Saturday Commentary and Review #123

Waiting on Coming UAF Offensive, US Economy Still King, Slavery in Libya Continues to Persist, Management Consultants as Apparatchiks, Forgotten Pygmies of East Africa

I think I must have written the line “while we wait for the upcoming Ukrainian offensive to begin…” five times at the very least on this Substack over the past few months. We are still waiting for it to begin.

There hasn’t been much reason to write about this war for the past few months from a ‘mile high’ perspective, as nothing has really changed from that vantage point: no military breakthroughs, no actual peace talks, no visibility as to whether something is going on behind the scenes. This means that we could only speculate on the larger matters, something that I try to engage in only minimally.

However, the infowar continues to be conducted in high gear, the same one that it has found itself in since the war began in February of last year. In the past few months, we’ve seen a release of secret material thanks to a young contractor for the US military. At the same time, we’ve also seen quite a lot of western media outlets beginning to tamp down expectations and temper enthusiasm for the upcoming UAF offensive. Being a cynic, I am partial to the idea that this media campaign could be a coordinated disinformation op. Or could it be true? Could it be that the Russians have ground down the UAF to the point of reducing their overall operational capacity? This is the argument of two former US diplomats:

Seven months ago, Russia mobilized 300,000 reservists and used the intervening time to train them. It threw armament production into high gear and amassed significant quantities of equipment and ammunition. Hundreds of thousands of Russian troops are now deployed in Eastern Ukraine where they have begun advancing in numerous of locations along a 450-mile front.

Ukraine, on the other hand, concentrated many of its best equipped and best trained troops in Bakhmut where they were pounded for months by Russian artillery, missiles, and drones. In the battle for Bakhmut, Ukraine lost thousands of experienced troops who cannot be replaced by conscripts with a few weeks of accelerated training.

Continued western escalation is the only thing keeping the UAF alive:

Western weapons made the defense of Bakhmut possible. Again and again, NATO support for Ukraine escalated from short-range Javelin and Stinger missiles to medium-range HIMARS and Patriot missile batteries, to heavy weapons such as Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. As the tide of battle turned against the undermanned and outgunned Ukrainians, Kyiv's advocates in the West did not pause to reflect on how they might end this tragedy. Instead, they called for the delivery of fighter jets and long-range missiles.

This makes sense as the USA won its overarching objective on day one of this war: the separation of Russia and its economy from Europe. Objective number two is to bleed the Russians as much as possible.

The economic argument and how it relates to the Russian “attrition” strategy:

Ultimately, we are not generals, but we do understand economics. It has always seemed extremely unlikely to us that a nation with a 2021 GDP of $200 billion and a population of 44 million could defeat a nation with a GDP of $1.8 trillion and a population of 145 million. This would seem particularly true if only the larger nation, that is Russia, possessed a sizable air force, significant defense industries, and nuclear weapons.

According to World Bank statistics, Ukraine had a population of 44 million when the war began, but today barely half that number are still in their homes. Eleven million Ukrainians have fled to Europe or are internally displaced. Several million more have fled to Russia and millions more now live in areas under Russian control.

Last year the Ukrainian economy shrank by 30 percent, while Russian GDP fell by only 3 percent. The ruble is as strong against the dollar today as it was when the war began. The IMF predicts that in 2023 Russia's GDP growth will surpass that of Britain and Germany. Clearly, Western sanctions have not destroyed the Russian economy.

While Russia remains largely self-sufficient in food, energy, and military hardware, much of Ukraine's infrastructure lies in ruins. While Ukraine has become heavily dependent on NATO for armaments, both NATO's own reserves and Ukraine's old Soviet-era munitions stocks of artillery shells and air defenses missiles are quickly being depleted. In this war of attrition, time is not on Kyiv's side.

On the concept of Just War, and the reality on the ground:

From Moscow's perspective, the referenda held in September 2022 transformed Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhiya, and Kherson provinces into parts of the Russian Federation and as a result Moscow will now seek full control of these regions. In six months' time, Russia may well be able to dictate even harsher conditions for peace.

The classic requirements for a just war include a reasonable possibility of victory. While a generation of Ukrainian men are dying, the sad reality is that Ukraine has about as much chance of winning a war against Russia as Mexico would of winning a war with the United States. Prolonging the conflict will not change that equation. More Ukrainian deaths and infrastructure destruction will only further traumatize that society. Unless we are prepared to risk significant escalation that could well involve NATO forces fighting Russians, the best way to assure the survival of a viable, independent Ukrainian state is to negotiate a settlement now.

Pretty much everyone expected that Russia would go into Ukraine with full-force upon learning that they actually did invade. That didn’t happen.

What has caught many by surprise is just how resilient the Russian economy has proven to be, and how western diplomacy has failed to bring more states into the sanctions regime targeting Russia.

What reason do the Russians have to actually agree to peace talks, knowing full well that Kiev’s sponsor, the USA, is “agreement non-capable”? If the UAF is as worn down as we are being told that it is, then there is very little reason for the Russians to not continue to grind down what is left of that army, and then march to the Dnieper.

…unless the UAF pulls off a surprise, something that would buy them more time and more external support.

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Many of you are familiar with Michael Snyder, the guy who ran the Economic Collapse Blog which now seems to be defunct. His blog lasted for a well over a decade, and would contain lists of data points that he culled from the internet and presented to readers with an 8th grade reading comprehension level. Full of warnings and dire predictions, economic collapse in the USA did not happen.

“The Business of America is Business”, and all else is subordinated to that. This creates a lot of room for businesses to exploit in the land of the free and the home of the brave, giving them competitive advantages over states that place a stronger emphasis on economic security for its citizens. Sometimes politics intrudes, and the USA is left with no option but to throw a bone to its own people at times.

Online decline and collapse porn is as old as the internet itself. For over half of my life, I’ve been hearing about how the USA is “broke”, the Dollar is “done”, hyperinflation is “around the corner”, and that we need to buy gold and silver. It’s an industry in and of itself, another example of the genius of America.

Recently, The Economist published a four page piece detailing how the US economy remains the global king, with Urban C. Lehner giving us the tl;dr:

Anxiety over America’s decline, the editors conclude, “obscures a stunning success story – one of enduring but underappreciated outperformance. America remains the world’s richest, most productive and most innovative big economy. Along an impressive number of dimensions, it is leaving its peers further in the dust.”

This challenge to conventional wisdom has energized pundits. The New York Times has run two op-ed commentaries on consecutive days. One, by conservative columnist David Brooks, agrees with The Economist, concluding that American capitalism – for all its faults – “has proved superior to all real-world alternatives.”

The other, by progressive economist Paul Krugman, cautions: “The numbers aren’t really as good as they look, and there are shadows over America that aren’t captured by gross domestic product.”

I think Krugman raises a good point, but for the wrong reasons (he harps on economic inequality in the USA, something that is almost entirely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things).

Some facts and figures:

• In 1990, the gross domestic product of the US represented 25% of the world’s total. Despite the rise of China, the US still accounts for 25% of the world’s economic output.

• Compared with its counterparts in the G-7, a group that includes Japan and Germany, the US share is growing. Adjusted for purchasing power, the US accounts for 51% of G-7 GDP, up from 43% in 1990.

• America’s income per person was 24% higher than Western Europe’s in 1990. It is 30% higher today.

• Between 1990 and 2022, labor productivity (output per hour worked) rose 67% in the US, 55% in Europe and 51% in Japan.

• US spending on research and development has risen over the past decade to 3.5% of GDP, well ahead of most countries.

• America spends 37% more on education per pupil than the 23 other rich countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development – and 34% of Americans have completed tertiary education, a proportion exceeded only by Singapore.

The last bullet point is largely meaningless, as it doesn’t explain what that spending gets, nor the costs in comparison to others. I recently learned that Baltimore spent the third most money per pupil in the USA in 2019. We all know that Baltimore is not producing the geniuses that go on to the Ivies. Nor does cost of living seem to factor into the stats above.

Krugman:

Yet, while the US has the most unequal income distribution in the G-7, The Economist also notes that “a trucker in Oklahoma can earn more than a doctor in Portugal.”

Presidents usually get credit for strong economies but The Economist implicitly criticizes both Biden and Trump, warning that their turn to protectionism and industrial policy risks squandering America’s strengths.

Income inequality and lower life expectancies are among the negatives Krugman plays up. “Do we care,” he asks, “that the rich can afford more and bigger superyachts?” Krugman also argues that, while Europe lags behind the US economically, Europeans enjoy a higher quality of life. Their long vacations give them a better work-life balance.

An important point:

Unfortunately, in focusing on GDP’s limitations as a measuring rod, Krugman ignores the many other dimensions on which The Economist rates the American economy highly.

Moreover, the tradeoff between European and American capitalism is broader than vacations. Brooks calls it “the tension between economic dynamism and economic security.” American capitalism, he says, “has always been tilted toward dynamism.”

This dynamism is evident to anyone working in finance or tech. It may not produce an ideal society, but power and idealism are two very different things.

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I think it’s wonderful when the West lectures others on human rights after destroying so many countries in the pursuit of defending them.

Thank God that David Cameron, Nicholas Sarkozy, and Barack Obama bombed and destroyed Libya! Otherwise, how would slavery have managed to re-assert itself there? How else could the lucrative human smuggling pipeline from Africa to Europe that was shut down by Gaddafi and Berlusconi be re-opened?

Libya is a disaster, and this disaster is over a decade old. The inability of the country to maintain a stable government that rules over the entirety of its country continues to compound the problems that arose in the wake of the overthrow of Gaddafi and his regime. Libya is a festering wound on Europe’s doorstep, one that shows no signs of getting better.

For some, there is no desire in helping it to get better. An anarchic Libya helps some bad actors continue to make money hand over fist in the human smuggling racket. They have even expressed the chutzpah of pointing to modern-day slavery in Libya as a reason to force open Europe’s borders to mass migration yet again. Alex Rubinstein reports:

Through its financial support of the Libyan Coast Guard and the Libyan Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration (DCIM), the European Union has aided and abetted crimes against humanity, according to a recent UN report.

On March 27, 2023, the United Nations released the findings of a three-year investigation, confirming that “arbitrary detention, murder, rape, enslavement, sexual slavery, extrajudicial killing and enforced disappearance” has become a “widespread practice” in the once-prosperous nation of Libya, which was plunged into civil war by NATO’s regime change war over a decade ago.

While crimes against humanity were found to be widespread throughout the country, the report homed in on the plight of migrants and blamed the European Union for enabling the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity to enact abuses against Africans seeking asylum in Europe.

The UN is full of people wanting to force open Europe’s borders by any means necessary, including using the evidence of slavery to pry it open, a practice that resulted from their support in overthrowing Gaddafi in the first place! Problem:Reaction=Solution.

The UN report states:

“The Mission found that crimes against humanity were committed against migrants in places of detention under the actual or nominal control of Libya’s Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration, the Libyan Coast Guard and the Stability Support Apparatus. These entities received technical, logistical and monetary support from the European Union and its member States for, inter alia, the interception and return of migrants.”

The answer, of course, is to throw open wide Europe’s borders. That’s it. That’s the entire purpose of this report.

In 2017, international media reported the revival of the slave trade in Africa due to continuing fallout of the NATO-backed regime change operation to depose Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi. The United Nations has now confirmed that the practice not only persists, but that it has been enabled by the EU.

“The support given by the EU to the Libyan Coast Guard… led to violations of certain human rights,” UN investigator Chaloka Beyani told reporters. “It’s also clear that the DCIM has responsibility for multitudes of crimes against humanity in the detention centers that they run. So the support given to them by the EU has facilitated this. Although we are not saying that the EU and its member states committed these crimes, the point is that the support given has aided and abetted the commission of the crimes.”

According to a 2021 report by the Brookings Institution, the EU has funneled $455 million to the Libyan Coast Guard and other government agencies since 2015.

Brookings backed Gaddafi’s removal, of course.

It was all so predictable:

The violent overthrow of Gaddafi’s government by NATO and the bands of Salafist insurgents it sponsored in 2011 plunged Libya into a state of civil war, with swathes of the country overtaken by Al Qaeda and ISIS-aligned bandits. As NATO and its jihadist proxies bore down on him, Gaddafi warned that his ouster would result in the destabilization of entire regions of the continent and a new migration crisis for Europe, with the Mediterranean transformed into a “sea of chaos.”

Gaddafi’s son, similarly warned at the time, “Libya may become the Somalia of North Africa, of the Mediterranean. You will see the pirates in Sicily, in Crete, in Lampedusa. You will see millions of illegal immigrants. The terror will be next door.”

and:

The UN investigator, Professor Beyani, blamed Libya’s current crisis on a “contestation for power,” alluding to the power vacuum the West created in Libya with its regime change war while avoiding any direct reference to it. Human Rights Watch has also veered away from discussion of NATO’s 2011 intervention in its coverage of the UN report, which it described as “brutal and damning.” Perhaps that was because its director at the time, Ken Roth, was a prolific supporter of the assault.

Create the problem….provide the solution.

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Many of you reading this are Management Consultants. I was one myself not too long ago. This class of business professionals continues to grow in size, power, and influence, for very good reasons. That’s why it’s important to share with all of you this essay by Scott Locklin in which he tears into those of us who have worked in this field:

Consider a standard example of a management consulting engagement: you have a giant corporation with tens or hundreds of thousands of talented people that are good at doing its corporate crap, whatever it might be. You are going to make an important decision in bigCo, so you hire a management consulting firm: a company which knows nothing about what you do as a company, has no inborn expertise about anything, and which  hires fresh out of Yalevard imbeciles to wear nice clothes and give powerpoint telling you what you want to hear. You then make your decision and proceed to feed millions of dollars to the  management consultancies.

The management consultants often get paid to do long term planning, as if the firm itself can’t do this. Most of the firms they advise are already old, so they must be at least historically adequate at long term planning. The management consultants won’t be there to take the consequences at the end of the long term planning, unless the planning fails and short-memory bureaucrats hire the consultants to sort out the long term disaster they created.

The benefits of belonging to this professional class:

There are obvious benefits to working for a consulting firm as an individual: you get to belong to a powerful mafia and you get trained in the latest in corporate rhetoric and polish. Look at Sundar Pichai; he went from McKinsey consultant to Google CEO. And everyone knows Sundar Pichai is the best Google manager of all time. It’s certainly not clear they bring any value to their clients.

Scott views PMCs as akin to Soviet apparatchiks (with some as nomenklatura):

Now, let us example what the apparatchik was. It’s a vaguely derogatory term, but most of us have no real knowledge of what these people did. We have an idea that they’re brown-noser loyalist commies who sit somewhere in the upper-middle tier of the Soviet bureaucracy. The Wakipedia entry has a few more choice words to put color on it:

An apparatchik (/ˌæpəˈrættʃɪk/; Russian: аппара́тчик) was a full-time, professional functionary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or the Soviet government apparat ….. Members of the apparat (apparatchiks or apparatchiki) were frequently transferred between different areas of responsibility, usually with little or no actual training for their new areas of responsibility. Thus, the term apparatchik, or “agent of the apparatus” was usually the best possible description of the person’s profession and occupation.

McKinsey  reached its present form via the leadership of someone named Martin Bower. George Booz was another inventor of the modern approach, though Booz Allen Hamilton is basically a publicly traded branch of the American intelligence services at this point, so they are more like nomenklatura than apparatchiks. Both men were from the finest Ivy League lizard backgrounds, and believed in the idea of firms taking outside advice from gentlemen of a certain education and social class. Probably this originated in some social club where these fellows were already doing this with their CEO pals, without the formal engagement.

What they do:

If you have a sclerotic 25, 50 or 100 year old American firm though: you hire management consultants to sort out your problems. Essentially the management consultant tells higher management what they want to hear by doing an end run around middle management bureaucracy. At best they may add value by asking people in the trenches what they think: something that could be done by proactive management. At worst they just regurgitate some bullshit they read in HBR. There are  variations on this formula: Accenture does this with a specialization in technology. They were probably a normal tech consulting firm at one point, but now they’re McKinsey with Eclipse editors.  Bain seem to specialize in extracting value from functioning companies by bankrupting them or sending their factories overseas. They also dabble in government corruption and insider trading. BCG also government corruption (aka colonialism) with a tech arm. McKinsey offspring Kearney is known for insider trading, colonialism and being WEF lackeys. McKinsey of course; they also do government corruption (aka colonialism), drug dealing and insider trading. They want to get into big data as well.

Let’s forget about the numerous ethical monstrosities of these management consulting firms for the moment and look at these firms for what they are. All of these firms are made up of members of a certain social class. The social class they’re drawn from are top bureaucrats and “leaders” in the American establishment. They’re people who went to Harvard and Northwestern, not U-Mass or U-Michigan. They have an ideology: pretty much it is the ruling class ideology -whatever it might be at the time. All that Davos/WEF “eat the bugs” horse pookey? That’s all management consultant stuff; I think WEF even has their favorite firm. I’m not sure what ruling class organ the apparatchiks of the Soviet Union were reading: Management Consultants read the Economist and HBR for their ideological updates. While the Economist and HBR are bad enough by themselves, these clown cars also have their own ideological tools, as lurid and ridiculous as anything out of communist apparatchiks.

and:

The role they’re supposed to fill is to fix dysfunction in sclerotic type 3 and type 4 organizations. This is always going to be a problem facing human beings. Large organizations are going to become disorganized and have ill defined self-serving groups within. Giving a pipe-fitter or machinist supreme power to hire, fire and reorganize the sclerotic organization is more likely to work than hiring McKinsey. Pipe-fitter is a regular no bullshit kind of Joe. Executives could explain their problems in minute detail to no-bullshit working man, working man will give advice, then get a million dollars if it works out. Unlike McKinsey he’d get paid on performance. Unlike McKinsey associates, Mr. hypothetical pipe-fitter isn’t afflicted with the degree or kinds of ideology and nonsense that afflict current year management consultants. His solution will likely have a lot of common sense baked into it, possibly even including the kinds of pool room Solomonic wisdom utterly foreign to management consultants. Plus, everyone’s incentives are aligned. I can go find legions of these people: they’re in Boston, drinking beer in taverns.

Scott’s verdict:

While the technical oriented consultancies may do some good, it’s  obvious at this point that the management consultancies do not serve any socially useful purpose in modern society. Mostly, they are a self serving group who exist to support their in-group and their customers. By “customers” I don’t mean the corporations and shareholders, I mean incompetent bureaucrats who have been promoted beyond their capabilities. Mind you, people from these groups have a lot of polish: they dress up nice and give good powerpoint. If you wanted to hire, say, a lobbyist or something like that requires diplomatic skills, someone formerly at one of these firms would probably be ideal.

However, they should mostly be laughed at, as people eventually laughed at communist apparatchiks. They’re the same phenomenon; ridiculous, self regarding goblins who get paid lots of money to, for example, get Americans addicted to pain pills to up your margins. At some point in the happy future, if people aren’t living in nuclear rubble, the management consultant will become a sort of punch and judy  comedy stereotype the way the communist apparatchik did. As it is, they should be shunned from all decent society for what they are.

Does Scott have a point?

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We end this weekend’s Substack with a fascinating look at “The Forgotten Pygmies of East Africa”.

Forgotten Pygmies of East Africa

However, such an explanation would not explain why Nonnosus saw pygmies in the Farasan Islands. It is possible that the late stone age groups in the Horn of Africa included yet unfound pygmy populations - a real possibility given the paucity of archaeological work in the region. Regions populated by hunter-gatherers could be highly diverse, with differences in choices of ecologies to exploit allowing for long term coexistence of highly divergent groups. The finds of Wilton tools on Dahlak Kebir show that the coastal populations were capable of sailing the Red Sea. However, it seems more likely that the pygmies of the Farasan Islands were brought there. The jungles that the pygmies thrived in did expand to the east and north during the African humid period at the same time as the Green Sahara, but they did not reach the Red Sea. The pygmies of the Farasan Islands were perhaps brought there as entertainment for the Roman garrison. The Romans, like the Greeks, were aware of the existence of pygmies, and like them made a number of artworks featuring them - often involving pygmies in fight with or flight from wild beasts. The Romans are known to have enjoyed performances by very short people in the Colosseum, although it is unknown if the performances were done by pygmies or dwarfs.

Herodotus references pygmies in the fifth century BC. According to him, a group of Libyan (specifically Nasamonian) explorers had crossed the Sahara and been kidnapped by pygmies living in the swamp on an eastwards-flowing tributary of the Nile. His description of the river and swamp matches the Bahr el Ghazal - a west-to-east flowing tributary of the Nile south of the Sahara that runs from what is now Chad into central South Sudan. The Bahr el Ghazal has many swamps near its confluence with the White Nile - the infamously impenetrable Sudd.

A Catholic missionary heard of pygmies hiding in the swamps of the Bahr el Ghazal, as late as August 1931. He mentions in his article that Nuer pastoralists feared the pygmies for their use of poison weapons, but like the ancient Egyptians and contemporary Bantus the Nuer saw the pygmies as close to the supernatural. When they were able to kill the pygmies, they did so and ate them for their magical powers, much as militias did during the Second Congo War twenty years ago. The Bahr el Ghazal swamps may have remained pygmy territory until the 1960s. Given the lack of reports of pygmies in the region since 1931, it seems likely that pygmies there were exterminated. Pastoralists associated with the Anyanya separatist movement seized WWII surplus weaponry during their rebellion in the 1960s, and used the swamps of the Bahr el Ghazal as bases. Their rifles and automatic weapons were presumably enough to enable the final victory of the herdsman over the pygmy. Whether or not the pygmies were merely killed or also eaten is unknown, although the recent history of warfare in southern Sudan suggests that cannibalism is not out of the realm of possibility.

Click here to read the rest.

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