Jon Taplin's Blog

Deep Afghanistan Corruption

A month ago, I referred to the “spooky parallels” between the Karzai government and the terminally corrupt Diem regime we found ourselves backing in Vietnam 50 years ago. Well today Peter Galbraith, the most experienced U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan was fired from his post at the U.N. station in Kabul for exposing the complicity of the head of the U.N. mission, Kai Eide, in covering up the fraud in the Afghanistan election.

Fearful of “ghost” polling stations that would never open because of a lack of security — but which would report fraudulent ballots — Mr. Galbraith wrote that he had pressed the Afghan ministers of defense and interior to secure these polling centers or shut them down. But he said the ministers “complained about my intervention and Kai ordered me to drop the matter.”

“As it turned out, most of the electoral fraud occurred in these ghost polling centers,” he wrote. A spokesman for the Ministry of Defense, Gen. Zahir Azimi, said he was not aware of any complaint before the election.

In addition, Mr. Galbraith wrote that United Nations field staff members collected data showing a “minuscule” turnout in southern provinces that somehow would report large numbers of votes for Mr. Karzai. But once it became clear that the data “would be deeply disturbing to President Karzai,” he said, Mr. Eide “ordered the staff not to share the data with anyone.”

The long sordid history of U.S. military support for corrupt regimes needs to be broken. President Obama’s willingness to take a long hard look at the potential Afghan War escalation is both brave and new. For fifty years Presidents have acquiesced to the conventional wisdom of the national security establishment. In the situation room today it’s obvious that Holbrooke, Clinton and Petraeus represent that conventional wisdom. Let us hope that fresh thinking can be brought to the table.

David Brooks on the New Culture War

Brooks is coming around to our side. He is starting to abandon the “cut taxes at all costs” brigade.

Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally.

If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.

It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos — the righteous conviction held by everybody from AARP to the agribusinesses that their groups are entitled to every possible appropriation, regardless of the larger public cost. It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending.

A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.

It's Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature

The scientists at the Ag Schools thought they had just the solution for the dairy farmers of America.

Three years ago, a technological breakthrough gave dairy farmers the chance to bend a basic rule of nature: no longer would their cows have to give birth to equal numbers of female and male offspring. Instead, using a high-technology method to sort the sperm of dairy bulls, they could produce mostly female calves to be raised into profitable milk producers.

But now just as a huge number of dairy cows are entering the herds, there is a giant oversupply of milk.

Desperate to drive up prices by stemming the gusher of unwanted milk, a dairy industry group, the National Milk Producers Federation, has been paying farmers to send herds to slaughter. Since January the program has culled about 230,000 cows nationwide.

The law of unintended consequences.

Dangerous Unemployment

What’s wrong with these two pictures? I believe there is a dangerous disconnect between the “investor class” and everyone else in the country. The Dow keeps climbing and jobs keep disappearing.  If this situation is not to dissolve into class warfare, our collective establishment (government and business leaders) better figure out a way to start creating jobs pretty quickly or your going to see the pitchfork brigades descend on both Washington and Wall Street. Already the signs of class tensions are high as the Pew Foundation found out last month when they asked what were the sources of conflict between social groups.

Both immigration and anger at the rich are sources of lower and middle class conflict. We don’t like to use those words in America, but there is no other way to describe this. In the 1930′s Depression this took two distinct paths–the Nativist/right wing vitriol of Father Coughlin and the “soak the rich” populism of Huey Long. Roosevelt had to thread the needle between fascism and socialism, but without the WPA putting people back to work, the country could have been taken over by the demagogues. God knows we have enough Father Coughlin’s to staff a whole cable TV network 24-7.

Obama needs a Digital Green WPA. If we could build the Hoover Dam in 1936, we could get started now on the massive solar and wind power opportunities to put people back to work.

Pentagon Strategy

Berlusconi Can't Help Himself

Look at Barack’s expression. The Italian Prime Minister is out of control.

Obama's Got his Mojo Working

Last month I counseled that all the handwringing over the townhalls was just white noise. I continue to believe that the President has a firm grasp of the realities of governing, even if some of his Democratic partners are less sure of this role.

Charles Blow’s column this morning reminds us that Obama is way ahead of the Republicans on most measures of competence. Clearly the public understands that the Republicans are being obstructionist, with no plan of their own for health care, climate change or financial regulation. In fact the public is much more supportive of a public option in health care than even the Blue Dog Democrats.

What is becoming clearer is that the Beck/Limbaugh/Palin wingnut fringe of the country has never risen above about 25% of the electorate. (that’s the percentage who believe in “death panels”). Continue reading ‘Obama's Got his Mojo Working’

The Art of the Long View

I’m playing Charlie Rose this morning in a live Webcast called Art of the Long View; The Media Company of 2020. I’m interviewing Peter Chernin, former President of News Corp and Gordon Crawford, the Managing Director of Capital Group, the most important media investor.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O93DFBH43BI]

The Real Afghanistan Battle

I have been focused for a while on the important role Joe Biden is bringing to the Afghanistan strategy debate. This morning the New York Times reports that Biden’s pragmatic views are getting more traction with the President.

President Obama is exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan, including a plan advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scale back American forces and focus more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan, officials said Tuesday.

What now plays out over the next month is the classic debate that has plagued the National Security State since the early 1950′s. On one hand inside the Pentagon, the true believers hold to the nostrum that there is a military solution to Afghanistan, despite the evidence of a thousand year resistance to foreign invasion that frustrated the Ottoman, British, Russian and now American empires. My guess is the true believers are led by General David Petraeus, who has been a source for Bob Woodward in the past. Leaking the McChrystal report to Woodward in order to pressure Obama is a classic technique of Pentagon hawks. Continue reading ‘The Real Afghanistan Battle’

Protect the Insurance Company Profits

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