Why we can't afford 99-cent gasoline

If you like the very low gasoline prices, even though we are not supposed to drive anywhere, get used to it. Oil's spot price may drop some more, yes (it plummeted today after Thursday's highest-rate increase ever in one day). But production is going to drop. Usually, that means gas prices rise. Not this time. And that is actually very bad news.

Cheap gas and nowhere to go. That's bad.

American oil frackers operate at a loss much below $60 per barrel (depending where they are located). The largest such operation, the Permian Basin, needs about $65 per barrel to make a profit. It straddles Texas and New Mexico.

The drop in oil price was triggered by Russia's refusal to cut production at the Saudis' request. So the Saudis jacked production up to drive the price down and punish the Russians. Well, good luck with that:

After oil prices collapsed in the worst drop in nearly three decades—courtesy of the renewed Saudi-Russia rivalry on the oil market – Russia’s Finance Ministry said on Monday that Moscow had enough resources to cover budget shortfalls amid oil prices at $25-30 a barrel for six to ten years.  

Not coincidentally, both the Saudis and the Russians would like to see America's frackers permanently closed and the United States to return to a major importer of oil, not net exporters as we are right now.

One way or another oil prices will rise. That seems a cloud but actually it is the silver lining. The cloud is cheap oil. Active-rig counts fell this week in the US by 160, year over year, to 722. On the other hand, US oil production remains near an all-time high at 13.1 million barrels per day. Go figure.

And next month may be even more dramatic.

Analysts say that the month of April could see the largest supply overhang in the history of the oil market.

“We now expect the y/y demand loss to peak in April at 10.4 million barrels per day (mb/d), and annual demand to fall by a record 3.39mb/d in 2020,” Standard Chartered wrote in a note.

In the short run, the oil market surplus could reach a peak of 13.7 mb/d in April, Standard Chartered said, with an average surplus of 12.9 mb/d for the second quarter. The inventory buildup could reach a gargantuan 2.1 billion barrels by the end of the year, “stretching the midstream of the industry to its limits,” the bank wrote. That figure represents an upward revision of 50 percent from the 1.4-billion-barrel inventory surplus the bank predicted…just a week ago.

Other analysts have even more dramatic scenarios. Eurasia Group says demand could fall by as much as 25 mb/d in the next few weeks and months. The historic glut means that the world could run out of storage space. “The combination of weakening demand and excess supply is hardly going to be accommodated by onshore storage,” Giovanni Serio, head of analysis at Vitol, told the FT. “At a certain point…we will need to fill all the boats.”

 So severe is the situation that for practically the first time in long memory, "Texas Weighs Curtailing Oil Production for First Time in Decades."

Texas regulators are considering curtailing oil production in America’s largest oil-producing state, something they haven’t done in decades, people familiar with the matter said.

Several oil executives have reached out to members of the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the industry, requesting relief following an oil-price crash, the people said. U.S. benchmark oil closed around $25 a barrel Thursday.

Texas, which hasn’t limited production since the 1970s, was a model for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which has sought to control world-wide oil prices in recent decades. OPEC and Russia were unable to reach a deal on reducing output in response to the coronavirus pandemic, which helped trigger the current collapse in prices.

It is unclear whether regulators will ultimately act to curtail production, but staffers are examining what would be required in such an event, the people said.

Oil prices have always been manipulated by producers. Even so, at the end of the day, demand has always been in control. And now the worldwide demand has dropped like an anvil and will continue to do so. The largest users of petro products - shipping and aviation - are harboring vessels and canceling flights. That will likely accelerate.

That said, oil production is going to plummet because, as stated above, we are running out of places to put it. That does not mean that gas prices will suddenly rise. The huge over-supply will see to that. But cheap gas prices are not going to offset the real pain dropping demand will cause: higher unemployment not only of oil-industry workers, but businesses whose revenues depend on customers using oil just to buy or get to their products or locations, such as hotels, tourist attractions, airline workers, dock workers, gas station owners and workers, the list is very long.

I am not an economist by a long shot, but unless we stop our "insane over-reaction," there is going to be a lot of pain to come that 99-cent gasoline will not pay for.

Update: How low can it go? "How Low Can Oil Go? One Forecast Sees $5 a Barrel." Which means that gasoline will be not much higher than free - and yet it will be also more difficult to find because gas stations will be closing at accelerated rates as oil prices plummet.

Hey, I want to be a Russian asset, too!

There are so many Russian assets being uncovered that eventually, they will say that I am one, too. I hope!

Russia, China, Venezuela - all same-o, same-o

There is the old joke of a man who propositioned a woman by telling her he would pay her $25,000 for one evening of certain, um, favors.

"Wow!" she exclaimed. "Twenty-five thousand dollars for a couple of hours? Sure!"

"Well then," he said, " what about doing it for twenty-five dollars?"

 "What kind of woman do you think I am?" she angrily replied.

"Oh, I have already learned that. Now we're just haggling over price."

Venezuela's late-stage socialism

And so it is the Soviet and Chinese communism and Venezuelan socialism. The difference is merely in degree - the price, so to speak - not in kind. UCLA law Prof. Eugene Volokh explains,

The horrendous history of China, the USSR, and their imitators, should have permanently discredited socialism as completely as fascism was discredited by the Nazis. But it has not – so far – fully done so.

Just recently, the socialist government of Venezuela imposed forced labor on much of its population. Yet most of the media coverage of this injustice fails to note the connection to socialism, or that the policy has parallels in the history of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other similar regimes. One analysis even claims that the real problem is not so much “socialism qua socialism,” but rather Venezuela’s “particular brand of socialism, which fuses bad economic ideas with a distinctive brand of strongman bullying,” and is prone to authoritarianism and “mismanagement.” The author simply ignores the fact that “strongman bullying” and “mismanagement” are typical of socialist states around the world. The Scandinavian nations – sometimes cited as examples of successful socialism- are not actually socialist at all, because they do not feature government ownership of the means of production, and in many ways have freer markets than most other western nations.

Venezuela’s tragic situation would not surprise anyone familiar with the history of the Great Leap Forward. ...

But all is well, comrades, because fairness!

Elections are still rigged

In 1980 a Marxist writer explained how elections work - and are supposed to work - in a bourgeoisie country (and the USA is definitely that). After delineating the tedium and manufactured excitement of the primaries and delegate counting and national political conventions and all the rest of American politics, writer Paul Saba explained how the elections were "Reaffirming the Marxist Theory of the State":

What is the purpose of this elaborate extravaganza? Marxists have long noted that insofar as its stated purpose is concerned–determining the question of political power in modern society–it is no more than a charade, a political sleight of hand in which the more things seem to change, the more do they remain the same. But Marxists do not deserve any special credit for making such an observation. One hardly has to be a Marxist to grasp the fact that bourgeois elections do not, in any way, impinge upon or alter questions of power. The general cynicism among the masses toward politics and politicians–a cynicism which runs far deeper than can be measured solely by noting the large numbers of people who do not bother to vote in elections–is itself proof that the futility and corruption of bourgeois politics has become a part of U.S. folklore.

In Marxist theory the whole point of elections is to give the proles the illusion that they have a say in the outcome and how the country is run. But they don't and they shouldn't. At least, not by the bourgeois world view.

What Marxists should do about this was debated quite a bit before the Russian Revolution. On the one hand, a faction believed that once the workers had cast off their chains and appropriated the means of production (the industrial plant), then the proletariat would be able to vote truly and well because the capitalist bourgeoisie would not be allowed or able to blinker them and the natural purity of their proletariat hearts. Hence, right away elections could continue to be held and this time, dadgummit, they actually would mean something.

But in American Democrat party theory, that day is still a long time off.

Levi Tillemann, an author, inventor, and former official with the Obama administration’s Energy Department, moved back home [to Colorado] to make a run against Coffman. He focused his campaign on clean elections, combatting climate change, “Medicare for All,” free community college, and confronting economic inequality and monopoly power. Another candidate for the nomination, Jason Crow, a corporate lawyer at the powerhouse Colorado firm Holland & Hart and an Army veteran, meanwhile, appeared to have the backing of the Democratic establishment, though it wasn’t explicit.

But that was about to change. Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat in the House of Representatives, went to Denver and met with Tilleman.

Tillemann met the minority whip at the Hilton Denver Downtown to make the case that the party should stay neutral in the primary and that he had a more plausible path to victory than the same centrism that Coffman had already beaten repeatedly. Hoyer, however, had his own message he wanted to convey: Tillemann should drop out. In a frank and wide-ranging conversation, Hoyer laid down the law for Tillemann. The decision, Tillemann was told, had been made long ago. It wasn’t personal, Hoyer insisted, and there was nothing uniquely unfair being done to Tillemann, he explained: This is how the party does it everywhere.

Tilleman recorded the conversation, though, and you can hear it at the link. 

The establishment Democrat party has become the Revolutionary Vanguard of Marxism-Leninism. The Russian Bolsheviks, seeing themselves as the Vanguard, took to heart Marx's instruction that a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat - meaning by Lenin and his gang, not the general proletariat - was the key to bringing forth True Communism.

The vanguard revolutionaries understood that to leap from workers in chains, unaware of how deluded and ignorant they really were, and in political infancy, to the status of the True Communist Man was stupidly unrealistic. So their own dictatorship was a deplorable but critically-important step to bring the long-oppressed and unenlightened proles to political maturity and understanding. Truly fair, honest and meaningful elections certainly would be held - eventually. Just not yet. But trust us, it's right around the corner, any day now. Forever.

Understand that the only time the Vanguard actually seized power was in the aftermath of the Russian civil war that followed the Russian revolution. And the Vanguard were all of the privileged classes of Russia. In fact, the Vanguard must be of the privileged classes of the society that is overturned, because only the well educated men and women of the non-working classes have the leisure time to study how Marxism works. (Well, it doesn't work, but you get what I mean, I hope).

Remember, the point of Marxist revolutions is not to empower the people, it is to brings the reins of state power to the Marxist revolutionaries. Which always means the Vanguard because for the proles' own good the vanguard of the revolution (maybe in its fifth generation by now!) must also be the conservators of the revolution. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.

And that is the state of the political establishment in America today. 

Syria Sarin Attack a Hoax?

Update: A few readers have pointed out that the linked article herein actually refers to last year's sarin attack, not last week's. I regret my error. I plan to post a follow-up soon.

Is Trump being played by anti-Assad elements who staged the recent sarin attack in the hope that Trump would go his usual bananas at being defied?

Well, that would depend on the attack being a staged or hoaxed attack to begin with. And an MIT expert claims that the chemical weapons attack in Syria was staged.

A leading weapons academic has claimed that the Khan Sheikhoun nerve agent attack in Syria was staged, raising questions about who was responsible. ...

Theodore Postol, a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [said] ... "I have reviewed the [White House's] document carefully, and I believe it can be shown, without doubt, that the document does not provide any evidence whatsoever that the US government has concrete knowledge that the government of Syria was the source of the chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun, Syria at roughly 6am to 7am on 4 April, 2017.

 Referring to the photo above,

His analysis of the shell suggests that it could not have been dropped from an airplane as the damage of the casing is inconsistent from an aerial explosion. Instead, Postol said it was more likely that an explosive charge was laid upon the shell containing sarin, before being detonated.

Read the whole article. Postol is a former science adviser to the defense department.

Among the credentials of my military career was that of nuclear and chemical target analysis. I was trained and qualified to determine the manner of attacking a target with chemical weapons, including sarin, attack calculations that would include amount of agent and technical attack profile.

Sarin is heavier than air. It has been many years since I worked such a problem, but I cannot recollect solving an attack profile with a ground burst. Lay persons simply do not know that enormous quantities of gas are required. Some of the problems we worked to attack Soviet formations actually required more nerve agent for one attack than the US had in its entire inventory.

Actually, sarin is not a gas, but a liquid. The warhead's charge is designed to explode the liquid sarin into basically a mist that is borne by prevailing winds over the target area, where the mist settles. Sarin can evaporate into a vapor, but doing so lessens it lethality by lowering the concentration in the air.

The linked article implies that a sarin delivery warhead explodes the way a high-explosive projectile would. That is not the case. Such an explosion would destroy much of the sarin content. Instead, a shell or bomblet would be designed to basically disassemble, releasing the interior container to dispel the sarin liquid in mist form.

However, the pieces  of the projectile simply drop to the earth. The article's photo shows what appears to be an intact casing, deformed in a crater in a concrete or asphalt street.

Um, no. First, while some delivery systems did retain an intact projectile (such as the US 155mm artillery projectile), cratering would be most unlikely in impact. There would be no HE to explode. Furthermore, having also been trained in crater analysis at the US Army Artillery Center and School, I absolutely guarantee that no such casing causing such a crater would conveniently remain nearly intact in the middle of the crater.

So I think that MIT Prof. Postol is correct. And sane heads within the defense department probably have been heard at the White House (I am guessing here) so that Trump has backed off his initial outrage.

Maybe they need to remember the old adage: "First reports are always wrong."

Panetta on Syria: We have never had a clue

The former Obama official referred to is Leon Panetta, one of the most sensible figures of Washington in either party. This is not a particularly well-written essay, but it does illuminate the fact that neither the prior administration nor the present one had/has a clue what the US objective is in Syria: Former Obama Defense, CIA Chief: U.S. 'Has Really Never Had a Strategy' on Syria

"And so, rather than developing that strategy, rather than trying to play a role in forcing Syria to figure out some kind of political settlement there that would get rid of Assad and allow Syrians to decide what their political future is, frankly, we have been hitting ISIS, on the side talking about Assad, but really don't have an overall strategy," he added. "And if we're going to strike Syria I don't think this ought to be a reflex action without a strategy. That's what this administration has to do, is figure out what is our long-term strategy in Syria going to be."

Which is to say that we do not like what Assad has done in using chemical weapons, but we have  no strategy to respond and no national objectives in responding. So to go to war with Syria would be like entering a dark room blindfolded in search of something that is not there.

Furthermore, absent specific Congressional authorization, a strike now against Syria would be an illegal war. Congress alone has the authority to declare war against a foreign power. That Congress' record of carrying out its Constitutional duties is one of abject failure and abdication, does not create a vacuum that a president may occupy to usurp Congress' authority.

Even if Congress did so declare, absent decisive and attainable national objectives to lead to a more just peace, the war would be unjust.

Yes, Assad is a monster. And his Russian sponsor, Putin, is a thug. And Iran is wielding strong influence in Syria also. That does not change the American domestic equation or our Constitutional requirements or the mandates of Just War Theory.

"Decide in hast, repent in leisure," said the ancient Greeks. It's long past time for Trump (and not only Trump) to take that to heart.

No war against Syria!

Related: "Just War and Syria Strikes"

"Friendly fire" is not friendly

This event happened during the Russian war games Zapad 2017 within the last few days.

The Russian military acknowledged that a helicopter accidentally fired a rocket during drills, but did not say when and where it happened. It insisted that no one was hurt in the incident.

The video released on the online 66.ru, RBC and Life.ru news portals showed a pair of Ka-52 helicopter gunships sweeping low at the Luzhsky range, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of the border with Estonia, during the Zapad (West) 2017 maneuvers. The video showed one of the helicopters firing a rocket that explodes next to a spectator on a parking lot.

66.ru said Tuesday two people were seriously wounded and two vehicles were destroyed in the incident. It said the accident happened Sunday or Monday, and that the video was provided by an unidentified witness.

Life.ru said the rocket exploded near a crowd of journalists, military experts and foreign military attaches.

It said a preliminary investigation by military officials indicated the incident was caused by a short-circuit in the helicopter's electric system that resulted in the accidental launch of the rocket. Life.ru also posted a cockpit video, showing the rocket's impact.

Both Life.ru and RBC reported that the incident took place Saturday and say that three people were injured.

My first thought on the cause of the firing was crew error because old car bodies are frequently used as target during range training. In the artillery, we used them for direct-fire training and I will tell you that a 155mm HE projectile will do wonders on a rusted out Ford Fairlane.

I am skeptical that the poor guy walking next to the targeted car survived.

'I was just doing my job': Soviet officer who averted nuclear war dies at age 77 — RT News

I learned about this years ago. The dangers of the Cold War were very real, and in my view, this Soviet officer is almost certainly the greatest hero of the entire 20th century (or longer), and yet hardly anyone knows what he did. If you are alive today, this man is probably the reason why.
Even bearing in mind that RT.com is a Russian propaganda site, this is a good account.

'I was just doing my job': Soviet officer who averted nuclear war dies at age 77 — RT News

Is Facebook a Stalin organ?

It's hard to say that Communism was a "greater" evil than Nazism - they were both genocidal slaughterers of indescribable mercilessness. The only real difference is that Nazism had a shorter life. Stalin murdered 20-25 million people and Mao Tse Tung murdered at least 50 million.

But guess which of the above Facebook posts was deleted by FB and which account holder was suspended? Really, just guess.

As Sarah Hoyt observed,

The two photos are actual shots of published by Stalin's propaganda machine in the 1930s. In the first, Nikolai Yezhov, chief of the Soviet secret police is to Stalin's left. Yezhov was in charge of the infamous Moscow show-trials, where "class enemies" were summarily pronounced guilty and then executed.

Alas, poor Yezhov became a burden to Uncle Joe and he, too, was executed. So the communists republished the photo with Yezhov removed, which took a lot of additional darkroom work and re-imaging done mostly by hand.

But today FB can just hit a "delete" button. Much simpler.

Maybe the best war movie ever made is Russian

I thought about posting this on Memorial Day weekend but the fact that White Tiger is a Russian (post-Soviet, 2012) movie made me reconsider.

IMDB.com summarizes it thus:

Great Patriotic War, early 1940s. After barely surviving a battle with a mysterious, ghostly-white Tiger tank, Red Army Sergeant Ivan Naydenov becomes obsessed with its destruction.

Which is true as far as it goes, but this is not just a duello movie of two single-focused, even near-fanatic tank crews gunning for one another. It's not a land-borne version of The Enemy Below. White Tiger is a penetrating inquiry into war and the human condition. The German tank and the Russian protagonist are archetypes not just of soldiers anywhere, but of fallen humanity itself.

Fortunately, you can watch the whole movie, subtitled in English, right here. It seems its copyright does not extend to the United States.



At the very end is a monologue by Adolf Hitler, speaking to an unidentified man couched in shadows. Despite the identity of the speaker - and the screenplay's words in his mouth are reflective of what Hitler said and thought - the monologue is quite thought provoking, coming as it does following the last view of the Russian tank we see, and why and how we see it.

This is a very serious, compelling work of cinema. I hope you will agree.

Update Dec. 27, 2019: David Goldman posted a fairly savage review of the just-out World War 1 movie, 1917, calling it, "the worst war movie ever." The fault is not in its technical excellence of recreating the trenches and filth of the war, but in the fact that it does not tell a story.

...  the audience views the sequence of events from the perspective of a small dog dragged along on a leash behind them. ...

The camera trails the actors in what Mendes imagines to be “real time” through trenches, battlefields, ruined cities, and assorted disasters. Technically this poses great challenges, but the aesthetic outcome is a canine perspective on human events.

Time is represented as an indifferent sequence of moments, which means practically that every moment commands equal attention. In this nightmarish world there can be no drama, that is, no climax. On the contrary, every occurrence of importance to the thin narrative necessarily becomes an anti-climax.

In reply, I posted, "If you have never seen the Russian war film, "White Tiger," I cannot recommend it strongly enough," with a link here. There followed a collegial exchange:

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  David Goldman Donald Sensing, I watched the "Hitler" interview at the end of the film, and it sounds like an unwholesome Russophilic mysticism: der Traum jedwelchen europaesichen Normalburgers" is to destroy "Russland, diesen wilden und europafremden Kentaur." And the Jews, to be sure. Sounds a bit Duginesque -- it makes me very uncomfortable. Man frage sich, wes Geistes Kind es sei.

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  David Goldman Donald Sensing, a similar point is made about "White Tiger" by James Pearce in a 2018 doctoral dissertation: https://arro.anglia.ac.uk/704511/1/Pearce_2018.pdf

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  Donald Sensing David Goldman Thank you, I will read the dissertation, although I am afraid not very soon. Also, I can certainly see how a Jew would react differently to such a film than a Christian; see for example reactions to The Passion of Christ.
  
  I would never attempt to recount to you the long, deep history of western European anti-Judaism, to say nothing of what took place in eastern. And while I am not so sure that the dream of Jeder normale Europäer hätte den russischen Zentauren vernichten sollen, for sure Hitler had a lot of cooperation from the German people and non-Germans in, um, "resettling" the Jews, at minimum.
  
  With that, I think I will watch that closing interview again with your comments in mind before I read the dissertation.
  
  BTW, my German is VERY rusty, please be kind in reading this comment!
  
  And Happy New Year!

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The dissertation David recommends is, “The Use of History in Putin's Russia,” by James C. Pearce, August 2018. I have scanned only very briefly, but ISTM that Pearce cites this film and a handful of others as Russia's attempt to use the Great Patriotic War to recall Russia's (not the USSR's) glory days as a way of cementing a renewed national identity.

The Putin Agenda is determined to reconcile with the problematic and unusable past.
However, much controversy surrounds its motives and policies concerning an already
problematic period that divides the population and ruling elites alike. There are concerns that ignoring the traumatic episodes of the past will be detrimental to Russia’s development and bring great instability to the present.

Pearce writes that Tiger and some other films "are fictional yet presented as fact."

Not having read through the dissertation, I will not argue otherwise except to note that I doubt Tiger's Russian audience really swallowed that the white Tiger tank was historically genuine or that the movie's Russian hero could literally mind-meld with destroyed T-34s. That the movie does serve such a purpose in Russia as Pearce describes, though, I do not dispute.

That said, Pearce could have cast a wider net. While his dissertation is certainly not a lengthy movie review, some other candidates that might have illustrated his point better are:

• Tanks for Stalin, 2018

• 1940. A prototype of a new cutting edge tank is being taken on a secret mission to Moscow, to Comrade Stalin. Soon the cross-country run turns into a ruthless race.

• Battery Number One, 2018

• The film takes place in August 1944 when Soviet troops are moving through eastern Poland. Under orders to ensure safe passage for the army over a bridge near an abandoned monastery, Lieutenant Egorov and his battalion discover a makeshift orphanage for deaf-mute children hiding in the monastery with their teacher Eve, and are faced with the dilemma of compromising the refugees or executing their orders blindly.

• The Dawns Here Are Quiet, 2015, a four-part TV series

• Based on the eponymous book by Boris Vasilyev, the film is set in Karelia (North-West of Russia, near Finland) in 1941 during WWII. In a beautiful and quiet wilderness far from the front-line there is an anti-aircraft artillery point, where corporal Vaskov is stationed with a group of many young women in training. One of the women while sneaking from camp to visit her young son sees two German paratroopers. Vaskov takes five of the women to stop the two paratroopers, but finds sixteen paratroopers instead, leaving the small group of patriots to engage the enemy in an unequal fight. 

And for good measure, a leap back to World War 1 with 2015's Battalion.

February 1917 revolution has affected mode of life in Russia and changed the course of Great War. Monarch has abdicated. In trenches, were the confrontation with Germans lasts for several years, Bolsheviks are very active with their propaganda. They call for making peace with enemy. Russian officers can actually do nothing without approval of so-called Soldiers Committees. The army is just near the stage of complete degradation. By order of Russian Provisional Government, attempting to strengthen the spirit, the female Death Battalion is established. In charge of the Battalion - Cavalier of St. George Maria Bochkareva. Death Battalion give the lead of courage, fortitude and composure, stiffen the spirit of soldiers and prove, that each of the female hero is worthy of the Warrior Title.

There is an historical nugget in each of these, though perhaps in a way that a McDonald's chicken nugget represents a whole chicken. Though most take place during the USSR era, the character emphasis is on Russians rather than the multiple ethnicities and nationalities that comprised the Soviet empire. These are, as Pearce observes, movies about Russia and Russians at their finest.

Battalion is based on real events nearing the end of Russia's fighting the Kaiser's army, when Russia really did send battalions of female soldiers into battle, where, as the movie suggests somewhat ambiguously, they were slaughtered. (It seems that infantry women cannot successfully fight hand to hand with infantry men after all, which I sort of covered in my post, "The Infantry Woman Shortage."

Thanks to David Goldman for his comments and suggestion!

Communism didn't fail the people, the people failed it

So MIT Press publishes a "Communism for Kids" book,

... written by a German author who specializes in political theory and "queer politics," was released last month. The thesis of the children's book is that communism is "not that hard," but has not been implemented in the right way.

Ah, yes, the oldest apologetic for communism there is: Communism has not been found difficult and lacking, it just has never been tried correctly.

When someone posted a question on Quora, "Why is communism a failed ideology?" it garnered a number of responses, including one that laboriously explained,

Communism is not a failed ideology, people failed to live up to communism. 

However, the writer did go on to call the whole communist ideology "quixotic" and unrealistic. Although he did not say so, communism is in fact a religion based on the ideology of the perfectibility of human beings through controlled economies. As I quoted a conversation between two Soviet army officers in "Why planned economies cannot succeed,"

"And who, in your view, will carry the sewage under communism?"

The question [wrote Suvorov] was so simple and it was put in such a mocking tone, it was like being pole-axed. . . . Before, everything had been absolutely clear: everyone works as he wants and as much as he wants, according to his ability, and he receives whatever he wants and as much as he wants, i.e., according to his needs. . . .

You want to be a teacher? Right then, every kind of work is honored in our society. You want to be a wheat farmer? What work can be more honourable than to provide the people with bread? You want to be a diplomat - the way is open!

But who will be busy in the sewers? Is it possible that there will be anybody who will say, ‘Yes, this is my vocation, this is my place, I am not fit for anything better?’ 

Finally, Suvorov hit upon the answer: "Everyone will clean up after himself!" The other man responded, "Take Kiev, for instance, and see how much of its one and a half million inhabitants arranges his own sewerage system, in his free time, and cleans it and maintains it in good order." He continued,

"Who, under communism, will bury the corpses? Will it be self-service or will amateurs carry out the work in their spare time? There is plenty of dirty work in a society and not everyone is a general or a diplomat. Who will carve up the pig carcasses? And who will sweep the streets and cart off the rubbish? . . . Will there be any waiters under communism? . . .

"And finally, for someone who at present has not the slightest idea about how to set about sewage-cleaning, like Comrade Yakubovskiy himself for instance, has he any personal interest at all in the arrival of that day, when he will have to clean up his own crap all by himself? . . .

"What, exactly, does an ordinary, run-of-the-mill Secretary of the District Party Committee stand to gain from this communism? Eh? Plenty of caviar? But he’s got so much caviar already that he can even eat it through his [rear end] if he wishes. A car? But he has two personal Volga cars and a private one as well. Medical care? Food, women, a country house? But he already has all these things. So our dear Secretary of the most Godforsaken District Party Committee stands to gain bugger-all from communism!  

"And what will he lose? He will lose everything . . . . He will lose his country house, his personal physicians, his hirelings and his guards. [So for party officials] communism has long since ceased to be of any interest to them at all." 

And that is precisely why planned economies -- meaning communism and its precursor, socialism -- cannot work: when the people of the society are serfs to be told what to do (and they have to be, otherwise the economy cannot be "planned") the directors always keep hold of their power. There is no reason to give it up.

In Marxism-Leninism, the directors were called the "dictatorship of the proletariat." The term was Marx's, but the implementation was Lenin's. Not long after Marx's death there arose debates among his disciples on what to do about elections once the worker had driven the bourgeoisie from power. Marx had insisted that bourgeoisie elections were completely rigged so that no matter who "won," the economics and power structure of the country would not change. Elections were a sham designed to do one thing only: deceive the proles that they actually had a real say in the governance of the country.

What to do about this? On the one hand, one Marxist faction believed that once the workers had cast off their chains and appropriated the means of production (the generators of the economy), then the proletariat would be able to vote truly and well because the capitalist bourgeoisie would not be allowed or able to blinker them and spoil the natural purity of their proletariat hearts. Hence, right away elections could continue to be held and this time, dadgummit, they actually would mean something.

The competing view, held by the Russian Bolsheviks, was that they were the "vanguard of the revolution" and that therefore Marx's instruction of the necessity of a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat -- meaning by Lenin and his gang, not the general proletariat - was the key to bringing forth True Communism.

In Marxism-Leninism, true communism was a state in which material production was so great that all human needs were met without shortage. Greed would therefore disappear and the inherent but capitalist-suppressed natural nobility of men and women would emerge. They would be transformed into true communists -- altruists who worked each day for the good of the people, not for crass, selfish profit.

The vanguard revolutionaries understood that to leap from workers in chains, unaware of how deluded and ignorant they really were, and in political infancy, to the status of the True Communist Man was stupidly unrealistic. So their own dictatorship was a deplorable but critically-important step to bring the long-oppressed and unenlightened proles to political maturity and understanding. Truly fair, honest and meaningful elections certainly would be held - eventually. Just not yet. But trust us, it's right around the corner, any day now. Forever.

So Soviet elections -- and those of every other socialist country ever -- were wholly fake and were supposed to be wholly fake. The education and political training of the general proletariat was not quite complete and if they had a real say in matters, they would only enchain themselves once again. So for the proles' own good the vanguard of the revolution (maybe in its fourth generation by now!) must also be the conservators of the revolution.

The people did not fail communism. Communists failed communism. But then, communism was never about the welfare of the people, but the personal enrichment and aggrandizement of the communists.

This is your hospital on communism:

This is your daily commute on communism.

Or maybe this.

This is your first-class apartment home on communism:

These are typical apartment exteriors in North Korea's capital, Pyongyang. Only
the well-connected are allowed to live in the capital. These are the apartments
of the country's elites.

However:

This is your politicians' commute on communism:

Kim Jong Un rides in his personal Mercedes limousine.

This is your politicians' homes on communism:

Former retreat villa of Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist
party of the USSR, 1964-1982. Now part of a hotel complex, it is located in Lithuania. 

Any questions?

Dueling Media Narratives!

The Washington Post: "Trump’s strike on Syria disrupts the narrative that he is Putin’s pal."

President Trump raised the ire of his counterpart in Moscow by striking a Syrian airfield Thursday, and in doing so disrupted the media narrative that he is too cozy with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

MSNBC: "What if Putin planned the Syrian chemical attack to help Trump?"

A volley of U.S. cruise missiles had barely been launched into Syria before the Internet filled up with fact-free theories about the real reason for an international crisis. ...

A slightly more convoluted strain on the left: Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the chemical weapons massacre to help Trump — distracting Americans from an investigation into Trump's campaign ties to Russia by provoking the missile strike. ...

Lawrence O'Donnell advanced similar speculation on his MSNBC show, “The Last Word.” ... 

“Wouldn't it be nice,” O'Donnell asked a nodding, smiling Rachel Maddow, “if it was just completely, totally, absolutely impossible to suspect that Vladimir Putin orchestrated what happened in Syria this week — so that his friend in the White House could have a big night with missiles and all the praises he's picked up over the past 24 hours?”

The theory was impossible to rule out, O'Donnell said, because of the Trump campaign's ties to the Russian government.

You can't make this stuff up.

Just War and Syria Strikes

Can we frighten this man into killing
people only conventionally?

This is a revisit of an essay I wrote in 2013 when President Obama was contemplating bombing Syria because of the Assad government's chemical-weapons attacks against militias opposing his regime.

As then, I am framing this in the context of Just War Theory (JWT henceforth), a theological inquiry in Christianity going back at least to Saint Augustine, 354-430. It's most robust treatment was by St. Thomas Aquinas, 1225-1274, whose exposition was so thorough that it still forms the basis of modern theory. I have written over the years quite a bit about JWT in different contexts.

Today my main points are that going to war justly requires that at least these questions to be answered in the affirmative, below.

1. Is there just cause for the war?

2. Is the war authorized by proper authority?

3. Is it wise, as far as we can discern, to wage the war?

4. Is there a just objective to waging war?

First, though, there is the question whether the cruise-missile strikes against Sharyat airfield the evening of March 6 constituted "war," or were they military violence of a kind other than war. I think the answer is straightforward, for here the key point is not what President Trump wanted to do (frighten Assad) but the means he used to do it. And the means were exclusively military and violent.

Throughout history, to attack another country with military forces has been seen unambiguously as an act of war. Just imagine that the evening of Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese government messaged President Roosevelt that the air raid against Pearl Harbor should not be construed as as act of war, but only as a warning to the US not to inhibit Japan's imperial plans in the Far East. "We are prepared to do more," Japan might have said, if the United States did not comply. What do you think Roosevelt's response would have been?

And that leads to a second key point: Though President Trump initiated the violence, he does not get to call it war or not-war. Bashar Assad does. To expect that Assad sees the strikes as anything other than war is fantasy thinking.

This doesn't mean that Assad won't be cowed away from using chemical weapons again. My point is that no matter how the strikes are spun by the administration or others, they opened an actual war against Syria. The war may be brief, it may not. Syria might respond, it might not. But war it is. And we must remember that it takes both sides to end a war. The United States unilaterally began it, but we cannot unilaterally end it. This war will not be ended until Assad either says so or is removed from power. And even then his successor may choose to continue it.

Is there just cause for war?

Just Cause of war is the fundamental question, of course. I remember reading a (probably apocryphal) story of a South Seas island native chieftain who after a large battle between the US Marines and the Japanese in World War 2 asked the American commander who was going to eat the vast quantities of flesh of the slain soldiers.

The Marine general explained that neither the Japanese nor Americans killed people for food.

"What barbarians you are!" the chief replied, "To kill for no good reason!"

Historically, Western thought on war has held that war cannot be separated from larger concerns of nations, and in fact is one part of national relationships. "Politics is the womb in which war develops," said Prussian officer and theorist Carl von Clausewitz. More famous is his observation that, "War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means."

JWT has generally held that the political just cause for war is pretty narrowly expressed: either to defend one's own nation from actual or imminent attack, or to protect innocent third parties from lethal aggression or oppression. Some years after the American Civil War, Union General William T. Sherman put it simply: "The only just aim of war is a more just peace," which is a political goal. Absent a political orientation, warfare becomes just what the South Seas chieftain said, an exercise in pointless killing.

Not all JWT theorists agree that a nation may strike pre-emptively even in the case of clearly imminent attack, but since no one in the Trump administration claims that Syria poses any kind of military threat to the US, I'll not address the self-defense tenet here, especially since in his remarks following the missile strike, President Trump never invoked it at all. (In fact, when President Obama was contemplating similar strikes in 2013, he said specifically that the United States did not face an imminent threat.)

Absent self defense, then, the question then becomes one of protection of the innocent. Is that the case here?  Undeniably, victims of March 4's sarin attack against Idlib Province, held by opponents of the Assad regime, were innocent. After all, of the 85-plus people who died and scores more injured, many were children. So it would seem that a prima facie case can be made that the cruise-missile attacks against Sharyat airfield were justified on the basis.

However, the question is then begged whether chemical weapons are so unique that American warmaking on their users is justifiable for that reason alone. The Syrian civil war has already taken the lives of 400,000 people, perhaps as many as 500,000, of whom many thousands were children and countless thousands more were adult non-combatants. Neither President Obama nor President Trump ever invoked the prospect of military strikes against Syrian government forces for that reason.

So what, exactly, makes Tuesday's chemical attack so uniquely objectionable? It cannot be the number of victims, which in war's sanguinary calculus was rather small compared to other attacks by Syrian forces on civilian targets. Nor can it truly be that children were killed, even though President Trump did cite that specifically. Children have been killed all along.

It would seem, then, this administration like the prior one, maintains that the use of chemical weapons by itself was the reason for the cruise missiles to be launched. Is that a just cause of war against Syria?

If the answer is no, then war making against Syria cannot justly be done on that basis alone.

If the answer is yes, as the administration clearly claims it is, we move to closely-related inquiry of JWT - the war we wage must be justly conducted to achieve a just objective, which Trump says is the cessation of chemical weapons.

Here is the sticking point as I see it. By focusing exclusively on chemical casualties, Trump has written off a half-million or so violently killed by other means. Trump spoke not a syllable indicating he would take active steps to end that slaughter. But Trump did call for a political settlement -- as did Obama, as have many other states, ad infinitum and ad nauseum.

But this simply means that at best the war will continue with conventional violence only, and unnumbered thousands more will die -- unless truly decisive military steps are taken to remove Assad from power and enforce a ceasefire. Absolutely no nation is contemplating that -- which makes the claim that the deaths of this week's 85 persons are uniquely offensive simply hollow and morally unsustainable.

Let's look at the the JWT tenet of proportionality. The doctrine of proportionality is simply stated that the means of conducting the war must be proportionate to the goal for which the war is waged. Another way of looking at it is that while the just ends desired do not justify any means to attain them, they absolutely justify some means. The tenet of proportionality, then, is to assess what the justified means are, then employ those means and not the unjustified ones.

Which leads directly to the question: what exactly is the goal here? The president, secretary of state and others, in multiple remarks and interviews, have announced four key things:

A. There is no intention of effecting regime change in Syria by military means.

B. The strikes are to punish Assad's regime for using chemical weapons.

C. The strikes are intended to deter Assad from using such weapons in the future.

D. It is more urgent than ever that a political solution to the conflict be obtained.

Are these just objectives of war? If so, it is apparently just to "punish" Assad for using chemical weapons, and to deter him from using them again, but not just to remove him from power. Why? (I will note that these are identical objectives to those of President Obama in 2013.)

In fact, is punishment itself a just aim of war? This tends to slide the war into a legal enforcement mode, which indeed the president has more or less confirmed in his denunciation of Assad's use of chemical weapons. But that only makes us confront a key question: why is it just to punish Assad but leave him in power - when it was his criminal exercise of power that is at the heart of the violation?

The question of means

"Without killing," wrote Clausewitz, "there is no war." Conducting war is a matter of intentional lethality. In the proposed war against Syria, then, this is the question of means: What constitutes a level of violence inflicted upon the Assad regime that is effective deterrence against using WMDs by the regime again or, in future years, deters other bad actors in the region?

The centering question of the doctrine of proportionality is deciding the violence necessary to achieve the war's objectives while not using excessive violence to do so. To employ too little violence is as disproportionate as to employ too much. It is unjust to wage war ineffectively even for a just cause.

Hence, planning for such strikes necessarily involved a massive amount of guess work on what level of lethality and destruction needed to be inflicted upon Syria to ensure the Assad regime never orders the use of chemical weapons again. But that is a heavily psychological calculation for which a high-confidence answer is practically impossible!

The reason is that we do not know the calculations Assad used to to order the chem-weapons attack in the first place. What was going through his mind when he gave the order? We don't know, although in 2013 the Obama administration said it had intercepted some messages that gave some clues. Even if the Trump administration has such messages, they are almost certainly originated mostly by subordinates and oriented toward action rather than rationale, and are many levels removed from what Assad was thinking, Since making him fearful of re-use is a stated goal of the president, our own calculations' margin of uncertainty is bound to be very vast.

As for deterring leaders of other nations, namely Iran and North Korea, assessing what example to make of Syria to deter them is like entering a dark room blindfolded, in the dead of night in a dense fog, to look for a black cat that may not even be there. Does anyone really expect that the Iranian or North Korean governments will abandon their goal of attaining nuclear capability just because the United States mounted a very limited missile strike against Syria, even if the president has promised would be repeated if he sees fit?

All of these things mean that the proportionality calculus has no answer. It is like a math question to solve the value of X in which both the variables and constants are also unknown. We do not know how much death and destruction to inflict upon Assad-Syria to persuade the regime to refrain from using a single class of weapons in the future, and have no realistic prospect that we even can know. And this is a problem cubed for deterrence of other national regimes.

So the question: Even stipulating that the use of chemical weapons is a just cause for the proposed war, can the war be justly waged when we have no way of assessing, within reasonable margins of error, what waging it will require to achieve its stated goals?

When I was assigned to the Pentagon during the planning for Operation Desert Storm, the first ground war against Iraq in 1991, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Carl Vuono emphasized that in our planning we needed to remember two simple concepts: "Hope is not a method and wishes are not plans." Good advice now, too. To which I add: launching missiles is not a strategy.

This is not a strategy. It may be a means to achieve a strategy. Or it may not. 

But is there a strategy?

ABC News Radio reported March 8 of the aftermath of a meeting between the Senate's leaders and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford on the previous day:

“We don’t have the benefit of a larger strategy, for the same reason that I think the previous administration had difficulty coming up with a strategy, because it’s very, very complicated,” Sen. John Cornyn, the second-highest ranking Republican in the Senate, said Friday after a meeting with the Chair of Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

The Hill adds,

Senators left a closed-door briefing Friday saying the Trump administration did not lay out a comprehensive plan for Syria. 

Cornyn added that there were “discussions” about the legal authority being used in Syria and whether the administration’s main target is President Bashar Assad government's or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

“We ... need a strategy to figure out what is our goals in Syria,” he said. “Is our goal just to defeat ISIS or is our goal to change the regime, and if there is policy to change the regime what comes next?”

There is presently no answer to that question.

My conclusion: The Trump administration has no strategic objectives evidenced by the missile strikes. "No chemical weapons" is not a strategic goal because it leaves untouched and undeterred almost all of Assad's total offensive capability and gives assent to the war's continuation, even escalation, by conventional means and offers no remotely significant protection of the innocent from lethal attack.

There is no just cause for this war if we use the terms and conditions that President Trump himself has set.

2. Is the war authorized by proper authority?

I covered this in my post, "Trump just went to war with Syria." The US Constitution clearly grants to Congress, and only to Congress, the authority to "declare war." However, the Constitution does not define just what constitutes a declaration. As then-Senator Joe Biden accurately explained in 2001, the Congress has declared war when the Congress thinks it has. Hence, he said, an Authorization for the Use of Military Force meets Constitutional muster as a declaration of war.

I happen to be a professor of Constitutional law. I'm the guy that drafted the Use of Force proposal that we passed. It was in conflict between the President and the House. I was the guy who finally drafted what we did pass. Under the Constitution, there is simply no distinction ... Louis Fisher(?) and others can tell you, there is no distinction between a formal declaration of war, and an authorization of use of force. There is none for Constitutional purposes. None whatsoever. 

Constitutional lawyers over the decades have held that varying kinds of enabling acts, such as monetary appropriations for military action, have also amounted to Constitutional satisfaction and, at least, consent of the Congress to action ordered by the president, in whom the Constitution grants authority to conduct warfare.

Neither of these conditions pertained to the missile strikes. The president did not even bring into consultation the senior leaders of either chamber of Congress before the strikes took place. As I pointed out in "The fierce urgency of bombing now!",

Even stipulating that bombing Assad's forces may be justified under humanitarian concerns, what the Guardian [newspaper] is conflating is the difference between moral justification of war and legal basis for it. They are not the same.

Under classic just war theory, both just cause and rightful authority are required. In Syria today there may be just cause for Western intervention, but so far there has been no rightful authority for it.  

... Since the dawn of the American republic, the Congress and the presidents have generally agreed that the president may order US forces into combat against another nation, solely on his own authority, if and only if there is:

1. Imminent danger of attack from the other power, so imminent that time taken for Congressional deliberations would hinder defense against it, or,

2. To protect actual threat against US citizens abroad, or to rescue them from actual danger.  

Neither of these were the case in Syria. Therefore, no matter the moral justification of them, the missile strikes failed the test of rightful authority. This is the president wielding military power not in a representative-democratic manner,  but in a monarchist manner.

There was and is no threat to the United States or to the Syrian people that is so immediately imminent that no time dare be spent in Congressional deliberation to authorize the strikes. If there is, the president should explain why, with 400,000-plus already dead, a few more days of deliberation is unwarranted.

My conclusion: The "proper authority" test was not met.

3. Is it wise, as far as we can discern, to wage the war?

With the failure of the first two criteria, it is hard to see how this war is being waged wisely so far. That the risk of confrontation with Russia has risen, perhaps sharply, seems incontrovertible. However, this question is really one of consequences as cannot be well answered except retrospectively.

My conclusions: Although I do not think the strikes were wise, based on their failure of proportionality (mainly meaning that Assad, not concrete and dirt, should have been the target), I'll keep an open mind. It may turn out to have been better than ill-advised. We will just have to wait and see.

4. Is there a just objective to waging war? 

Well, not yet. See all of the above. But to the point: the deaths and suffering inflicted by chemical weapons have been and are such a tiny part of the overall deaths and suffering inflicted that merely ending their use is not in itself a just objective of waging war against Assad's Syria.

Final thought

One thing the chemical and missile attacks have done is illustrate that the status quo - unending war that is effectively a proxy war between the Western powers one one side and Russia and Iran on the other - cannot be maintained for long. Eventually, Trump and his administration will be faced with doing something other than simply keeping their hand in. The United States will face the hard choice in Syria of going big or going home.

That is exactly is the reason that Congressional and public debate must be entered into sooner rather than later. Going to war against Assad-Syria may be the right thing to do (or maybe the least-bad option) but President Trump initiated it the wrong way politically, strategically, and tactically.

Related:

When Secretary of State John Kerry insisted in June 2013 that US warplanes should begin bombing Assad-regime targets right away, I wrote an extended essay on JWT and Syria, "No justification for Syria Intervention," in which I claimed that not only would such intervention fail the Just War test, it also failed the test of the rigidly secular concept of Realpolitik.

A key note from that day: "Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey made it clear that a few runs on target would do no good, that if the bombing was not be be merely symbolic, it would require a sustained, large effort of no short duration."

What has changed? Nothing. Except now there are Russian boots on the ground in Syria, which certainly does not simplify things.

Other essays here and here and here.

Update: "The Grim Logic Behind Syria’s Chemical Weapons Attack"