Larry On Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex Before Midterms. Germany And Diesel...

Larry continues to review one very important book ( I need to read it too) on US defense "industry" and comes to the conclusion:

Politics and defense spending are intertwined in ways that most people do not appreciate. I gained some insight into the corruption of this process thanks to my neighbor (when I lived in one of the Washington, DC suburbs). My former neighbor is 15 years younger than me and owns the largest defense lobbying firm in Washington, DC. His job entailed signing up major and minor manufacturers of weapons and military equipment. They paid him hefty monthly fees. In turn, my neighbor–let’s call him “Mr. D”–would wine and dine key members of the House of Representatives and the Senate. He was the man the legislators wanted to see because he could host “dinners” that raised money that was poured in turn to the bank accounts of those members of Congress. Buying influence in Washington is a multi-million dollar business that generates billions for the Defense Industry and has inflicted misery, suffering and death on millions of foreigners. I am afraid that tomorrow’s election in the United States will not alter the defense incest that dominates Washington, DC. The corrupt system will have to be broken by an outside force. What worries me is that the United States, in a moment of hubris, will find itself in a war with Russia or China and will discover the hard way that the expensive weapon systems will fail or be destroyed quickly on the battlefield. Like an alcoholic at the end of his ropes, the system must hit bottom and admit the addiction. Only then is reform possible.  

I agree completely. I also do not think midterms will change much in this respect, but as always--the logic of the events and circumstances sometimes is even stronger than corruption and greed. We'll see what tomorrow brings. Or (I stole it from comments from PJW's excellent video), as they say: My father has been a life long Republican until he died. Then he voted Democrat.(c) LOL)). Watch PJW's superb video and, if anyone ever doubted that PJW was not a neocon--he never was--his position on SMO and Russia completely dispels any speculation on this issue--I continue to watch him with pleasure all the time and I totally get the place he is coming from. Part of my roots is in this place too. 

In related news, Russian Duma has a bill ready for the first reading in which it is forbidden to show German porn in Russia, because it creates unrealistic expectations from young Russians on the speed with which plumbers arrive to customers' homes. This is absolutely impossible in real life and this perception creates absolutely unreasonable expectations from young customers. But jokes aside, Andrei Raevsky posted a superb series by Thorsten J. Pattenberg in which he with a stylish literary finess  demolishes the myth of Germany's "mighty" industry, especially in the modern geopolitical (Chinese) context and a complete degeneration of Germany's current ersatz "culture". He notes:

Germany depends on China’s industries A LOT. China might be the only nation that unconditionally keeps up with the German poop and still deals with the neonazis after Berlin started WW III with Russia this summer. If the Middle Kingdom was Middle Earth [an Anglo-Saxon fantasy world], then the Germans would be the Balin dwarves toiling under the mountains. It would be good for cave king Stoltz to discuss steel legions, rare earth mining, and bolt-throwers. But maybe the German mines ran dry and empty, so the Stoltz people crawled back to the surface with this new business plan of… morally harassing orcses, wizards, and little Chinese girls alike. Germany is a beaten, crushed, debilitated US-occupied nation. It should not exist in this form. But the victorious Western allies did not release these poor wretched people. Instead, they decided to chain them to the BRD regime [Federal Republic of Deutschland] and tell lies about how great it is to change from a glorious 1000-year-old Reich into a homo anal-fixated Iew-worshiping seepage. Watch any US movie and the villains are probably Germans. Also, watch gay porn, German’s best.

Read the whole piece--it is bitter and brilliant. But since we all know Russians are again meddling in US elections, here is another wowser form those evil Rooskies. Trying to figure out Four Reasons Why The U.S. Is Grappling With A Diesel Shortage, they "suddenly" discovered:

But the primary reason is the cutoff of Russian imports. Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. was importing nearly 700,000 barrels per day (BPD) of petroleum and petroleum products. Most of those imports were finished products and refinery inputs that boosted distillate supplies in the U.S. The loss of those Russian imports have caused problems for refineries as they struggle to fill holes in their product slates. Refineries do have a small amount of flexibility in shifting gasoline production to diesel production. But it’s a relatively small amount (e.g., ~5% in a refinery I once worked in). That also means that if refiners do shift production, that also potentially creates shortages in the gasoline market. Some relief is on the way, as some diesel imports are on the way from Europe to the East Coast. But, the distillate market won’t likely return to normal before next summer at the earliest.

Indeed, Russian perfidy knows no bounds. To convince the US to cut off Russian imports--what a plan, what a plan...

START Is Dead.

START Treaty is dead, because of the US exceptionalism, I mean, because of US political class being exceptionally arrogant and exceptionally incompetent, if not outright dumb. Marshall Billingslea is your typical product of the US law "education" machine and political career within swamp. Serving as an aid to late Jesse Helms alone qualifies a man for a serious observation by experienced psychologist but that is only half the problem. The issue is larger and it is that realistically it is impossible to teach US upper power echelon anything because it makes shit up as it goes to experience a constant gratification from own aggrandizement, a perpetual orgasm, of sorts, and one does not negotiate with such people. So, this dude came up with the set of conditions for extension of START Treaty, which, everybody understand the United States wants dead and works hard for that. He spoke to Washington Examiner and declared:

New START is an issue that the Russians are seized upon,” he said. “It does nothing for the United States with respect to our concerns regarding China, and it does nothing for the United States with respect to our concerns regarding what Russia has been doing, which are a series of destabilizing activities outside of — and not constrained by — the treaty.

There is no need to debunk this obvious newspeak, but some retrospective is needed here--obviously the United States, at the peak of own, grossly talked up, unipolar moment in 2002 decided to quit 1972 ABM Treaty--one of the most important building blocks of the arms control system. But here is a clue, in 2002 Bush Jr. Admin thought itself to be very righteous and very competent--a defining characteristic of US body politic. They, and their in-house lawyers and corridor generals, thought that the end of history has arrived and US was well on its way to a complete "democratic" global dominance--a typical mode of thinking, or, rather lack thereof, by the whole highly concentrated cabal of all kinds of geopolitical, military, economic and what have you "experts" abusing their sinecures inside the Beltway think-tankdom. Well, it is not 2002 anymore and some hard cold military-technological realities begin to dawn even on all those career bureaucrats in, now, Trump Admin. 

The reason to a Billingslea's bloviation about START is not even China and preposterous desire to make her a party to this treaty, despite the fact that even if to consider a degree of misinformation  about the actual size of Chinese strategic nuclear arsenal emanating from Chinese themselves, China's arsenal still remains well below massive nuclear arsenals of Russia and US. But, obviously, nobody in Trump Administration ever heard of weight categories in boxing, power lifting and wrestling. The real, also well know, reason for this patent BS from US Department of State is this:

The two systems covered by the treaty are the new Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile and the Avangard hypersonic missile stage, a maneuvering nuclear or conventional warhead delivery system. Three other new weapons include a new air-launched ICBM called Kinzhal; and the Burevestnik, a nuclear-powered, nuclear-tipped subsonic cruise missile. That new missile blew up during a test in August, killing several Russian arms developers and spreading radiation in the White Sea. The last new strategic weapon is a drone submarine armed with a large nuclear warhead capable of blowing up ports.

Here is the real deal. As I stated not for once, and even wrote a book on this issue, main concern is a dramatic shift in geopolitical power balance that Kinzhal and Burevestnik provide even merely in a conventional, non-nuclear that is, variants. Burevestnik (Petrel) is a weapon which assures that no one who makes a homicidal decision to unleash a global war, while sitting it out somewhere in Patagonia or in New Zealand, will feel safe from, as it is becoming known, Mach=6+ justice capable to wait for attack for days in the air. In general, this weapon is for cooling heads trying to save their asses in the Southern Hemisphere, in addition to its already wide range of purely military applications globally. Per Kinzhal--it was discussed so much and on so many occasions that I simply see no reason to concentrate again of the weapon which changed naval warfare forever. Wait for 3M22 Zircon getting to IOC by the end of this--start next year and you may confidently add this too to the list. The issue is a dramatic lag of the United States in hypersonic weaponry and anti-air and anti-missile defense. In other words, the US lost arms race in these and other key fields of military (or dual use) technology. There is simply nothing out there which can compete with something like S-400, not to speak of S-500, forget about Nudol, US has NO supersonic missile weapons, it certainly doesn't have any viable hypersonic technology and I can continue with this list for a long time. 

In one of the more remarkable demonstration of the depth to which US military-industrial complex fell in the last decades is the fact that the US Navy for years hasn't been able to come up with a viable design for a frigate and was forced to resort to an Italian (Finkantieri) design of what essentially is a FREMM class frigate. It is a nice ship and the US Navy made a choice in favor of this ship. These are unprecedented developments which can not obscure the fact, that even with the most of hulls and equipment of the American origin, this frigate follows in the wake of a technological and fighting doctrine catastrophe of a ship-class known as LCS (Littoral Combat Ship) known in US Navy as self-propelled 57-mm gun. If that wasn't enough, latest revelations about F-35 not being capable to fly super-sonic without damaging itself, only underscore a major clusterfvck that US technological "expertise" has become and underscores neurotic, delusional and arrogant statements from US political top, which was, most likely, briefed on a simple fact that the only default position for the US in a new world is to build as many nuclear ICBMs as possible and even this position is untenable, once one takes a look at the US economy.

As is often the case, under such circumstances US "elites" resort to lying and stealing, so much so that even Russia's Foreign Ministry today officially demanded from Trump Administration to stop lying about WW II (in Russian). Daniel Larison may lament the upcoming death of the START and Trump's China "diversion", but behind all this hustle in D.C. ranging from perpetual sanctions' war, to losing one war after another, to killing START to lying about WW II is a reaction of sore losers who desperately want to see and feel themselves important and powerful. Same as Barbara Jean Trenton from Twilight Zone Episode "Sixteen-millimeter Shrine", in which aging movie star still pretends to be a young starlet capable to play roles of young lover, forgetting that she lives not in 1934 but in 1959. I know, reality is a bitch and US political top has neither class, nor competence, nor education to understand that making grandiose demands and statements they increasingly look like clowns or Barbara Jean Trenton. But I am on record, for years now, that most of those people have no concept of causality and that every act has consequences.     

Monopoly Crisis?

An interesting piece from  Matt Stoller and Lucas Kunce at TAC with symptomatic title: America’s Monopoly Crisis Hits the Military. It is a fairly long and substantive piece--I mean it makes the case, certainly. Even I somewhere here discussed China's penetration of the US semi-conductor market, including in military field. The authors make this observation:

Who are these stockholders that CEOs are so compelled to answer to? Oftentimes, China. Jennifer M. Harris, an expert in global markets with experience at the U.S. State Department and the U.S. National Intelligence Council, researched a recent explosion of Chinese strategic investment in American technology companies. She found that China has systematically targeted U.S. greenfield investments, “technology goods (especially semiconductors), R&D networks, and advanced manufacturing.” The trend accelerated, until the recent flare-up of tensions between the United States and China. “China’s foreign direct investment (FDI) stock in the U.S. increased some 800% between 2009 and 2015,” she wrote. Then, from 2015 to 2017, “Chinese FDI in the U.S. …climbed nearly four-fold, reaching roughly $45.6 billion in 2016, up from just $12.8 billion in 2014.” This investment runs right through Wall Street, the key lobbying group trying to ratchet down Trump’s tough negotiating posture with the Chinese. Rather than showing concern about the increasing influence of a foreign power in our commerce and industry, Wall Street banks have repeatedly followed Archie Cox down the path of easy returns.

And while I agree to a degree that monopolies are not necessarily good in many respects, the focus should be on what is highlighted in yellow. Yes, one may create and then tweak all kinds of legislative and financial instruments in order to decrease "the influence of a foreign power"--enough to take a look at Russia's program of import substitution. But in the American case we immediately encounter a purely, not just economic capitalist sense with US selling to China the rope by which she is being hanged, to rephrase Marx. The issue is the culture--the United States simply lacks all required cultural pressures to make the whole thing work. Yes, yes, monopolies--I get it. Try now to explain to most US "elites" what the real war is. Good luck doing this--there is no culture of grasping it. Only US military people, and even then, not all of them, can and do contemplate what is going to happen to them, to their families, property, things they love in case of real serious war. US collective memory has no recollection of massive bombing of Chicago, of the rape of women near Boston, concentration camps, and other manifestations of real war. 

That's the problem--nobody realistically believes that China or Russia will conduct massive amphibious landings at the Pacific Northwest Coast or around Tampa to kill, rape, pillage Americans. There is no land invasion threat to the United States--there never realistically was and that is the factor which plays huge disjointing role in both American mentality and the way business is conducted in military-technological field. In other words, the United States is not really under ANY serious pressure to produce top-notch defensive weapons. Of course, whipping oneself into constant paranoid frenzy of seeing military threat everywhere can work, but only so far, in the end--one has to grow up with shared historic memory of Chicago burning in Japanese bombing raids and Wehrmacht landing on the beaches of South Carolina to really FEEL THE NEED to give it a proper attitude beyond the limits of financial enrichment and bragging. I will quote myself from my first book:

War, a bloody and gory midwife of a nation’s cohesion, largely spared the United States and the American obsession with weapons can be viewed in part as a longing for a missing formative factor of most modern nations. It is in this field of weapons design and manufacturing that the United States ultimately sees the extension of its own self and needs a constant validation of itself as a global superpower. 

So, while piece on monopolies is worth reading and contemplating, the answer lies, to a very large degree, in a cultural field and there is no escaping it. And then, of course, Russia's military does it all through monopolies--Rostec anyone? It does it all and, let's face it, some of the military technologies they produce are amazing and they work because they are produced within militarily totally different cultural environment. Again, quoting myself:

For a nation with such a military history as Russia’s the issue of military technology is an issue of survival. As such, weapons in Russia are sacralized because behind them are generations of Russians who shed blood to make those weapons what they are. They have become a part of the culture to such a degree that commercial considerations take a very distant second place to a main purpose of these weapons—to actually defend the nation. This is absolutely not the case in the United States, with some exception for its Navy, with Americans having no knowledge or recollection of what real war is and what instruments for fighting and winning it are needed. Those things cannot be paid for in money, they are paid for in blood.

Guess what, no nation ever survived the war without state monopolizing it. And that means.... ahem.... monopoly.