A new BBC poll finds that only 11 percent of people questioned around the world – and 29,000 people were asked their opinions – think that free-market capitalism is a good thing. The rest believe in more government regulation. Only a small percentage of the world’s population believes that capitalism works well and that more regulation will reduce efficiency.

One-quarter of those asked said that capitalism is “fatally flawed.” In France, 43 percent believe this. In Mexico, it is 38 percent. A majority believes that government should rob the rich to give money to poor countries. In only one country, Turkey, did a majority say that less government is better.

It gets even worse. While most Europeans and Americans think it was a good thing for the Soviet Union to disintegrate, people in India, Indonesia, Ukraine, Pakistan, Russia, and Egypt mostly think it was a bad thing. Yes, you read that right: millions freed from socialist slavery: bad thing.

That news must lift the heart of every would-be despot the world over. And it comes as something of a shock twenty years after the collapse of socialism in Russia and Eastern Europe revealed what this system had created: backward societies with citizens who lived short and miserable lives. Then there is the China case, a country rescued from bloody barbarism under communism and transformed into a modern and prosperous country by capitalism.

What can we learn? Far from not having learned anything, people have largely forgotten the experience and have developed a love for the ancient fairytale that all things can be fixed through collectivism and central planning.

As to those who would despair at this poll, consider that it might have been much worse were it not for the efforts of a relative handful of intellectuals who have fought against socialist theory for more than a century. It might have been 99% in support of socialist tyranny. So there is no sense in saying that these intellectual efforts are wasted.

Ideas also have a life of their own. They can lie in waiting for decades or centuries and then one day, the whole of history turns on a dime. Especially these days, no effort goes to waste. Publications and essays, or any form of education, is immortalized, ready for the taking by a desperate world.

As for the opinion poll, we have no idea just how intensely these views are held or even what they mean. What, for example, is capitalism? Do people even know? Michael Moore doesn’t know, else he wouldn’t be calling bailouts for elite, Fed-connected financial firms a form of capitalism. Many other people reduce the term capitalism to: “the system of economics in the U.S.” It is no more complicated than that. This is despite the reality that the U.S. has a comprehensive planning apparatus in place that is directly responsible for all our current economic troubles.

Now, let’s take this further. Among the people around the world who do not like the U.S. empire, many believe they don’t like capitalism either. If the U.S. economy drags the world down into recession, that is a prime example of capitalism’s failure. Even more preposterous, if you didn’t like George W. Bush, his ways and his cronies, and Obama is something of a relief, then you don’t like capitalism and you do like socialism.

Another point of view misunderstands the idea of capitalism itself. It is not about creating economic structures that benefit capital at the expense of labor or culture or religion. It is about a system that protects the rights of everyone and serves the common good. Capitalism is just the name that happened to be identified with this system. If you want to call freedom a banana, fine. What matters is not words but ideas.

I do know that none of these messed-up definitions of capitalism follow. You know this too. But for the world at large, serious ideological analytics are not the animating force of daily life. Many people attach themselves to vague slogans.

Further, as Rothbard has forcefully argued, free-market capitalism serves no more than a symbolic purpose for the Republican Party and for conservatives. Economic liberty is the utopia that they keep promising to bring us, pending the higher priority of blowing up foreign peoples, jailing political dissidents, crushing the left wing on campus, and routing the Democrats.

Once all of this is done, they say, then they will get to the instituting of a free-market economic system. Of course, that day never arrives, and it is not supposed to. Capitalism serves the Republicans the way Communism served Stalin: a symbolic distraction to keep you hoping, voting, and coughing up money.

All of which leaves true capitalism – a product of the voluntary society and the sum total of all the exchanges and cooperative acts of people all over the world – with few actual intellectual defenders. They are growing, but the educational work we need to do is daunting, and we are facing the most powerful forces in the world.

There is nothing new in this. In the history of the world, freedom is the exception, not the rule. It must be fought for anew in every generation. Its enemies are everywhere, but the leading enemy is ignorance. For this reason, the main weapon we have at our disposal is education.

Education includes explaining that socialism is an unworkable idea. There is nothing better than Ludwig von Mises’s 1922 book Socialism, a comprehensive presentation of the fallacy of the socialist idea. Another essential work is The Black Book of Communism. Here we have a wake-up call that shows that the dream of socialism is actually a bloody nightmare.

Then there is the issue of the positive case for capitalism. One can do no better than Mises’s own Human Action, which is not likely to ever be surpassed as a treatise on the free economy. True, it is not for everyone. And that’s fine. There are many primers out there too.

The fashion for socialism and the opposition to capitalism should alarm every lover of freedom the world over. We have our jobs cut out for us, but with numbers this bad, it is not difficult to make a difference. Every blow you can land for free markets helps protect freedom from its enemies.

Regards,
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

November 13, 2009

Editor’s Note: This article orginally appeared as “The Triumph of Socialism” on LewRockwell.com. To view the original article, please click here.

The Triumph of Socialism, the Misunderstanding of Capitalism was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

Right now, Detroit is as close as any city in America to becoming a food desert, not just another metropolis like Chicago, Philadelphia, or Cleveland with a bunch of small- and medium-sized food deserts scattered about, but nearly a full-scale, citywide food desert. (A food desert is defined by those who study them as a locality from which healthy food is more than twice as far away as unhealthy food, or where the distance to a bag of potato chips is half the distance to a head of lettuce.) About 80 percent of the residents of Detroit buy their food at the one thousand convenience stores, party stores, liquor stores, and gas stations in the city. There is such a dire shortage of protein in the city that Glemie Dean Beasley, a seventy-year-old retired truck driver, is able to augment his Social Security by selling raccoon carcasses (twelve dollars a piece, serves a family of four) from animals he has treed and shot at undisclosed hunting grounds around the city. Pelts are ten dollars each. Pheasants are also abundant in the city and are occasionally harvested for dinner.

Detroiters who live close enough to suburban borders to find nearby groceries carrying fresh fruit, meat, and vegetables are a small minority of the population. The health consequences of food deserts are obvious and dire. Diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, and obesity are chronic in Detroit, and life expectancy is measurably lower than in any American city.

Not so long ago, there were five produce-carrying grocery chains—Kroger, A&P, Farmer Jack, Wrigley, and Meijer—competing vigorously for the Detroit food market. Today there are none. Nor is there a single WalMart or Costco in the city. Specialty grocer Trader Joe’s just turned down an attractive offer to open an outlet in relatively safe and prosperous midtown Detroit; a rapidly declining population of chronically poor consumers is not what any retailer is after. High employee turnover, loss from theft, and cost of security are also cited by chains as reasons to leave or avoid Detroit. So it is unlikely grocers will ever return, despite the tireless flirtations of City Hall, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Michigan Food and Beverage Association. There is a fabulous once-a-week market, the largest of its kind in the country, on the east side that offers a wide array of fresh meat, eggs, fruit, and vegetables. But most people I saw there on an early April Saturday arrived in well polished SUVs from the suburbs. So despite the Eastern Market, in-city Detroiters are still left with the challenge of finding new ways to feed themselves a healthy meal.

One obvious solution is to grow their own, and the urban backyard garden boom that is sweeping the nation has caught hold in Detroit, particularly in neighborhoods recently settled by immigrants from agrarian cultures of Laos and Bangladesh, who are almost certain to become major players in an agrarian Detroit. Add to that the five hundred or so twenty-by-twenty-foot community plots and a handful of three- to ten-acre farms cultured by church and non-profit groups, and during its four-month growing season, Detroit is producing somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of its food supply inside city limits—more than most American cities, but nowhere near enough to allay the food desert problem. About 3 percent of the groceries sold at the Eastern Market are homegrown; the rest are brought into Detroit by a handful of peri-urban farmers and about one hundred and fifty freelance food dealers who buy their produce from Michigan farms between thirty and one hundred miles from the city and truck it into the market.

There are more visionaries in Detroit than in most Rust-Belt cities, and thus more visions of a community rising from the ashes of a moribund industry to become, if not an urban paradise, something close to it. The most intriguing visionaries in Detroit, at least the ones who drew me to the city, were those who imagine growing food among the ruins—chard and tomatoes on vacant lots (there are over 103,000 in the city, sixty thousand owned by the city), orchards on former school grounds, mushrooms in open basements, fish in abandoned factories, hydroponics in bankrupt department stores, livestock grazing on former golf courses, high-rise farms in old hotels, vermiculture, permaculture, hydroponics, aquaponics, waving wheat where cars were once test-driven, and winter greens sprouting inside the frames of single-story bungalows stripped of their skin and re-sided with Plexiglas—a homemade greenhouse. Those are just a few of the agricultural technologies envisioned for the urban prairie Detroit has become.

There are also proposals on the mayor’s desk to rezone vast sections A-something (“A” for agriculture), and a proposed master plan that would move the few people residing in lonely, besotted neighborhoods into Detroit’s nine loosely defined villages and turn the rest of the city into open farmland. An American Institute of Architects panel concludes that all Detroit’s residents could fit comfortably in fifty square miles of land. Much of the remaining ninety square miles could be farmed. Were that to happen, and a substantial investment was made in greenhouses, vertical farms, and aquaponic systems, Detroit could be producing protein and fibre 365 days a year and soon become the first and only city in the world to produce close to 100 percent of its food supply within its city limits. No semis hauling groceries, no out-of-town truck farmers, no food dealers. And no chain stores need move back. Everything eaten in the city could be grown in the city and distributed to locally owned and operated stores and co-ops. I met no one in Detroit who believed that was impossible, but only a few who believed it would happen. It could, but not without a lot of political and community will.

There are a few cities in the world that grow and provide about half their total food supply within their urban and peri-urban regions—Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Havana, Cuba; Hanoi, Vietnam; Dakar, Senegal; Rosario, Argentina; Cagayan de Oro in the Philippines; and, my personal favorite, Cuenca, Equador—all of which have much longer growing seasons than Detroit. However, those cities evolved that way, almost unintentionally. They are, in fact, about where Detroit was agriculturally around one hundred and fifty years ago. Half of them will almost surely drop under 50 percent sufficiency within the next two decades as industry subsumes cultivated land to build factories (à la China). Because of its unique situation, Detroit could come close to being 100 percent self-sufficient.

First, the city lies on one hundred and forty square miles of former farmland. Manhattan, Boston, and San Francisco could be placed inside the borders of Detroit with room to spare, and the population is about the same as the smallest of those cities, San Francisco: eight hundred thousand. And that number is still declining from a high of two million in the mid-nineteen fifties. Demographers expect Detroit’s population to level off somewhere between five hundred thousand and six hundred thousand by 2025. Right now there is about forty square miles of unoccupied open land in the city, the area of San Francisco, and that landmass could be doubled by moving a few thousand people out of hazardous firetraps into affordable housing in the eight villages. As I drove around the city, I saw many full-sized blocks with one, two, or three houses on them, many already burned out and abandoned. The ones that weren’t would make splendid farmhouses.

As Detroit was built on rich agricultural land, the soil beneath the city is fertile and arable. Certainly some of it is contaminated with the wastes of heavy industry, but not so badly that it’s beyond remediation. In fact, phyto-remediation, using certain plants to remove toxic chemicals permanently from the soil, is already practiced in parts of the city. And some of the plants used for remediation can be readily converted to biofuels. Others can be safely fed to livestock.

Leading the way in Detroit’s soil remediation is Malik Yakini, owner of the Black Star Community Book Store and founder of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. Yakini and his colleagues begin the remediation process by removing abandoned house foundations and toxic debris from vacated industrial sites. Often that is all that need be done to begin farming. Throw a little compost on the ground, turn it in, sow some seeds, and water it. Water in Detroit is remarkably clean and plentiful.

Although Detroiters have been growing produce in the city since its days as an eighteenth-century French trading outpost, urban farming was given a major boost in the nineteen eighties by a network of African-American elders calling themselves the “Gardening Angels.” As migrants from the rural South, where many had worked as small farmers and field hands, they brought agrarian skills to vacant lots and abandoned industrial sites of the city, and set out to reconnect their descendants, children of asphalt, to the Earth, and teach them that useful work doesn’t necessarily mean getting a job in a factory.

Thirty years later, Detroit has an eclectic mix of agricultural systems, ranging from three-foot window boxes growing a few heads of lettuce to a large-scale farm run by The Catherine Ferguson Academy, a home and school for pregnant girls that not only produces a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, but also raises chickens, geese, ducks, bees, rabbits, and milk goats.

Across town, Capuchin Brother Rick Samyn manages a garden that not only provides fresh fruits and vegetables to city soup kitchens, but also education to neighborhood children. There are about eighty smaller community gardens scattered about the city, more and more of them raising farm animals alongside the veggies. At the moment, domestic livestock is forbidden in the city, as are beehives. But the ordinance against them is generally ignored and the mayor’s office assures me that repeal of the bans are imminent.

About five hundred small plots have been created by an international organization called Urban Farming, founded by acclaimed songwriter Taja Sevelle. Realizing that Detroit was the most agriculturally promising of the fourteen cities in five countries where Urban Farming now exists, Sevelle moved herself and her organization’s headquarters there last year. Her goal is to triple the amount of land under cultivation in Detroit every year. All food grown by Urban Farming is given free to the poor. According to Urban Farming’s Detroit manager, Michael Travis, that won’t change.

Larger scale, for-profit farming is also on the drawing board. Financial services entrepreneur John Hantz has asked the city to let him farm a seventy-acre parcel he owns close to the Eastern Market. If that is approved and succeeds in producing food for the market, and profit for Hantz Farms, Hantz hopes to create more large-scale commercial farms around the city. Not everyone in Detroit’s agricultural community is happy with the scale or intentions of Hantz’s vision, but it seems certain to become part of the mix. And unemployed people will be put to work.

Any agro-economist will tell you that urban farming creates jobs. Even without local production, the food industry creates three dollars of job growth for every dollar spent on food—a larger multiplier effect than almost any other product or industry. Farm a city, and that figure jumps over five dollars. To a community with persistent two-digit unemployment, that number is manna. But that’s only one economic advantage of farming a city.

The average food product purchased in a U.S. chain store has traveled thirteen hundred miles, and about half of it has spoiled en route, despite the fact that it was bioengineered to withstand transport. The total mileage in a three-course American meal approaches twenty-five thousand. The food seems fresh because it has been refrigerated in transit, adding great expense and a huge carbon footprint to each item, and subtracting most of the minerals and vitamins that would still be there were the food grown close by.

I drove around the city one day with Dwight Vaughter and Gary Wozniak. A soft-spoken African American, Vaughter is CEO of SHAR, a self-help drug rehab program with about two hundred residents recovering from various addictions in an abandoned hospital. Wozniak, a bright, gregarious Polish American, who, unlike most of his fellow Poles, has stayed in Detroit, is the program’s financial director. Vaughter and Wozniak are trying to create a labor-intensive economic base for their program, with the conviction that farming and gardening are therapeutic. They have their eyes on two thousand acres in one of the worst sections of the city, not far from the Eastern Market. They estimate that there are about four thousand people still living in the area, most of them in houses that should have been condemned and razed years ago. There are also six churches in the section, offering some of the best ecclesiastical architecture in the city.

I tried to imagine what this weedy, decrepit, trash-ridden urban dead zone would look like under cultivation. First, I removed the overhead utilities and opened the sky a little. Then I tore up the useless grid of potholed streets and sidewalks and replaced them with a long winding road that would take vegetables to market and bring parishioners to church. I wrecked and removed most of the houses I saw, leaving a few that somehow held some charm and utility. Of course, I left the churches standing, as I did a solid red brick school, boarded up a decade ago when the student body dropped to a dozen or so bored and unstimulated deadbeats. It could be reopened as an urban ag-school, or SHAR’s residents could live there. I plowed and planted rows of every imaginable vegetable, created orchards and raised beds, set up beehives and built chicken coops, rabbit warrens, barns, and corrals for sheep, goats, and horses. And of course, I built sturdy hoop houses, rows of them, heated by burning methane from composting manure and ag-waste to keep frost from winter crops. The harvest was tended by former drug addicts who like so many before them found salvation in growing things that keep their brethren alive.

That afternoon I visited Grace Lee Boggs, a ninety-three-year-old Chinese-American widow who has been envisioning farms in Detroit for decades. Widow of legendary civil rights activist Jimmy Boggs, Grace preserves his legacy with the energy of ten activists. The main question on my mind as I climbed the steps to her modest east side home, now a center for community organizers, was whether or not Detroit possesses the community and political will to scale its agriculture up to 100 percent food self-sufficiency. Yes, Grace said to the former, and no to the latter. But she really didn’t believe that political will was that essential.

“The food riots erupting around the world challenge us to rethink our whole approach to food,” she said, but as communities, not as bodies politic. “Today’s hunger crisis is rooted in the industrialized food system which destroys local food production and forces nations like Kenya, which only twenty-five years ago was food self-sufficient, to import 80 percent of its food because its productive land is being used by global corporations to grow flowers and luxury foods for export.” The same thing happened to Detroit, she says, which was once before a food self-sufficient community.

I asked her whether the city government would support large-scale urban agriculture. “City government is irrelevant,” she answered. “Positive change, leaps forward in the evolution of humankind do not start with governments. They start right here in our living rooms and kitchens. We are the leaders we are looking for.”

All the decaying Rust-Belt cities in the American heartland have at one time or another imagined themselves transformed into some sort of exciting new post-industrial urban model. And some have begun the process of transformation. Now it’s Detroit’s turn, Boggs believes. It could follow the examples of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo, and become a slightly recovered metropolis, another pathetic industrial has-been still addicted to federal stimulus, marginal jobs, and the corporate food system. Or it could make a complete break and become, if not a paradise, well, at least a pretty good place to live.

Not everyone in Detroit is enthusiastic about farming. Many urbanites believe that structures of some sort or another belong on urban land. And a lot of those people just elected David Bing mayor of the city. Bing’s opponent, acting mayor Ken Cockrel, was committed to expanding urban agriculture in Detroit. Bing has not said he’s opposed to it, but his background as a successful automotive parts manufacturer will likely have him favoring a future that maintains the city’s primary nickname: Motor City.

And there remains a lasting sense of urbanity in Detroit. “This is a city, not a farm,” remarked one skeptic of urban farming. She’s right, of course. A city is more than a farm. But that’s what makes Detroit’s rural future exciting. Where else in the world can one find a one-hundred-and-forty-square-mile agricultural community with four major league sports teams, two good universities, the fifth largest art museum in the country, a world-class hospital, and headquarters of a now-global industry, that while faltering, stands ready to green their products and keep three million people in the rest of the country employed?

Despite big auto’s crash, “Detroit” is still synonymous with the industry. When people ask, “What will become of Detroit?” most of them still mean, “What will become of GM, Ford, and Chrysler?” If Detroit the city is to survive in any form, it should probably get past that question and begin searching for ways to put its most promising assets, land and people, to productive use again by becoming America’s first modern agrarian metropolis.

Contemporary Detroit gave new meaning to the word “wasteland.” It still stands as a monument to a form of land abuse that became endemic to industrial America—once-productive farmland, teaming with wildlife, was paved and poisoned for corporate imperatives. Now the city offers itself as an opportunity to restore some of its agrarian tradition, not fifty miles from downtown in the countryside where most of us believe that tradition was originally established, but a short bicycle ride away. American cities once grew much of their food within walking distance of most of their residents. In fact, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most early American cities, Detroit included, looked more like the English countryside, with a cluster of small villages interspersed with green open space. Eventually, farmers of the open space sold their land to developers and either retired or moved their farms out of cities, which were cut into grids and plastered with factories, shopping malls, and identical row houses.

Detroit now offers America a perfect place to redefine urban economics, moving away from the totally paved, heavy-industrial factory-town model to a resilient, holistic, economically diverse, self-sufficient, intensely green, rural/urban community—and in doing so become the first modern American city where agriculture, while perhaps not the largest, is the most vital industry.

Sincerely,
Mark Dowie

November 3, 2009

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the August 2009 edition of Guernica. To view the original article, “Food Among the Ruins,” please click here.

Urban Farming in Detroit and Big Cities Back to Small Towns and Agriculture was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

The predicament that the USA finds itself will not be “solved” at the scale of operation that we’re accustomed to, and we should just stop wasting precious time and dwindling resources in the idle hope that it will be. The failure to recognize this dynamic is the most impressive part of the meltdown. The only thing that the federal government is likely to prove in the process is the ineffectiveness of its actions as applied to any of the raging current problems from the killing burden of hyper-debt to the brushfires of geopolitics. Congress will only make the health care system more complex. Both congress and President Obama will do everything possible to keep housing prices unaffordable — in a quixotic effort to protect the collateral of the big banks. Capital will continue to vanish in the black hole of default.

Something’s got to give in the remaining three months of 2009. My guess is that attention will shift overseas for a while. This will not be due, as many probably think, to a cynical effort by the government to divert attention from the financial fiasco, but because the intrinsic tensions in the Middle East are reaching the snapping point. Iran is being called out on its nuclear program. If, from the start, it had just maintained the need for electric generating power in the face of dwindling fossil fuel reserves, they might have gone unchallenged. As it happened, though, the elected leader of Iran made too many intemperate remarks about wiping other nations off the face of the earth, and this has only prompted the leaders of other nations to take his remarks at face value and presume that Iran’s nuclear program was devoted to armaments, not electric power generation.

So, now the USA has picked up the gauntlet. If Iran doesn’t act to demonstrate the de-activation of its bomb-making capacity, then the USA will try to impose sanctions depriving Iran of necessary imported supplies. (Iran actually imports gasoline, due to inadequate refineries.) For sanctions to be effective, support will be required by other nations, including Iran’s chief gasoline supplier, China. What a delicate calculus this will be! I rather imagine that China would not like to see the Middle East blow up. I’m not so sure about the nations of the Middle East though, or at least major parties in certain nations. The rulers of Saudi Arabia would probably enjoy seeing Iran get into big trouble, since Iran is Saudi Arabia’s most active antagonist, working tirelessly to destabilize the Kingdom. Al Qaeda interests dispersed in many nations would certainly cheer any mayhem. The Taliban would love anything that takes the spotlight off them in Afghanistan. The Russians are conflicted between the wish to enhance their own leverage in world affairs and their need to discipline Islamic maniacs along their own borders. Europe is probably scared to death of anything that might threaten their energy lifeline. Pakistan is too tormented to have a position, but its radical Islamist factions are probably on the side of disorder — as the best remedy for the status quo. If any of that spills over on India, as in the Mumbai bombing, then that flashpoint could turn to conflagration very quickly. We forget about Turkey, which was the hegemonic player in the region for centuries until its swift decline after 1914, but it has potent military capability and very mixed feelings about the the Jihad to ruin the West (since it is partly of the West). And finally there is Israel, the object of Iran’s intemperate public statements.

This is a dangerous situation. I’m not so sure that Israel could launch an effective attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, but it might try anyway, especially if a US-backed sanctions effort fails to coalesce quickly. I’m not sure Israel would seek permission from the US to do this, though the US would certainly be tasked with defending the shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf. Iran might succeed in sinking more than a couple of US ships-of-the-line with sunburn missles and other toys, and this would lead to the bigger danger of oil supplies being choked off to the rest of the world. The US air response would be impressive, but possibly not effective against hardened targets. The leaders of Iran might exult even if the Iranian people were swept into a maelstrom. I imagine that what followed would be a very extravagant military frenzy amounting to World War Three, with European air forces and navies dragged in, with Hezbollah and Syria striking back at Israel, India and Pakistan possibly incinerating each other, and mayhem galore among the bystanders in Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan. There could easily be internal mischief in the UK, France, and Germany from angry immigrant populations, and “sleepers” could work some overdue hoodoo in the USA. I don’t know what Turkey would do, but it could be the biggest beneficiary of a bad regional meltdown, providing the only effective governance what remains in the region. China and Japan would probably just gape at the spectacle in wonder and nausea from the sidelines as they saw their energy supplies for years-to-come go up in flames.

The G-20 nations would be crippled as global oil supplies were choked off indefinitely. And if anyone — Iran, or its friends inside the Kingdom — managed to pull off a stunt such as blowing up the Ras Tanura oil terminal — then a darkness will spread across places that were used to being lighted and they will stay dark a long time.

I don’t know if any of this will come to pass, but as I said, tensions have reached a breaking point, including the greater tensions of history, which seem to require periodic release no matter how poignant the Pete Seegar songs are. It is perhaps, just another prime symptom of “overshoot,” the world’s way of shedding some of the toxic organisms that are making it so unhappy — Gaia in a really bad mood.

If nothing develops along these lines on the geopolitical scene, the USA is still stuck in its predicament of trying desperately to maintain an overscaled living arrangement, with no coherent public discussion of downscaling, re-scaling, or re-arranging things. My guess is that this kind of restructuring only occurs when all other options have been exhausted. The last time the USA found itself in an intractable economic morass, World War Two came along and it made things all better here (after considerable sacrifice for us and catastrophe elsewhere). After World War Two, we ruled the world for a couple of generations. The outcome of World War Three would not be so favorable for us. At the very least, it would leave us attempting to run things on about one-quarter of the oil we’re used to. That does not suggest a seamless transition between how we behave now and how the future will require us to behave differently.

Regards,
James Howard Kunstler

October 6, 2009

Iran Fidgets in the Middle East: World War III Anybody? was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

I’m OK with state-by-state action. In fact, I couldn’t have bought the last pack of cloves in Maryland at 11:55 p.m. if I had wanted to. Because Maryland was nearly two decades ahead of the curve, mandating: “It is illegal to sell, give or otherwise distribute clove cigarettes to ANY person, even if 18 years old or older.”

I had a friend in Washington, D.C., buy my first and final pack of clove cigarettes last month — as an exercise of freedom. On my regular weekend visits (albeit on a porch in Maryland), we’ve passed a single cig from mouth to mouth on his front porch with whoever happens to be there (all over age 21, in fact). We told neighbors who popped by that this was their last chance.

Jim Nelson warned you about this back in July. But now it’s here. And the law’s been beating down on smokers — with the help of Philip Morris — for years.

A few months earlier, on a misty spring day in Annapolis, my friend wanted just one cigarette for old time’s sake at the local smoke shop. The law says she can’t buy just one. Why? Because the state says that breaking up a pack to sell “loosies” helps hook the youth. The loose logic is that a kid will spend under a buck to try it out, but will draw the line at $8 packs. I call it a state-mandated dare: Betcha can’t smoke just one. Nonetheless, this fine lady did, and as parting gift gave me the balance of the pack. Those lightly minted Nat Shermans she gave me are now contraband. (And I thought I was joking when I told her that I’d ration these dear as the real currency of wartime Berlin, with Russians at the door.)

Have we gotten so that we don’t know what it means to put adult things on a higher shelf? Can a proprietor not just keep the tempting goods under lock and key? Keep making sure to ask for ID? Show me one 12-year-old who asks for a Mocha Dream cigarette.

Over the pond in the House of Lords, its version of Family Smoking Prevention is to cover all cigarettes with a screen behind the register by 2013. So now the number crunchers are hard at work, defending the small mum and dad shop around the corner. Cost of the new display that doesn’t display: £1,850 at best. Ultimate total cost: £252 million. Hasn’t anyone ever heard of a cheap black crepe pall? The pall, from the Latin for “cloak,” is a perfect solution. Or is that, in fact, too cool? Too goth to ensnare the young death-seeking teen for that holy of holy day when he or she is finally old enough to choose risk?

Lighting up Between the Bans

Like the loosie law, we note another hypocrisy: menthols — a whopping 25% of the smokers’ market — fave of black smokers in particular, remain legal when all other flavors are banished for tempting kids to light up.

When my parents were young and poor, they drank Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine. Did they drink it because it tasted like apples or berries? Here’s the reason: It was cheap. In the case of cloves, we’re talking a cost of $2 more per pack on average.

Which brings us to another smoker’s casualty: Marshall McGearty in Chicago. This place did not peddle flavored cigarettes to minors. It was an elite companion to the gentleman’s shop and the cigar bar, with a ventilation system that changed the air every six minutes. In the same way that Starbucks elevated coffee, so would R.J. Reynolds’ bar do for the cigarette. Just like ordering an espresso, you could order a pack of flavored cigarettes, blended and rolled while you waited.

This little mecca was refuge for smokers kicked out of their pleasant bar habitats once Chicago’s first-phase cigarette ban clicked into place.

At the time, the president of the Tobacco Control Resource Center, Richard Daynard, wasn’t worried. He said: “I certainly would be surprised if it’s still in business five years from now. The problem is that their clientele is not this, but mainly working-class and poor people.” Wow, that almost sounds like a belief in free markets!

According to former bartender, Griffith, the pack-a-day crowd really doesn’t go in for flavors. And most smoke emporium owners would agree with him. The typical profile is be a woman, between 22-50 years old, who smokes three a day max, but mostly as an occasional treat. (In other words, me, whom Gary would characterize as a bastion of personal responsibility.) Now the place where Griffith used to work, 1553 N. Milwaukee Ave., is a Steve Madden shoe store.

But Phase 2 of the Chicago ban — not lack of interest — killed Marshall McGearty. Since the place offered smokers wine, beer, coffee, pastries and cheese, the city banned it from allowing any form of smokes.

A ban with no exceptions has the virtue of seeming more convincing. But right now, menthol flavoring skirts any Family Act violations. For how long?

Mixed Message Brought to You By Philip Morris

Menthol — which cools and smooths the taste — has been proven in studies to make the nicotine take even better for the long-term smoking life. You’re encouraged to inhale deeper. (Just ask my friend Jimmy about that.) Take this stat: 44% of smokers between 12-17 choose menthol, yet it gets off today scot-free.

Meanwhile, take cloves. At 0.09% of the total cig-pushing market, they’re no big threat. The thing is, Philip Morris USA has no clove business. And its parent, Altria, made the smart move to split its business into Philip Morris USA and Philip Morris Intl. Back in 1995, Philip Morris also started up what’s known as Project Sunrise. This ultimate focus group worked on ways to stave off the death of Big Tobacco for as long as possible. What better than to join hands with the likes of the Campaign for Tobacco Free-Kids? This bolstered the company image as cancer stick vendors with a heart, and made it champions of what other tobacco companies are calling the “Marlboro Monopoly Act of 2009.” They look about as reformed as George W. Bush to me. But they sure did secure the fastest, cheapest way to knock out free enterprise in new forms of tobacco product.

But one company knew about Philip Morris and the mixed message. It’s been in the tobacco field since 1968. This company, known for hotel chains, cineplexes and beating Mr. Ted Turner to CBS, knew when to buy. And as we all know, investing is not just at what price you buy in, it’s when you sell. And it went all cash on this business just last year.

Why Drop Your $700 Million Per Year Cash Cow?

We think these fellas exited the biz because they knew the government could take it away. (It’s the same reason why Byron King might tell you to avoid a mining stock in Venezuela.) And when your family takes up 25 pages of Federal Election Commission reports, you bet you’re going to be two steps ahead of congressional developments.

But let’s back up a second. When Larry “King of Cash” Tisch bought Lorillard Tobacco with his brother in 1968, they knew they would get plenty of cash to catapult their millionaire-making holding company, Loews, into a billion-dollar business to pass to their sons.

Lorillard is now No. 3 in U.S. tobacco because the Tisches made their mark. The brothers bought the company for $450 million. And they immediately set to work. Turns out the former execs had spent 75% of their time on 5% of the business: candy and cat food.

Today, Lorillard’s Newports make up 35% of the menthol market. And by the company’s count, over half of those smokers are black. Back in the old days, free cigarettes were passed around Congressional Black Caucus meetings. Today, the pro-smoke policy is getting murky, although Altria is the CBC’s largest PAC donor. But the Tisch family saw menthol’s days as numbered.

When the next generation of Tisches spun off Lorillard in 2008, they made a tidy $10 billion if profits — not including nearly 30 years of juicy dividends. Make 22 times your money…and then some? That’s a money-management team I want in my court.

It should not surprise that Warren Buffett and Larry Tisch were tight. But unlike Warren with his Coke, Larry did not smoke. (That’s according to a Tisch family insider interviewed by Marie Brenner for a 1996 Vanity Fair article). For anyone who likes a moral tale — or thinks our cells have a limited functional life span no matter what we inhale — we note that Larry Tisch died of cancer at a very ripe age of 80 in the hospital that bore his family name. This gastroesophageal blight took him away from his life’s work and family on Nov. 15, 2003. His brother, Bob, died of brain cancer exactly two years later on the very same date.

When the heirs of Lorillard cut off its tobacco roots at the stem, they did so because they saw richer opportunity ahead. Cash raked in on Newports went toward something America is even more addicted to: oil and gas. This long-range metamorphosis started in the 1980s when Loews picked up offshore oil rigs aplenty at scrap metal prices. Next came its biggest investment in a decade: Texas Gas in 2003.

In case you’re wondering, the Tisch family didn’t swap their shares for Lorillard stock in the spinoff. James Tisch said it wasn’t about politics, but kindly filled a 163-page prospectus with concerns about fed officials and menthol.

So are menthol’s days numbered? Is the count down to the triple digits? Hard to tell. If you want a sign that Philip Morris will hold menthol’s ground, try its June 2009 introduction of a new menthol: Blend No. 54.

Meanwhile, I’m off to find sponsors for a new FDA study…Which is more harmful to kids (or will cost more in health care spending by 2050): cigarettes or high-fructose corn syrup? Like the fellas at Loews, I want to be ahead of the curve when it comes to “sin” investments and the legislatures that nix ’em.

And if you want to know where the Marlboro Man is lassoing new market share? Try China.

Regards,
Samantha Buker

October 1, 2009

Tobacco Ban Begins was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

The slow, agonizing death of that dream began in 1913 with the establishment of the Fed. It was damaged further by the behavior of the Fed and the big money men through events which led to the Great Depression, and suffered mortal blows under Roosevelt and Truman. The avalanche of irrational spending and social legislation since that time has lead to impractical expectations that could never have been true in any country at any time…after America in the early nineteen hundreds.

“Achievement” based on our own talents and effort has has been replaced by the entitlement mentality and the politics of envy. Passing lightly, for the moment, over the fiscal impossibility of Mr. Obama’s latest scheme to duplicate a chicken in every pot — “A college education for every young American!” — this is yet another feel-good, gimme, pie-in-the-sky statist ploy. In a nation with the drop out rates and widespread illiteracy among youngsters, how does anyone propose to qualify every last kid in America for matriculation? Where are the extra classrooms, textbooks, and teachers to come from?

The whole idea is ludicrous because no matter what the Constitution says (not that statists care), all men are not created equal intellectually. All men are not created equal in terms of what they want to do with their lives or what they would find fulfilling careers. Some of us do not want a MacMansion if it means living in the city. Some would stay cramped in a railroad flat in NYC for decades just to be in the Big Apple. Some like being mechanics and plumbers and electricians, careers which provide them with considerable personal satisfaction and very much above average incomes. Some don’t want to do anything except lie around watching TV or to talk trash, smoke dope, mug strangers, and “draw” welfare.

I did an analysis in 1990 and discovered that over 90% of all youth going before the courts in Seattle were functionally or totally illiterate. How does Mr. Obama propose to turn such into college graduates? A shockingly disproportionate number of “gifted” kids drop out of school, bored senseless with the watered down curriculum and “social” programs. Some, in time, will earn a GED and go to college; many will be wasted.

Each generation in the last century saw a lessening of expectations academically. Use a search engine to find the final exam for the 8th grade — as high as undergraduate education went late in the 19th Century — for Kansas, I think in 1895, although it may have been 1875. I have two college degrees and have done graduate work in five fields. I could pass that exam, but I certainly could not cover myself with glory.

The HS education of the Thirties was the equivalent of a BA in the Sixties. Very few of those who have been graduated since the Eighties will ever begin to know what the average college graduate knew in the Viet Nam era. The real truth is that most of the erudition the highly-educated have came from work they had done on their own because they wanted to know. They view education as a life-long pursuit.

These days we have a show asking “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?” We have millions who never even heard of diagramming a sentence.

Two years ago a high school junior in a “good” school in Houston took Biology. At her age, we were dissecting angle worms the first day and worked our ways up through rats, eels, and cats. HER class went to nearby Galveston and got a small shark. The course of instruction consisted of keeping the shark alive until the last week of school when the teacher dissected it. This is not the sort of biological “knowledge” that leads to future research geniuses. Neither does “Bowling,” another of her classes, or “Yearbook.” She had yet to have mastered the multiplication tables and was still on “pre-Algebra.” I had my first real Algebra course in the 7th grade and three more in high school plus geometry, Latin, Spanish, and Business Law, which stands me in good stead to this day. A college education these days is little more than a necessary stamp of the ticket and does not begin to guarantee even an entry level job, as witness how few recently-graduated lawyers were able to get jobs in that field ten years ago and ever since. We’ve got more lawyers than we need and nowhere near enough engineers, veterinarians, and butchers.

We cannot make genuine college graduates, with what most of us think that term should mean, out of every bit of the raw material at hand. Kids who read poorly, if at all, have no idea how percentages work, and think they are “entitled” to free food, housing, insurance, and medical care are not college material, any more than all of them can become stars in the NBA, successful actresses, or morticians.

Naturally, we cannot set the matter of cost aside. The federal government has beggared this nation for generations and is on a rampage in this century that cannot fail to usher in The Greater Depression. Japan has been suffering from Depression for 19 years, now, and it didn’t spend nearly as much as Washington did. There are so many “social” programs now, and so many more being demanded, that it is not feasible to fund college even for those who qualify even under the current very lax standards.

College is a sheer waste of time for those who have neither the inclination nor the ability to succeed there. Year after year the costs have gone up, and the degree it took four years to earn in my day now takes six. Rather like car loans. Less product for more money.

We can all but guarantee that with true joblessness running nearly 20% (by the standards used during the Great Depression), firms cutting back hours and cutting salaries, and the difficulties universities are having getting operating funds because charitable giving is down, that prices will continue to rise, enrollment will drop (making cost per student even higher), and we will see increasing defaults on student loans. My son has about $75,000′ worth, himself, for which he was graduated summa cum laude and has an MBA. That is also over a year’s salary for him. To add to the strain, through governmental witchery some of those student loans got thrown over into a program with 15% interest rates, breaking the agreement Andrew had made! Nobody consulted him; they just broke the contract and said, “This is how it is now.”

I have written before that the future of higher education is on-line schooling, just as the best option for fortunate children is home-schooling. Three years ago it cost almost exactly what going to the University of Texas for ‘Drew’s MBA would have…but his books were included, classes were never closed to enrollment, and he didn’t spend a great many dangerous, expensive hours on freeways, hunting parking places, or hanging around campus between classes. His work involved all written projects and reports, developing the writing skills he had learned at home. (By the time your mama the editor has marked up all of your papers for three years…)

There isn’t even an illusion of pie in the sky any more. The big rock candy mountain is down to a pile of grubby shards. ALL of the children in America may not and can not go to college for free or even otherwise, and $4000/a year or even a semester is a token. A college education these days costs as much to the families — or a state — as does incarcerating a felon, although it yields a better proportion of taxpayers eventually.

Next time we will discuss other factors which lead to the dismal level of “scholarship” in America and what that portends for the future. Governmental policies have driven away manufacturing jobs, and brains have been drained. There will be less and less interest in “service” industries. My focus is always on what we, as individuals, can do to solve problems for ourselves. We can see that our children do not end up unable to distinguish between they’re, their, and there, or confused over whether to write “companies” or “company’s.” Education, charity, and financial responsibility all need to begin at home, as they did long ago.

Regards,
Linda Brady Traynham

September 16, 2009

The Education Bubble, Part I was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

Who Was This Man?

The hour. The man. But let’s pause, and ask again who was this man? Keep in mind that Lemay was a field general, or perhaps we should call him an “air” general. Lemay devised doctrine, training and tactics for bombers. He planned and commanded air operations. His operations in many ways affected strategy.

But Lemay was always a subordinate, a general officer carrying out the greater aims and subject to the authority of others. That is, Lemay was not a politician, a theater commander or an industrialist. These latter players gave Lemay his orders and his tools. For all his efforts, Lemay was an instrument of the national will and productivity.

A Returning American Hero

Still, Lemay became the face of winged victory. He was the triumphant air marshal. When the war with Japan ended, Lemay flew home in a B-29 and landed to become an American hero. He toured the country, speaking to appreciative audiences, and received honorary degrees. Lemay was on the cover of Time Magazine.

The governor of his native Ohio considered appointing Lemay to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate. Lemay declined the offer, preferring to remain on active duty in what was to become the newly-established U.S. Air Force.

Demobilization Fever

Lemay traveled, shook a lot of hands, testified before Congress. He was a walking testimonial to the idea of establishing an independent Air Force. By 1948, Lemay was assigned to build a new organization called the Strategic Air Command (SAC) out of the remnants of the U.S. Army airpower arm. And what a job that would turn out to be.

Building SAC was a Herculean task because the U.S. had demobilized so quickly after the war. It astonished many people – including Lemay — to learn that a mere 30 months after the war ended, U.S. forces operated almost no serviceable, long-range combat bomber aircraft. Nor were there sufficient trained crews or maintenance personnel. What happened? It was a classic case of demobilization fever.

Building Strategic Air Command

Yet Lemay set about accomplishing exactly what he was ordered to do. The World War was over, but the nation soon realized that its dark hours had not passed. Joseph Stalin had his own ideas about the fate of Europe.

On the other side of the world, there was a civil war raging in China. It highlighted the point that there was a world to police, or so went the bipartisan consensus. And someone had to do it, or so went the bipartisan consensus. The U.S. was the only free and great power left — with an intact economy — after the fighting.

So the late 1940s provided other of the nation’s hard hours, and these hours required a certain kind of man, Lemay — again.

Build SAC? Lemay requisitioned aircraft and spare parts from storage sites in the deserts of Arizona and California. He recruited the best pilots and maintenance personnel he could find. He scrounged for funds to build barracks and hangars and command centers. In essence, Lemay had to recreate an entire new bombing air force because the old one was gone.

Berlin Blockade

Lemay’s efforts were soon interrupted when the Soviets placed a blockade around Berlin in 1948. The U.S. turned to its great air general, Curtis Lemay, to organize an airlift of supplies to the beleaguered city. More than a few Germans changed their minds about the American occupation when they learned that Lemay, who used to bomb them, was now delivering coal and food to Berlin.

In the process of relieving Berlin, Lemay suggested making a highly visible geopolitical point. Eventually Lemay ordered B-29 “atomic bombers” to fly to England. The Soviets knew that there was a message in the action, and that message was crystal clear.

“We believe that Lemay would drop atom bombs on us,” said one Soviet diplomat to an American counterpart. The American diplomat smiled, as diplomats do, and concurred with the Russian.

Stalin was many things. But he was no fool. After a period of time, the Soviets wound down the Berlin blockade.

Korean War

Not long after, and again at the behest of that Soviet troublemaker Stalin, in June 1950 North Korea invaded South Korea. Lemay had B-29 bombers ready to roll, and quickly sent his birds to Japan and Okinawa. From bases there, Lemay’s B-29s could hit targets in North Korea.

Lemay’s view was that early, massive, visible blows would help bring the war to a swift conclusion. Thus, early-on in Korea, Lemay urged intense bombing to shatter the economy and military forces of the North Koreans. Lemay wanted to do to North Korea what he had previously done to Germany and Japan. And this time, he had the bombers with which to do it from the start.

But at the beginning of the Korean War, Gen. Douglas MacArthur was in command. MacArthur was an old-school soldier who did not want to see a reprieve of Lemay’s aerial campaign such as had burnt out Japan in World War II. Also, MacArthur had plans to fight and defeat the North Koreans on the ground. So MacArthur blocked Lemay’s idea of early and powerful bombardment.

Meanwhile, the Chinese and Soviets had plans of their own. And those plans involved NOT permitting their North Korean ally to be defeated by a Western army, particularly not by any army mostly American, commanded by a certain Douglas MacArthur.

Macarthur scored successes at Inchon and afterwards. His troops rolled up the invading North Koreans. Then MacArthur made a fateful decision and ordered U.S. and United Nations troops to cross the 38th Parallel. MacArthur’s soldiers spent the late summer and early fall overrunning most of northern Korea.

China would nave none of this. The Chinese had just kicked out the Japanese five years earlier. They wanted nothing of a Western army on their border. So in October 1950 China entered the war, sending vast numbers of troops south across the Yalu River. U.S. and U.N. forces were quickly overrun and pushed back, south of Seoul. It was a humiliating defeat. For this, and a list of other reasons, MacArthur was relieved of command.

After MacArthur departed, Lemay tried once more to move the idea of a massive Korean bombing campaign. But Lemay was overruled by the policymakers in Washington. No massive bombing.

In Korea Lemay encountered the beginnings of the modern American political phenomenon of committing troops to wage war, without the political will to deliver crippling military blows against the enemy. The expression of the soldiers was, “We die for a tie.”

The Worst of All Worlds

The fighting in Korea strung out over the next three years. The bitter combat, and overall air war, eventually pulverized most significant targets in the North. The end-result was the same as Lemay had first proposed. But it played out slowly, not quickly. The fighting and destruction occurred gradually, piecemeal, and at great human and material expense.

Compounding the problem, the war commanders used Lemay’s B-29s inappropriately. Air tasking orders had B-29s performing missions like ground-interdiction and close-air-support. Really, you just don’t use big bombers down low for things like that.

“I have heard of military campaigns that were clumsy but swift,” wrote Sun Tzu. “But I have never seen military campaigns that were skilled but protracted.” That is, time is precious during a war. And over time the North Koreans, and their Chinese allies on the ground, learned how to dig in and take hits from the big American bombers.

The North Koreans and Chinese also figured out how to fight back against the B-29s. It helped that they had at their disposal several hundred veteran Soviet pilots flying MiG-15s. These MiGs were nimble jet-powered fighters, flying from airfields in Manchuria that were off-limits to U.S. attack. By the end of the Korean conflict, 107 of 150 B-29s in theater had been lost to enemy action or in-flight accidents.

“No nation has ever benefited from protracted warfare,” wrote Sun Tzu. And of course, Sun Tzu was correct. For American air power, Korea demonstrated the point. It was the worst of all worlds.

{Of interest, the Korean War gave rise to the military requirement for a day-night, all-weather, radar-mapping, low-level attack aircraft with a heavy bomb load. The result was the venerable and incomparable Grumman A-6 Intruder. Intruders Forever!}

Evolving SAC

While Lemay ran SAC, 1948 – 1957, he finally was in a position to drive policy. And he presided over transformations that were astounding. For example, Lemay commanded four different generations of advancing aircraft, and a host of evolving munitions. The logistics requirements, basing requirements, personnel and training requirements and operational planning were a continuous whirlwind.

Think about the complexity. Starting with the World War II-era B-29, Lemay transitioned SAC to the improved, but gigantic and costly B-36. Then came the sleek, jet-powered B-47. The B-47 was followed by the mighty B-52 – which is still part of the backbone of U.S. security, 50 years later. As Air Force Chief of Staff in the early 1960s, Lemay pushed hard for the supersonic B-70 (which never made it past two prototype examples).

Keep in mind, though, that Lemay was always subject to the push and pull of the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC). Sometimes the pork-hawks in Congress gave Lemay what he wanted. Often not.

Evolving Weapons

Still, it’s fair to say that Lemay also had a powerful hand in defining the requirements for several early generations of nuclear weapons, as well as aircraft and missile systems, electronic warfare systems, and precision weapon developments.

When it came to the early nuclear weapons, Lemay needed bombs that could fit inside his bombers (and later his missiles). He needed bombers and missiles that could carry the big-yielding boomers that the weapons designers were dreaming up. Thus for more than a decade Lemay played a key role in aircraft and missile design requirements, as well as in setting the requirements for missions, targets and payload.

Basically, Lemay wanted faster, more potent aircraft, and smaller, more secure, more accurate weapons. Thus did the U.S. aircraft industry, electronics industry, and nuclear weapons complex – among numerous defense sectors — shape itself to the will of one senior officer and his immensely capable staff of aerial war-fighters. Lemay issued requirements that drove technology, shaped industry, and even reached down into the research and teaching levels of academia.

Among other things, Lemay soon realized that most of the new nuclear weapons could be armed and triggered by just one person. So he insisted that the designers build safeguards into the weapons. And Lemay inaugurated the idea of two-person control, with arming keys, and airtight security systems during storage and transport.

Through it all, in the 1950s, much of SAC’s development, acquisition and operating tempo occurred in an era of tight and balanced federal budgets.

The Battles of Washington

By the late 1950s Lemay was posted to Washington as Assistant Chief of Staff, and eventually Chief of Staff of the Air Force. Now he was ensconced within the highest reaches of the MICC.

Lemay got along well with Pres. Eisenhower and members of the Eisenhower administration. At many meetings with Ike, senior military brass and civilian staff sitting around the table, it was as if the old World War II boys were holding a reunion.

Eisenhower was an old soldier who had been the Supreme Commander in Europe. Ike implicitly understood the military and national security issues that confronted the U.S. in those days. Nobody had to explain basic defense and security concepts to Ike, let alone explain them twice. And then came a new presidential administration, in which many of the novices needed spoon-fed – twice and more.

Opposing Bay of Pigs

In the early days of the Kennedy administration, one of Lemay’s first big fights was an unsuccessful attempt to stop the Bay of Pigs operation. Lemay reviewed the plan to land a small number of mercenary troops in Cuba, with the idea of staging an overthrow of Fidel Castro.

Lemay was appalled at the shoddiness of the plan, and said so. But of course the CIA experts knew better how to stage an invasion than did Lemay, the crusty old bomber pilot. Thus despite his best efforts to prevent the operation, Lemay watched in April 1961 as the Bay of Pigs fiasco blew up in the face of Pres. Kennedy.

Cuban Missile Crisis

The Bay of Pigs debacle emboldened Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to place missiles in Cuba. Again, this led to an international military standoff, the Cuban Missile Crisis, in October 1962. The U.S. and Soviet Union were perhaps days, if not hours, from going to war.

Through it all, Lemay offered steady and consistent advice to Pres. Kennedy and his advisers. Backing up Kennedy was Lemay’s potent and powerful creation, SAC. This highly trained airborne battle-force, aimed at the heart of the Soviet Union, was critical. SAC – along with the battle forces of the U.S. Navy in blockade-mode — gave Kennedy the military flexibility and credibility he needed with which to negotiate and de-escalate the looming crisis.

Opposing Kennedy-Johnson Vietnam Strategy

Towards the end of the Kennedy administration, and in the early days of the Johnson administration after Kennedy was assassinated, Lemay argued strenuously against the U.S. strategy of gradual escalation that he saw occurring in Vietnam. Lemay’s principle nemesis throughout was Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and what Lemay called “the Whiz kids.”

Lemay visited and toured South Vietnam. He saw that South Vietnam’s security was being undermined by Communist troops and guerilla cadre whose arms and training flowed down from the North. Thus, according to Lemay, if the security of South Vietnam was worth committing U.S. forces (a very big “if,” in Lemay’s view), then it was important to hit the North Vietnamese soon and hard.

At the outset, Lemay recommended destroying and mining North Vietnamese logistic centers such as the port facilities at Haiphong and other coastal areas. Lemay offered a plan to wreck the North Vietnamese supply lines at the source. The Kennedy-Johnson policymakers rejected Lemay’s advice — although this operational plan stayed near the top of the military shelf. The bomb-Haiphong operation is exactly what the Nixon administration eventually did in December 1972, about nine years after Lemay suggested it.

“Back Into the Stone Age”

This period is also the origin of that “bomb them back into the Stone Age” comment, attributed to Lemay about attacking North Vietnam. In 1963 Lemay was working with the author McKinlay Kantor to write an autobiography, entitled Mission with Lemay: My Story. Kantor spent many hours with Lemay. He took notes and apparently took a number of liberties in his writing. In short, Kantor simply made some things up.

According to Lemay, he read the galley proofs and never noticed Kantor’s version of Lemay saying he would bomb North Vietnam “back into the Stone Age.” Hence the made-up quote went to print in a book under Lemay’s name.

The Advice Not Taken

During his tenure in Washington, Lemay offered his fair share of military advice. It’s accurate to say that essentially all of it was based on Lemay’s experience, and it was sincerely presented. As with all advice, some was accepted. And some was rejected – some of the best, in fact, to the eventual regret of those who failed to listen hard enough.

By 1964 there was concern within the highest political circles of the Johnson White House that Lemay might go public with his criticism of defense policy. Pres. Johnson turned on the charm and sweet-talked Lemay into remaining on active duty through the 1964 election. This was to prevent Lemay from hanging up his uniform and campaigning on behalf of another old Army pilot named Barry Goldwater.

Ever the good soldier, Lemay stayed in the Air Force through the election of 1964. He kept his mouth shut, out of deference to his commander in chief. Shortly after Johnson’s inauguration in January 1965, the newly-sworn president asked Lemay to retire.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man? Well, by now Lemay’s clock had run out. It was time for the old warhorse to retire, kick back and think about the good old days. Then again, there were still some chapters yet to be written in a remarkable life.

Thanks for reading Part III.

Until we meet again,
Byron W. King

September 15, 2009

Review of Lemay The Life and Wars of General Curtis Lemay, Part III was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

If you have a house which is falling down from termites, has a leaky roof, iron plumbing, stopped up septic tank, or whatever, and you approach a home insurance company, wanting full coverage for your house, and they say “you’ve got to be kidding,” should the D.C. Gang force the insurance company to issue you a homeowners policy? If you never cut your grass, never paint, never shovel snow off your sidewalk, and your neighbors consider you a menace, would any insurance company issue you a policy? Both Dems and Repubs might want big daddy government to force them to issue it, assuming the health care thing goes into effect. Why not throw pre-existing conditions out the window for home coverage?

Currently, there are scads of auto mechanical insurance policies advertising on the TV channels. If you have a true clunker which knocks, smokes, and leaks, would you expect an insurance company to issue you a policy? If the health care proposal for no pre-existing conditions considerations, why not for cars too?

If you were an alcoholic, with dozens of DUI’s, and a host of traffic accidents charged to you, would any insurance company issue you any coverage for any price, if they had their head screwed on correctly? If no pre-existing conditions can keep a health insurance company from insuring your health, why not force insurance companies to insure your driving habits, regardless of the risks?

Insurance companies as well as all businesses are in it to make a profit, and that’s the way it should be.

If you need a loan and go to a bank, shouldn’t they check your credit rating? If you have a credit rating of 100, have defaulted on lots of loans in the past, have no savings, your credit cards have been revoked, and there are tens of thousands of dollars still owed on them, would a banker loan you a quarter if he was in his right mind? If insurance companies can’t use pre-existing conditions to deny you health coverage, why not force the banks to loan you money, regardless of your credit rating?

If the Dems and Repubs have their way, along with Obama, and you have advanced cancer, Hodgkin’s, melanoma, kidney failure, or whatever, they want insurance companies to have no choice but have to insure you. In other words, by law or bureaucracy, the D.C. Gang in both parties wants to insure the death of insurance companies.

It seems to this amateur, that if you have a serious, incurable disease, or severe health condition which either can’t be fixed, or to fix it would cost several hundred thousand dollars, an insurance company wouldn’t really be interested in covering you for a hundred bucks a month. One of my best friends is in such bad health that he has cost his medical insurance company probably a million dollars already, and he is still living with myriad health problems. Bud is probably 150 pounds overweight, has never cared for himself, smoked for decades, has very high blood pressure, and did tons of drugs, in addition to being diabetic and having had several heart attacks. He is still covered because unless he misses a payment, his insurance can’t be cancelled. Believe me, he’ll never miss a payment! His insurance company is on the hook with a certain loser, but when he took out the policy, the insurance company thought him to be a fair risk.  They were wrong, and are paying for it.

Denying pre-existing conditions as an excuse for not issuing a health policy, sounds just wonderful to the un-thinking boobs who occupy those offices on Capitol Hill. Do they ever really THINK?

Actuaries are in business to do risk assessment for insurance companies. They go over statistics, figures, probabilities, and risks. If the Demos and Repubs have their way, you can forget actuaries, because the D.C. Gang will force insurance companies out of business. The point is, once again, that both parties have destroyed America with stupidity, greed, and that ever-present ego governing us, when we need laws only to protect us from our enemies, and not ourselves. With every vote over the last 75 years, it seems as though each vote drove another nail in our collective coffins. The Tea Parties have plainly demonstrated that we have had enough of both parties, and we should throw them both out with a couple of exceptions. The Democrats are worse than the Republicans, I’ll admit, but there are far too many office holders who haven’t a grain of common sense, and I have had enough of both of them. I am no longer proud to be a registered Republican, but have not yet re-registered as an independent. Local Republicans are fine.

Regards,
Don Stott

September 11, 2009

Pre-Existing Conditions? was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

China, the Pacific, and Building a New Air Force

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. And Lemay’s hour had come, but it was not over. Lemay’s clock was still ticking.

Thus in July 1944 Lemay was posted to China to run air operations against Japan using the newly-developed B-29. Lemay called the China effort, “the tiny B-29 war that was being waged.”

It may have been a “tiny B-29 war,” but it posed big problems. Lemay’s first problem was that the B-29 was going through severe birthing pains. Despite its immense cost (more than the U.S. spent on the Manhattan Project that built the atom bomb) the B-29 program was plagued with serious mechanical and material defects. Its four giant engines, particularly, had the nasty tendency to swallow valves and explode and burn uncontrollably in flight. Plus, the B-29 had myriad of other advanced systems that tended to break or fail at the worst possible moment.

So the aircraft didn’t work very well. Now add the stress of flying this giant bird in combat. And do it from austere fields at the far end of logistics lines that snaked from primitive India to the undeveloped innards of China. Thus were both the flyers and fixers challenged all day, every day. Someone had to come in and figure out how to make this expensive program work.

Lemay took control of a flailing operation, attempting to bomb Japanese targets from isolated bases in China. “Everything had to be flown in,” wrote Lemay. “Every single item.” It was a 1,500 mile trek over the world’s highest mountains, the Himalayas.

Lemay started with his innate ability to put the right people into the right jobs. He made the Chinese operation work better, and soon increased combat effectiveness. In the process, Lemay developed a working relationship with the Communist leader Mao Zedong. Mao started by agreeing to return downed U.S. aircrews in return for medical supplies. As the relationship evolved, Mao’s troops were scrupulous about protecting and returning downed U.S. aircrews. Mao and Lemay worked well together.

From China to the South Pacific

By the end of 1944 the Chinese operation was beginning to click. Lemay had worked his magic and set things up for success. So sure enough, at the end of the year Lemay was transferred out. He was ordered to the South Pacific to perform another of his leadership miracles with what came to be called the 20th Air Force. This was the island-based air campaign and against Japan.

Again, there were the same problems of B-29 maintenance and training in the South Pacific, as well as near-impossible logistics and primitive living conditions. Leading by example, Lemay lived out of a tent and ate basic field rations, the same as the men under his command.

Lemay quickly learned that high altitude operations against Japan were problematic on the best of days. The U.S. had almost no accurate military maps of Japan. The best that the intelligence system could do was to supply pre-war maps from the National Geographic Society.

For the B-29s that made the flight to the Japanese islands, powerful, easterly-blowing jet streams out of Northeast Asia made flying and bombing a navigational and targeting nightmare. The obvious solution was to obtain weather information from the Soviets about atmospheric conditions forming in Siberia.

Yet the Soviets stonewalled. They lived up to their reputation for secrecy. The Soviets absolutely refused to provide Lemay with any weather information. Lack of this basic information, of course, confounded aerial mission planning. Even worse, the Soviets confiscated all B-29s that made emergency landings on their territory, and interned the crews.

Lemay understood that his options for high-level bombing were constrained. So he quickly adapted his tactics and revised the operational concept.

Burning an Empire

Meanwhile, back in the U.S. a group called the “Joint Incendiary Committee” had come up with industrial requirements for firebombs. Weapon developers tested the bombs on a mockup of a Japanese town, erected in the desert of Utah. In short order the U.S. supply system procured vast numbers of incendiary bombs, and deployed them to the South Pacific munitions depots. What was going on?

Indeed, what WAS going on? Lemay never received specific orders to use incendiary bombs in one way or another. Political leaders and senior generals on the home front seldom dirty their hands or sully their reputations with such distasteful matters. (Not until the Johnson administration would a U.S. President actually select bombing targets.) But the intent and purpose of these firebombs was clear. Lemay had ‘em in order that he could use ‘em.

So he used ‘em. “No matter how you slice it, you’re going to kill an awful lot of civilians,” Lemay later wrote. “Thousands and thousands. But (otherwise) we’re going to have to invade Japan. And how many Americans will be killed in an invasion? … Five hundred thousand seems to be the lowest estimate. Some say a million. … Crank her up. Let’s go.”

Thus on March 9, 1945, Lemay sent 325 B-29s flying towards Japan at astonishingly low altitudes, between 5,000 and 10,000 feet. “Throw your mask away, you fly with Curt Lemay,” was one bit of graffiti that appeared soon after.

Under two miles altitude, there was no issue of a jet stream. The aim point was Tokyo, one of the largest cities in the world. The B-29s thundered in, and were unexpected. The Japanese scrambled almost no fighters. Lemay’s planes dropped incendiary bombs that leveled a dozen square miles of one of the most densely-populated cities in the world.

The heat from the burning fires of Tokyo was so intense that U.S. aircraft returned to their bases covered with thick layers of carbon, and even blistered paint on their underside. Updrafts from the Tokyo fires tossed some B-29s up to 15,000 feet in the air. Powerful vortexes tore the wings off at least one B-29, and flipped other aircraft upside down, causing them to crash.

This one air raid on Tokyo killed over 100,000 people on the ground. (There’s no exact number.) The Japanese were utterly stunned at the ferocity of the U.S. attack. If the common folk of Japan had not questioned their government before, many had their doubts now. It was raining fire. Soon after the Tokyo raid, the Japanese Army sent troops into the capital to prevent rioting by civilians.

Victim Populations

Few in the West shed tears for the civilians on the ground. Some Roosevelt-era policy makers referred to Japanese noncombatants as “victim populations.” At the highest levels, Allied powers around the world were elated at the Tokyo attack.

Even Joseph Stalin was impressed. In a high form of flattery, Stalin ordered Soviet aircraft designers to build exact copies of seized American B-29s. This they did, down to the last rivet hole and shade of green anti-corrosion paint. The Soviet copy of the B-29 aircraft, built by the Tupolev Bureau, eventually flew with Soviet forces as the Tu-4. (It even had the word “Boeing” written on the pilot’s and copilot’s yoke.)

Breaking the Will to Resist

Up until the Tokyo attack, nothing seemed to break the Japanese will to fight and resist. Across the arc of the Pacific theater, and throughout Asia, the Japanese just killed, and killed, and killed. Now the war was striking home, at the heart of the Japanese Empire. So the Japanese could burn, for all anyone cared.

In the editorial salons of America, even the New York Times gave high praise to Lemay and his bombers for taking the war to the heart of the enemy. Nearer to the face of battle, U.S. troops cheered from trenches in Europe to foxholes on Pacific islands when they heard the news of the Tokyo raid. There was a better chance that they might survive the war. Japan was burning, and Lemay was lionized for his role.

Lemay kept up the aerial bombardment of Japan. He would burn them into submission. The military justification was that U.S. intelligence believed (correctly, as it turned out) that much Japanese industry was dispersed throughout urban areas in small machine shops and assembly centers. Thus there were legitimate military reasons for burning the cities. As for the “victim populations?” Well, total war was total war.

Leaflets, Mines and Overwhelming Aerial Power

Still, to spare the civilian population Lemay ordered his B-29s to drop leaflets warning people to leave areas that the planes were going to return and bomb. Indeed, Lemay personally wrote the warning message, which was then translated into Japanese.

“I’ll tell them I’m coming,” he said. Then Lemay sent the bombers, which dropped incendiaries on a long target list of Japanese cities.

Lemay’s B-29s dropped so much ordnance that the 20th Air Force literally ran out of bombs in early-spring 1945. The Navy had to divert convoys to haul more munitions to Lemay.

While he waited for more incendiary bombs to arrive, Lemay’s B-29s laid underwater naval mines along the Japanese coastline. This virtually strangled coastal shipping. Between these mines, and the deadly U.S. submarine campaign against Japanese shipping in the Sea of Japan, much of Japan’s economy ground to a halt. For example, not a single oil tanker landed at any Japanese port between March 1945 and the end of the war.

Six Months of Fire

The last six months of the war were a time of fire for Japan. Back in February 1945, the island-fighting in the South Pacific was hard and Japan was intransigent. In February it looked like this was going to be a long war.

In fact at the Yalta Conference in February, the U.S. practically begged the Soviets to enter the fight against Japan. Stalin promised Pres. Roosevelt that the Soviets would attack Japan “within three months” of the defeat of Germany.

What a difference six months makes. By mid-summer of 1945, Lemay told a reporter that he expected Japan to capitulate by October 1. Soon after, Lemay received a note from the U.S. War Department, cautioning him against making public speculations. Then again, Lemay would know because it was his bombers that were burning out Japan’s cities. Meanwhile, more and more members of the leadership circles of U.S., Britain, China and other nations started to hope that Stalin might break yet another of his promises.

The Buildup to the Last Attacks

Lemay’s campaign of great fires served as a buildup for the two atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Japan in August 1945. Throughout the spring and summer of 1945, when the Japanese heard B-29s flying overhead they knew that another city was doomed. In fact, when Japanese spotters noted three aircraft approaching Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, they were at first relieved that it was not one of Lemay’s incendiary air armadas.

The Hiroshima attack certainly shocked Japan, in so many ways. At the highest levels of leadership, the decision makers were utterly confused about what happened. Another city was destroyed? Hiroshima? At first they didn’t know what hit them. Where was Lemay’s air army? It took several days for Japanese physicists to confirm that Hiroshima was destroyed by a uranium-based nuclear weapon.

Meanwhile, on August 9 the second atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki. The Japanese government was still slow in understanding the mechanism of destruction. They took their time to gather basic information. Japanese physicists were shocked to discover that the second bomb was of a completely different mechanism, plutonium. The Americans had not just one, but TWO different nuclear weapon programs at work.

To the peril of their nation, Japanese leadership dallied instead of discussing surrender with the U.S. In turn, Lemay received approval to stage one final firebombing raid on an already devastated Tokyo. After this final attack the Japanese quickly signaled that they were ready to end the war.

Ending a War

In September 1945 Lemay stood on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, while representatives of the Empire of Japan signed an instrument of surrender. In the distance, the horizon began to rumble. Then came a sound of thunder, as 462 of Lemay’s B-29s flew in perfect formation across a clear sky. The Japanese watched. The world watched. The point was made.

Later, Lemay noted his thoughts as he observed the surrender ceremony. Lemay went over in his mind the course and cost of the war. He’d spent his early career flying Army planes, in something like a “flying club” atmosphere. Now he commanded the largest, most destructive assemblage of air power on earth.

Lemay had written an entirely new operational doctrine for waging conventional war. In the end, he had helped usher in the nuclear age. And through it all, ever the great captain, he asked himself what else he could have done to save the lives of more of his troops who died in the terrible fighting.

Salute the Conqueror

Not long after the surrender at Tokyo Bay, Lemay piloted a B-29 to the northern reaches of Japan. He was preparing to return to the U.S., and this was the closest large airfield from which Lemay – a great aerial navigator in his own right – could fly a non-stop, “great circle” Polar route to North America. Lemay landed at a Japanese training base, and spent the night in a barracks with 3,000 Japanese naval cadets.

A month before, Lemay was burning Japanese cities. Now the Japanese cadets guarded Lemay and his crew while they slept. The next day the Japanese sailors lined the roads, saluted and offered military honors to Lemay. Then the cadets watched and waved as Lemay took to the skies and headed north across the vast, dark Pacific Ocean.

War is a grim business. It asks much of people. From some, it takes everything. And war is personal to every participant. But past some point, nations and militaries and people have to let it go.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man? For Curtis Lemay, his hour was over – or so it seemed. Now the man was returning home. But Lemay’s clock still was running.

Thank you for reading Part II. Part III will follow.

Until we meet again,
Byron King

September 10, 2009

General Lemay Sics B-29s on Japan was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

When even the biographer begins on such a disparaging note, it’s not hard to understand why Lemay has been the subject of so few worthy accounts. One that comes to mind is Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of Gen. Curtis Lemay, by Thomas Coffey, 1987. But there are few others. So after 22 years we now have a new effort to tell the tale of one of America’s greatest warriors. Better late than never, I suppose.

The Neglected Military and Strategic Genius

Again and again, fine writers have told the stories of almost all U.S. military leaders of World War II and the Cold War. Library shelves strain beneath books detailing the military accomplishments of George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, Omar Bradley, Ernest King, Chester Nimitz and others of that mid-century era.

But Curtis Lemay? He’s a neglected captain, if not forgotten. Today, many Americans under age 50 scarcely know his name. To those with only a casual acquaintance of Lemay’s story, his life is summed-up in the disdainful quip – an irreverent dismissal, really — that he was “George Wallace’s running mate in the 1968 presidential election.” Oh, you don’t say. Well, yes he was. And that’s a nugget of truth that explains precisely nothing in the saga of war and peace in our time.

To those with more knowledge, Lemay supposedly said of North Vietnam that “we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.” Actually, Lemay denied saying that. The words are those of a ghost-writer who took too much literary license.

Then there’s the insult of artful insults. It was Lemay who was caricatured as the loony Gen. Buck Turgidson (played by the actor George C. Scott) in Stanley Kubrick’s classic film, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

No, Stanley. Not at all. Not even close. When it comes to portraying Lemay, Dr. Strangelove is literary license on steroids. Here’s the rebuttal. Dr. Strangelove is only a movie. As to Lemay, it’s neither accurate nor fair. Lemay was Lemay, of course, sui generis. But Lemay was no Buck Turgidson.

A Man of Many Great Battles and Campaigns

What a shame, then, that two (going on three) generations of Americans know so little about Curtis Lemay. He was more than just an effective wartime commander. He was one of the most brilliant military leaders and strategists that the U.S. has produced in its entire national existence. Thus it’s about time that the man receives the recognition he deserves in this new volume of straightforward biography.

First, some perspective. How many great battles and campaigns did George Washington plan or fight? Less than ten. For how many great battles did Ulysses Grant or Robert E. Lee set the stage? Under twenty. How about John J. Pershing, or Douglas MacArthur or George Patton? A couple of dozen, perhaps.

What about Curtis Lemay? As commander of the Eighth Air Force in Europe, and later the 20th Air Force in the Pacific, Lemay set the stage for literally hundreds of great aerial battles.

During those battles, Lemay flew many a combat mission. But he was no mere knight of the air. Lemay was directly responsible for inventing and refining many key concepts of aerial warfare, from heavy bombardment to precision strike. Lemay took the abstract ideas of airpower thinkers from Giulio Douhet to Billy Mitchell, and turned them into the steel rain of bomb-dropping reality.

By one macabre statistic, Lemay ordered and commanded actions that led to the deaths of more enemy combatants and civilians than any other military leader in U.S. history. So Gen. Sherman burned Atlanta? Well, Lemay out-Sherman’ed Gen. Sherman. Indeed, Lemay put the torch to Japan, as we’ll discuss below.

Cometh the Hour…

Burn Japan? Yes indeed. Lemay burned many cities — to the ground. That’s what Lemay did AFTER his bombers pounded large swaths of Germany into rubble. Lemay’s record for death and destruction is a strange honor, to be sure. It’s probably a dubious distinction these days, in the hindsight of contemporary morality and the trend towards judgmental, 20-20 hindsight.

But then again, recall the old saying that “cometh the hour, cometh the man.” Lemay lived and served in a time of many desperate hours. His hour came. In the context of his time, the dirtiest of dirty jobs fell to Lemay. He worked with exactly the tools that his nation handed him. It was left to Lemay to act.

Thus in both World War II and the following Cold War, Lemay accomplished what necessity demanded. By all accounts Lemay performed his work out of a sense of duty. History, if not the fates, offered him his hour and assigned him his mission. By all accounts Lemay didn’t relish the death and destruction he rained upon the enemy. But he accomplished what his nation asked him to do, and under the hardest circumstances.

For a while, Lemay even received high praise for his grisly work. Until, of course, some people forgot why they needed Lemay. Until, of course, a new generation came along that knew not of the desperation of those previous hours. But this gets ahead of the story.

Leading from the Front – from Inside a Plexiglas Dome

Unlike many generals – before his time, then or since — Lemay shared the risk. Many times he led his troops into battle over Germany, directing the fight from a cramped perch inside a Plexiglas dome atop a B-17. Lemay was often in the lead aircraft, at which German guns poured heavy volumes of fire.

Later, Lemay flew against Japan as well. He only flew a few missions and wouldd have flown more, except that eventually his knowledge of the Manhattan Project kept him out of the action. Under direct orders from Washington, Lemay could not risk getting shot down and captured.

Later, in 1948 Lemay organized the Berlin Airlift, and not long afterwards orchestrated the 1950 – 1953 air campaign against North Korea during the Korean War.

Throughout the 1950s Lemay built the Strategic Air Command (SAC) of the U.S. Air Force, and set it on a near-constant, wartime footing.

In 1962, as Air Force Chief of Staff, Lemay counseled Pres. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis while SAC and other Air Force capabilities gave Kennedy military options to play out against the moves of his Soviet counterparts.

A Story of a General, and of America at Mid-Century

In the life of any nation, it is for the fates to decide when the hard hours shall come. But whence cometh those men to meet those hours?

The question brings us to Kozak’s new biography of Lemay. It’s not just another book about another military man. Oh, Kozak tells that tale of course. But another theme that permeates the discussion is the story of the U.S. at war in the mid-20th Century.

Lemay’s early life sets the stage. Lemay was a child of an unsuccessful father. Most of the time, his family was destitute. And from such humble roots, Lemay rose to command great air armies, to control god-like nuclear powers, and to advise U.S. presidents – several of them, in fact.

Yet despite his early hardships, Lemay revered the Wright Brothers. He wanted to fly. Eventually it dawned on Lemay that he needed to pursue an education. Thus did Lemay work his way through college. And while in school, Lemay joined the Army Reserve because he figured it was about the only way he’d ever get off the ground.

At first, Lemay didn’t know where the Army would take him. But flying airplanes seemed like a good skill on which to build some sort of career. It’s not unlike the story of another college-man of his era, Ronald Reagan, who joined an Army unit to learn how to ride horses. You just never know where some skills will take you.

Work Hard, and the Army Will Buy the Gas

After college, Lemay passed flight school and took to the air, with the U.S. Army buying the gas. He achieved his success without the advantages of family, politics, good looks, charm or even all that much luck. It’s fairer to say that Lemay succeeded by dint of a phenomenal work ethic. He had guts, street-smarts and the uncanny ability to make good decisions. Later, he maintained his success by selecting other good people who could interpret his ideas and help him accomplish things.

Lemay started as an Army pilot in the 1930s, during the depths of the Great Depression. Funding was tight, although it also was a time of great advances in aviation. Lemay mastered the technical intricacies of every aircraft he flew. He was, in particular, a superb navigator – perhaps the best in the Army; perhaps the best in the country; perhaps one of the best in the world. It would come to matter, eventually.

And Lemay knew his aircraft weapons, too, from guns to arming wires to tail fins. In the process of mastering these systems, he developed a sense of the training and supervision he needed to impart to his subordinates.

Thus Lemay understood the “envelope” of performance in many different respects. That is, he understood what he could demand from both people and machines. Lemay also understood how the Army system worked, and he could out-bureaucrat even the best of bureaucrats.

Finally, Lemay thought broadly about big ideas, of how to employ technology and people within the system, to accomplish the job at hand. People, ideas, machines, systems. That’s what all the great ones understand. They can tie it all together and make something work.

Lemay Rewrites the Book of Bombing in Europe

So there was Lemay, working in the wings of the U.S. Army (pardon the pun) as World War II began in Europe in 1939. Initially, Lemay rose to squadron-level command posts during the U.S. aerial supply effort towards Britain. He learned a lot, and it would prove to be useful knowledge after the U.S. entered the war with Germany.

By 1942, and the early days of U.S. bombing effort against Germany, things were not going well. Targeting was poor. Accuracy was terrible. Losses were high. Into this mix, Lemay was assigned to command one of the first B-17 bomber groups in England.

Lemay immediately focused on crew-training and aircraft-maintenance. He flew with his crews, developing the “box formation” in which the defensive guns of each bomber provided protection not only to themselves, but to others in the group as well.

As the bombers approached the target, Lemay insisted on steady, accurate run-ins despite the murderous German antiaircraft fire. Lemay believed that there was no use taking the risks and losses of air assaults, if the bombs could not be placed accurately on targets.

Lemay’s tactics were successful. Bombing accuracy increased, and his units’ losses went down. Over time, the B-17 even became a fearsome killer of enemy aircraft, shooting down more German fighter airplanes than any other type of aircraft in World War II. Lemay was promoted, and his tactics became operational doctrine. Lemay’s concepts began to have a strategic impact on the war effort.

“A Lot to Learn in Combat”

But Lemay knew – and never forgot — that bombing was a brutal, unforgiving business. The Germans put up one hell of a fight, every time. “We had a lot to learn in combat,” Lemay wrote later. “Many people didn’t last long enough to learn much.”

On a typical mission, flak exploded all around, tossing thousands of pieces of supersonic shrapnel in every direction. Or the German Messerschmitt-109s fired cannon shells the size of milk bottles, filled with high explosive.

Blue Battlefields, Orange Balls

In 10,000 years of human history, there had never been a conflict like this. Up in the blue battlefield, massive airplanes were ripped to pieces in just fractions of a second. Death was random and made no distinction between good men or bad. Aircraft collided. Aircraft maneuvered so violently that their wings ripped off. Aircraft were hit, and exploded into orange balls that vaporized every soul. The lucky ones, at least, died before tumbling 26,000 feet to earth amidst a rain of scorched metal and parts.

In World War II, the Army Air Corps suffered more combat deaths than did the ground-pounding, beach-hitting Marines. Almost every day, for over three years, hundreds of aircraft full of young men took off from bases in England. Later in the day, chaplains stood by the end of the runways, counting the returning aircraft and checking off their tail numbers as they landed. Lemay, too – when he was not up-front and flying — was in the control towers or operations rooms, keeping vigil.

And of those aircraft that never returned? There were just so many, something like 5,000, filled with American aircrew. Later, as time permitted, the chaplains went through the personal effects of the missing. Then the Army sent a footlocker home to a grieving family. Lemay went through many a service record, personally writing thousands of condolence letters.

The Highest Praise Comes from the Opponent

After the war, the Strategic Bombing Survey second-guessed the results of Lemay’s efforts. Targeting was never all that good, the survey pointed out. Indeed, most bombs missed the targets entirely. Bombing did not truly cripple German industry, noted the survey. One key conclusion was that bombing used vast resources for limited results.

Then again, not everything is subject to “survey.” Indeed, Lemay’s European bombing campaign received high praise from the highest of all sources. It came from no less an expert than Albert Speer, the German Minister of Armaments. Speer would know, of course, because it was his industries on the receiving end of Lemay’s bombs.

In memoirs published in the 1970s, Speer noted that the increasingly effective U.S. bombardment required Germany to redeploy over 2.5 million troops, 150,000 high-velocity guns and 20,000 fighters and pilots across Western Europe to cover the “aerial front.” Speer commented wryly on the effect these troops and munitions could have had, if only they had been available to fight the Red Army on the Eastern Front.

Cometh Another Hour…

Thus did one man meet the call of a dark hour in Europe. But Mars, god of war, was not finished with Lemay. There was another trumpet blowing. There was another dark hour for the nation, and Lemay was summoned to Asia.

Thank you for reading Part I. Part II will follow.

Until we meet again,
Byron W. King

September 8, 2009

A Review of “Lemay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis Lemay” was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder

In order for there to be a restaurant at all some entrepreneur has to put his money and vision on the line and open it. He has a thing called “overhead,” which is irreducible on-going expenses whether he has any customers at all or not. The rent, utilities, taxes, staff, laundry, raw ingredients, and so forth are constants. He is harried by assorted inspectors, frequently with conflicting demands.

In order for a meal to be put on the table once Joe Entrepreneur reaches that point the cooks have to prepare it and somebody has to serve it.

The diner has to have both the inclination to eat there and the wherewithal to pay for the meal and tip the waiter.

When government becomes the restaurant the system flies apart in many ways. Governments do not worry about overheads; indeed, it is an essential function of government to grow. The gang in DC has no concept of being able to “afford” the expenses they occasion. Money isn’t real to them. Other people’s money rarely is. They print some more any time they want to knowing that it reduces the value of the dollars we hold. They hire staff which always turns out to be permanent with reckless abandon.

Back in the real world government makes everything more expensive and more difficult. In our example, the minimum wage concept makes labor more expensive for the business owner. He has his choice of taking less profit, reducing staff, not expanding, or cutting quality. All of those will damage his enterprise. For over two decades I have been listening to small business owners say that they had the business to expand, but that between ludicrous restrictions, regulations, and taxes it simply was not worth their while to do so.

Cap and Trade will make energy far more expensive, and do so by design. Does the restaurateur reduce the fourteen ounce Angus strip to ten ounces? Raise prices? Charge for parking? Use frozen french fries instead of hand cut ones from fresh potatoes? It does not matter which unpleasant choice he makes he will be obliged to offer less to customers who are under the same constraints with their work and family expenses. Every time one of them decides that dinner out is an expense he cannot justify the restaurant suffers.

The waiters are damaged by the harm done by government to the owner and the customers, and so is the cook, so is the busboy, and so is the bartender.

The diner, at least, still has the choice of whether or not to patronize the restaurant, although he has to eat somewhere, whether at home or out. This is where we get into taxation policies.

Statists and, indeed, politicians in general, rarely know anything about where money comes from. They seem to think that “made,” “earned,” “produced,” and “printed” all mean the same thing. They really cannot tell the difference between a US savings bond and gold. They think borrowed money is real and does not actually have to be paid back.

They appear to believe that incomes are immutable, that if you make $200,000 this year that you will continue to make at least that much every year until you retire no matter what else changes. They speak blithely of your electrical bill doubling, not seeing that as causing you to spend less elsewhere because you have a ludicrous fondness for heat and light in your home. They even think you should run automobiles on the stuff. Some of them probably even believe that you can charge the ten thousand dollar battery on a Volt with twenty-five cents’ worth of electricity, as advertised.

They think that burger-flippers will always flip burgers, and their lot will improve only if Congress mandates higher wages for them.

Governments understand only fear, force, and how to use the public treasury to buy votes. Congress fails to grasp the very simple fact that everything is interconnected. In one sense it does not matter who, other than those with Pelosi-like incomes, has his or her light bill doubled, the money that will be allocated for electricity can no longer be spent in another area. If Hal’s discretionary income is $500/month and he has to give $167 of that to Brazos Power and Light, one out of every three dollars that he had previously to spend in restaurants, or to have carpets cleaned, or to buy a new fishing rod is gone forever, vanished into the insatiable maw of government. If Susie, the single mom teacher loses a third of her discretionary income, she will have to do without a washing machine, painting her house, or as many school clothes for her child. There is no way, short of a second job, to replace the money which has been stolen by government action, or that stolen by inflation which was caused by printing of fiat money.

I suppose I sound as though I am speaking to a sixth grade civics class, although most kids have allowances or parents who utter the foulest three words in the English language, “We can’t afford…” One wonders if the constantly increasing out of control “budgets” at local, state, and national levels are caused in part by a system that requires great wealth to be elected to public office, and great dependence on funds gathered by those who demand political favors in return. I live near Bryan, a town of 55,000 people. Can someone explain to me why Bryan needs to spend nine million dollars a year? All of it extorted from local property owners?

You may wonder why I am covering anything this basic here on Whiskey & Gunpowder! Surely you Shooters, of all others, understand the basic principles of business, budgets, and von Mises. One would have thought so–right up to the point where the Editor was deluged with letters asserting that pie in the sky “health care” is a “right” and expressing their sentiments in language unbefitting ladies, gentlemen, and civilized debate. If you understand why we cannot have “single payer” health insurance, fine, pass this on to some child who needs to know.

The basic fact is that there is only so much “money” in the world, when we see “money” as a medium of exchange, which it is. I need a better way to induce the cobbler to make me a pair of shoes than offering him twenty dozen eggs he can’t eat before they spoil, although we might agree that I would deliver a dozen a week until the debt was paid. He, in turn, needs cow hide to make shoes, and I have cows, but I don’t want to skin one just to get shoes…at any rate, it worked better when we all exchanged little slugs of silver or gold for each others’ labor and production. The balance gets destroyed when the government creates “fiat” money and expects us to accept their fairy not-gold at the same value as shimmering silver ingots. We won’t do it. We also know that every time more money is cranked out of thin air every dollar we have is worth less because there is no way to differentiate between the dollar we had when there were only ten in the world and that same dollar when suddenly there are a hundred.

The Statists’ theory is that there is no limit to how much money they can “create,” just as there is no limit to how much milk the cow can give. There really are limits to how much moo-juice Bossy will produce, including her heritage, her age, how good her feed is, and whether or not she has had a calf recently. Even cows want a break after being milked for 300 days. It takes nine months to produce another calf and “freshen,” or begin producing more rich, creamy milk.

My darling Charles and I sent Asia, our Segundo, off to pick up a cow and her week old bull calf today. Mathilda, as we have named her, is three-quarters Jersey and a quarter Black Angus, both animals are black, and they will fit in beautifully with the Black Dexters. Mathilda will handle our milk and cream needs for the next three hundred days, more time than it takes for the goats to reproduce (210 days.) The funny part is that the owner didn’t want to milk her so he has been underfeeding her deliberately so that she won’t produce more milk than the calf can drink! How about that, Shooters, when a “simple farmer” in “flyover country” knows that to get less out of the cow you provide less sustenance than she needs. (We gave her a whole bale of first class hay and a big container of clear water for tonight.) Why can’t all those Ivy League economists and lawyers see that when they take too much of our money we produce far less taxes?

There really are practical limits to how many taxes can be extracted from most of us. Particularly in a land where nearly half of the people pay no taxes at all and a lot of them get “earned income credits” for doing one day’s work a year. There is a large class of people that is paid to do one simple chore: vote for the Statists. I suppose it is nice work if one can stomach it. I don’t know, since no government has ever bought my food, shelter, utilities, and medical care. Given my choice I would prefer to be a slum landlord, but the government beat me to it.

There are two points here that the DC gang had better grasp quickly. The first is that no matter how you jigger the figures, jobless people aren’t making money and they aren’t paying taxes on the money they didn’t earn. Just because they aren’t counted officially doesn’t mean that they aren’t out there, as increased robberies, claims for unemployment, and appeals to churches show. Those who are losing more of their income to higher taxes and utility bills are not purchasing as much, which means that the stores they once patronized are no longer making as much money, so they don’t pay as many taxes.

The Statist solution is automatic: “Oh, we’ll just tax the rich!” “Rich” is a relative term but our dear leader defines it at a quarter of a million dollars a year. Their problem is that if they confiscate all of the earnings of every person in America who makes $250,000 a year or more it won’t be more than a drop in the bucket they have to fill to cover their expenditures. It can’t be done. According to the most recent analysis available, 2006, the “richest” ten per cent. paid fifty-five per cent. of all taxes. Statists think that is “fair,” but what they had better start thinking is that pulling that much money out of those who produce jobs, start new businesses, invest in others, or even play the stock market slows everything down. Charity? When you filter money through the government over ninety per cent. of it is spent as salaries and overhead or disappears from graft or theft. Good private charities more than reverse that ratio.

How many families do you suppose there are with incomes of two hundred thousand dollars a year or more? I’ll tell you, since Newsweek kindly told me: 3.4%. That is 34 out of 1000 families, or 340 out of 10,000 families, or 3400 out of 100,000 families, or 34,000 out of a million families. Those are the ones who pay more than half of the taxes. I’m not among them, but I understand the frustration and annoyance such a state of affairs must cause.

The really fun statistic is this one: those 3.4% do 14% of the consumer spending and they are the ones who create and sustain businesses, which is where jobs come from. When the top five per cent. bears the greatest burden of onerous taxes, sooner or later not only does commerce decline but at least some of them ask why they are bothering. That is one of the difficulties with the proposed health “care” legislation, the bizarre proposition that doctors will submit to a 15% pay cut at the government’s whim. No, they won’t. Those who are old enough will retire. Young people who were planning on enrolling in medical school will think of something else to do.

The best solution I can see is to do the John Galt thing. Quit. If you cannot afford to quit your job literally, stop your consumer spending to the greatest extent that you can.

Put the money into commodities for your family’s use or into chunks of silver. Some of you may shake your heads in bewilderment and ask, “Isn’t that consumer spending?” Well…yes, and no. If you spend a hundred dollars taking your family out for pizza and a movie, that money (minus taxes) goes back into the economy to be taxed again and again in every hand that holds it, and you have nothing to show for it beyond a few memories. If you buy a case of MREs (ugh), your money has gone to an individual who will do whatever with it, but you have taken it out of circulation. You are storing value in the form of food that you can eat during the coming Greater Depression. If you wear the clothing you have now and do not visit Macy’s or Dillards, the shock of what you do not spend ripples through the economy. A nice blouse costs a couple of hundred dollars and you may wear it two years. That money goes to pay those who manufactured, shipped, and sold the blouse. If you turn that money into a dozen ounces of silver you have pulled that value out of circulation. You are richer for having “savings” that cannot be lost through devaluation. You have turned the value of your fiat dollars at present into a metal which will preserve it. You have also hit the tax-and-spenders where they live…

A great many stores and firms are going out of business and this trend will gain momentum. You’re smart. You can figure out for yourself which businesses will not make it through a deepening depression and what you should stock now. Only the big, the smart, and the connected will survive, and the myriad choices you have now will be a distant dream perhaps five years from now. Perhaps in less.

Big government turns you into lunch. Most of us cannot afford to be the owner. Our choice is whether to be the waiter, who may lose his job and will surely see his customers and his tips diminish, or to be the diner. It isn’t too late to do the Joseph thing and stock up for the future, and emulating John Galt and Midas Mulligan will shorten the time until the whole rotten system collapses. Too many carpenter ants have been nibbling at the foundations of our financial structure.

John Galt said to withdraw our minds. The current system doesn’t want those and doesn’t want us to use them. Take away what they do want, an endless stream of tax revenues.

Cordially,
Linda Brady Traynham

September 4, 2009

Free Lunches, Money from Nothing and Limits to Government Theft was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder