What you may not know about Mattis

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In 2011, when Iranian-backed insurgents in Iraq, using Iranian-supplied rockets, were killing American troops, Marine General James Mattis,  head of U.S. Central Command, grew increasingly incensed. As a result, he formulated a plan, which made it to (and was rejected by) the Obama White House, to launch a direct American “dead-of-night” attack on Iran either to take out a power plant or an oil refinery. This “World War III scenario” — the willingness to take a chance, that is, on sparking a regional conflagration — and the urge to act preemptively (including against “Iranian swarm boats” in the Persian Gulf) finally led to his being replaced as CENTCOM commander five months early. ( extracted from an article by Greg Jaffe and Adam Entous, Washington Post).

This, dear Reader, is the man billed as one of the ” grown-ups” in the new Trump Administration.  If this is a serious, thoughtful member of the Cabinet, then we are in dire trouble.  Epicurus might well  appoint psychological councillors for the whole lot of these bomb-throwers and sentence them to intensively growing cabbages in his Garden for two full years.

Seriously though, this points up the reason why the American system puts control of the military in civilian hands – under normal presidencies.  Trump has chosen several military people in place of civilians, to control key aspects of national security and the military.  Why is this being allowed?  Where is judgment?

Britain up for sale

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Britain runs a big trade deficit. The last time there was a surplus was in 1984, when it was modest 0.3% of GDP. The current rate is 6%. Leaving the effect of Brexit aside, the government is temporarily averting a balance of payments crisis by selling the country’s gold and silver – the basic infrastructure.

Yes, Britain is for sale. Its infrastructure has gradually been sold off since the days of Thatcher. One third of all energy, water, transport and travel infrastructure has already been sold. The water Brits drink is supplied by a French company, the National Grid gas pipelines are being sold to a consortium of foreign Chinese and Qatari investors led by the Australian investment bank, Macquarie. Macqaurie owns the biggest car parking company, National Car Park, along with Glasgow, Southampton and Aberdeen airports The state-owned green investment bank will soon be owned by them as well. A French firm, using Chinese funding, is building a new nuclear power station. Three quarters of the rail franchises in the UK are foreign-owned, the companies concerned using the profits earned to keep down the travel costs of people in Holland, Germany etc. Power distribution is dominated by French, German and Spanish companies. Add to all this the fact that the car, steel, cement and most of food processing is owned by foreigners, and even aerospace industry is succumbing.

The City of London makes huge commissions out of the sales, making profits now and hoping for the best for the future. When the government organise trade delegations overseas they are not encouraging inward investment; they are flogging off assets paid for over decades by the British taxpayer. Every time a big piece of infrastructure is sold it has, until Brexit at least, increased the value of the pound sterling, and thus made exporting products that much more difficult. The situation now is that the UK-owned assets, lumped together, are worth less than UK assets owned from overseas. And as a result, there is now a net out flow of interest, dividends and profits from the UK that cannot go on much longer without having serious economic effects.

Britain is unique in being totally open to foreign ownership, in contrast to almost every other country. Others can block takeovers deemed not to be in the interest of their countries (for the record the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US makes decisions on what is and is not in the nation’s interest). Only carelessness or a short-sighted ideology on the part of conservative government could explain the utter stupidity of the policy. One has to wonder who, apart from the bankers might be profiting?

Thought for the Day

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The following is a quotation from the Vatican documents on Epicureanism:

S. 17. It is not the young man who should be thought happy, but the old man who has lived a good life. For the young man at the height of his powers is unstable and is carried this way and that by fortune, like a headlong stream. But the old man has come to anchor in old age as though in port, and the good things for which before he hardly hoped for, he has brought into safe harbor in his grateful recollections.

The bloated Pentagon

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Not only has the United States failed to win a war in recent years, not only is it inefficient and over- staffed – it hides up the facts.

Recently the Pentagon buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste. The study found that almost a quarter of the defense budget is spent on “business operations”, meaning admin, and $580 billion on overhead in general – accounting, human resources, logistics and property management. It pays no less than 1,014,000 contractors, civilians and uniformed personnel to fill back- office jobs far from any front line. Military contractors number 199,661, according to McKinsey, thus exceeding the combined civil workforce of 7 other Federal departments. The purchasing function alone employs 207,000 people; property employs 192,000 and human resources 84,000 people.

The top people at the Pengagon have claimed for years that the armed forces are starved of funds, which is  nonsense – there is no incentive to be efficient. The warriors in Congress can usually be relied on to keep shoveling money in their direction, regardless of the poor performance. But recently, with these revelations, the top brass are worried that Congress, which holds the purse- strings will now make cuts. They rely on the new Trump people to stew up the fear of terrorism to ensure that no cuts are made.

In any case, the internal study was hidden up and the data that proved the waste was made secret. A 77 page summary report on the scandal was removed from the Pentagon website.  If you want to hide up your incompetence you have reports stamped “classified”, which is what happened to most of the report last year into CIA torture.  Mind you, this is what most governments do  – the British are masters of this sort of thing.

The US Defense Department is the “world’s largest corporate enterprise”, and is notable for not analysing its own efficieny. The technique has been, when faced with inquiries, to wait out the studies with a “this too will pass” attitude. McKinsey estimated that the overhead cost between 15 and 20% of the Pentagon operation, but basically threw their hands up and admitted they really had no idea.

Spending gigantic sums of money on sophisticated weaponry does not prevent terrorism.  What you need to do is have human spies (“assets”) with their ears and eyes wide open.  Mass electronic spying on everyone in sight has proved ineffectual.  My wife and I met a recently retired secret service officer who told us precisely this years ago.   The truth, also, is that the Pentagon is not there just to prosecute never-ending war – it is there to plan for and pay for the development of weaponry that can be sold to countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Living in the past

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In the November edition of (the British) Prospect magazine a Dutch author, Joris Luyendijk, wrote an article on the inflated sense of self-worth that pervades a small section of the political Right in Britain.  He writes that many English people have a superiority complex that prevents them being realistic about their country’s place in the world, a sort of collective clinical narcissism.  This rather disagreeable British attitude manifested itself most obviously in the Brexit campaign.  Some Remain advocates  argued that the UK should remain so that it could “run the EU”.  In the Economist Edward Lucas argued that “Britain’s size, experience and friends make us the continent’s natural leader”.  In the Spectator Toby Young opined that, once out of the EU Britain would become “the world’s third economy”.  Being special, other nations would rush to make deals with Britain, which needs the EU far less than the EU needs it.
These grandiose fools, encouraged by the tabloids and approximately two generations out of date, were, or should have been, put in their place by a recent State of the Union speech by Jean-Paul Junker: “Today Europeans make up 8% of the world population – and will represent only 5% in 2050 . By then you will not see a single EU country among the top world economies.  All the bluster and the  appeals to old people who recall the Empire and the red all over the map, do not conceal the fact that the whole EU, including the UK, are becoming irrelevant (Trump, who knows nothing, recognised that when he was dismissive of the British Prime Minister on the phone).
The case for the EU rests on the simple fact that, as Luyendijk writes, that seen from China or Brazil the difference between the UK and Belgium is a rounding error- 0.87% of the world population versus 0.15%.  The only hope for the UK would have been to stay in the EU and try to be constructive and positive, try and change the things that don’t work well, stop the crazy EU expansion policies and moderate, perhaps, some of the regulation-making. Tthe pity is that Labour and the Liberal Democrats have little hope of power, and this leaves the country in the hands of people who have a sense of bravado, who cannot accept criticism and whose quaint sense of “British greatness” is totally unrealistic and, by the way, offensive to others. No wonder Continentals have no wish to offer Brexit-Britain any special favours.