sylphy, Tiida, Qashqai and Kicks increased. Year-to-date (YTD) sales from January to October totaled 1,230,047 units, reflecting a 0.6% y/y decrease.
Toyota sold 131,700 units in October, reflecting a 2.9% y/y decrease.
YTD sales totaled 1,313,000 units, reflecting a 7.2% y/y increase.
Honda announced that its October sales were 147,716 units, reflecting a y/y increase of 6.5%.
Sales of the Accord, Crider, Vezel, Civic, CR-V and XR-V exceeded 10,000 units. The Civic topped 20,000 units in monthly sales for the fifth consecutive month from June to October. Sales of the Accord, Odyssey, CR-V, Inspire and Elysion, all of which are equipped with the SPORT HYBRID, a highly efficient double-motor hybrid power system, totaled 15,373 units. YTD sales totaled 1,271,286 units, reflecting a 15.2% y/y increase.
On November 6, Mazda announced that sales in October reached 19,882 units, reflecting a 9.1% y/y decrease. YTD sales totaled 181,624 units.
Meanwhile, to add insult to injury, China’s Passenger Car Association said on Friday that NEV deliveries fell for a fourth straight month, down 45% in October as a result of subsidy cuts occurring while the global consumer remains under pressure.
China is considering cutting back on subsidies for electric vehicles, which have been the sole silver lining (if you can even call it that) over the last 12-18 months for the industry. The country has accounted for about half of the world’s sales of EVs and the last time the government cut subsidies, it triggered the first drop in EV sales on record.
That drop could arguably come at the most devastating time for China and the rest of the global auto industry, should it happen now.
Patches, pins, medals, and badges are the visible signs of an exclusive military culture, a silent language by which soldiers and officers judge each other’s experiences, accomplishments, and general worth. In July 2001, when I first walked through the gate of the US Military Academy at West Point at the ripe young age of 17, the “combat patch” on one’s right shoulder – evidence of a deployment with a specific unit – had more resonance than colorful medals like Ranger badges reflecting specific skills. Back then, before the 9/11 attacks ushered in a series of revenge wars “on terror,” the vast majority of officers stationed at West Point didn’t boast a right shoulder patch. Those who did were mostly veterans of modest combat in the first Gulf War of 1990–91. Nonetheless, even those officers were regarded by the likes of me as gods. After all, they’d seen “the elephant.”
We young cadets arrived then with far different expectations about Army life and our futures, ones that would prove incompatible with the realities of military service in a post-9/11 world. When my mother—as was mandatory for a 17-year-old—put her signature on my future Army career, I imagined a life of fancy uniforms; tough masculine training; and maybe, at worst, some photo opportunities during a safe, “peace-keeping” deployment in a place like Kosovo.
Sure, the United States was then quietly starving hundreds of thousands of children with a crippling sanctions regime against autocrat Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, occasionally lobbing cruise missiles at “terrorist” encampments here or there, and garrisoning much of the globe. Still, the life of a conventional Army officer in the late 1990s did fit pretty closely with my high-school fantasies.
You won’t be surprised to learn, however, that the world of future officers at the Academy irreparably changed when those towers collapsed in my home town of New York. By the following May, it wasn’t uncommon to overhear senior cadets on the phone with girlfriends or fiancées explaining that they were heading for war upon graduation.
As a plebe (freshman), I still had years ahead in my West Point journey during which our world changed even more. Older cadets I’d known would soon be part of the invasion of Afghanistan. Drinking excessively at a New York Irish bar on St. Patrick’s Day in 2003, I watched in wonder as, on TV, US bombs and missiles rained down on Iraq as part of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s promised “shock and awe” campaign.
Soon enough, the names of former cadets I knew well were being announced over the mess hall loudspeaker at breakfast. They’d been killed in Afghanistan or, more commonly, in Iraq.
My greatest fear then, I’m embarrassed to admit, was that I’d miss the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn’t long after my May 28, 2005, graduation that I’d serve in Baghdad. Later, I would be sent to Kandahar, Afghanistan. I buried eight young men under my direct command. Five died in combat; three took their own lives. After surviving the worst of it with my body (though not my mind) intact, I was offered a teaching position back at my alma mater.
During my few years in the history department at West Point, I taught some 300 or more cadets. It was the best job I ever had.
I think about them often, the ones I’m still in touch with and the majority whom I’ll never hear from or of again. Many graduated last year and are already out there carrying water for empire. The last batch will enter the regular Army next May. Recently, my mother asked me what I thought my former students were now doing or would be doing after graduation. I was taken aback and didn’t quite know how to answer.
Wasting their time and their lives was, I suppose, what I wanted to say. But a more serious analysis, based on a survey of US Army missions in 2019 and bolstered by my communications with peers still in the service, leaves me with an even more disturbing answer. A new generation of West Point educated officers, graduating a decade and a half after me, faces potential tours of duty in… hmm, Afghanistan, Iraq, or other countries involved in the never-ending American war on terror, missions that will not make this country any safer or lead to “victory” of any sort, no matter how defined.
A NEW GENERATION OF CADETS SERVING THE EMPIRE ABROAD
West Point seniors (“first-class cadets”) choose their military specialties and their first duty-station locations in a manner reminiscent of the National Football League draft. This is unique to Academy grads and differs markedly from the more limited choices and options available to the 80 percent of officers commissioned through the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) or Officer Candidate School (OCS).
Throughout the 47-month academy experience, West Pointers are ranked based on a combination of academic grades, physical fitness scores, and military-training evaluations. Then, on a booze-fueled, epic night, the cadets choose jobs in their assigned order of merit. Highly ranked seniors get to pick what are considered the most desirable jobs and duty locations (helicopter pilot, Hawaii). Bottom-feeding cadets choose from the remaining scraps (field artillery, Fort Sill, Oklahoma).
In truth, though, it matters remarkably little which stateside or overseas base one first reports to. Within a year or two, most young lieutenants in today’s Army will serve in any number of diverse “contingency” deployments overseas. Some will indeed be in America’s mostly unsanctioned wars abroad, while others will straddle the line between combat and training in, say, “advise-and-assist” missions in Africa.
Now, here’s the rub: Given the range of missions that my former students are sure to participate in, I can’t help but feel frustration. After all, it should be clear 18 years after the 9/11 attacks that almost none of those missions have a chance in hell of succeeding. Worse yet, the killing my beloved students might take part in (and the possibility of them being maimed or dying) won’t make America any safer or better. They are, in other words, doomed to repeat my own unfulfilling, damaging journey—in some cases, on the very same ground in Iraq and Afghanistan where I fought.
Consider just a quick survey of some of the possible missions that await them. Some will head for Iraq—my first and formative war—though it’s unclear just what they’ll be expected to do there. ISIS has been attritted to a point where indigenous security forces could assumedly handle the ongoing low-intensity fight, though they will undoubtedly assist in that effort. What they can’t do is reform a corrupt, oppressive Shia-chauvinist sectarian government in Baghdad that guns down its own protesting people, repeating the very mistakes that fueled the rise of the Islamic State in the first place. Oh, and the Iraqi government, and a huge chunk of Iraqis as well, don’t want any more American troops in their country. But when has national sovereignty or popular demand stopped Washington before?
Others are sure to join the thousands of servicemen still in Afghanistan in the 19th year of America’s longest ever war—and that’s even if you don’t count our first Afghan War (1979–89) in the mix. And keep in mind that most of the cadets-turned-officers I taught were born in 1998 or thereafter and so were all of three years old or younger when the Twin Towers crumbled.
The first of our wars to come from that nightmare has always been unwinnable. All the Afghan metrics—the US military’s own “measures for success”—continue to trend badly, worse than ever in fact. The futility of the entire endeavor borders on the absurd. It makes me sad to think that my former officemate and fellow West Point history instructor, Mark, is once again over there. Along with just about every serving officer I’ve known, he would laugh if asked whether he could foresee—or even define—“victory” in that country. Take my word for it, after 18-plus years, whatever idealism might once have been in the Army has almost completely evaporated. Resignation is what remains among most of the officer corps. As for me, I’ll be left hoping against hope that someone I know or taught isn’t the last to die in that never-ending war from hell.
My former cadets who ended up in armor (tanks and reconnaissance) or ventured into the Special Forces might now find themselves in Syria—the war President Trump “ended” by withdrawing American troops from that country, until, of course, almost as many of them were more or less instantly sent back in. Some of the armor officers among my students might even have the pleasure of indefinitely guarding that country’s oil fields, which—if the United States takes some of that liquid gold for itself—might just violate international law. But hey, what else is new?
Still more—mostly intelligence officers, logisticians, and special operators—can expect to deploy to any one of the dozen or so West African or Horn of Africa countries that the US military now calls home. In the name of “advising and assisting” the local security forces of often autocratic African regimes, American troops still occasionally, if quietly, die in “non-combat” missions in places like Niger or Somalia.
None of these combat operations have been approved, or even meaningfully debated, by Congress. But in the America of 2019 that doesn’t qualify as a problem. There are, however, problems of a more strategic variety. After all, it’s demonstrably clear that, since the founding of the US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2008, violence on the continent has only increased, while Islamist terror and insurgent groups have proliferated in an exponential fashion. To be fair, though, such counter-productivity has been the name of the game in the “war on terror” since it began.
Another group of new academy graduates will spend up to a year in Poland, Romania, or the Baltic states of Eastern Europe. There, they’ll ostensibly train the paltry armies of those relatively new NATO countries—added to the alliance in foolish violation of repeated American promises not to expand eastward as the Cold War ended. In reality, though, they’ll be serving as provocative “signals” to a supposedly expansionist Russia. With the Russian threat wildly exaggerated, just as it was in the Cold War era, the very presence of my Baltic-based former cadets will only heighten tensions between the two over-armed nuclear heavyweights. Such military missions are too big not to be provocative, but too small to survive a real (if essentially unimaginable) war.
The intelligence officers among my cadets might, on the other hand, get the “honor” of helping the Saudi Air Force through intelligence-sharing to doom some Yemeni targets—often civilian—to oblivion thanks to US manufactured munitions. In other words, these young officers could be made complicit in what’s already the worst humanitarian disaster in the world.
Other recent cadets of mine might even have the ignominious distinction of being part of military convoys driving along interstate highways to America’s southern border to emplace what President Trump has termed “beautiful” barbed wire there, while helping detain refugees of wars and disorder that Washington often helped to fuel.
Yet other graduates may already have found themselves in the barren deserts of Saudi Arabia, since Trump has dispatched 3,000 US troops to that country in recent months. There, those young officers can expect to go full mercenary, since the president defended his deployment of those troops (plus two jet fighter squadrons and two batteries of Patriot missiles) by noting that the Saudis would “pay” for “our help.” Setting aside for the moment the fact that basing American troops near the Islamic holy cities of the Arabian Peninsula didn’t exactly end well the last time around—you undoubtedly remember a guy named bin Laden who protested that deployment so violently—the latest troop buildup in Saudi Arabia portends a disastrous future war with Iran.
None of these potential tasks awaiting my former students is even remotely linked to the oath (to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”) that newly commissioned officers swear on day one. They are instead all unconstitutional, ill-advised distractions that benefit mainly an entrenched national security state and the arms-makers that go with them. The tragedy is that a few of my beloved cadets with whom I once played touch football, who babysat my children, who shed tears of anxiety and fear during private lunches in my office might well sustain injuries that will last a lifetime or die in one of this country’s endless hegemonic wars.
A NIGHTMARE COME TRUE
This May, the last of the freshman cadets I once taught will graduate from the Academy. Commissioned that same afternoon as second lieutenants in the Army, they will head off to “serve” their country (and its imperial ambitions) across the wide expanse of the continental United States and a broader world peppered with American military bases. Given my own tortured path of dissent while in that military (and my relief on leaving it), knowing where they’re heading leaves me with a feeling of melancholy. In a sense, it represents the severing of my last tenuous connection with the institutions to which I dedicated my adult life.
Though I was already skeptical and antiwar, I still imagined that teaching those cadets an alternative, more progressive version of our history would represent a last service to an Army I once unconditionally loved. My romantic hope was that I’d help develop future officers imbued with critical thinking and with the integrity to oppose unjust wars. It was a fantasy that helped me get up each morning, don a uniform, and do my job with competence and enthusiasm.
Nevertheless, as my last semester as an assistant professor of history wound down, I felt a growing sense of dread. Partly it was the realization that I’d soon return to the decidedly unstimulating “real Army,” but it was more than that, too. I loved academia and “my” students, yet I also knew that I couldn’t save them. I knew that they were indeed doomed to take the same path I did.
My last day in front of a class, I skipped the planned lesson and leveled with the young men and women seated before me. We discussed my own once bright, now troubled career and my struggles with my emotional health. We talked about the complexities, horror, and macabre humor of combat and they asked me blunt questions about what they could expect in their future as graduates. Then, in my last few minutes as a teacher, I broke down. I hadn’t planned this, nor could I control it.
My greatest fear, I said, was that their budding young lives might closely track my own journey of disillusionment, emotional trauma, divorce, and moral injury. The thought that they would soon serve in the same pointless, horrifying wars, I told them, made me “want to puke in a trash bin.” The clock struck 1600 (4 pm), class time was up, yet not a single one of those stunned cadets—unsure undoubtedly of what to make of a superior officer’s streaming tears—moved for the door. I assured them that it was okay to leave, hugged each of them as they finally exited, and soon found myself disconcertingly alone. So I erased my chalkboards and also left.
Three years have passed. About 130 students of mine graduated in May. My last group will pin on the gold bars of brand new army officers in late May 2020. I’m still in touch with several former cadets and, long after I did so, students of mine are now driving down the dusty lanes of Iraq or tramping the narrow footpaths of Afghanistan.
