Naked Capitalism has the article Andrew Bacevich: Washington in Wonderland, Down the Iraq Rabbit Hole (Again).

You really have to read the article to see how the putting together of seemingly logical and small steps can lead to an illogical non-strategy. However, I know many of you can’t take the time to read the article, so I’ll give you some pieces that probably will mislead you from the gist of the article.

But first, I’ll give you my conclusion. If you can’t figure out what to do to fix a problem, and everything you can think to do will make the problem worse, then the only logical action is to do nothing. When people urge you to “don’t just stand there, do something” keep reminding them that anything you can think to do rather than just standing there will only make matters worse. Why do people insist that we make matters worse? What is the logic to that?

In describing one small step in the chain of illogic that he was describing, Bacevich said the following:

AT-4s blowing up those Humvees — with fingers crossed that the anti-tank weapons don’t also fall into the hands of ISIS militants — illustrates in microcosm the larger madness of Washington’s policies concealed by the superficial logic of each immediate situation.

In discussing a conversation that was on a PBS News Hour, Bacevich made the following points:

So what the former secretary of defense, think tank CEO, and retired general chose not to say in fretting about ISIS is as revealing as what they did say. Here are some of the things they chose to overlook:

* ISIS would not exist were it not for the folly of the United States in invading — and breaking — Iraq in the first place; we created the vacuum that ISIS is now attempting to fill.

* U.S. military efforts to pacify occupied Iraq from 2003 to 2011 succeeded only in creating a decent interval for the United States to withdraw without having to admit to outright defeat; in no sense did “our” Iraq War end in anything remotely approximating victory, despite the already forgotten loss of thousands of American lives and the expenditure of trillions of dollars.

* For more than a decade and at very considerable expense, the United States has been attempting to create an Iraqi government that governs and an Iraqi army that fights; the results of those efforts speak for themselves: they have failed abysmally.

Now, these are facts. Acknowledging them might suggest a further conclusion: that anyone proposing ways for Washington to put things right in Iraq ought to display a certain sense of humility. The implications of those facts — behind which lies a policy failure of epic proportions — might even provide the basis for an interesting discussion on national television. But that would assume a willingness to engage in serious self-reflection. This, the culture of Washington does not encourage, especially on matters related to basic national security policy.

Just to boost my ratings, I’ll embed the panel discussion below. Bacevich, in his article, admits that his contribution to this discussion was too weak and ineffective, and failed to make the points he made in the article.

Here is the blurb that went along with the above video.

The White House has announced it will send more troops to fight the Islamic State group in Iraq. To discuss the multi-front war with the militants, Judy Woodruff talks to Michèle Flournoy of the Center for a New American Security, retired Col. Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, former commander of the U.S. Central Command.

Naked Capitalism has the article Unresolved Allegations of Criminal Insider Trading Leaks from the Fed.

A segment on yesterday’s Boom/Bust program, starting a 22:30, discusses the still-open inspector general criminal investigation into leaks from the Fed. As Ed Harrison recounts, the Fed had set up limits on meetings with officials in 2011 because former Fed staffers were profiting from these relationships.

If the Fed is not answering Congress’s questions, I don’t know why the Congress can’t just initiate its own investigation. If the Fed failed to make a referral to the Department of Justice, why can’t the Department of Justice initiate its own investigation based on what is already publicly known.

The Naked Capitalism article pointed to the Pro Publica article Leak at Federal Reserve Revealed Confidential Bond-Buying Details.

Leaks from inside the Fed are considered a serious matter. In the past, they have prompted Congressional concern and triggered the involvement of federal law enforcement. In this instance, then Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke instructed the central bank’s general counsel to look into the matter.

Why is Congress being so reticent in investigating this matter? Do they already know who is the powerful person that they all need to protect? The SEC probably has the capability of finding out who were the big money makers from the leaked information. They certainly know who published the information. Was that a criminal act itself?

Patheos has the article Jeb Bush Says Catholic Dogma Trumps US Government.

Theocracy Alert: In an ominous speech announcing his 2016 presidential campaign, Jeb Bush promised if elected president he would favor Catholic dogma over the courts, the law, and the U.S. government.

John Ellis Bush (aka Jeb) is free to choose his own religion, but he is not free to choose mine.

The Salon article Here’s how Bernie Sanders could win: The one issue where Hillary’s vulnerable, and where the Tea Party might be right has the perfect one line description to start you off.

If progressives want to retake government, a full-throated war on public corruption is the key to everything

I liked the fact that the article notes that corruption of the political system was running rife long before the Citizen’s United decision where the Supreme Court explicitly accepted corruption as part of the system.

In Citizens United, Justice Kennedy “found” that government has no stake in “soft corruption”–the billions spent on lobbying and elections–because, he says, it does no harm and people don’t seem to mind it.

This is nowhere near what the founding ancestors thought about corruption. If Supreme Court justices actually wanted to be strict constructionists, they would not be so cavalier about even a hint of corruption.

I bet some politicians are going to say that the Supreme Court will knock down any efforts at fixing the system. So first we have to change the Supreme Court. Under the current corrupt system, that would take too long before we could even get started.

If we have a flood of laws making even the hint of corruption punishable, as the founding ancestors did, it could take years for the Supreme Court to knock them down. While the reformers are at it, they could also make clear that impeachment will rapidly follow any Supreme Court justices who take money, or even vague promises of favors, for their decisions. There are at least a couple of current justices who would be gone in seconds if this rule were enforced.

To set the stage, let’s take a little detour into the preposterous article by Reuters, Greek PM tears into lenders, euro zone prepares for ‘Grexit’

“In the event a solid reform package is not presented, then a ‘Grexit’ would have to be accepted if necessary,” said Michael Grosse-Broemer, a senior lawmaker in Merkel’s Christian Democrats. “I’m not so sure anymore if the Greek government is really interested in averting damage for the people of Greece.”

How much worse can it get than what Germany has already forced on Greece? We know who isn’t really interested in averting damage for the people of Greece. This is a ploy often used by our Republicans. They know perfectly well what a damaging policy is when they choose it. In fact they think it is so damaging that the accuse the other side of doing it. The gall of it is almost beyond belief had we not seen it with our own eyes.

OK, let’s return from the detour to the article on New Economic Perspectives, The IMF “Defense” of it Actions against the Greeks is an Unintended Confession.

The IMF, the heedless horseman of the troika that announced it would stop negotiating with the Greeks and go home, has attempted to justify its position through Olivier Blanchard, its “Economic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department.” Blanchard entitled his defense “Greece: A Credible Deal Will Require Difficult Decisions By All Sides.” That is a “serious person” title, but it is also economically illiterate – and no one knows that better than Blanchard. After all, it is the IMF’s deeply neo-liberal economists whose research has confirmed that the IMF’s austerity policies are self-destructive responses to the Great Recession and that fiscal stimulus programs are even more effective than economists had predicted.

The reason why this ought to be of so much interest in the USA, is that if we let the oligarchs get away with this behavior in Greece, it only strengthens the arguments for doing it here. If we get the chance to prove them wrong in a definitive way, then we can more easily defeat them here. Who was it said that we’d rather defeat them over there than have to fight them over here?

I received an email from Bernie Sanders where he promised not to make the same mistake that President Obama did when he got into office. I have previously identified this exact mistake. My most recent post on this was House Rejects Trade Measure, Rebuffing Obama’s Dramatic Appeal. The fact that Bernie Sanders nailed the issue so well just thrills me.

Campaign For America’s Future has the article Hillary’s Relaunch. It is an excellent analysis. I would take their comments a step further than they did.

The call for an infrastructure bank and issuing bonds shows that she knows nothing about modern money theory. We are trying to pump money into the economy through fiscal policy. We don’t need to take money out of the economy by selling bonds. Although, I must admit, if the bonds are bought by the wealthy, and we take their money out of one investment into another, that could work out well. Even better would be to tax the money away from the wealthy. We don’t need to be paying them interest for lending us back our own money. I don’t think her economic advisers are sharp enough to get the difference. Also, if they do know the difference, they need to be educating the public on this nuance. They need to dispel the myth that we need taxes or bonds to borrow back the money the government freely creates with a few keystrokes on a computer.

Her call for tax incentives for corporations that do the right thing sounds like more giving away taxes to the wealthy. We ought to tax penalize the companies that do the wrong thing, and charge normal taxes on companies that do the right thing.

What she said on foreign policy was enough to indicate that she was overly hawkish. Did she have to poke Russia and Iran? Did she fail to mention what we have done to those to countries to make them our adversaries? Does she feel that “standing up to them” is part of our problem? Did she own up to our provocation in the Ukraine that made this situation the mess that it is?

Here is a YouTube video Bernie Sanders Predicts Crash of 2008 in 1998.

Who was President back then? Did either the President or his wife, whoever, she might have been, pay any attention to Bernie Sanders back then? Who has been warning us about this issue for 15 years, and who has come upon this knowledge only recently? Who has friends, advisers, and contributors, who were responsible for letting this loose on the world, and who does not? Who has denounced the people who recommended these policies to every President since then, and who has not? Who is still using those same advisers, and who isn’t and never has used such advisers? Who has discovered the benefits of Modern Money Theory and chosen a proponent of that theory as a chief economist for the Senate Banking Committee for the minority of which he is the ranking member, and who has not? You can infer the answers from the way I asked the questions, you can Google the answers for yourself, or you can just ask me for the answers.

Oh, and who just extolled the presidential record of her husband without even giving a nod to this havoc that he unleashed? Havoc against which she wants us to believe she will fight tooth and nail if elected President.

I found the video Hillary Clinton’s Official Campaign Launch.

Hillary’s official campaign launch at Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island, New York City. She lays out her vision for the country, inspired by the stories she’s heard from everyday Americans

I present this to you sight unseen by me. I say to both of us “Now analyze this!” To heck with how the lame stream media analyzes it.

Either while you are watching this speech or after you watch it you might want to consider what I have written in the previous posts Why has President Obama been willing to spend so much political capital on the Trans Pacific Partnership? and Hillary Clinton, in Roosevelt Island Speech, Pledges to Close Income Gap.

Robert Reich has posted Why has President Obama been willing to spend so much political capital on the Trans Pacific Partnership? on his Facebook page.

Here is some of what Reich had to say about Michael Froman, the United States Trade Representative.

Froman went to Harvard Law School with Obama, but that’s not the only important connection. In the Clinton Administration, Froman was chief of staff to Bob Rubin when Rubin was Secretary of the Treasury. Rubin, you may recall, had convinced Clinton to pass NAFTA, kill the Glass-Steagall Act, and not regulate financial derivatives.

When I bring up this behavior of the Clinton administration, Hillary Clinton fans go into a state of denial. Robert Reich is a good friend of Hillary Clinton, and he was Labor Secretary in the Bill Clinton administration. If he can say this, perhaps you can give him a little credit that he might know a thing or two about what went on at that time.

Will Hillary Clinton denounce these actions that occurred during her husband’s administration? I am not claiming that she has responsibility for what he did. I am claiming that she has a responsibility to tell us what she thinks about those policies now. It is essential that we understand what she thinks about this if we are to vote for her for President.