Stalingrad in the information age

 Supposedly Russian forces have surrounded Kyiv.   The comparison to the siege of Stalingrad in WW2 is inevitable.   The German army considered the city named after the Soviet dictator a speed bump on the way to victory.  How wrong they were.   The citizens of Stalingrad not only held out, but with the assistance of the Red Army compelled the German army to surrender after a 5 month struggle.   

     The resistance around Kyiv is certainly not in the same league.   The Germans reduced much of Stalingrad to rubble during the course of the battle.  A similar strategy by Putin's army would be met by worldwide revulsion.   Without all out bombardment at their disposal, the Russians will be stuck with  a stalemate which will be perceived as a defeat.   They have already lost the propaganda war and Putin's overreach is likely to bite him in the short and long term.   

taking Putin to the cleaners

         One of the fundamental problems facing the democracies of the west when taking on the kleptocracy that is today's Russia is an unwillingness to use Putin's corruption against him.

        In today's NYT, Paul Krugman lays out the case for and against hitting the Russians where it hurts, namely in their wallets.   Putin is reputedly the world's richest man with most of the money tied up in overseas accounts.   Going after his wealth as well as that of his fellow kleptocrats is seemingly a no-brainer.   However, in order to do that, the west must confront its complicity in this corruption and its own oligarchy.   That is one reason the Biden administration is tip toeing around the direct confrontation with Putin and his ill gotten gains.

Are we all Ukrainians now?

        So it begins.   The most dangerous tyrant since Adolph Hitler has unleashed the full conventional military might at his disposal on the people of Ukraine.   I believe Putin's plan is to fully occupy the country and install a puppet government.  I also think he will be disappointed in the ultimate outcome.  This should worry those of us who fear nuclear war.

      Meanwhile, the fascist, ethno-nationalist apologists in the US are actually blaming of all things, the Russia investigation for Putin's decision to invade a sovereign nation.   The twice impeached failed former president continues to heap praise on the Russian dictator, comparing the invasion to a savvy real estate deal!!  The Republican party needs to repudiate tRump and those who defend Putin quickly or the stench that will attach to the GOP will be irreversible.

      

The new reality

         From the war in Ukraine to the fight against inflation there are two views on any given subject.   The first, held mainly by people who are interested in evidence based policy, is to evaluate proposals on any given policy by its merits.   The second is to judge policy based on ideology.   The former view is held by most Democrats, the latter by virtually all Republicans.

      A couple of examples;  tRump's tax cut in 2017 was widely praised by economists who would have had the mother of all hissy fits if the same policy was introduced by a Dem.  The second example is the current crisis in Ukraine.   The Biden administration has supported a fellow democracy, while the Republican opposition has mostly lined up on the side of the Putin autocracy, aka, Russia.  

     Today's GOP is defined by support of autocratic talking points and dedicated to increasing the income inequality gap.  Full stop.

Words matter

      All major news outlets have reported Putin "has ordered troops into Ukraine".   As one of my favorite bloggers, Kevin Drum, points out, ordering troops into an adjacent country without its permission is an invasion.   Words matter.

Holding our collective breath

          According to most western media reports, Russia is days or even hours away from invading Ukrainian territory in the most blatant display of naked aggression since the Shrub's administration invaded Iraq in 2002.   The pretexts are not too much different in both cases.   The Bushies used Colin Powell's reputation to put a gloss of respectability on the invasion.   Vladimir Putin seemingly cares little for the approbation of the West.

       Russian separatists in two breakaway  "republics" on the eastern border of Russia and Ukraine are firing on their own people and blaming the Ukraine military as a forerunner to Russian military invasion.  This is Putin's war and as in 1914, a minor miscalculation could turn a brushfire  into a worldwide conflagration.   Let's hope and pray cooler heads prevail.

The price of gasoline and political fortunes

        Despite polls showing most Americans remain upbeat about their own economic situations, many of us feel the rest of their fellows are not doing well.   It seems to me it all comes down to the price of gasoline at the pump.   From its nadir during the peak of the Covid 19 shutdown, the price of gas is up by a $1.50/gallon as I write this.   Filling up a gas guzzling pickup can conceivably set you back 40 dollars or more.  For those who use a couple of tanks per week, this adds up in a hurry.   You can cut back on many items in a pinch, but for many, there is no substitute for gas.

       In absolute terms, gas is still cheap compared to many periods of time since the early 1980s, but cheap gas encourages gas guzzlers and environmental havoc.   Electric vehicles will eventually wean us away from petroleum, but in the meantime, the political fortunes of Democrats and Republicans will be tied to the per gallon cost of gasoline.

Drum along the Don

         Anyone following the crisis manufactured by Vladimir Putin to intimidate or conquer Ukraine knows Putin is an opportunist who is hell bent on reassembling the old Soviet Union.  He considers the fall of the communist state the single biggest tragedy of the 20th century.  Tell that to the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust!

       Regardless of the spurious arguments Putin is making for his aggression, the warmongers on both sides are cheering him on, albeit silently in this country.   War is always good for business.   Witness the stories on the "babushka brigade".   Grandmothers training to fire AK-47s is the sort of feel good story purveyors of armaments love.   

       The only body which may have had a chance to avert the violent overthrow of Ukraine, the United Nations, is a toothless tiger thanks to the organization's founders' reluctance to give it any enforcement powers.   America is mainly responsible for this fiasco.   It's a heads I win, tails you lose situation .

Smoke and Fire

       Thanks to the far right media ecosystem which includes Fox News, Newsmax and OAN, supporters of Donald tRump have a continuous stream of mostly debunked news to freak out over nearly every day.   The latest is coming from the moribund investigation by John Durham into the origins of the Mueller probe of the tRump campaign's ties to Russia.   After nearly 2 years, Durham was only able to indict a lawyer connected with the Clinton campaign for "lying" to the FBI when presenting them with evidence that servers in tRump tower were communicating with servers of a bank in Russia.  He said he came forward as a private citizen but Durham alleges he was  a Clinton operative.   From this slender thread, the conspiracy theorists have already claimed this is evidence  Hilary will be running for President in 2024!

      Meanwhile, the January 6 Select Committee in the House has amassed a mountain of verifiable evidence that tRump and a gaggle of associates plotted to overthrow the lawfully elected president in the wake of the 2020 election.   Needless to say, the sounds of crickets are coming from Faux News, etc.  One of these stories is smoke and one is fire.  You decide.

The new Civil War

       In today's NYT, Jamelle Bouie takes on the doomsayers who claim another Civil War in America is all but inevitable.   The  January 6 attack on the Capitol by right wing extremists is often cited by pundits as evidence of the inevitability of a war of secession.  

       Bouie gives a little history lesson regarding the origins of the Confederacy to act as a corrective.   The Civil War was driven by King Cotton and the fact it could only be produced at that time by a slave economy.   The constriction of slavery to the South and the impoverishment of the soil by the continuous planting of cotton in the region led southern planters to gamble on secession as a way to perpetuate the slaveholding economy.

      Nothing similar exists in today's America.  Despite the disparity between the 1% and the rest of us, I think it is safe to assume plutocrats such as Jeff Bezos will not be taking up arms against the rest of us in the name of economic supremacy.   There are haters out there, and people who would try to roll back the tide of demography, but Bouie thinks their  numbers and fervor are doubtful.

Back to blogging

      After a two week hiatus, the blog is back!   One of the perks of retirement is to do things on a whim, especially if a recent knee operation had basically confined me to a recliner for 6 weeks.  I plowed through nearly 12,000 pages of the Wheel of Time fantasy series by Robert Jordan with an assist from Brandon Sanderson after Jordan's death.   The prose was certainly not deathless, but it was engaging enough to take my mind off the healing process.

     Meanwhile, in what could be a blueprint for social unrest in the US, truckers in Canada are clogging the streets in Ottawa and snarling the border crossing between Windsor and Detroit.   It turns out the supposed protest over government vaccine mandates is overblown.  90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated, so this is a fringe movement and much of its support is coming from right wing groups in America.  In a familiar gambit, the truckers and supporters are calling for the recently elected liberal government to be overthrown.   The Ambassador bridge has been cleared, so only the Ottawa protestors remain.   Despite the best efforts of Faux News and the right wingnuts,  this entire "protest" has been a sideshow.   I doubt American truckers will participate in similar performance art on this side of the border, since they lack the liberal benefits most Canadians take for granted.

Gettin' Old

        There is somewhat of a freakout on the liberal left as tRump spends more and more time at far right rallies.   The failed, twice impeached former president has increasingly serious legal problems in several states and probably the DOJ as well.   He is increasingly unhinged in public and I would argue he vastly overestimates his support among the public at large.   He will be in his late 70s by 2024 and a health risk for various diseases of old age.   tRumpism as an ideology was able to weld together racism, misogyny and ethnonationalism into an incoherent but potent political force.   However, I doubt its staying power when the man behind this noxious mess increasingly reveals himself as a doddering old fool who is liable to do the perp walk before the next presidential campaign.

The GOP platform

       According to Paul Krugman in today's NYT, the party platform for the tRumpist Republican party is a pledge to make Americans' lives nasty, brutish and short.

       Guns for everyone, vaccines for no one and bitcoin mining to lessen even further the government's ability to affect the ordinary citizen's life for the better.   That, in a "nutshell" is the GOP's plan for us.  Dog help us all.