Month: August 2015

by William Skink

Bernie Sanders backs Saudi intervention in the Middle East. This is what he said to Wolf Blitzer:

“What we need now, and this is not easy stuff, I think the President is trying, you need to bring together an international coalition, Wolf, led by the Muslim countries themselves! Saudi Arabia is the third largest military budget in the world they’re going to have to get their hands dirty in this fight. We should be supporting, but at the end of the day this is fight over what Islam is about, the soul of Islam, we should support those countries taking on ISIS.”

Is Bernie Sanders showing his fealty to Israel? How else to explain this stupid, dangerous perspective? He can’t actually believe entrusting the soul of Islam to Saudi Arabia is a good thing, can he? I mean, does Sanders know the Saudis like beheading people for witchcraft and sorcery?

Here is more from the link:

Some have argued that Sanders’ candidacy is very valuable — that win or lose, he’s putting the issue of income inequality front and center. But if the candidacy is to be lauded for raising issues of economic inequality, educate the public and galvanize around that that, it’s fair to ask how the candidacy is also deforming public discussion on other crucial issues. If the position of the most prominent “progressive” on the national stage is for more Saudi intervention, what does that do to public understanding of the Mideast and dialogue between people in the U.S. and in Muslim countries?

If the U.S. further subcontracts the Mideast to the Saudi regime, the setbacks and disappointments for peace and justice in the Mideast during the Obama years will be small potatoes in comparison. If the Mideast continues to deform, largely because of U.S. policies backing Saudi Arabia, as well as Israel, all the other things Sanders is talking about regarding economic inequality are arguably out the window. He himself has noted that “wars drain investment at home.”

Yeah, wars drain investment at home. How can anyone take the Sanders campaign seriously when his foreign policy positions are so stupid and dangerous?

by William Skink

I think it was the guy with the guns and alpaca that finally did it for me. I am so frustrated with the “travelers” that blow through town every summer to spange, get fucked up and just generally be assholes. I have to willfully remind myself of the good conversations I’ve had with a few of them because more and more what I see is not good.

Maybe it’s just me, but Missoula feels out of control right now. Downtown seems especially unhinged. I know students are returning and the Griz are playing on Saturday, but there seems to be a particularly nasty edge to the manic energy permeating this valley. Maybe it’s the smoke. I don’t know.

In that Bozeman Chronicle article linked above, “Tinker” (the guy with the guns and alpaca) used a term I’ve heard before: Drainbow. Here’s the full quote:

“A lot of these travelers out here, they don’t deserve to be traveling,” he says, adding that many are into drugs and miss the point.

“The rainbows aren’t rainbows any more. The hippies aren’t hippies,” he says. “They’re hipsters and drainbows.”

Tinker is right, there is a dark side to the traveling way of life. And, at least from my perspective, peace and love seems to be rapidly losing ground to violence and hate.

by William Skink

Griz football is about to start, and so is the UM presidential schmooze circuit. Normally that wouldn’t be news, but with UM facing a projected budget shortfall of 5.7 million dollars, any expenditure is fair game for criticism.

When households have budget shortfalls, usually the thing to do is cut back spending. Going out to eat dinner is fun, but usually the first thing that gets put on the chopping block is recreational discretionary spending. Not so at UM, where a VIP brunch before this weekend’s game got a little media scrutiny. Here’s how Engstrom describes this “very common practice”:

“It’s very common practice among universities to be good hosts to visitors, to our alumni and supporters, to policymakers and the greater Missoula community,” Engstrom said. “The pregame events provide a vehicle for our friends and alums to engage with us and one another around the excitement of the game.”

Maybe it’s just me, but the thought of people going around “engaging” each other seems borderline salacious, especially when alcohol is involved.

Luckily, as taxpayers, we are only funding the food. The booze served up at these events is bought by the UM foundation. Here’s more from the link:

According to UM, the brunch menu includes pastries, quiches, bacon, yogurt, granola and berries, lox and more.

The UM Foundation pays for the beer, wine, mimosas and Bloody Marys. Kuhr said state money does not pay for alcohol, and Engstrom has cut back on events that serve alcohol on campus.

The amount of money the foundation spends on alcohol was not available Monday.

Wining and dining donors, politicians and other influential people is just how things work. Why should anyone expect these perks to just disappear because the institution footing the bill is in the hole nearly 6 million dollars? That would be like expecting administrators to take pay cuts instead of insulating themselves from financial reality and forcing the lower rung adjuncts and other expendables to take the hit. Cutting out the smoke salmon and scones? That is crazy talk.

The rationale for protecting events like this is that it’s a good investment to make. I’m not a PR person, so I’ll let a Board of Regents member explain why brunch is a strategic investment:

Fran Albrecht, a Board of Regents member, said she believes UM’s decision to spend state money on the events is both strategic and well-founded. Albrecht also is a longtime nonprofit leader based in Missoula.

“There is in fact a return on investment when you host something like this because it helps to further engage people, key donors, who want to continue to invest and support the University of Montana,” Albrecht said.

Sure, if you want to engage rich people, it’s handy to have delicious food and plenty of booze. There are plenty of politicians who are also swayed by this strategy. But some are not, and when the University goes hat in hand to the next legislature to beg for more money, a conservative politician, like Rep. Greg Hertz from Polson, might remember this schmoozy, boozy brunch:

Rep. Greg Hertz, R-Polson, views the brunch as a “junket.” Hertz sees value in the event, but he believes money for those functions should come from a different source, such as the alumni association.

“They need to spend some time making sure all their expenses are appropriate, and I just don’t think this is an appropriate way to use taxpayer money,” Hertz said.

I suspect most non-invited readers of this article agree with Hertz. Dropping 2,700 bucks for brunch may not seem like much to well-paid administrators like Engstrom, who earn over $340,000 in salary and other unspecified compensation packages, but it’s a lot to most people in Montana. Using myself as an example, it would take me six weeks of take home pay to raise $2,700 dollars.

A University budget is immense and I’m sure it’s a challenging behemoth to run. Hell, our entire economic system is a debt-crazed house cards ready to fall, so why not keep the party going?

Go Griz!

by William Skink

We are on the precipice of a “correction” in the stock market. How’s that for semantics? After years of zero interest liquidity pouring into banks like booze down an alcoholic’s throat, it’s about to get real ugly again. When alcoholics who can’t quit are at the end-stage of their disease, going cold turkey can kill them. If Yellen holds to raising interest rates next month after 6 years of a liquidity bender, which no one of course expects the Fed to actually do, ugly could get catastrophic.

There’s another malady many Americans suffer from: American Exceptionalism. I hope The Polish Wolf keeps writing, because he’s such a great example of this debilitating mindset.

Case in point, a post up today, titled China Beats the US at Neoliberalism.

It’s a curious post that takes China to task for propping up it’s crashing stock market with state pensions:

In an effort to boost its flailing stock market, and apparently learning nothing from the US experience, China has authorized local pension authorities to put workers’ pensions into national stocks, bonds, and derivatives. This is in fact a much bigger deal than the same thing happening in the US (where local and state level pensions have been playing the stock market, and not always winning, for years), because not only does it strip away some of the last facades of socialism from China’s capitalist core, but this affects virtually every worker in China, because unlike in the US almost all Chinese pensions are run through local bodies. This is risky to say the least, and seems to vastly widen the potential fallout of another financial crisis.

Since we are quickly approaching another financial crisis, it might be more helpful to figure out why instead of bashing China for going into damage control mode. If figuring out why is something you’re into, Michael Whitney has a piece worth reading about why China’s market volatility might not be the underlying reason for last Friday’s plunge.

That said, I do appreciate PW’s effort to cast China’s pension gambit as somehow beating the US at Neoliberalism (like it’s some sort of game) because he produced this gem of exceptionalist thinking (“It” refers to China’s ploy to prop up its stock market):

It also has implications for foreign policy, especially for those on both the far right and far left who are rightly concerned about the power of global plutocrats. If we’re really concerned about the spread of a ‘neoliberal’ mindset, which sees the government as merely an apparatus to appease the markets (what Paul Krugman brilliantly describes as the ‘confidence fairy’ theory of laissez faire economics), China’s willingness to risk its people’s pensions to re-inflate the stock market should be solid evidence, nay, proof positive, that a ‘post-American world’ will not have any more humane or less capital-dominated goals than an American one. While in Western Europe and increasingly in the US there is real resistance to this shift, China (and Russia), far from being bastions of resitance to neoliberal inhumanity, are out at the forefront of it.

I’m very familiar with this kind of argument, not because I studied rhetoric in college, but because I have a 7 year old that likes to say “but so and so did it to” when he’s caught doing something he knows he shouldn’t be doing. The evidence that someone else is doing the wrong thing as well doesn’t get him out of trouble.

Worrying about a post-American world is just bizarre to me. I don’t get it. Personally, I’m worried about a post-collapse world. And so are the uber-wealthy:

Super rich hedge fund managers are buying ‘secret boltholes’ where they can hideout in the event of civil uprising against growing inequality, it has been claimed.

Nervous financiers from across the globe have begun purchasing landing strips, homes and land in areas such as New Zealand so they can flee should people rise up.

With growing inequality and riots such as those in London in 2011 and in Ferguson and other parts of the USA last year, many financial leaders fear they could become targets for public fury.

The vast majority of humanity—Americans, Russians, Chinese and everyone in between—will be the ones left behind to suffer if things get really bad. At that point it won’t matter who beat who at Neoliberalism. It will be all about survival.

by William Skink

As Don bids Montana adieu for an extended period of traveling, other intelligently discontented writers will pick up the slack at Intelligent Discontent. One of those writers, The Polish Wolf, is already penning such intelligent missives, like this post about how killing the Iran deal sets us up for a quagmire, nuclear Iran, or both.

The Polish Wolf exemplifies American ignorance when it comes to foreign policy. In the comments, Steve Kelley ponders a concept that is hard to fathom for many: that our policy in Iraq and Afghanistan is producing the desired results:

Perpetual war is our mission. Please at lease consider that the “mission” was accomplished, and conditions are precisely as predicted. I’m not buying the “miscalculation” or “incompetence” argument. Plans to divide-and-conquer the ME have been written and followed faithfully since at least the 1982 Yinon Plan.

The Polish Wolf just can’t seem to wrap his brain around this notion:

While I agree that a prosperous and democratic Iraq (as advertised) was not the likely goal of the planners of the Iraq war, I find it hard to imagine that the present situation was the plan, either. If the main goal by the US had been simply to destabilize the Baathist regime in Iraq and thus split up the country, that could have been accompished easily and relatively cheaply from the air – indeed, it was nearly accomplished inadvertantly in 1998. I can’t see the geopolitical logic in intensifying (immensely) the influence of Iran in Iraq and ruining our relationship with Pakistan, especially because both moves increase the influence of our greatest actual rivals in the region, China and Russia.

I sympathize with the difficulty of understanding America’s foreign policy. But here is a good place to start: American foreign policy never concerns itself with human rights and democracy. There was no “humanitarian intervention” in Libya, nor a legitimate populist revolt in Ukraine, but don’t tell that to The Polish Wolf.

The only geopolitical logic is attaining domination and control, and where that isn’t possible, chaos is preferable to the stability of non-aligned nations.

If American foreign policy was truly concerned with human rights, we wouldn’t be providing Saudi Arabia cover to do what it’s doing to Yemen, where the war is now stalled and widespread famine is likely.

But it’s Ukraine where The Polish Wolf was most spectacularly wrong when he claimed in April of 2014 that The American Left has Failed on Ukraine. Here is a part of that alleged failure:

Perhaps the biggest failing of Leftist analysis, though, is the consistent belief that somehow this is related to NATO’s eastward expansion, or that a reasonable solution can include preventing Ukraine from ever joining NATO. If one knows the history, this is absolute hogwash. Note that Russian intervention in neighboring countries has been a constant fact since the Napoleonic wars – and NATO membership has shown to be the strongest preventive measure of that outcome. Georgia has been invaded; Turkey has not. Ukraine has been invaded; Estonia, almost incalculably weaker, has not.

The Polish Wolf hasn’t addressed the situation in Ukraine since that post, but that doesn’t mean the situation isn’t continuing to worsen. The coup government in Kiev has used the ceasefire to prepare for a full-scale offensive against Ukraine’s Eastern population:

At an August 22 military ceremony in Chuguev, near Donbass, illegitimate oligarch president Petro Poroshenko boasted about using Minsk II to rearm and increase Ukraine’s military ranks to much greater size than last year – despite a bankrupt economy near collapse, using borrowed funds desperately needed for vital services going begging. More on this below.

Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) military spokesman Eduard Basurin said Kiev’s armed forces in Southeastern Ukraine total 90,000. Their weapons include 450 tanks, 203 salvo artillery units, and five Tochka-U missile systems.

“A total of five separate mechanized brigades, two separate tanks brigades, and air mobile brigade, an artillery brigade, and a salvo system brigade have been deployed…to Mariupol,” he explained.

“All in all, this grouping has 22,500 men and officers, more than 130 tanks, more than 560 armored cars, fifty-five salvo artillery units, about 200 artillery guns and mortars, and about 720 antitank weapons.”

DPR’s Defense Ministry intelligence shows heavy troop and weapons concentrations deployed near Donetsk. More military force was sent to the Debatsevo sector and near Lugansk. Reserves back up front line strength.

Basurin said Kiev plans escalated war on Donbass. “Information has been received about the plan of forthcoming actions by the Ukrainian army from a source in the Ukrainian General Staff and, no matter how strange this may seem, there are still true officers there who do not want to fight against their own people,” he explained.

When will this madness end?