Author Archives: Kennith30E

Has Vladimir Putin Painted Himself Into a Corner?

by Kennith30E Posted on August 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Max Fisher writes today that Vladimir Putin probably never wanted to invade Ukraine. So why did he? It all started when he was elected to a third term as president amid continuing economic stagnation:

Putin expected another boisterously positive reception, but that’s not what he happened. Instead, he got protests in major cities, opposition candidates, and, even according to the highly suspicious official tally, only 63 percent of the vote.

Putin panicked. He saw his legitimacy slipping and feared a popular revolt. So he changed strategies. Rather than basing his political legitimacy on economic growth, he would base it on reviving Russian nationalism: imperial nostalgia, anti-Western paranoia, and conservative Orthodox Christianity.

….Then the Ukraine crisis began….In March 2014, Putin indulged his own rhetoric about saving Ukraine’s ethnic Russians — and seized an opportunity to reclaim a former Soviet strategic port — when he launched a stealth invasion of Crimea….This is when the crisis began to slip beyond Putin’s control….The nationalistic rhetoric inside Russia was cranked up to a fever pitch. Putin’s propaganda had built a parallel universe for Russians, in which the stakes in eastern Ukraine were dire not just for Russia but for the world….But the violence in eastern Ukraine was spinning out of control, with Ukrainian military forces looking like they were on the verge of overrunning the rebels.

In a rational world, Putin would have cut his losses and withdrawn support for the rebels. But, thanks to months of propagandistic state media, Russians do not live in a rational world. They live in a world where surrendering in eastern Ukraine would mean surrendering to American-backed Ukrainian Nazis, and they believe everything that Putin has told them about being the only person capable of defeating these forces of darkness. To withdraw would be to admit that it was all a lie and to sacrifice the nationalism that is now his only source of real legitimacy. So Putin did the only thing he could to do to keep up the fiction upon which his political survival hinges: he invaded Ukraine outright.

Is this basically correct? It’s more or less the way I view events in Russia, so it appeals to me. But I don’t know enough about Russia to have a lot of confidence that this is really the best explanation for Putin’s actions.

It’s also not clear—to me, anyway—that Putin is truly stuck in a situation he never wanted. I agree that this interpretation makes sense. Eastern Ukraine just flatly doesn’t seem worth the price he would have to pay for it. But that’s easy to say from seven thousand miles away. I wonder if this is really the way Putin sees things?

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Has Vladimir Putin Painted Himself Into a Corner?

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BPA Sales Are Booming

by Kennith30E Posted on December 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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Bisphenol A, a chemical used in can linings and plastic bottles, is pretty nasty stuff. The Food and Drug Administration recently banished it from baby bottles (at the behest of the chemical industry itself, after baby bottle producers had already phased it out under consumer pressure). BPA, as it’s known, is an endocrine-disrupting chemical, meaning that it likely causes hormonal damage at extremely low levels. The packaging industry uses it to make plastics more flexible and to delay spoilage in canned foods.

You might think that such a substance would lose popularity as evidence of its likely harms piles up and up. Instead, however, the global market for it will boom over the next six years, according to a proprietary, paywall-protected report from the consultancy Transparency Market Research. The group expects global BPA sales to reach $18.8 billion by 2019, from $13.1 billion this year—about a 44 percent jump.

TMR researchers declined to be interviewed by me and wouldn’t give me access to a full copy of their report. But they did send me a heavily redacted sample. One of the few trends I could glean from it is that the “steady growth” in global BPA consumption is driven by “increasing demand in the Asia-Pacific region.” (According to this 2012 paper by Hong Kong researchers, Chinese BPA production and consumption have both “grown rapidly” in recent years, meaning “much more BPA contamination” for the nation’s environment and citizens.) As for the United States, the report says that North America is the globe’s “third largest regional market for BPA,” behind Asia and Europe. North American BPA consumption is growing, but a “at a very slow rate,” the report states. As a result, our share of the global BPA is expected to experience a “slight decline” by 2019. Not exactly comforting.

The sample that Transparency Market Research sent me blacked out its analysis of which companies have what share of the global BPA market. This 2012 US Department of Agriculture report claims that just two companies, German chemical giant Bayer and its US rival Dow, “produce the bulk of BPA in the world.” Another major producer is Saudi Basic Industries Corp., or SABIC, a company 70 percent owned by the Saudi government. This charming corporate crew looks set to cash in on handsomely on the ongoing BPA boom.

This article:

BPA Sales Are Booming

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The Lesson of Obamacare: Sabotage Works

by Kennith30E Posted on November 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin have a big piece in the Washington Post today about the disastrous implementation and rollout of Obamacare following the euphoria of its passage in 2010. Goldstein and Eilperin document plenty of bad decisions along the way, and lots of them reflect poorly on Team Obama. Still, I have to say that my big takeaway from the article was the same as Andrew Sprung’s: sabotage works.

The primary example of this comes early in the story, when the team responsible for building the marketplaces—and the website—was moved under the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Partly this was for operational reasons, but:

The move had a political rationale, as well. Tucked within a large bureaucracy, some administration officials believed, the new Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight would be better insulated from the efforts of House Republicans, who were looking for ways to undermine the law. But the most basic reason was financial: Although the statute provided plenty of money to help states build their own insurance exchanges, it included no money for the development of a federal exchange — and Republicans would block any funding attempts. According to one former administration official, Sebelius simply could not scrounge together enough money to keep a group of people developing the exchanges working directly under her.

Now, one obvious question is why the law failed to finance the federal exchanges. That was pretty clearly a mistake. Still, under normal circumstances, even an opposition party would end up cutting a deal eventually to shore up the missing funding. Not this time, though. As one White House official told the Post, “You’re basically trying to build a complicated building in a war zone, because the Republicans are lobbing bombs at us.”

There are plenty of other examples of this, and Sprung outlines them in his post today. No federal program that I can remember faced quite the implacable hostility during its implementation that Obamacare has faced. This excuses neither the Obama administration’s poor decisions nor its timidity in the face of Republican attacks, but it certainly puts them in the proper perspective.

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The Lesson of Obamacare: Sabotage Works

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