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Op eds that call for common sense to prevail. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Trump, according to a recent interview, made some boorish remarks about Carly Fiorina's looks .
Let's give him credit for bringing some meaty matters to the fore but the more Donald campaigns the more he shows himself to be an infant parading as a candidate for president of The United States. (See 2 below.)
This from an old and dear friend and fellow memo reader. (See 2a below.)
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I served on the Board of The Wilson Foundation for several years. It is a non-partisan organization funded partially by Congress and partially from private sources. Wilson Scholars are acknowledged accomplished experts in their chosen fields.
The organization is housed in The Reagan Building and occupies some of the more expensive real estate in all of D.C. Though I met some interesting other Board members I resigned because I found it not of much personal interest like so many comparable entities in D.C. (See 3 below.)
and
then there's Syria and Russia's growing involvement. (See 3a below.)
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Because I am outspoken and let the area know my views when it comes to election time some of my friends seek me my support I am always happy to support good people who are willing to make the sacrifice of serving. However, I have always shied away from participating in campaigns where I cannot vote and/or live.
In my last memo I posted information about Julian Miller who I believe is a worthy candidate for a seat on The City Council.
Joe Steffen is running for the Post 2 At large Council Seat and I am posting what he sent me pertaining to his campaign.
Joe and I have served on an advisory board of a local company for many years and I came to know him through that association. Joe is a good person. He is thoughtful, conscientious and the kind of person Savannah needs. Joe has a good heart and serves as legal counsel to Savannah State University. It so happens we are somewhat politically opposite but this is not that kind of race and Savannah needs people with integrity and good judgement and Joe fits the bill. I cannot vote for him because I do not live in the city but I can ask others who do to familiarize yourself with his message and I believe you will agree he deserves your vote and some dollars to help with the expense of an At Large campaign. (See 4 below.)
Joe is on the left!
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Dick
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1)
Black Lives Matter’—but Reality, Not So Much
The movement was founded on a falsehood. Scapegoating the police ignores the true threats to the urban poor.
Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.
— Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
The great lie of the summer has been the Black Lives Matter movement. It was founded on one falsehood—that a Ferguson, Mo., police officer shot a black suspect who was trying to surrender—and it is perpetuated by another: that trigger-happy cops are filling our morgues with young black men.
The reality is that Michael Brown is dead because he robbed a convenience store, assaulted a uniformed officer and then made a move for the officer’s gun. The reality is that a cop is six times more likely to be killed by someone black than the reverse. The reality is that the Michael Browns are a much bigger threat to black lives than are the police. “Every year, the casualty count of black-on-black crime is twice that of the death toll of 9/11,” wrote former New York City police detectiveEdward Conlon in a Journal essay on Saturday. “I don’t understand how a movement called ‘Black Lives Matter’ can ignore the leading cause of death among young black men in the U.S., which is homicide by their peers.”
Actually, it’s not hard to understand at all, once you realize that this movement is not about the fate of blacks per se but about scapegoating the police in particular, and white America in general, for antisocial ghetto behavior. It’s about holding whites to a higher standard than the young black men in these neighborhoods hold each other to. Ultimately, it’s a political movement, the inevitable extension of a racial and ethnic spoils system that helps Democrats get elected. The Black Lives Matter narrative may be demonstrably false, but it’s also politically expedient.
It’s the black poor—the primary victims of violent crimes and thus the people most in need of effective policing—who must live with the effects of these falsehoods. As the Black Lives Matter movement has spread, murder rates have climbed in cities across the country, from New Orleans to Baltimore to St. Louis and Chicago. The Washington, D.C., homicide rate is 43% higher than it was a year ago. By the end of August, Milwaukee and New Haven, Conn., both had already seen more murders than in all of 2014.
Publicly, law-enforcement officials have been reluctant to link the movement’s antipolice rhetoric to the spike in violent crime. Privately, they have been echoing South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who said in a speech last week that the movement was harming the very people whose interests it claims to represent. “Most of the people who now live in terror because local police are too intimidated to do their jobs are black,” the governor said. “Black lives do matter, and they have been disgracefully jeopardized by the movement that has laid waste to Ferguson and Baltimore.”
Over a three-day stretch last week, the New York Times ran two heart-wrenching stories about black mothers of murdered children. Tamiko Holmes, a Milwaukee native, has seen two of her five children shot dead this year and a third wounded by gunfire. Sharon Plummer of Brooklyn lost a 16-year-old son on Aug. 30. He was gunned down while standing on a street corner two blocks away from where his 17-year-old brother was shot dead three years earlier. After the older child’s death, Ms. Plummer moved to a safer community, but the younger son repeatedly returned to the old neighborhood to hang out with friends. She didn’t move to escape predatory cops, which is what the Black Lives Matter activists would have us believe. Rather, she moved to protect her children from their predatory peers.
Asked recently about the increase in violent crime, New York City Police CommissionerWilliam Bratton said what precious few public officials and commentators have been willing to say. He stated the obvious. “We have, unfortunately, a very large population of many young people who have grown up in an environment in which the . . . traditional norms and values are not there,” Mr. Bratton told MSNBC. The commissioner added thatDaniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report warning that the disintegration of the black family could lead to other social ills had proved prescient. “He was right on the money,” Mr. Bratton said, “the disintegration of family, the disintegration of values. There is something going on in our society and our inner cities.”
But the left has no interest in discussing ghetto pathology. Summer movies like “Straight Outta Compton” are too busy glorifying it, and summer books like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” are too busy intellectualizing it. The Black Lives Matter crowd has become an appendage of the civil-rights industry, which uses the black underclass to push an agenda that invariably leaves the supposed beneficiaries worse off.
Mr. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor, is the author of “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed” (Encounter Books, 2014).
1a) Strategic Lying and Obama
In the chapter entitled "The Arts of Selling" from 1958's Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley wrote that "[t]he survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information. A dictatorship, on the other hand, maintains itself by censoring or distorting the facts, and by appealing, not to reason, not to enlightened self-interest, but to passion and prejudice [.]" Which is why under the soft dictatorship of Barack Hussein Obama, the American people may be hard pressed to make realistic choices since they are far too susceptible to the distortions of language.
Logical fallacies are really "weaponized irrationality" gussied up to catch people unaware. Ad hominem attacks against an individual instead of the merit of an idea have been a hallmark of this administration. In 2014 when attempting to persuade the country on his immigration policy, Obama utilized the ergo decedo fallacy by attacking Republicans for their party position rather than for their argument.
Logical fallacies have long been the lifeblood of dishonest politicians and in Obama, we find an abundance of them. A favorite fallacy is the strawman, which is an attack on a position that is not even held by the other side. Obama's strawmen have been those never-named naysayers Obama claims are "urging him to sit on his hands at the White House and do nothing to address any of the economic or national security problems facing the country." Some telltale indicators that the straw man tactic is being used are the words "there are those who say" or "some say" as in Obama's "[s]ome people say that maybe I'm being too idealistic." Then there is the false choice embedded inside another straw man as in his "You can't have 100 percent security and then also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience"-- yet no one ever asked for 100 percent of these things in the first place.
More currently, Americans who oppose the Iran nuclear deal are "crazies." Those Jewish groups who still cannot perceive the existential threat to America and Israel need to recall that Islamic Iran allows lying to unbelievers in order to defeat them. Taqiyya is saying something that isn't true while kitman is lying by omission. Thus, to advance Islam, one gains the "trust of non-believers in order to draw out their vulnerability and defeat them." Coupled with his use of logical fallacies and his schooling in Islam, Obama surely knows these tenets which is why he can blithely claim that Iran will be compliant.
Demonizing conservatives as teabaggers is another ad hominem attack that eliminates Obama's need to actually defend his position since he has now demeaned his opponents. His intentional "targeting of conservative and Christian organizations and individuals for harassment, intimidation, and ultimately for political destruction" shows his mastery of this fallacy. Furthermore, in 2012, when Mitt Romney was talking about economic plans and policies, Obama attacked Romney's profession, thus distracting the listener from Romney's factual arguments. The other blame-it-on-someone fallacy known as Post hoc ergo propter hoc has been in constant use by Obama as he blamed Bush, Israeli settlements, and gun owners, rather than taking responsibility for his actions.
When using a logical fallacy known as argumentum ad antiquitatem, or appeal to antiquity, Obama twists the truth. Steve Hanke at Cato explains that Obama, by referring to the Declaration of Independence, made an "illegitimate appeal to ages past in order to justify his case for collective or state action." Thus, "while invoking America's founding documents . . . to justify collective action" Obama brazenly and incorrectly makes parallels that simply do not exist.
In 2011 when our credit rating was downgraded, Obama referred to Warren Buffet who said "If there were a quadruple-A rating, I'd give the United States that." Yet this allusion has nothing to do with the burgeoning debt. It is an appeal to authority (argumentum ad verecundiam) -- but it is irrelevant what Buffet thinks of the credit rating and serves only to muddy the real issue of a serious economic downturn for the U.S.
Michael K. Baranowski explains that when Obama was elected in 2008, the U.S. imported 57% of its oil. By 2010, dependence on foreign oil was down to under 50%, thus giving the impression that Obama had done a really fine job of reducing dependence on foreign oil, a notion that Obama was only too pleased to highlight. But the 44th president conveniently neglected to state that such reduction in dependency had actually begun four years before he took office. This is an example of a Post Hoc fallacy that Obama used to take credit for something he had nothing to do with. In the same vein, this fallacy can be used when someone does not want to take credit for an event. Thus, an insignificant filmmaker is punished for the Benghazi debacle, rather than the administration owning up to the actual events which transpired.
The tu quoque fallacy or appeal to hypocrisy is the "you, also" appeal that tends to discredit the validity of an opponent's logical argument because after all someone else has done a similar thing. It is the "wave it away" approach. Thus, dismissing the ISIS bestiality that assails us every day, Obama will cite the Crusades, which happened centuries ago -- thus implying an equivalency. One can almost hear the banal schoolyard chant committed by children who respond by saying “[s]o and so did it too" as if that explains everything away.
Another of Obama's favorite logical fallacies is that of oversimplification and exaggeration. Consequently, the actual causes for an event are massaged to the point where there is no longer a genuine, causal connection. Consequently, in Obama's worldview if Republicans would only agree with him, then everything would be better.
Then there is the either/or false dilemma fallacy where "only two choices are presented yet more exist, or a spectrum of possible choices exists between two extremes." According to Obama, either we sign this not-so-terrific Iranian deal or we go to war. He has de facto eliminated other possibilities such as continuation of sanctions or making concrete non-negotiable demands. The most egregious is his claim that American sanctions were some of the toughest and they really did have an impact on Iran, when, in fact, he had actually opposed those very sanctions.
The Jewish proverb that "a half-truth is a whole lie" surely describes Obama's moral stance. His whining about the nastiness of the [Iranian] pact's critics while at the same time being unwilling to own up to the toxic tone and insults that he has employed to pressure Congress to back the deal" is a constant theme.
Regarding climate change/global warming, Richard Larsen asserts that Obama uses the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy which "confuses correlation with causation." Closely related to this is the "regression fallacy, which ascribes cause where none exists." This fallacy is created by failing to account for natural fluctuations in global temperatures or other factors such as solar activity.Obama and his ilk also employ the faulty generalization fallacy, where a broad generalization about climate change is concluded from weak premises, i.e., CO2 emissions hurt the environment. Moreover, led by Obama, global warming "alarmists also rely heavily on the Argumentum ad populum, also known as the bandwagon argument, where a proposition is claimed to be true or good solely because many believe it to be so" notwithstanding the many scientific and credible challenges to their ideas. And the appeal to emotion ". . . compels us to be 'green' lest we destroy the earth."
If we cannot identify and comprehend the onslaught of logical fallacies being employed, then we ignore the real agenda which is that of "controlling, regulating, and taxing human activity."
Essentially, ObamaCare was a manipulation of peoples' emotions in order to initially induce them to accept a set of claims as being true. Americans were told they could keep their doctors and that health insurance premiums would go down. Anyone daring to expose the manipulations became an object of scorn and humiliation, via ad hominem attacks. Yet the Obama White House knowingly mischaracterized the healthcare plan. “More and more people, while hesitant to call the President of the United States a liar are concluding, based on all the available evidence [that one is hard pressed to reach] any other conclusion [.]"
Obama is a pathological liar whether he engages in statistical fraud, i.e., the war on women, or claims in a 2007 speech that Congress did not assist New Orleans black residents during Hurricane Katrina. Yet, stunningly, Obama was one of only 14 senators who voted against the waiving of a provision that would have provided relief. He is a breathtaking hypocrite who projects his own worldview and claims his opponents are engaging in attacks, when, in fact, he is the one doing the attacking. Hence, he can condemn Afghans for releasing killers of Americans, but urges Israel to release Palestinian killers of Jews. Thus, he can decry racism, but continually "plays the race card in order to inflame racial tensions."
From contortions of logic to outright lies, Obama continues to "infect the body politic."
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2) By MYRON MAGNET
The GOP’s Trump Trouble . . .
. . . And how to handle it
You can just picture the impish smirk on Bill Clinton’s face when he picked up the phone late this spring to encourage fellow plutocrat Donald Trump to enter the Republican primary contest, a few weeks before the reality TV star, erstwhile real-estate tycoon, and regular contributor to the Clintons and other Democrats threw his hat into the GOP ring. That’s putting the cat among the Republican pigeons, Clinton surely thought with satisfaction. The flying feathers and panicked fluttering were bound to make his wife’s flatfooted, scandal-ridden campaign look positively balletic by contrast.
But even if Trump is no real Republican, and even if his motive is simply to cash in on yet more notoriety, serious GOP candidates have to show they can deftly take him on, for two important reasons. First, many world leaders more resemble boastful thug Vladimir Putin than milquetoast François Hollande, so an aspirant to the American presidency needs to show he can coolly handle a mere blowhard showoff like Trump. Presidential palaces the world over throng with genuine bullies. Since Trump is a seasoned, uninhibited performer, candidates will need quick comebacks as well as barbed putdowns in debates. But they should also go on the attack in speeches and advertisements.
In addition, Trump has expressed two powerful feelings churning in the hearts of the Republican rank and file, and no candidate can succeed if he can’t give more coherent and civil voice to those deep emotions than Trump’s primal scream (and the party is beholden to Trump for making clear what grassroots Republicans believe but mainstream candidates won’t say). Above all, there’s illegal immigration. Grassroots Republicans simply don’t buy the elite GOP orthodoxy about the free movement of capital, goods, and labor. The first two, fine. But grassroots conservatives (and many independents as well) have no patience with the idea that people should just flow over borders as if there were no such thing as national sovereignty and clear immigration laws. They don’t condone lawbreaking, and they hate the refusal to enforce the law that leaves a five-times deported criminal free to walk around San Francisco and murder a beautiful young tourist at her father’s side. They find President Obama’s imperial edicts exempting young illegals from the nation’s laws abhorrently antidemocratic. They view with suspicion the airy assumption that birthright citizenship means that a pregnant illegal’s baby is a citizen, entitling the family to child-only welfare benefits (not much less than the full payment), and they can hear with an open mind the argument that when the Fourteenth Amendment defines citizens as those born in the United States “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” that second qualification excludes babies whose mothers have sneaked over the border and are subject to the jurisdiction of another nation. And, taking a longer, colder-eyed view than the GOP elites take of the culture of many illegal communities, where gangs are rife and marriage rare, grassroots Republicans wonder whether the babies of the hardworking illegals are going to become Americans who won’t do the jobs Americans won’t do. That they will swell the Democratic voter rolls and change the political character of the nation, ordinary Republicans have no doubt. So while one unit of capital is the same as another, these Republicans know that one unit of labor isn’t, since each pair of hands comes attached to a particular mind, skill set, and culture.
Most Republicans don’t want to round up millions of illegals and ship them south in boxcars. My guess is that they’d be satisfied with a path to citizenship for longtime residents with a good work history who are willing to pay a stiff fine, demonstrate English proficiency, and renounce their Latin American citizenship when they gain a U.S. passport. But they would want this to be a one-and-done deal, with all further illegal entrants deported and ineligible for amnesty, while future requirements for legal entry emphasize skills and education over family relationships. And no rank-and-file Republican wants a single federal nickel to go to law-flouting “sanctuary” cities.
The second deep chord that Trump has struck in Republican hearts is disgust with political correctness. So no California or San Francisco official is held accountable for a five-time deported felon murderously walking that city’s streets, and IRS chief John Koskinen defies with impunity the subpoena of the people’s elected representatives, while a county clerk who out of religious scruples won’t issue marriage licenses to homosexuals goes to jail, and a bakery that won’t make a cake for a homosexual wedding is put out of business? We worry about the rights of the transgendered while our economy performs so poorly that record numbers of Americans have given up even looking for work? We give tax dollars to windmill companies, while already hardscrabble Appalachian communities wither and die because President Obama, on the basis of “science” that is very far from “settled,” has imperially decreed pie-in-the-sky clean-air standards? Putting aside the other vexed issues of abortion, can any rank-and-file Republican feel anything but revulsion at the thought of his tax dollars funding the ripping of viable third-trimester fetuses from their mothers’ wombs and harvesting their organs—andselling them? And no grassroots Republican believes that disparate impact is evidence of racial discrimination, while most believe that forcing suburban zoning boards to approve housing projects for their “fair share” of poor minorities is tyranny. All Republican candidates need to be able to discuss such issues with feeling but not fanaticism: to explain coolly that opposition to homosexual marriage is not “homophobia,” rejection of partial-birth abortion—infanticide, that is—is not a war on women, support for coal miners is not hatred of nature, opposition to affirmative action is not racism.
In Mexico, we read, piñatas in the form of Donald Trump are selling fast. GOP candidates themselves might take a salutary whack at The Donald—as a prime example of the crony capitalism that grassroots Republicans deplore. A New York real estate developer, after all, needs no architectural or engineering skills; he is a political manipulator, a buyer of zoning variances and expedited approvals in exchange for the “honest graft” of campaign contributions or less-honest graft of jobs for relatives. This isn’t the free-market, entrepreneurial capitalism that Republicanism should stand for, and candidates should say so, especially since so many of Trump’s declared economic notions are anti-free market. Howard Roark he isn’t.
The Risks If Iran Doesn’t Become More Moderate With Nuclear Deal
By Aaron David Miller
The Iran nuclear agreement looks all but certain to proceed through the U.S. Congress in the coming days . Whether you love the deal, hate it, or are still undecided, the inconvenient truth is that the durability of the agreement and its benefits for the U.S. depend almost entirely on the moderation of Iran’s regime and its behavior in the region.
In defending the accord, President Barack Obama has asserted that regardless of whether Iran becomes more moderate, Tehran without a nuke is better than a Tehran that has the bomb . It’s hard to argue with this.
But this reasoning fails to account for three factors that will continue to make Iran a formidable adversary. And in some ways, the agreement–regardless of restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program–could make the regime even more dangerous.
It is virtually impossible to separate Iran’s nuclear weapons aspirations from the nature of the regime, its ambitions in the region, or its view of the United States. Iran’s desire to become a nuclear weapons threshold state or maintain the option to weaponize at some point was driven by its desire to preserve its highly ideological and authoritarian character. Iranian leaders are looking to protect the 1979 revolution and create a hedge against regime change by hostile powers–principally the U.S. and key Sunni Arab states–that they believe are seeking to encircle or overthrow the government in Tehran. Iran is driven by a sense of insecurity and entitlement when it comes to regional standing. And Henry Kissinger was right years ago that as long as Iran remains a cause rather than a nation, it will not abandon its nuclear weapons pretensions .
Iran doesn’t (yet) have a nuke, and U.S. intelligence assessments are that Tehran has yet to make a decision about weaponizing . Right now, the threat to the U.S. and its allies isn’t what’s in the agreement but actions that fall outside it–namely, Iran’s ambitions in the region. Iran isn’t a superpower; its allies (embattled Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, Hezbollah, Houthi rebels in Yemen, Shiite militias in Iraq) are pretty weak tea and expensive to maintain. But compared with the weaker foes they face in Iraq and their influence among Shiite Muslims, these proxies can do major damage in terms of undermining political reconciliation and stability and ensuring that Iran remains the most important regional actor in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria–the areas Tehran really cares about. Now, consider that in exchange for time-limited restrictions on a nuke the Iranian government doesn’t yet have, it will get billions in sanctions relief. The exact amount is less important than the capacity those funds give Tehran to bolster its surrogates.
Now, consider this irony: Iran’s primary partner in the nuclear deal is the U.S.–a country that Tehran has consistently used to mobilize hard-line elements within Iran and to maintain its revolutionary character. Since the terms of the deal were announced in July, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has made numerous statements criticizing Washington and President Obama. He continues to refer to the U.S. as the Great Satan. He said again Wednesday that there would be no negotiations with the U.S. outside the nuclear issue and opined that in 25 years the Zionist entity–Israel–would not exist. The regime that purged Iran of U.S. influence in 1979 has no intention of letting Washington back in. For the regime, the nuclear deal was a means of reinforcing the revolution by getting international sanctions on Iran’s economy lifted, attracting foreign investment, and satisfying popular desires for better quality of life. Next year Iran is scheduled to hold elections for parliament and the council responsible for choosing the next supreme leader. Let’s see how Iranian moderates and reformers fare.
The bottom line is that President Obama was wrong. Ultimately, success of the nuclear deal depends on significant changes in Iran’s regime at home and its policies abroad. Without such changes, Iran will not give up its option to weaponize. And this agreement will leave Tehran with the nuclear infrastructure to pursue that option should it so choose. Absent some moderation in these ambitions, the next U.S. president–Democrat or Republican–might decide that negative Iranian actions–whether within or outside the parameters of the accord–would be grounds to walk away from the deal’s provisions.
So the big questions are: Can Iran change? Will the nuclear agreement hasten that moderation at home or abroad? A large swath of Iran’s population is young, and many are pro-Western and eager for both better lives and more connections to the outside world. Will foreign investment and influence loosen things and satisfy the public’s thirst for greater freedom? Highly authoritarian and ideological states–China, the former Soviet Union, Vietnam–have proven adept at opening up while maintaining tight control. Right now, that outcome looks likely for Iran too.
Aaron David Miller is a vice president at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars and most recently the author of “The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President.” He is on Twitter: @AaronDMiller2.
3a)
Russia in Syria Declining Military Capabilities Won't Hold Moscow Back
Although the reported intervention in Syria may spread Russia's armed forces too thin, the Kremlin seems poised to grow even more aggressive in its near abroad.
According to photo evidence republished in a September 8 Daily Mail report, Russian troops have been on the ground in Syria since at least April. Other reports of Moscow's increased military buildup there have mentioned additional deliveries of advanced weaponry to the Assad regime, a military advance team, and prefabricated housing units sent to an airfield near Latakia. On September 4, President Vladimir Putin described the talk of Russian troops in Syria as "premature," but he confirmed that Moscow continues to provide serious assistance through training, weaponry, and equipment. Whatever its current extent, Russia's increased involvement in Syria raises questions about its overall military capabilities.
LARGE-SCALE MILITARY REFORMS
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian military entered a sharp state of decline, suffering from low morale, training/discipline problems, lack of modern equipment, and massive corruption. The 2008 invasion of Georgia highlighted what Congressional Research Service described in August 2011 as "large-scale Russian military operational failures"; indeed, Moscow's forces prevailed only with difficulty over a considerably smaller opponent.
In response, then-defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov unveiled major military reforms in October 2008, aiming to reorganize the army's structure and chain of command, reduce its size, and create a lean, modern, and competent force by 2020. Russia then began its largest military buildup since the Soviet collapse, with major annual increases in defense spending that are slated to continue until 2020. According to the Economist, the most substantial of these changes is a ten-year, $720 billion weapons modernization program launched in 2010.
As the reforms gained traction, the Kremlin also took an increasingly aggressive posture abroad, resuming bomber patrols in the Atlantic and Pacific, extending leases on military bases in Armenia and Tajikistan, launching plans for a new air base in Belarus, and increasing the size and sophistication of its annual joint military exercises with China. According to the Moscow Times, when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014, its troops were "unmistakably better trained and equipped" than they had been during the 2008 Georgia campaign (the troops in Crimea were also the Russian army's elite).
UNSUSTAINABLE SPENDING
Despite the increased expenditures and signs of success, a March 2014 Congressional Research Service report indicated that "mismanagement, changes in plans, corruption, manning issues, and economic constraints" continued to complicate Moscow's military reforms. Moreover, Russian experts have raised concerns that the massive spending is being conducted at the expense of economic growth and much-needed investments in infrastructure and education. In a May 2015 article, Russian economist Sergei Guriev concluded that the Kremlin cannot afford its current military expenditures, noting that budget data for the first three months of the year showed military expenditures were more than double their budgeted amount, exceeding 9 percent of the quarterly GDP. "In other words, Russia has already spent more than half of its total military budget for 2015. At this rate, its reserve fund will be emptied before the end of the year," he wrote. Similarly, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin left his position in September 2011 because he opposed the increased military spending, among other reasons.
The annexation of Crimea exacerbated these financial constraints. According to Stratfor.com, the need for consistent and strong military support for separatists in eastern Ukraine is only part of the problem -- in addition, "the increased tension with the West and NATO has compelled Moscow to increase training, military exercises, and security posturing such as combat air patrols and naval movements." Amid international isolation, falling oil prices, and a weakened ruble, inflation rose to double digits in Russia, with prices on some basic foodstuffs increasing as much as 30 percent. And as President Obama noted in August 2014, Russia experienced capital flight of somewhere between $100 and $200 billion.
Meanwhile, Russia continues to maintain a large military presence in the rest of its "near abroad," including stationed troops in Armenia (3,200), Abkhazia and South Ossetia (7,000), Transnistria (1,500), Kyrgyzstan (500), and Tajikistan (5,000), according to a December 2014 Newsweek report. To put this in context, Russia's entire armed forces comprise between 700,000 and 800,000 personnel, with an army of less than 300,000. Moreover, the military continues to rely primarily on conscripts with limited training.
DEMOGRAPHICS AND RADICAL ISLAM
Russia's population has been in sharp decline since the early 1990s. As demographer Nicholas Eberstadt wrote in 2011, "The troubles caused by Russia's population trends...represent a previously unprecedented phenomenon for an urbanized, literate society not at war." The country continues to face high mortality, low fertility, and emigration of the well-educated in the context of overall economic decline; the Kremlin's most recent demographical data (from May 2015) shows little change in these trends.
Yet as Russia's overall population continues to hover at approximately 144 million, its Muslim population has reached around 21-23 million and growing. Muslim families have better health than ethnic Russians (due in part to relatively high alcoholism rates among the latter) and tend to bear more children. According to 2014 statistics from the now-defunct Ministry of Regional Development, the North Caucasus -- a Russian region with heavy concentrations of Muslims -- has one of the highest growth rates in the country.
This expanding Muslim population is likely to have serious implications for Russia's security, armed forces, and foreign policy. For example, internal clashes between ethnic Russians and minorities may increase in various parts of the country. Moreover, some analysts believe Muslims may soon make up as many as half of Russia's military conscripts, raising questions about whether the armed forces would continue to support Moscow's policies in the North Caucasus. In September 2013, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced that the army would dramatically cut down on conscripts from that region, despite the military's overall recruiting shortfall and the large pool of potential soldiers in the North Caucasus. This announcement came several years after the military had reportedly already begun excluding conscripts from that area.
Meanwhile, Russia continues to lose its domestic battle with radical Islam, which has intensified and spread throughout the Caucasus and Central Asia. Most recently, tensions have grown in Tajikistan between pro-Kremlin authorities and the Islamist opposition. On September 4, a rare burst of violence hit the capital, Dushanbe, where nine policemen and thirteen militants were killed. Authorities claimed that "terrorists" who sympathize with the so-called "Islamic State"/ISIS were responsible -- in particular, they have blamed former deputy defense minister Abduhalim Nazarzoda, a member of the recently banned Islamic Renaissance Party.
CONCLUSION
As Russia increases its military presence in Syria, it could find itself spread too thin to effectively fulfill its commitments elsewhere. Indeed, on September 5, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko stated that the latest ceasefire agreement in the east had been observed for an entire week -- something that had not happened since fighting with Russian-backed separatists first broke out. This statement coincided with reports of Russia's build-up in Syria.
Even so, Moscow shows no signs of decreasing its aggressive posture in its near abroad. In August, Georgia's Foreign Ministry noted that the Kremlin had deployed troops to Abkhazia "under the pretext of carrying out restoration works over the railway section from Ochamchire to Enguri." The statement pointed out that Russia had made similar moves prior to its 2008 invasion, when Moscow "illegally launched restoration of the Abkhazian section of the railway and deployment of railway troops to the Georgian territory, which it subsequently used effectively for the transportation of its troops and equipment during the hostilities." And according to a September 7 Russian Defense Ministry statement, Putin ordered snap military exercises in the Central Military District, a vast area that encompasses the Volga River, the Ural Mountains, and western Siberia.
These trends reveal an important irony: as Russia's military capabilities decline, the Kremlin will likely grow even more aggressive in its near abroad, including the Middle East. Despite their problems, the Russian armed forces still appear capable of carrying out limited missions, so using their broader decline as an excuse to delay tougher action would be a mistake. A more effective approach would be to strongly condemn Moscow's buildup in Syria while continuing to pressure the Kremlin on its policies toward its neighbors.
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4)“A Great City Deserves a Great
City Government”
One Savannah Campaign
Together we can build a safer, healthier and
more prosperous Savannah. We can’t build this Savannah without a renewed
commitment to personal safety, fairness, equality and inclusiveness. Most of
all we will only build this if we work as ONE SAVANNAH.
ONE SAVANNAH
means participation by all
stakeholders, all neighborhoods and all interest groups not just the connected or privileged. I will be a candidate for Post 2 At-Large for all of Savannah;
FOR ONE SAVANNAH.
ONE SAVANNAH
means that when another young person is struck down by gun violence we all
mourn, we share our outrage and we all act together to create a city where no
parent must bury a child because of a bullet. Simply put, A great city that is
not safe will soon cease to be great.
Whether we
like it or not we are engaged in a battle against what the streets offer to our
youth and we must fight for their hearts and minds with all our resources; with
trained, community-based and visible law
enforcement, with body cameras and 21st
Century technology, juvenile curfews and the proper response time that only a
fully-staffed department can offer. But we must also compete with ethical role
models, with faith, with education and with real opportunity.
I’ve heard
it said that the only thing that can stop a bullet is a job. That’s only partly
true because we ALSO must offer more than just a job but a dream, a promise of
prosperity, a living wage and a
sense of self-esteem to compete the dangerous and deceptive lure of the
streets.
The City of Savannah can be a REAL job creator
both in excellent relationships with local business and in its recruitment of
companies but we must hire our own people and diversify our job market as well
as be a conduit of opportunity for those on the sidelines of our prosperity. We
also must start WINNING the battles for better paying jobs being lost to
competing localities.
Imagine not
only a safer Savannah with a healthy and
diverse local economy but one where YOUR City Government responds to your
concerns with compassion, accountability, fewer hassles and the type of customer
service hard working taxpayers expect. That’s the Great City Government that
our Great City deserves. It is the type of City Council and City Government I
wish to fight for as your At-Large Post 2 City Council Member !!
Let’s get
started!!
Send Check to: Joe Steffen for City Council
818 E 41st St
Savannah, Ga. 31401
ONE
SAVANNAH CAMPAIGN Joe Steffen for
Post 2 At Large
Ø ENERGY for a SAFER,
HEALTHIER and MORE PROSPEROUS SAVANNAH
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