How the Gray Lady Works for the Government

This Friday Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu will confer with their American counterparts, Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense of Chuck Hagel, in Washington D.C. to see if they can salvage the September presidential summit in Moscow between Putin and Obama. The main sticking point seems to be Russia's decision to grant renegade NSA contractor Edward Snowden temporary asylum. But, according to a story by Michael Shear and Steven Lee Myers that appears in today's New York Times, "Kerry, Hagel and Russians Will Meet on Issues Imperiling Obama-Putin Visit," differences over Syria loom large as well.

Towards the end of the story, after Shear and Myers have summarized the American position on Snowden's asylum, there is a description of Russia's stance on various issues, including the Syrian civil war:

[Mr. Lavrov] also discussed the need to move ahead with Syrian peace talks that he and Mr. Kerry agreed to in Moscow in May. 

“The more we delay calling it, the more victims there will be among civilians,” Mr. Lavrov said, according to the Interfax news agency. He blamed the Syrian rebels for resisting opening talks with President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

The bold facing of the last sentence is mine. I think it's noteworthy because though otherwise an innocuous statement -- it is factually accurate -- it is manipulative. There is no question that the Syrian National Coalition is opposed to peace talks. This is beyond dispute. Ahmad al-Jarba, the head of the opposition, did briefly, the weekend before last, raise the possibility of his group attending peace talks in Geneva, but then, a few days later, he corrected himself and returned to the opposition's default position: No peace talks until military gains are achieved and al-Assad steps down.

To frame this as Russians blaming the rebels for resisting negotiations is to make it seem as if it is all just tit-for-tat, "he said/she said," blame-game petulance of equally guilty squabbling parties trying to secure the upper hand. It's nothing of the sort. It's a civil war where one side -- the side the United States supports with money and munitions and CIA training -- favors war, with its resulting death and devastation, over peace. The United States position is to continue with war and death. This has to be elided somehow, obfuscated. And the Gray Lady, as an extension for the most part of the U.S. government, plays its part.

Coming on the heels of yesterday's report of Islamist rebel gains in Aleppo at the Minakh airbase and the push by ISIS into the coastal mountain Alawite villages surrounding Latakia, there is a report this morning of a government ambush of Al Nusra Front fighters outside Damascus with over 60 killed.

Brooks on Health Care Spending

David Brooks' column this morning looks at the nomination of Chuck Hagel to lead the Department of Defense through the prism of budgetary battles to come.  Obama needs a Republican war hero to provide political cover for a Democratic administration to reduce the size of the Pentagon.  Brooks has been playing Cassandra when it comes to the dangers of ever-growing Medicare spending.  Soon it will blot out nearly all else that the government does:

As the federal government becomes a health care state, there will have to be a generation of defense cuts that overwhelm anything in recent history. Keep in mind how brutal the budget pressure is going to be. According to the Government Accountability Office, if we act on entitlements today, we will still have to cut federal spending by 32 percent and raise taxes by 46 percent over the next 75 years to meet current obligations. If we postpone action for another decade, then we have to cut all non-interest federal spending by 37 percent and raise all taxes by 54 percent.

As this sort of crunch gradually tightens, Medicare will be the last to go. Spending on things like Head Start, scientific research and defense will go quicker. These spending cuts will transform America’s stature in the world, making us look a lot more like Europe today. This is why Adm. Mike Mullen called the national debt the country’s biggest security threat.

This assumes that we will continue to provide and pay for health care in the manner that we do today.  We can't.  The math doesn't lie.  A shift to preventative medicine is going to have to take place.  This of course is easier said than done.  For each person to begin to take responsibility for his or her own health is akin to an Apollo program or a World-War-Two-type mobilization.  Infantile narcissism and the consumerism that makes it a defining characteristic of our culture will have to be put in check.

Andrew Ross Sorkin in a DealBook column this morning argues that the four-year delay in the implementation of the Basel III liquidity requirements was less a heinous capitulation on the part of bank regulators than an unavoidable acceptance of reality:

In truth, the reason that regulators ultimately chose to relax the rules was simple practicality: many banks in Europe and some in the United States would have never been able to meet the requirements without significantly reducing the amount of credit they were to extend to Main Street over the next two years, according to people involved in the Basel decision process.

My problem with this is it is a continuation of the Wall Street-bailout, Too-Big-to-Fail logic: Let's go easy on the banks because if we don't they'll hurt Main Street.  How is this different from calling the 1% "job creators"?