Clueless Carly – Crony Capitalist Warmonger With Flash Cards

Carly Fiorina proved at least one thing last week. Namely, you don’t have to be a career GOP politician to come across as a war-mongering neocon and abortion-bashing statist demagogue. She took the stage fully formed as a frightul modern-day Torquemada, threatening to bring fire and brimstone down on anyone running afoul of her righteous indignation and crystal clear grasp of the Truth.

That included about everyone on the world stage, save for the presumably sainted Bibi Netanyahu. As for the others, Putin was to be given the silent treatment and a stiff dose of NATO encirclement, while Iran was to be occupied by US inspectors at “every military and every nuclear facility…….. anytime, anywhere……”

In trying to sound like she actually knows something about national security policy there was not a single neocon shibboleth that she didn’t name check, nor any possibility for bolstering Washington’s military might she failed to mention:

Having met Vladimir Putin, I wouldn’t talk to him at all. We’ve talked way too much to him…….What I would do, immediately, is begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland, I would conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic states. I’d probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany. Vladimir Putin would get the message…..We could also, to Senator Rubio’s point, give the Egyptians what they’ve asked for……..We could give the Jordanians what they’ve asked for…bombs and materiel. We have not supplied it…We could arm the Kurds.

Yada yada. If you thought Fiorina was actually running for CEO of the military-industrial complex, you would not necessarily be wrong. After the above riff, she was just getting warmed-up:

We need the strongest military on the face of the planet, and everyone has to know it. And, specifically, what that means is we need about 50 Army brigades, we need about 36 Marine battalions, we need somewhere between 300, and 350 naval ships, we need to upgrade every leg of the nuclear triad…….we need to reform the Department of Defense, we need as well… …to invest in our military technology, and we need to care for our veterans so 307,000 …aren’t dying waiting for health care.

Ok, Carly has a distinct facility for memorizing flash cards. But here’s one she missed. Contrary to her suggestion from the debate transcript below, the Russians did not just show up in Syria last week because Iranian General Suleimani recently flew to Moscow.

Actually, the Russians have been in Syria since the CIA’s abortive coup attempt in 1957. That was less than one year after the General was born and while his own country was being ruled by the brutal tyrant the CIA installed on the Peacock Throne to keep watch on the Persian oilfields:

By the way, the reason it is so critically important that every one of us know General Suleimani’s name is because Russia is in Syria right now, because the head of the Quds force traveled to Russia and talked Vladimir Putin into aligning themselves with Iran and Syria to prop up Bashar al- Assad………. Russia is a bad actor……. the only way (Putin) will stop is to sense strength and resolve on the other side, and we have all of that within our control……We could rebuild the Sixth Fleet. I will. We haven’t.

Had enough? It’s not just that Fiorina didn’t get the memo that the Cold War ended 25 years ago, and that the massive military build-up she name checked would blow the current generous $523 billion sequester caps on Pentagon spending sky high. By my estimate, Fiorina’s senseless armada and new force deployments would cost at least $800 billion per year.

But that is just plain nuts. After all, at the peak of the cold war in 1960, the great General Dwight Eisenhower not only warned the nation about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, but also affirmed that a defense budget of $400 billion in today’s (2015) dollars of purchasing power was more than enough to contain the Soviet Union.

And that’s when the latter was run by an erratic dictator who said he would bury us; had taken the lead in the space race; had 4 million men under arms, upwards of 50,000 tanks and an immense nuclear arsenal at its disposal; and had not yet eviscerated its economy during the final decades of socialist plunder and asphyxiation.

So why in heavens name would a quasi-bankrupt America need to spend 2X more than Ike’s budget? That is, in a world in which the Soviet empire is no more, and in which we have no industrial state enemy left on the planet, why would you propose to pour hundreds of billions more into that swampland of waste otherwise known as the Pentagon?

Surely it is not because Putin’s Russia is a threat to the safety and security of Lincoln NE or Worcester MA or any other place in America. For crying out loud, the Russian GDP at $1.86 trillion last year was 25% smaller than the $2.3 trillion GDP of California.

Moreover, the kleptocracy that Putin has built is every bit as disabling as the rickety façade erected by the Soviet commissars. In fact, nearly the entire Russian economy is a bloated artifact of the central bank driven global credit boom that is now coming to a screeching halt. Subtract oil and gas, minerals and metals, fertilizer and wheat, and like and similar natural resources and industrial commodities from the Russian economy, and you do not have much left.

Stated differently, the Soviet Union perished not because Ronald Reagan threatened a bad joke called Star Wars or wasted countless billions on a 600-ship Navy, 10,000 new tanks and fighting vehicles, 18,000 new aircraft and helicopters and hundreds of billions more on weapons of power projection like cruise missiles and amphibious landing craft.

No, the Evil Empire collapsed on its own weight; it was a victim of the very central planning and socialist statism that Fiorina claims to oppose.

Yet Putin’s kleptocracy is now falling victim to just another form of statism and its deflationary aftermath. That is, monetary central planning as it has been practiced by the Fed and most of the world’s central banks for the past two decades. The fact is, the Russian ecomomy is sinking like a stone, and has no prospect for recovery in a world in which $35/bbl oil and $0.70/ lbs aluminum are here for an extended duration.