Productivity (or not) in Russia

After reading an American business article breathlessly gushing about the supposed strength of Russia's economy, with such details as a high employment rate under 3%, it seems worthwhile to draw attention to facts known about the topic.

More than 40% of the enterprises in Russia – including both civilian business and firms dedicated to military production – are shorthanded. Want to expand your business, or buy a house? The Bank of Russia has set its benchmark rate at 16% and still expects inflation not to fall quickly. A commercial loan isn't going to be made at the bank benchmark rate.

The same article that celebrated Russia's economic "strength" reported that Russia's employment situation benefitted from Russia's "voluntary" military recruitment model. Sure, there are some Russians who signed contracts to kill Ukrainians for $2,000 per month; that's true. But there's also a regularly scheduled conscription system that pulls several hundred thousand young Russians into the military each conscription cycle and, despite Russian law that states conscripts cannot be sent abroad to war, they've been sent to Ukraine from the very start of the war. These hundreds of thousands of men haven't had an easy time of it; Western estimates put the number of dead and wounded over 400,000. Few of them will work normal jobs again. More workers have fled Russia to avoid conscription – the UK Ministry of Defense estimated fleeing Russians numbered 1,300,000 in 2022 alone. Many of the fleeing Russians have been the most employable: young people in technology work who left because it was easy to do their work abroad.

That full-employment picture looks less cheery when one considers how many Russians fled the country or were sent to Ukraine to die, to get Russia to its low unemployment rate. And those who are working are being courted by military supply firms to lure them from economy segments that sustain and improve Russians' quality of life. Inflation is a direct result of military suppliers outbidding civilian employers to satisfy Russia's demand for weapons and ammunition.

When calculating GDP in Russia, translation into dollars is tough: selling rubles for dollars is illegal, so there is no market value for rubles. The rate of exchange for rubles is a government-promulgated fiction. Who knows what it'd be worth.

Russia is still in the war in Ukraine for the simple reason that enemies of the democratic West – primarily China, Iran, and North Korea – are showering Russia with supplies from which to make war materiel. It should be no surprise that Ukraine requires support itself. Like the Cold War ended when Russia bankrupted itself in an arms race against the so-called "Star Wars" (technically the Strategic Defense Initiative) defense programs, the conflict with fascist dictatorships allied against the West may be won luring them into an escalation of commitment to an unwinnable fight to expand Russia's borders.

And the more Russia embarrasses itself failing to defeat Ukraine, the more Russia's neighbors will be emboldened to reach out to make alliances with the capacity to support them in improving their quality of life.

Putting the Jab in Hijab

Women's Lib comes to Iran. Apparently in the small towns, women aren't expected to take a stand on issues like their required attire, and one "man of the cloth" hit the mat in the street when he didn't take a girl's hint he should keep his opinion to himself.

Go get 'em, tigress.

Taliban Bars Vaccines Over Drone Strikes

According to a new press release, Taliban leaders in Afghanistan demand that American drone strikes halt or polio vaccines will be denied to civilians subject to their control. This curious threat – linking disease eradication in the Taliban's own backyard to American military behavior – continues a common theme of Islamofascists* that recently included the poisoning of 160 schoolgirls because they committed the offense of being girls seeking education. The basic premise of the Islamofascist movement is understood fairly clearly once it is evident that the health and education of the population are less valuable to the movement's proponents than the solidification of their military despotism.

The principal difference between Afghanistan and Iran in this is that Iran spent a few years unable to make spare parts for US-made military equipment, and learned the value of engineers (and thus schools) to the movement.

====
* Islamofascism may not be a word, but is intended to describe a brand of fascism conducted in advancement of a strain of purported Islamism that includes doctrinaire claims of a religious right to operate a despotic police state that oppresses contrary elements by declaring them religiously forbidden and thus subject to reprisal on religious grounds without need of courts, due process, or even evidence. Iran has offered an example of Islamofascism for several decades, and now supports genocide in Syria to prevent the threat of successful Islamic democracy.

Military Drones Spoofed: Real Security Is Hard

Iran captured a modern US drone using cracking techniques developed through analysis of older crashed drones. First, the drone's remote operators were cut off using electronic noise. Then, once the craft was on autopilot, false GPS signals were sent to it in order to persuade it that it was landing in a safe airbase in Kandahar. The real location was a pre-prepared airstrip in Iran.

Spoofing attacks are serious. Anti-spoofing hardening such as frequent comparison of GPS coordinates to coordinates calculated from inertial sensors and camera images would make this more difficult. Highly accurate inertial positioning systems are in common use in deepwater oil and gas construction equipment, and could readily be adapted to the somewhat less hostile environment of high altitude. Both environments, of course, are subject to currents and other confounders, making them ideal places to share positioning technology.

Dollar Ascendant Again?

Remember when Russia said the dollar sale of oil was coming to a close and the Middle East said oil would be priced in Euros?

Iran, no lover of the Great Satan of the West, has announced its central bank is selling Euros in favor of dollars and gold.

While the dollar has a lot of inflationary concerns weighing on it (at least in my mind), the Euro is apparently much worse. One wonders how this might impact China's potential unlinking of its currency to the dollar.

The fact that enemies of the United States are left investing in its currency does have a certain irony.

Iran: Welcome To The New Rule By Terror

When accusation of allegiance with the United States or Israel failed to thwart anti-government protesters, insiders clinging to power began executing them as Enemies of God.

Given that there's no worse accusation in the nominally theocratic state, the legal and moral escalation of government's accusations against those who would hold government politically accountable by demanding genuine ballot counts has apparently reached a pinnacle. The question is whether the government will abandon its nominal public participation and announce naked despotism, or will use terror fostered by religious-branded executions to suppress transparency advocates while pretending to continue public participation.

Iranian Election Protest Lives

Apparently the opposition isn't spent, after all.

Anyone got links to serious analysis of where the protest might be going (other than into Iranian jails)?

Irate In Iran: The Election That Exposed The Emperor

I'll cut to the chase: it's now evident that the Emperor has no clothes.

Not the apparently falsely-elected Ahmadinejad -- the ideology behind his religious state. As Eloquently encapsulated by Fareed Zakaria in a CNN interview:

Fareed Zakaria: One of the first things that strikes me is we are watching the fall of Islamic theocracy.

CNN: Do you mean you think the regime will fall?

Zakaria: No, I don't mean the Iranian regime will fall soon. It may -- I certainly hope it will -- but repressive regimes can stick around for a long time. I mean that this is the end of the ideology that lay at the basis of the Iranian regime.

The regime's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, laid out his special interpretation of political Islam in a series of lectures in 1970. In this interpretation of Shia Islam, Islamic jurists had divinely ordained powers to rule as guardians of the society, supreme arbiters not only on matters of morality but politics as well. When Khomeini established the Islamic Republic of Iran, this idea was at its heart. Last week, that ideology suffered a fatal wound.

CNN: How so?

Zakaria: When the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a "divine assessment," he was indicating it was divinely sanctioned. But no one bought it. He was forced to accept the need for an inquiry into the election. The Guardian Council, Iran's supreme constitutional body, met with the candidates and promised to investigate and perhaps recount some votes. Khamenei has subsequently hardened his position but that is now irrelevant. Something very important has been laid bare in Iran today --- legitimacy does not flow from divine authority but from popular support.

The idea that the state does not act from divine authorization that is clear to the competent cleric undermines not the power of the state -- it has still got its guns, for example -- but it undermines the political philosophy and the religious justifications that have given the state its heretofore-unchallenged power. Now that it's obvious that political insiders are manipulating government for their own ends and not in keeping with divinely-ordained purpose, the legitimacy of the government and its activities will erode until the country is understood by all its neighbors and inhabitants as a naked police state -- or its inhabitants will succeed in reforming the government (I don't speculate as to whether this is largely by reform or mainly by violence; I simply see only two routes).

The fact that neighbors understand Iran as a fascist regime might not seem to help anything -- residents will still live in increasingly unvarnished oppression -- but it will likely impact Iran's capacity to recruit supporters with purely religious motivations. Dividing Islamists from the Iranian state will have a beneficial impact on the state of the propaganda battle being waged in the Middle East. When the word "martyrdom" takes on the connotation of self-sacrifice by pro-democracy advocates resisting the tyranny of dictators who fix elections with blatantly illegal vote fraud, we will have improved the language with which we discuss conflict in the Middle East.

Who knows: instead of Iraq importing Iranian enemies to undermine democracy and stability, Iran may start exporting freedom-loving Shia whose bitter experience with Iran's oppressive state leave them ardent supporters of a state committed to counting votes.

Soundest Rigged Election Ever

When Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described the recent elections as "the soundest, the healthiest of their kind" I don't think he intended to evoke the memory of Soviet-era elections, but if so it's only because it was lawful to campaign against the incumbent. Actually counting all the votes against the incumbent was apparently not allowed, though.

Threatening mobs gathering at the doorways of anti-incumbent activists, police break-ins and threats, and other features make it doubtful the election's surprise outcome was the result of fair electioneering. Perhaps character isn't the only thing being assassinated in connection with Iranian election.

Moussavi, the leading contender in the election, has suggested nullifying the election result may be the only way to restore confidence. Asked whether he would guarantee Moussavi's safety following his claimed victory in the election, Ahmadinejad likened the post-election situation to a crowd clashing with police following a soccer match. Ahmadinejad seemed to miss the fact that claiming the rule of law would protect everyone who wasn't unruly presumed Iran to be a nation governed by the rule of law, which is the very subject of his opponent's debate.

Considering that Ahmadinejad "debated" Moussavi during the election season by waving a folder and telling Moussavi that he had a file on Moussavi's wife, it's pretty easy to see how Moussavi might get the idea the rule of law is in jeopardy in Iran.

UPDATE: Time lists a few reasons the tally seemed suspicious, including the bizarre result that the incumbent's >60% support demonstrated enormous geographic uniformity, including in his opposition candidate's own hometown (where he is hugely popular) and in cities where demographics are significantly different than in rural areas where the incumbent previously drew his apparent support in prior (alleged to have been rigged) elections.

Iran's Interesting Offer

Iran, which has been mentioned here on more than one occasion, is in the news as having made this proposition to the British: we'll stop killing your soldiers in Iraq if you stop undermining our nuke plans.

This sort of undermines the Iranian claims that they're uninvolved in Iraqi violence, no?

Brian's Study Breaks

I was trolling for information on Iran and hit a gold mine: Brian's Study Breaks. It's clear that part of the world is of keen interest to him, and he keeps atop its events much more carefully than I. I don't have any reason to expect I'll necessarily see things the way Brian does, but it's my hope he'll call me out if I say something particularly imbecilic about the region, its religions, or its politics.

I'll be visiting it to keep up with Iran, not the least by trolling through his back-posts and their excellent links (failure to turn the other cheek in the Church of the Nativity? The U.S. Army's Short Guide to Iraq, circa 1943?), and I encourage you to do the same.

I realize now how I found Brian's blog: I was hunting on Google for an earlier post of my own on Iran, and found Brian's post in which he described himself as a "jaded consumer of fiction" -- and ended up atop my search list. Intrigued by anyone proposing such a description, I noticed reviews of Firefly and Babylon 5 and was impressed that he really did care about fiction. Troll his blog for entertainment ideas, too!

Temple of Lies

Iran's propaganda machine is much more effective than the Americans'.

This week, Iran released missile launch video and said belligerent actions would be met with harsh reprisal. The fact the video was apparently doctored to conceal technical failures in the launch, and the fact that the missile launches were mostly short-range missiles and not the more concerning longer-range missiles indicated by the government in Tehran, will probably go largely unnoticed in the part of the world where the video was intended to be digested.

Last year, Iran made a show of strength by kidnapping British sailors patrolling Basra on the pretext that they were trespassing in Iranian waters. When one confronts stateless terrorists, one expects grainy videos of disheveled prisoners being subjected to public humiliation by being made to read ultimatums and participate in propaganda. It is, however, surprising to see such maltreatment accorded uniformed soldiers captured by Geneva Convention signatory states. Ratification of terrorist conduct isn't new for the regime in Tehran, though. Ratification by directly apeing it on television may be a clearer admission than previously available of exactly how uncivilized the nation's leadership is. Interestingly, British doctrine for soldier interactions with captors, updated to handle the realistic probability that capture will be by stateless criminals uninterested in honoring the international laws governing civilized behavior, turns out to fit in just fine when Tehran stages a kidnapping. In the Middle East, where the video was intended to be digested, Tehran's behavior was interpreted not as barbarism but evidence of strength.

Iran has been reassuring anyone who would listen that bombings and murders and assassinations within Iraq are not a product of Iranian training or funding or direct involvement, but result solely from US policy blunders.

Well, that latest point might be half-true. The policy blunder of the United States is a failure to articulate its objectives in a way anyone -- foreign or domestic -- can understand. Years after ousting the tyrant who used to run Iraq, Americans haven't established a "victory condition" sufficient to support departure from the theater of operations -- or explain why Americans should be in the area indefinitely. The result is widespread belief -- supported by opposition propaganda -- that Americans efforts are a failure and that the United States is in an endless, losing battle against local forces. In short, failure to articulate its definition of success has left opponents to define it however needed to depict its impossibility.

Without a clearly articulated vision of success, America can hardly claim victory is feasible. Indeed

On the theory advanced by some critics -- that inability of Americans to leave with their heads up proves their failure -- the U.S. occupations of Germany and Japan are also a failure, in that they're still there and still face both embarrassment and failures in local relations as a result.

The question I see is whether anti-Soviet military presence in newly democratized countries (or, in the case of Germany, re-democratized) is a good model for countering the new crop of religious radicals (the Soviets were arguably radical in asserting there was no God and punishing unapproved religious conduct as China now does) and their hypocritical efforts to bring righteous government to the masses by murdering them until they accept some self-proclaimed caliph as their absolute master. The basic idea is the same: a frightening ideology that promises to steamroller the engines of human progress threatens to overtake legitimate governments by force, and has shown willingness and capability to throw weak governments into chaos at the expense of local life and prosperity. Communism and Islamofascism aren't much different in that regard. The question is simply whether the tactics that were applied to the last eruption of the threat are good tactics for the current bout.

It's an interesting parallel to attempt, and we shouldn't look at the end of the Soviet Union as a model for relations with the proponents of the present evil. I think that Americans and the Soviets eventually reached a kind of realization that their assets and interests were too important to risk by a serious escalation. By contrast, Iran has little compunction -- and stateless terrorists none at all -- about killing people who stand in their way. Like the beginning of the conflict against international totalitarian movements masquerading as communism, the beginning stages of the conflict against reactionary tyrants pretending to advance Islam is doomed to be violent.

As in the old conflict, we will need to pay close attention to the terms in which the conflict is cast, and take care not to lose control of the framing of the conflict. Losing control of how the conflict is framed in the public dialog will result in propaganda defeat, and cause great increase in the duration and cost of any American effort toward any objective American policymakers may eventually deign to articulate.

It may not be possible to prevent other players from cheating, but it doesn't hurt to announce the rules. The United States' failure to articulate an achievable military purpose when it sent forces into Iraq (or failure to articulate a follow-on purpose after it was clear Mr. Hussein's regime no longer controlled the country) invited critics to supply their own framing of the issues, tailor-made to ensure the United States has as little opportunity as possible to achieve political objectives involving the region. The United States has made this error before, and lost the propaganda conflict for minds despite success on the field.

The powers that be should wake up and smell the coffee. What effect swords (bullets), if their achievement can be readily undone by an unchallenged pen (video)?

Trading With The Enemy

CNN seems to imply that allowing Americans to sell cigarettes, brassieres and bull semen to folks suffering under the Islamofascist regime in power in Iran since the Carter era is evidence of political hypocrisy.

I beg to differ.

As mercantilist competition of earlier centuries illustrates, trade is tantamount to war. In this enlightened era in which we like to preach free trade, we have anything but free trade. When the Soviets were still the major bogeyman for Americans, the US' staunch anti-Communist allies in Japan were so wary of US as a threat to domestic rice producers that it seized (purportedly on grounds of national security) the few kilos of specimens an American exhibitor had brought to a Toyko trade show. You know, several little clear boxes with labels like "long grain" and "for sushi" or the like. If buyers knew rice grew in Texas for a few bucks a pound, they might not want to pay through the nose for the produce of Japanese farmers that, to maintain price competitiveness, was protected with an 800% import tariff.

Yes, 800%.

The United States maintains import tariffs, too. The question isn't whether the US will protect domestic producers, but which producers and in what percentage. A look at the tariff on sugar, for example, shows that not only do we tax it strangely (for example, Congress levies a greater tariff against an import of cane sugar than it does against beet sugar), but there's a lot of energy being spent figuring out what sugar tariffs do to its price over time. Carl Hiaasen's excellent Florida-set fiction includes some hilarious hijinx caused by sugar barons and their lobbying efforts; I wouldn't recommend the movie, but read the book. The things domestic lobbies accomplish ....

Who is allowed to bring what into a national market and at what price is a big deal to people in the market, and to people trying to sell into the market. Trade isn't an academic matter. There are some financial heavy-hitters who regard dependence on foreign-produced commodities as a serious threat (Pickens views petroleum imports for energy as such an albatross that he's investing in alternative energy.)

So CNN has figured out that over the last eight years, America's biggest export to Iran is addictive poisons for recreational use. When last I heard, Iran was the enemy. (UPDATE: one of this cycle's remaining U.S. presidential candidates gets this joke, though he probably lost political correctness points for spelling it out while the camera was rolling.) Iran's current regime had been so cast since overrunning the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 (even if the invasion was unconnected with the government, the new government's later conditioning of captives' release on political accommodations by the United States unequivocally ratified and endorsed the action), then subsequently parading the corpses of US servicemen who died in an ill-coordinated interdepartmental rescue mission. Jimmy Carter's museum web site paints these events in a slightly different light that I present, and I link it in the interest of equal time. Some of Iran's attacks have been pretty clever. However, Iran's Islamofascist government has not merely confined its attacks to other tyrannical regimes, but have targeted the interests of democratically-aligned targets. Doubt that Iran's agents work to undermine neighboring democracies is quenched by Iranian reprisals for thwarting its agents and admissions by co-workers. One would be unsurprised to learn that, despite official positions on the matter, efforts against various Iranian efforts have resulted in some activity that resulted in chasing Iranian agents home to Iran.

Of course, the US position is that it is against the government in power in Tehran, not against the people whose efforts to oust them have been thwarted by systematic efforts to ensure only Islamic fundamentalists have any chance of appearing on the ballot. For example, U.S. Secretary of State Rice has discussed opening a bureau in Tehran modeled after the one in Cuba, for cultural contacts and processing visas but not for diplomatic contacts. This would be immediately attributable to a propaganda effort, except that no U.S. administration has had a competent propaganda campaign since Truman threatened to continue using atomic bombs to end the capacity of Japan to wage war, after he'd dropped the last one he could order dropped. The probable intent of a new bureau in Tehran is to process visas for dissedents and businessmen whom the US would like to encourage in the view that the US is a great place to do business and to give talks about how life sucks under what passes among Islamist tyrants for an Islamic caliphate.

If the Japanese want to suck down Marlboros -- or if Americans can work out how to market them successfully, there will always be some folks who think addictions are about supply and not demand -- at the same time as they fight tooth and nail to beat Americans in the marketplace, let them. When I say tooth and nail, I mean the Japanese government made sure the most modern production mechanisms were affordable and that container ships the US were cheap to build by providing capital to Japanese industrialists at reduced interest rates, on the backs of Japanese taxpayers whose national debt per capita swelled far past Americans' own crazily-mounting Cold War debt. Life in Japan was so stressful one could buy insurance against, and get paid benefits for insured losses from, death due to overstress due to overwork. The Japanese even have a one-word name for this risk: karoshi. Hundreds of claims are paid each year for karoshi. That's not claims made, that's claims proven.

And still, Japanese somehow live longer than nearly anyone else. So on those smokes: no harm, no foul, right?

Americans rail against dollars for petroterror, or how SUVs fuel terrorism, or the like, so they should be entitled to smirk when they hear about some distant tyranny sucking down cigarettes, bull semen, and anything else Americans can produce at will. Assuming Americans have some dog in the fight, sales are bullets in an economic war and should be withheld only for cause.

If Iranians want to buy American bull semen, how does this harm Americans? There's even a propaganda angle in there, if Iranians need to order out to America for quality semen.