American Middle Class (2010)

American Middle Class (2010): the more you earn, the less you save.

Intelligence

Intelligence does not necessarily confer wisdom.

Six Years and Counting

Maximum Advantage in all Things is six years old today!

Hezbollah, Radical but Rational

In Hezbollah, Radical but Rational Stratfor analyzes the group's capability and motivation for conducting a terrorist attack in the U.S.:

Hezbollah’s global commercial network transports and sells counterfeit consumer goods and electronics and pirated movies, music and software. In West Africa, the network also deals in “blood diamonds” from places like Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and fences illegally bunkered oil from the Niger Delta. Cells in Asia procure and ship much of the counterfeit material sold elsewhere; nodes in North America deal in smuggled cigarettes, baby formula and counterfeit designer goods, among other things. In the United States, Hezbollah also has been involved in smuggling pseudoephedrine and selling counterfeit Viagra, and it has had a significant role in the production and worldwide propagation of counterfeit currencies. Hezbollah also has a long-standing and well-known presence in the tri-border region of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, where it earns tens of millions of dollars annually from legal and illegal commercial activities, according to U.S. government estimates.

The Hezbollah business empire also extends into the drug trade. The Bekaa Valley, Lebanon’s central agricultural heartland, is controlled by Hezbollah and serves as a major center for growing poppies and cannabis and for producing heroin from raw materials arriving from places like Afghanistan and the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia. Indeed, Hezbollah controls a commanding percentage of the estimated $1 billion drug trade flowing out of the Bekaa. Much of the hashish and heroin emanating from there eventually arrives in Europe, where Hezbollah members also are involved in smuggling, car theft and the distribution of counterfeit goods and currency. Hezbollah operatives in the Western Hemisphere work with Latin American drug cartels to traffic cocaine into the lucrative markets of Europe, and there have been reports of Hezbollah members dealing drugs in the United States.

[...]

Hezbollah has a group of operatives capable of undertaking terrorist missions that is larger and better-trained than any group al Qaeda has ever had. Hezbollah (and its Iranian patrons) have also established a solid foothold in the Americas, and they have demonstrated a capability to use their global logistics network to move operatives and conduct attacks should they so choose. This is what U.S. government officials fear, and what the Iranians want them to fear. The threat posed by Hezbollah’s militant apparatus has always been a serious one, and Hezbollah has long had a significant presence inside the United States. The threat it poses today is not some new, growing phenomenon, as some reports in the press would suggest.

But despite Hezbollah’s transnational terrorism capabilities, it has not chosen to exercise them outside of its home region for many years now. This is due in large part to the way Hezbollah has matured as an organization. It is no longer the new, shadowy organization it was in 1983 but a large global organization with an address. Its assets and personnel can be identified and seized or attacked. Hezbollah understands that a serious terrorist attack or series of attacks on U.S. soil could result in the type of American reaction that followed the 9/11 attack and that the organization would likely end up on the receiving end of the type of campaign that the United States launched against al Qaeda (and Lebanon is far easier to strike than Afghanistan). In the past, Hezbollah (and its Iranian patrons) have worked hard to sow ambiguity and hide responsibility for terrorist attacks, but as Hezbollah matured as an organization, such subterfuge became more difficult.

There is also international public opinion to consider. Hezbollah is a political organization seeking political legitimacy, and it is one thing for it to be seen as a victim of Israeli aggression when standing up to Israeli forces in southern Lebanon and quite another to be seen killing innocent civilians on the other side of the globe.

Hezbollah also sees the United States (and the rest of the Western Hemisphere) as a wonderful place to make money through its array of legal and illegal enterprises. If it angered the United States, its business interests in the Western Hemisphere would be severely impacted. Hezbollah could conduct attacks in the United States, but it would pay a terrible price for doing so, and it does not appear that it is willing to pay that price. The Hezbollah leadership may be radical, but it is not irrational. Many of the senior Hezbollah leaders have matured since the group was founded and have become influential politicians and wealthy businessmen. This older cadre tends to be more moderate than some of the younger firebrands in the organization.

So, while Hezbollah has the capability to attack U.S. interests, it does not currently possess the intent to do so. Its terrorist attacks in Lebanon in the 1980s, like the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks and the two attacks against the U.S. Embassy, were intended to drive U.S. influence out of Lebanon, and the attacks largely succeeded. An attack by Hezbollah inside the United States today would result in the return of U.S. attention to, and perhaps even a presence in, Lebanon, something that is clearly not in Hezbollah’s interests.

Then why the recurring rumors of impending Hezbollah terrorist attacks? For several years now, every time there has been talk of a possible attack on Iran there has been a corresponding threat by Iran that it will use its proxy groups in response to such an attack. Iran has also been busy pushing intelligence reports to anybody who will listen, including STRATFOR, that it will activate its militant proxy groups if attacked and, to back up that threat, will periodically send IRGC-QF, MOIS or Hezbollah operatives out to conduct not-so-subtle surveillance of potential targets. (They clearly want to be seen undertaking such activity.)

In many ways, the Hezbollah threat is being played up in order to provide the type of deterrent that mutually assured destruction did during the Cold War. The threats of unleashing Hezbollah terrorist attacks and closing the Strait of Hormuz are the most potent deterrents Iran has to being attacked. Since Iran does not yet possess a nuclear arsenal, these threats are the closest thing it has to a “real nuclear option.” As such, they are threats that Iran will make good on only as a last resort.

So it would appear that the threat of a terrorist attack by Hezbollah is
mostly propaganda, by both the U.S. and Iran (provided the U.S. stays out of Lebanon), than any real wish to do so by the group's leadership.  They could do so, but it would not be worth the price.  Like other international drug dealers, like MS-13 and other 4GW entities, they simply have too much to lose if they chose to stray off the path of their profitable business ventures.

P.R. Failures

In P.R., like other forms of propaganda, believing your own B.S. is done at your peril as described In Case of Emergency: What Not to Do regarding recent failures by Toyota, P.B. and Goldman Sachs:

WHOEVER suggested that all publicity is good publicity clearly never envisioned the wave of catastrophe engulfing high-profile corporations over the last year, laying waste to some of the most meticulously tailored reputations on earth.

Toyota, celebrated for engineering cars so utterly reliable that they seemed boring, endured revelations that its most popular models sometimes accelerated for mysterious reasons. The energy giant BP, which once packaged itself as an environmental visionary, now confronts the future with a new identity: progenitor of the worst oil spill in American history. And the Wall Street icon Goldman Sachs, an elite player in the white-collar-and-suspenders set, found itself derided in Rolling Stone as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Last month, Goldman agreed to pay $550 million to settle federal securities fraud charges. 

“These were real reputational implosions,” says Howard Rubinstein, the public relations luminary who represents the New York Yankees and the News Corporation. “In all three cases, the companies found themselves under attack over the very traits that were central to their strong global brands and corporate identities.”

In other words, there comes a point where spin will not be swallowed any longer. Real world actions have a way of superseding Verbal Worlds.  When one cheats, steals, lies, builds defective products, destroys the environment or the economy propaganda just can't compete.  Politically, the U.S.S.R. learned this lessons when internal conditions came to light.  It seemed it was less a worker's paradise than had been previously believed, and much of its left wing support world wide was lost.  Perhaps, corporations (whose modern in incarnations are as much a product of right wing capitalist ideology as the U.S.S.R. was Marxist-Leninist) should take a closer look at history before their marketing departments lay the groundwork to destroy what little credibility they have...

Level

Level is relative.

Default

Sometimes it just doesn't pay to pay.

Do You Like Plunder?

Do you like plunder?  If so, maybe living in an empire would have some appeal.  In the US, based solely on the level of military expenditures (greater than the rest of the world combined), we live in an empire.  The politicians just do not call it that.  The result is a mediocre empire.  Therein lies the problem: where's my share?

Project Management

"Plan the work then work the plan."

-Project Management (PMI) truism.

This approach works fine if something has never been done before (or long term where the project team may change over time), but for something short term and having been done before it is a complete waste of time and money.  If you know what you're doing, there is generally less need for formalism.  For instance, I recently completed the design of a $1.6M paving project, in a location I had done two others, for 2% of the cost of construction: on time and way under budget.The tax payers were saved about $125K.    (Of course, I already had the surfacing recommendations in hand, which would have added about $20k to the cost due to the high expense of sending out a drill crew for coring.)  A Project Management Plan (PMP), which would typically have been required had we not been able to talk management into waiving it, would have cost more about 1.5 times more money than we spent (albeit still under budget) and delayed the project (which may have over-ran the construction budget as it would have been too late in the season thus requiring the contractor to mobilize twice the crews to complete the work in the time stipulated by the contract).

The construction phase should be even more fun: now I get to verbally abuse the contractor.  Fun times.  Fun times. ..

(And all this time you just thought I was a cranky philosopher with a physics degree...)

Propaganda Studies: "Terrorism"

Terrorism can mean just about anything as pointed out by Glenn Greenwald in Manipulative use of the term "Terrorism":

There's a great paradox in the American political landscape:  the word that is used most frequently to justify everything from invasions and bombings to torture, indefinite detention, and the sprawling Surveillance State -- Terrorism -- is also the most ill-defined and manipulated word.  It has no fixed meaning, and thus applies to virtually anything the user wishes to demonize, while excluding the user's own behavior and other acts one seeks to justify.  All of this would be an interesting though largely academic, semantic matter if not for the central political significance with which this term is vested:  both formally (in our law) and informally (in our political debates and rhetoric). 

Remi Brulin, who teaches graduate and undergraduate courses at NYU, has spent many years -- as part of his PhD dissertation at the Sorbonne in Paris -- examining the use of the word Terrorism in international relations, the law, and the media (particularly as used by The New York Times).  The history of this term -- how and why it came to be such a politically prominent and consequential label, the radically inconsistent meaning it has based on who is wielding it, the failure to create a universally or even widely recognized definition -- reveals how long it has been manipulated as a propagandistic tool. 

The word "terrorism" and "terrorist" is probably one of the longest applications of exploiting a word for Maximum Advantage in All Things.  indeed, it is far older than the Technical Morality, and as such will outlast it.  As a consequence, the label is very difficult to negate, but can become meaningless.  As it is presently overused, "terrorism" and "terrorist" are largely losing impact as overexposure tends to blunt impact.  Hence, as it becomes widely ignored, propagandists will need to start looking around for another phrase in the next few years.  What will it be?  I would bet that another fall back, namely "anarchist" or something more specific like "Islamo-anarchist" or right/left wing-anarchist labels will make a comeback.  The peasants need to be kept in line somehow and old bogeymen are an easy means to that end.

Twenty Feet Tall

A man ten feet tall is dwarfed by the S.W.A.T.

Ten Feet Tall

A man three foot tall walks ten feet tall with a gun.

Atrocities Committed by Intellectuals

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard agrees with my pronouncements that economics is not a real science:

The 20th Century was a horrible litany of absurd experiments and atrocities committed by intellectuals, or by elite groupings that claimed a higher knowledge. Simple folk usually have enough common sense to avoid the worst errors. Sometimes they need to take very stern action to stop intellectuals leading us to ruin.

The root error of the modern academy is to pretend (and perhaps believe, which is even less forgiveable), that economics is a science and answers to Newtonian laws.

In any case, Newton was wrong. He neglected the fourth dimension of time, as Einstein called it, and that is exactly what the new classical school of economics has done by failing to take into account the intertemporal effects of debt – now 360pc of GDP across the OECD bloc, if properly counted.

There has been a cosy self-delusion that rising debt is largely benign because it is merely money that society owes to itself. This is a bad error of judgement, one that the intuitive man in the street can see through immediately.

Debt draws forward prosperity, which leads to powerful overhang effects that are not properly incorporated into Fed models. That is the key reason why Ben Bernanke’s Fed was caught flat-footed when the crisis hit, and kept misjudging it until the events started to spin out of control.

Economics should never be treated as a science. Its claims are not falsifiable, which is why economists can disagree so violently among themselves: a rarer spectacle in science, where disputes are usually resolved one way or another by hard data.

It is a branch of anthropology and psychology, a moral discipline if you like. Anybody who loses sight of this is a public nuisance, starting with [Fed member] Dr Athreya.

I frankly think he is being kind.  However, economics is an ideology, and lumping it with the so-called soft sciences is also insulting.  Lying with statistics is just another form of propaganda.  Otherwise, I agree with the author.  (Whereas the soft sciences are just tools of propaganda.)  Idiot intellectuals are a menace.  Their feedback loops, employed when attempting to prove their idiotic scientific pretensions, are among the most destructive.  Remember the dialectic?  It was inevitable, only it wasn't.  Western capitalist economic is the same.  Their commonality is manifest. The "people" and the "free market" are the same means to their ends.   Twentieth century ideologies need to die.

Happy 4th.

Competency

Competency never goes unpunished.

Bliss

1. Bliss is the grave.
2. The grave is fear.
3. Happiness is something to be feared?