Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Dodging bullets.

Fuck all, what a week this has been. The Suleimani assassination has turned Trump’s disastrous approach to foreign policy up past eleven, and that is a positive danger to organized society. Domestic president Bam-Bam is dangerous enough, but give him a war that he has started himself and god only knows where the hell we’ll end up. It’s like someone let a chimp loose in the oval office, and after months on the job he’s going stir crazy, pulling levers, pressing buttons, and randomly throwing feces at his political enemies. Does this kind of governance really work for anyone? It’s like living on a very active volcano. We may have temporarily dodged a bullet this time, but nothing has fundamentally changed.

Times like these I am grateful for podcasters, bloggers, and independent journalists. The mainstream press have been of very little use through this recent crisis. There is this insistence, for instance, on calling Suleimani a terrorist or a bad guy, over and over like a mantra. Usually tagged on to that is the claim that he was directly responsible for the killing of hundreds of Americans – I’ve heard talking heads put the number around 700 – during a certain phase of the Iraq war. This is total shit. I remember those days pretty well, as does the Progressive’s Stephen Zunes, who wrote a good treatment of this claim this past week. It is well to remember that the Bush administration, even in the face of their disastrous invasion of Iraq, still had Iran in the cross hairs and were working to build a public case for yet another regime change enterprise. They didn’t succeed, but what they did manage was to plant this notion in the heads of journalists and commentators that Iran was responsible for every EFP roadside bomb planted in southern Iraq, a vacuous claim that assumes every Shi’ite resistance fighter is subject to mind control by the Ayatollah.

Once again, let’s be clear – the people responsible for the deaths of the more than 4,500 U.S. service members killed in Iraq are named Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc. We can try to blame the people we invade for resisting our armed forces, but doing so doesn’t hold a lot of water. We should never have been in Iraq in the first place; anything that proceeded from that criminal decision is the responsibility of our own decision-makers. It took virtually no time for the same crop of insane leaders to exploit the deaths of the people they sent over there and attempt to utilize them as a means of starting yet another needless war. And now the current incarnation of the Republican regime change machine is working overtime to make war with Iran inevitable. That includes most prominently that overstuffed geiser of pig shit – a veritable Old Faithful of rancid manure – Mike Pompeo, who is in many ways worse than Trump.

Arrgh. I could go on, but my main point is, agitate for peace. Make your voice heard. Don’t think someone else will do it. This is like the election – you need to participate and encourage others to do the same. That’s the only way out of this shithole.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Happy new war.

President Bam-Bam has started off the new year with incoherent threats against Iran, and it appears as if the entire corporate media establishment is pretty much on the same page as him. I was greeted on New Year’s morning by the usual cavalcade of retired generals (e.g., Barry McCaffrey, etc.) and inside-the-Pentagon correspondents (e.g. Hans Nichols, etc.) that MSNBC (a.k.a. “the liberal news channel”) trots out whenever someone challenges the U.S. empire somewhere in the world. This time it’s Iraqis, and of course Iran is to blame … because we seem to want war with Iran. That’s why whenever they talk about our opposition in Iraq, these Iraqis are termed “Iranian-backed militias” or “Iranian-backed extremists,” though they would never call the forces we fund and train “American-backed militias”. Yes, Iran has substantial influence in Iraq – they share a long border and a troubled history with Iraq, so it’s no surprise. We, on the other hand, come from the other side of the Earth, and yet somehow we consider our enormous influence on Iraqi affairs more legitimate.

The Trump administration decided last week that it was a really, really good idea to conduct air strikes on an Iraqi Shi’ite militia group Kata’ib Hizbullah, killing 45 of them in supposed retaliation for mortar attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq that recently killed one U.S. contractor. (See Juan Cole’s blogpost on this for details.) The protests and intrusions at the U.S. embassy compound in Baghdad were a predictable response to what General McCaffrey and others consider a proportionate use of force. (That was quickly followed by their assassination by drone of the Iranian Quds force leader Qassim Suleimani in Baghdad, a major escalation by Trump.) Not being a member in good standing of the American Empire Positive Propaganda Force, my first question is … just what the hell are we doing in Iraq in the first place? In all fairness, I think that question is on the minds of many Iraqis right now.

Okay, this isn't going so well.

In my humble opinion, there are a couple of things going on here. Of course, Trump likes to look tough, hence the drunken threat tweets and the rushing of 3000 more U.S. troops to Baghdad. But despite the fact that these threats are directed at Iran, I think deep in his tiny lizard brain he understands, albeit tenuously, that war with Iran would be a disaster for his presidency far worse than his impending impeachment trial or his failing trade war. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why. No modern president has had as high an approval rating as George W. Bush did in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and yet just a few years after invading Afghanistan and Iraq, his presidency was in tatters. His wars are still going on, metastasizing again and again into new, more toxic cycles of violence. And Bush’s wars were against one nation that was totally destroyed (Afghanistan) and one that was partially destroyed and starved to death (Iraq); we have essentially lost both of those wars. Iran would be harder to beat, and the events of this week demonstrate part of the reason why – the exercise of power by proxy, to put it in terms an imperialist might understand.

I have no doubt Trump’s foreign policy establishment is working towards war with Iran, whether or not that is their full intention. Smarter presidents than Trump (a category that includes every other president) have blundered into disastrous wars that have essentially destroyed their presidencies. Whatever Trump’s intentions may be regarding Iran, this escalation in Iraq may be the start of his ultimate undoing if he’s not careful. And the entire establishment – Trumpist and faux resistance – will wave him on into the catastrophe.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Sharing the wealth.

I should start this post with the standard disclaimer that I am not an economist. Inasmuch as this is a nominally free country, at present, I am going to opine on one of the central issues in the Democratic primary debate – the idea of instituting a wealth tax. Advocated in some form by both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, taxing wealth is not a new idea by any means. Chris Hayes’s recent conversation with Gabriel Zucman gives a really good overview of the question, so if you want to hear someone knowledgeable discuss the merits of instituting a wealth tax in the United States, by all means give that a listen. For now, here’s my once-over-lightly. right in time for the holiday season.

First, while this idea is remarkably popular, there is a lot of howling on the part of articulate opinion over it. If I were to guess, I would say that the reason may be simply that virtually everyone you see on television has some magnitude of wealth in the form of stocks, property, etc. in excess of what Warren or Sanders would deem taxable in their proposals. The reasons they typically give, though, are the standard capitalist tropes about stifling innovation, misdirecting funds to inefficient government programs, etc., etc. There is honestly no credible evidence to substantiate this claim, but even if some version of it were true, the revenue generated by such a tax would be more than worth the cost of inspiring some caution on the part of the billionaire class. Also, I think it’s important to fully understand what being a billionaire means. Having billions of dollars is not merely being wealthy; billions are about power, and I don’t mean purchasing power. I think there’s a strong argument to be made for putting a cap on wealth simply to constrain unaccountable power and influence on the part of billionaires, but that’s another conversation.

Bernie: just tell them they'll pay less property taxes. Piece of cake.

Zucman, a recognized authority on income and wealth inequality, points out that in America we already have a form of wealth tax, and it’s one that most potential readers of this blog (or any other blog, for that matter) are directly affected by: property taxes. For decades, home ownership has represented far and away the principal form of wealth held by ordinary (i.e. non-rich) people in the United States. I suspect it’s no accident that homes are taxed in a remarkably regressive way – specifically, not indexed to income in any way. Also, as Zucman points out, the property taxes we pay (either directly or indirectly as renters) are at the same level regardless of whether the owner holds a mortgage or not. So you may have less than 40% equity in your home, shell out half of your income on your mortgage, but still pay taxes on the full assessed value of that property. (I don’t know about other states, but here in New York, you can roll your taxes into your mortgage payment for added convenience. How thoughtful!)

A true wealth tax, on the other hand, would consider all forms of wealth, not just this narrow category that disproportionately impacts workers. It would be progressive – the less you own or earn, the less you pay – and a hell of a lot more fair than our current property tax system. So don’t buy the hype, people. As with our health care system, we are already doing it … we’re just doing it wrong.

luv u,

jp