Wednesday, March 2, 2016

2016 Elections Results: Military Take-over

Cincinnati is named after Cincinnatus the Roman statesman and general who became a benevolent dictator and, after restoring order, retired to his farm.  After the Revolutionary war, a Society of Cincinnati, and not to put too fine a point on it, George Washington was the first head of the organization.  The statesman who became a general, dictator, and then retired to his farm.

As we wonder at these elections, and know Hillary will win, Trump will have had his election stolen, economic chaos is inevitable, as there are too many claims on too few assets.  These are the times of black swans.

Which is the one black swan no one has mentioned, so the most likely? A military coup in the USA.  It will never happen!

Why not?  The military is probably the one most popular god in the USA.  They have the organization and muscle to impose order, of a sort. A world war USA is the other likely event given hillary as president, since she wants to be a 'great" president, and we judge presidents by their wars. We would likely lose any world war, and generals do not like having their toys taken away.  So why not just conquer USA?

Before you scoff, recall these two recent articles: On the one hand, ex-military Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel on his way out of office in disgrace has this to relate:

It was Aug. 30, 2013, and the U.S. military was poised for war. Obama had publicly warned Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad that his regime would face consequences if it crossed a “red line” by employing chemical weapons against its own people. Assad did it anyway, and Hagel had spent the day approving final plans for a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missile strikes against Damascus. U.S. naval destroyers were in the Mediterranean, awaiting orders to fire.
Instead, Obama told a stunned Hagel to stand down. Assad’s Aug. 21 chemical attack in a Damascus suburb had killed hundreds of civilians, but the president said the United States wasn’t going to take any military action against the Syrian government. The president had decided to ignore his own red line — a decision, Hagel believes, that dealt a severe blow to the credibility of both Obama and the United States.

As is usually the case, in time we found out it was USA proxies who launched the gas attack, but never mind,  Foreign Policy mag has never bothered with fact checking.  So here we have the military folk outraged as the civilian president calling the shots.

Then it gets better, this from Sy Hersh, on generals simply disobeying the president with whom the disagree:
The thrust of Hersh’s article is that unbeknown to President Obama, his former Joint Chiefs chairman orchestrated the way for Assad to remain in power while paving the way for Russia to enter the Syrian war—despite stated White House policies and criticisms of both Assad and Putin. 
Personally I am delighted that the USA military kept us from implementing stupid policy.  But the fact is, um, disobeying the president, that is orders, in war, well, not good.  But never mind, we have public instance #1 of the generals doing their own thing cuz they disagree with the President, their commander in chief.

When the USA military was in charge of occupied West Germany, they ran it as a socialist paradise, and shortages were endemic.  Finally a politician by the name of Adenauer prevailed upon the commanding US general to remove all price controls on just eggs, to see what would happen.  Within days, plenty of cheap eggs filled the markets.  Next bread, milk, etc.  Free markets emerged and West Germany emerged rather quickly from the horrors of war.

If a military coup would bring back free markets in USA, then count me in.

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