Updated. 

Notoriously, the Iraq war has required far more troops than the administration expected. Back when the war planners were selling the operation as a “cakewalk,” part of the unrealistic plan was that only 100,000 or so troops would be needed to pacify and bring freedom to the country – when, weeks before Shock and Awe, Army General Eric K. Shinsek put the number at “several hundred thousand,” the Pentagon claimed he “misspoke” and Paul Wolfowitz reasserted the naive, lower figure.

Furthermore, this war has gone on considerably longer than many hawks expected, or claimed to expect. America has been occupying Iraq for more than five years since “Mission Accomplished,” and during this time nearly 4,000 members of the US Armed Forces have died trying to wrap up this cakewalk.

Overall, the government has sent 1.6 million troops into combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. All this strain for enough fresh bodies, exacerbated by the waning willingness among those who have historically been willing to enlist and the worst failures in reaching projected recruitment targets since the 1970s, has forced the military to steadily lower its recruitment standards and otherwise cut corners in order to sustain operations abroad. They’ve resorted to severe uses of stop-loss orders, which constitute a form of extended involuntary indentured servitude for the military. They’ve lessened up on the academic prerequisites – which helped for a while. They’ve begun signing up illegal aliens, offering them citizenship if they join and even going so low as to mislead them with false promises of citizenship for their families. They’ve waived rules against recruiting felons for tens of thousands of convicts, and more every year, including some implicated in sexual assault and terrorist threats. They’ve used No Child Left Behind to blackmail recalcitrant high schools into handing over the names of their students to recruitment officials. (Even their standards and training for recruiting recruiters have been questionable, seeing as how these people have been caught encouraging teenagers to fake high-school diplomas to qualify for enlistment, and, in a startling number of cases, have been accused of raping would-be enlistees: in one year alone, 80 recruiters were disciplined for sexual misconduct, including the raping of teenage girls “on recruiting office couches.” Other victims were “assaulted in government cars and groped en route to entrance exams.”) Such depredations on the part of recruiters, as well as just their more mundane but nevertheless disturbing, federally-imposed presence, have understandably caused controversies in both higher and lower education, and in some communities.

With this unpopular war dragging with no end in sight, with an increasingly invasive recruitment apparatus, with a strain on troops that has translated into all sorts of misconduct and poor morale generally, it is no surprise they have to keep lowering their standards, stooping to ever lower lows, to maintain a military hold on Iraq. And yet I am still surprised by this: Now they’re deploying 43,000 troops who, for medical reasons, have been deemed “undeployable” and unfit for combat. The empire has reached another depth of barbarism. Perhaps soon getting wounded will no longer be a way out of the line of fire.

Here’s a story about how global warming is being offset by natural causes, and why it’s a problem. “Natural climate changes may offset human-caused global warming over the next decade, keeping ocean temperatures the same or even temporarily cooling them slightly, German researchers said on Wednesday. However, this short-term situation might create a problem if policymakers regarded it as a sign they could ease efforts to limit greenhouse gases or play.”

This reminds me of the somewhat recent theory that global dimming – also caused by pollution – is masking the great extent of global warming, which is therefore “a far greater threat to society than previously thought.”

Perhaps if the new ice age finally comes, they’ll also use it as proof that global warming is vastly more apocalyptic than anyone realizes.

Stars and Stripes reports:

“‘There is nothing inherently wrong with providing information to the public and the press,’ [U.S. Rep. Ike] Skelton said. ‘But there is a problem if the Pentagon is providing special access to retired officers and then basically using them as pawns to spout the administration’s talking points of the day.’”

Skelton, who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he was also disturbed by the ties between the military officers and defense firms.”

‘It hurts me to my core to think that there are those from the ranks of our retired officers who have decided to cash in and essentially prostitute themselves on the basis of their previous positions within the Department of Defense,’ he said.”

When members of Congress assume this shocked pose and spout such nonsense to the press, we may rest assured that they do indeed take us for fools. The congressman is hurt to his core, he says, to think that former military officers may be cashing in on their previous military service and their connections with former associates still at the Pentagon. Well, let’s see: this sort of thing has been going on actively for only sixty-five years or so. If Congressman Skelton has not yet become aware of it, especially given his service on the House Armed Services Committee, we may fairly conclude that the man is blind, deaf, and dumb. Come to think of it, reaching that conclusion would be more reassuring than knowing the truth about Skelton and his ilk.

My op-ed piece, co-authored with Ilya Somin, has appeared in the Kansas City Star. We wrote the article in part to promote Tuesday’s public forum at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham on the civil rights implications of eminent domain:

Few policies have done more to destroy community and opportunity for minorities than eminent domain. Some 3 to 4 million Americans, most of them ethnic minorities, have been forcibly displaced from their homes as a result of urban renewal takings since World War II.

The fact is that eminent-domain abuse is a crucial constitutional rights issue. On Tuesday, the Alabama Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will hold a public forum at Birmingham’s historic Sixteenth Street Baptist church to address ongoing property seizures in the state. The church was not only a center of early civil rights action, but also, tragically, where four schoolgirls lost their lives in a bombing in 1963.

Read the rest here

The State Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will hold a public forum on the civil rights implications of eminent domain.   It will be at the famous 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.  Among those who will appear are minority property owners who will allege eminent domain abuse, government officials, and legal experts.   Some of those who will appear lost their land to make way for a Wal-Mart.

The meeting will be begin at 9:00 a.m. on April 29 and there will be an opportunity for members of the audience to speak after 4:15.  I’ll be chairing the meeting. 

For more information, contact me at davidbeito@hotmail.com

Speaking of comparisons between the struggle against climate change and World War II, two Iwo Jima survivors are upset about this Time Magazine cover:

I, too, am flabbergasted. Not, mind you, by Senator John McCain’s proposal to suspend collection of the federal excise tax on gasoline temporarily so as to ease the pain of driving to the beach this summer. Rather, I am stunned to learn that Robert Poole (an otherwise insightful contributing author to the recent Independent Institute book on road transportation, Street Smart ) thinks it’s a bad joke on American drivers, who would save a few pennies at the pump, but might end up blowing out tires on the Interstate because there won’t be enough money in the Highway Trust Fund to fix potholes.

As Mr. Poole knows well, the highway “trust fund” is about as trustworthy as the Social Security account supposedly holding the “contributions” deducted from your paycheck to finance your public pension. Indeed, as he admits, the balance in the fund is expected to be in the red by $2 to $3 billion in 2009 because Congress already has authorized more highway spending than will be covered by anticipated gasoline tax revenues.

Surprise, surprise! As is examined in depth in the Institute’s book that I edited, Taxing Choice, transportation programs at the federal and state levels of government are hotbeds of political corruption and poster children of pork-barrel politics. How can Mr. Poole, or anyone else for that matter, imply with a straight face that the Highway Trust Fund is managed on the basis of sound benefit-cost principles? To the extent that gasoline tax revenues actually are used to fix potholes, you can bet that priority is given to the ones located in the districts and states of powerful members of the transportation committees in the House and Senate, and that other highway construction and maintenance projects financed by the gas tax are doled out to buy votes in electorally important constituencies.

Sure, the federal tax is a trivial fraction (about 5%) of the cost of a gallon of gasoline nowadays and, because some of the tax burden is borne by producers, not all of the savings from a tax-collection holiday will be passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices. But given that the demand for gasoline is relatively inelastic, at least in the short run, consumers will capture most of the benefits of a temporarily lower federal tax. Small savings are not to be sneezed at, even so. Weekend sales tax collection holidays prior to the start of the school year have been declared recently in several states to reduce parents’ out-of-pocket costs of buying clothing and school supplies. Retail sales boom as a result. A local purveyor of adult beverages in Oxford, Mississippi, advertizes the first Tuesday every month as “Tax-less Tuesday” and pays the 7% state sales tax on all purchases. She grosses 30% more than usual on those days.

Mr. Poole may have a different take on the tax holiday idea than Senator McCain’s critics on the left, who are thrilled to see high gas prices because they are both consistent with a green political agenda and provide opportunities for demonizing the oil companies. But the proper conclusion to draw from recognizing that federal transportation programs have been politicized and transformed into “a New Deal-style public works boondoggle” is not that a temporary tax holiday is laughable. The holiday should instead be made permanent.

Here’s my article commemorating the Waco tragedy fifteen years ago. It covers a number of bases – the right to revolution, the problem with liberals and conservatives, the public ideology of statism, the police state, and so forth – but here’s just one excerpt from it relating to the recent FLDS affair in El Dorado, Texas:

“Waco still matters. Not just because it has become the paradigmatic symbol for federal police power gone out of control. Not just because it starkly demonstrates the American government’s militarism unleashed against its own people. Not just because it showcases the propensity of politicians and law enforcers to deceitfully cover and obscure their wrongful actions. No, Waco’s still important mostly because it shows exactly what happens when people resist the unjust incursions of their own government, including under democracy.

“Consider, in contrast, what has happened quite recently in Texas. This time, state and local officials seized 416 children from the Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints (FLDS) Church. The supposed justification was the abuse of minors, but there is in any event no reason to assume these children would be less abused in the custody of the Texas government, whose foster system has been rife with child rape, poisonings and murder.

“This mass seizure of children featured officials “wearing body armor and carrying automatic weapons, backed by an armored personnel carrier.” The militarization of domestic police has infected every level of American government, down to the local. The Texas police were ready to conduct a warlike raid of the Fundamentalist Mormon home, and the particular justification for it has shifted from a specific report of abuse (still unconfirmed, and possibly a prank) to a more general one, just as the rationale behind Waco shifted (from a methamphetamine lab, to illegal guns, to child abuse).

“Thank goodness the family under siege this time around did not forcibly resist, because it could have ended violently, with many of those kids not just kidnapped, but killed.”

John Maynard Keynes was a member of the British delegation to the peace negotiations at Versailles after World War I. He was disgusted by the Allies’ vindictive, grasping, and short-sighted actions at the conference, and he dashed off a book to denounce those actions and to explain why he thought the treaty would give rise to a plethora of troubles, as indeed it did. His book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), is still well worth reading today for its vivid character sketches, its recitation of key facts, and its penetrating political and economic insights.

Along the way, Keynes digressed to discuss why the European governments’ inflation of their money stocks during and after the war portended grave consequences. Although Keynes is not ordinarily cited as a strong anti-inflationist–indeed in important ways, his later views helped to create a well-nigh inevitably inflationary system of government macroeconomic interventionism–I know of no stronger statement against inflation than the one he expressed on pp. 235-36 of his book. It reads as follows:

“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the  process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become ‘profiteers,’ who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.”

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

Calling someone a gold bug is rarely a compliment, and often an insult. For most people, a gold bug is a weirdo, at best, and a complete nut case, at worst. Don’t these gold bugs understand that gold does not pay interest or dividends? And as for those who advocate a return to the gold standard, geez, what are they thinking? Don’t they know the relic of a vanished politico-economic order when they see one?

The alternative, of course, the modern, sophisticated setup that hardly anybody can imagine doing without, comprises fiat money, legal-tender laws, fractional-reserve banks, a central bank, and a cornucopia of regulations on money, banks, and nearly everything they touch, which is now pretty much everything in existence.

And how cool is that? Why, without this modern monetary regime, we might never have experienced the grandeur of the Great Depression or the thrilling 95 percent shrinkage of the dollar’s purchasing power since the Federal Reserve System’s creation in 1913. We’d have been forced to forgo even the joys of stagflation in the 1970s, because we’d have had no serious inflation to combine with the real stagnation. Christ, Jimmy Carter might never have been elected, and—horror of horrors—we’d have had to endure four more years of newspaper stories about Gerald Ford’s stumbling over his own feet or hitting his head against something.

So, obviously, gold bugs are too old-fashioned for us to abide. Instead, we moderns vastly prefer, in effect, theft bugs, because the inflation that is inherent in the modern politico-monetary (dis)order entails, among other evils, a hidden tax on all those who hold assets denominated in dollars and who fail to anticipate the impending depreciation of the dollar and to rearrange their affairs to compensate for it. Stealing is good, of course, especially if you are a professional thief, as any politician can attest, and being able to pull off a heist without the victim’s even knowing that he’s been fleeced is fabulous, indeed.

As John Maynard Keynes wrote in one of his more insightful moments (The Economic Consequences of the Peace [1919], p. 236), “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

Who among us can resist such a deliciously wicked prospect? Evidently, only a gold bug.