Year: 2015

Advertisement Octagon. Only One Shall Emerge Victorious!

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Coneheads


Brady Bunch

I really like these two ads that invoke classic TV, the Bradu Bunch and the the Coneheads from Saturday Night Live.

They are both brilliant.

Casting Danny Trejo as Marsha and Steve Buscemi as Jan Brady is genius, and their seamless integration into an existing scene is magnificent.

Conversely, the Coneheads commercial splices seamlessly into the already well known “Jake, from State Farm” ad.

I cannot decide which is the better exemplar of the classic TV based advertisement form.

As Nebraska Goes………

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The Nebraska legislature has overwhelmingly voted to abolish the death penalty:

The Nebraska Legislature on Wednesday voted, 32 to 15, to abolish the death penalty, setting up a final showdown between a bipartisan coalition that supported the bill and the Republican governor, who has promised to veto it. No conservative state has banned the death penalty since North Dakota did so in 1973.

If the bill is vetoed by Nebraska’s Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, a vote to override his veto could come as soon as Tuesday. Thirty votes are required to override.

The bill, which would replace lethal injection with life imprisonment, passed the unicameral Legislature on Wednesday after months of debate and lobbying on both sides, with conservative Republicans lining up in opposition to a group of Democrats and moderate Republicans who said they have come to oppose the death penalty for reasons that are moral, fiscal or religious.

Nebraska has not executed an inmate since 1997, leading some lawmakers to argue that the state has ended the death penalty in practice.

This is significant, because, well, it’s Nebraska.

Hopefully, this is a part of a trend.

The Most Incompetent Member of the Bush Administration

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I think that we have a winner, and despite a spirited competition, Richard Bruce Cheney has won the “most incompetent” crown:

Dick Cheney would like you to believe that he knows more about protecting the nation from terrorism than anyone else. But he actually knows less.

When presented with an actual terror threat — the one that turned into the 9/11 attacks — Cheney thought al Qaeda was bluffing.

No kidding. This is from The Great War Of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism, a new book by former acting CIA director Mike Morell:

The threat reporting continued [in the spring and summer of 2001] — other pieces were titled “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent” and “Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks” — but I sensed some skepticism about it. The vice president one morning asked me whether all this threat reporting might not be deception on the part of al Qa‘ida — purposely designed to get our attention and to get us to needlessly expend resources in response.

UBL Threats Are Real. Take a minute and think about that. Think about what would have happened on the afternoon of September 11, 2001 if Americans had known that had been Cheney’s attitude just a few months before. Think about how, if he’d been a Democrat, that would have defined liberals as weak, cowardly children for the next 50 years.

So it’s not just that Cheney is cartoonishly evil, it’s that he’s monstrously incompetent; in fact, his monstrous incompetence is a large part of why he’s so cartoonishly evil. He was overwhelmingly powerful, but with no understanding of reality, and so blundered around the world strewing destruction wherever he went.

Dick Cheney initiated the privatization of key military functions as SecDef under Bush 1.

He ignored the threat of  al Qaeda.

His response to the attacks of September 11 was to gin up a war with Iraq, who was secular Arab enemy of Jihadists.

As White House Chief of Staff, he convinced Gerald Ford to dump Nelson Rockefeller as VP for his reelection bid, killing any chance at grabbing a portion of Black vote.  (In 1976, Jimmy Carter was viewed with some suspicion by elements of the Black community)

This is a guy who has failed upward throughout his career.

No wonder that  Harry Whittington who was shot in the face by Cheney, ended up apologizing to Cheney for his being shot in the face. 

It appears to be some sort of twisted Republican imperative.

Seriously, Is Anyone Surprised by This?

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In nature, parasites are associated with decreased success of the host, so it should come as no surprise that an IMF study shows that economic parasite, such as a bloated finance industry, also hinders economic success:

As the world has floundered in low growth post-crisis, with advanced economies still suffering with credit overhangs and hypertrophied, largely unreformed financial services sectors, it has become acceptable, even among Serious Economists, to question the logic that a bigger financial sector is necessarily better. Of course, the logic of “more finance, please” was never stated in those terms; it was presented in the voodoo of “financial deepening,” meaning, in layperson’s terms, that more access to more types of financial products and services would be a boon. For instance, one argument often made in favor of more robust financial services is that they allow for consumers to engage in “lifetime smoothing” of spending. That basically means if times are bad or an individual has a big investment they to make, he can borrow against future earnings. But we have seen how well that works in practice. Most people have an optimistic bias, so they will tend to underestimate how long it will take them to get back to their old level of income, assuming that even happens, which makes it too easy for them to rationalize borrowing rather than going into radical belt tightening ASAP. And we’ve seen, dramatically, on how college debt pushers get students to take on debt to “invest” in their education, when for many, the payoff never comes.

 Moreover, despite an enormous increase activity and widespread use of technology, costs of financial intermediation have increased, as Walter Turbewille shows, citing a study by Thomas Philippon:

But the recent IMF paper, Rethinking Financial Deepening: Stability and Growth in Emerging Markets, is particularly deadly. Even though it focused on the impact of financial development on growth in emerging markets, its authors clearly viewed the findings as germane to advanced economies. Their conclusion was that the growth benefits of financial deepening were positive only up to a certain point, and after that point, increased depth became a drag. But what is most surprising about the IMF paper is that the growth benefit of more complex and extensive banking systems topped out at a comparatively low level of size and sophistication. We’ve embedded the paper at the end of this post and strongly urge you to read it in full. (at link)

 The contribution of the IMF paper is that the authors developed a new index to do a comprehensive job of capturing financial activity. Previous work had tended to look either at the size and sophistication of financial institutions, or the depth and complexity of financial markets. The new index incorporates both aspects of financial activity, as well as incorporating access. The writers concede that their measure is still imperfect, but is an improvement over other approaches. They also stress that they are well aware of the issue of establishing that the relationship between the size and complexity of the financial sector is causal, and not a mere correlation:

Empirically, establishing causality from finance to economic growth has been a key challenge. King and Levine (1993) were the first to address this issue in a cross-country regression context. Their paper found that initial levels of financial depth—approximated by the size of the banking system relative to GDP—could predict subsequent growth rates over extended periods, even when controlling for other explanatory variables. Stock market depth was also incorporated later by Levine and Zervos (1998), with the finding that causality went from finance to growth. These results held up with further refinements of the approach, by using instrumental variables (Levine, Loayza, and Beck 2000). In the 2000s, the empirical work continued to evolve with the application of dynamic panel data techniques, using lagged values of the financial variables as instruments and controlling for other determinants of growth (Beck and Levine 2004). The present paper follows this last approach, using similar control variables and econometric techniques to ensure that the relationship is not one of simple correlations but of causality that goes from finance to growth.

This is the money chart:

I have always maintained that the financial industry should be restricted to the minimum size possible, because anything above the level required to bring the generate capital for the “real” economy is inherently parasitic.

It appears that the IMF agrees with me.

I Finally Have Something Nice to Say about Los Angeles

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Kudos to the “City of Angels” which has raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour, including tipped workers:

The nation’s second-largest city voted Tuesday to increase its minimum wage from $9 an hour to $15 an hour by 2020, in what is perhaps the most significant victory so far for labor groups and their allies who are engaged in a national push to raise the minimum wage.

The increase, which the City Council passed in a 14-to-1 vote, comes as workers across the country are rallying for higher wages and several large companies, including Facebook and Walmart, have moved to raise their lowest wages. Several other cities, including San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Oakland, Calif., have already approved increases, and dozens more are considering doing the same. In 2014, a number of Republican-leaning states like Alaska and South Dakota also raised their state-level minimum wages by ballot initiative.

The effect is likely to be particularly strong in Los Angeles, where, according to some estimates, almost 50 percent of the city’s work force earns less than $15 an hour. Under the plan approved Tuesday, the minimum wage will rise over five years.

………

Even economists who support increasing the minimum wage say there is not enough historical data to predict the effect of a $15 minimum wage, an unprecedented increase. A wage increase to $12 an hour over the next few years would achieve about the same purchasing power as the minimum wage in the late 1960s, the most recent peak.

Many restaurant owners here aggressively fought the increase, saying they would be forced to cut as much as half of their staff. Unlike other states, California state law prohibits tipped employees from receiving lower than the minimum wage. The Council promised to study the potential effect of allowing restaurants to add a service charge to bills to meet the increased costs.

The restaurant owners can, to quote Bender Rodriguez, “bite my shiny metal ass.”

There is no justification to pay slave wages to your employees, and there is no reason for a wait person to have to tolerate bad behavior from a customer because they depend on tips for their livelihood.

If your business cannot make it if you have to pay your employees a fair wage, then your business should not make it, no saving throw.

If You Are a Guy and You Refuse to Go on Your Rescuing-Supermodels Adventure Because Charlize Theron Is Coming with You, You Really Need to Reconsider Your Commitment to Heterosexuality.

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Virginia Hey, “Warrior Woman”, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)


Charlize Theron, Furiosa, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

You may be aware that Australian director George Miller has done a reboot of his seminal 1979 film Mad Max.

What you may not be aware of is the fact that various members of the really small penis brigade, aka “Men’s Rights Advocates”, have called for a boycott of the film.

Over at Unfogged, a guest poster notes:

The new Mad Max movie may be the most guy movie ever made. The plot is literally Tom Hardy (Mad Max) and Charlize Theron (Furiosa) rescue scantily-clad supermodels. If you asked me when I was 15 to list movie ideas, the list would have gone something like: scantily-clad supermodels, 18 wheelers, guys getting shot, guys getting blown up, fist-fights on top of an 18 wheeler, guys with chainsaws, guys getting run over by 18 wheelers, guys with guitars that shoot fire, and cars crashing into 18 wheelers and blowing up. This list is basically the script for Mad Max: Fury Road. The only thing missing is a helicoper piloted by velociraptors crashing into an 18 wheeler. But there’s always the chance of a sequel.

He further notes that the this shows just how toxic the “Mens Rights” Movement is. Not only are they demandin “guy films”, they are demanding the exclusion of any strong women from the movie, even though the director, George Miller, has a long history of woman warriors in his films.

His closing statement says it all, “If you are a guy and you refuse to go on your rescuing-supermodels adventure because Charlize Theron is coming with you, you really need to reconsider your commitment to heterosexuality.”

That’s gonna leave a mark.

H/t Brad DeLong

This is a Good Rebuttal of Obama’s Pro TPP Arguments

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Michael Wessel, who has been deeply involved with trade deals, and who has had access to the classified draft text of the TPP, has basically called Barack Obama over his claims about the trade deal:

You need to tell me what’s wrong with this trade agreement, not one that was passed 25 years ago,” a frustrated President Barack Obama recently complained about criticisms of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). He’s right. The public criticisms of the TPP have been vague. That’s by design—anyone who has read the text of the agreement could be jailed for disclosing its contents. I’ve actually read the TPP text provided to the government’s own advisors, and I’ve given the president an earful about how this trade deal will damage this nation. But I can’t share my criticisms with you.

I can tell you that Elizabeth Warren is right about her criticism of the trade deal. We should be very concerned about what’s hidden in this trade deal—and particularly how the Obama administration is keeping information secret even from those of us who are supposed to provide advice.

So-called “cleared advisors” like me are prohibited from sharing publicly the criticisms we’ve lodged about specific proposals and approaches. The government has created a perfect Catch 22: The law prohibits us from talking about the specifics of what we’ve seen, allowing the president to criticize us for not being specific. Instead of simply admitting that he disagrees with me—and with many other cleared advisors—about the merits of the TPP, the president instead pretends that our specific, pointed criticisms don’t exist.

What I can tell you is that the administration is being unfair to those who are raising proper questions about the harms the TPP would do. To the administration, everyone who questions their approach is branded as a protectionist—or worse—dishonest. They broadly criticize organized labor, despite the fact that unions have been the primary force in America pushing for strong rules to promote opportunity and jobs. And they dismiss individuals like me who believe that, first and foremost, a trade agreement should promote the interests of domestic producers and their employees.

I’ve been deeply involved in trade policy for almost four decades. For 21 years, I worked for former Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt and handled all trade policy issues including “fast track,” the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization’s Uruguay Round, which is the largest trade agreement in history. I am also a consultant to various domestic producers and the United Steelworkers union, for whom I serve as a cleared advisor on two trade advisory committees. To top it off, I was a publicly acknowledged advisor to the Obama campaign in 2008.

………

The text of the TPP, like all trade deals, is a closely guarded secret. That fact makes a genuine public debate impossible and should make robust debate behind closed doors all the more essential. But the ability of TPP critics like me to point out the deal’s many failings is limited by the government’s surprising and unprecedented refusal to make revisions to the language in the TPP fully available to cleared advisors.

Bill Clinton didn’t operate like this. During the debate on NAFTA, as a cleared advisor for the Democratic leadership, I had a copy of the entire text in a safe next to my desk and regularly was briefed on the specifics of the negotiations, including counterproposals made by Mexico and Canada. During the TPP negotiations, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has never shared proposals being advanced by other TPP partners. Today’s consultations are, in many ways, much more restrictive than those under past administrations.

………

Only portions of the text have been provided, to be read under the watchful eye of a USTR official. Access, up until recently, was provided on secure web sites. But the government-run website does not contain the most-up-to-date information for cleared advisors. To get that information, we have to travel to certain government facilities and sign in to read the materials. Even then, the administration determines what we can and cannot review and, often, they provide carefully edited summaries rather than the actual underlying text, which is critical to really understanding the consequences of the agreement.

………

In an effort to diminish criticism, USTR is now letting cleared advisors review summaries of what the negotiators have done. In response to a question about when the full updated text will be made available, we’ve been told, “We are working on making them available as soon as possible.” That’s not the case overseas: Our trading partners have this text, but the government’s own cleared advisors, serving on statutorily-created advisory committees, are kept in the dark.

………

Senator Warren should be commended for her courage in standing up to the President, and Secretary Clinton for raising a note of caution, and I encourage all elected officials to raise these important questions. Working Americans can’t afford more failed trade agreements and trade policies.

Congress should refuse to pass fast track trade negotiating authority until the partnership between the branches, and the trust of the American people is restored. That will require a lot of fence mending and disclosure of exactly what the TPP will do. That begins by sharing the final text of the TPP with those of us who won’t simply rubber-stamp it.

(emphasis mine)

What might be useful here is an amendment to any fast track legislation that says that the full and final text of any agreement, along with all side agreements, must be made available to the public in full for some period of time (I would suggest 6 months, which is enough time for lawyers who make their money on gaming this sort of crap to develop loose lips) before it can be taken up by the Congress.

The British Have Their Own Version of the Cadillac Driving Welfare Queen

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One of the oft repeated claims in UK politics, are that there are families for whom three generations that have never worked. The quotes have been made by any number of politicians, most commonly Tories, but also Tony “Bush’s Poodle” Blaire.

It turns out that no one can find any evidence that even one such family ever existed:

This month I ran a workshop with a group of first year undergraduate sociology students at Teesside University (in the North East of England). Our students tend to be from working-class or lower-middle class backgrounds and often the first in their families to go to university. I’d been invited to give an insight into a ‘real life’ research project, and I began by asking for responses and thoughts about some quotations:

‘Behind the statistics lie households where three generations have never had a job’ (ex-British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, 1997).

 ‘…on some deprived estates…often three generations of the same family have never worked’ (Iain Duncan Smith, 2009; now British government Minister for Work and Pensions).

 ‘To reintroduce the culture of work in households where it may have been absent for generations’ (Universal Credit, Department of Work and Pensions, 2010; this is a document that introduces a very major overhaul of UK welfare payments).

 ‘…there are four generations of families where no-one has ever had a job’ (Chris Grayling, ex-Minister for Work and Pensions, 2011).


 The idea that there are families in the UK with three (or four, or five and even six have been claimed) generations where no one has ever had a job is a particularly powerful orthodoxy. It is often repeated, rarely questioned, becoming part of a taken for granted vernacular. I was struck by the students’ comments. One said, ‘well, it must be true if all these [people] are saying it’. Another felt the same because ‘they wouldn’t say it unless there was loads of data to back it up’. Simple ideas boldly spoken (and repeated) by people in authority can carry real weight.

 ………

But my colleagues and I are social scientists, so instead of relying on ‘personal observations’, Tracy Shildrick, Andy Furlong, Johann Roden, Rob Crow, and I began rigorous research to see if there really were families like this. We have continued thinking, analysing, writing about, and presenting the complexities of the research material that we gathered since then. The research generated other questions, but, unusually for a sociological study, we found a clear and unequivocal answer to this first question: the existence of families where ‘no one had worked for three generations’ is highly unlikely.

 We searched very hard to find such families. We chose two extremely deprived working-class neighbourhoods – in Glasgow and Middlesbrough, because we assumed that they were the sorts of places most likely to reveal this phenomenon. Despite deploying all the strategies and tactics we could think of (including financial inducements), we were unable to find any. This does not mean that they do not exist. Some people believe in fairies or Yetis, and one cannot prove they do not exist. We can say, however, that it is highly improbable that they do. Or, if they do, their numbers are infinitesimally small. Other research drew upon the best available secondary statistics and concluded that less than half of one per cent of all workless households in the UK might have two generations where no one had ever had a job. Households with three generations that have never worked are, logically, going to be far, far fewer in number than even this tiny fraction.

 This was, actually, a quite predictable conclusion. A little socio-economic history helps. How long is ‘three generations’? Maybe sixty years, so back to the 1950s, or earlier. The proposition is that there are families where no one has had a job since the 1950s. The UK welfare state has become tougher and tougher over this period, particularly in the last few years. We have very tight ‘conditionality rules’ and ‘activation tests’; recipients of unemployment benefits must provide evidence of their worthiness for these on a weekly basis. It is difficult to imagine a person being able to defraud the state for the whole of his/ her working life – and then his/ her son or daughter doing the same and then his/ her son or daughter after them, for sixty years.

So this family appears to never have existed, but that didn’t stop various people, including the Smiler (Blair) from using it on the stump.

To be fair to Ronald Reagan, (I f%$#ing cannot f%$#ing believe that I f%$#ing just said that) in his case, he was referring to one individual, Linda Taylor ((AKA Connie Walker, AKA Linda Bennett, AKA Linda Jones, AKA Connie Jarvis, AKA Martha Louise Miller, AKA Martha Louise White), who did use a number of aliases to defraud social welfare programs, though it appears this was only one of many criminal endeavors.

Ms. Taylor appeared to be a veritable criminality, with allegations of a lot of other crimes, including kidnapping, baby trafficking, and murder.

Our Private Little War Is Going so Well

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ISIS just took over Ramadi, the capital of al Anbar provice:

Islamic State fighters used a sandstorm to help seize a critical military advantage in the early hours of the terrorist group’s attack on the provincial Iraqi capital of Ramadi last week, helping to set in motion an assault that forced Iraqi security forces to flee, current and former American officials said Monday.

The sandstorm delayed American warplanes and kept them from launching airstrikes to help the Iraqi forces, as the Islamic State fighters evidently anticipated. The fighters used the time to carry out a series of car bombings followed by a wave of ground attacks in and around the city that eventually overwhelmed the American-backed Iraqi forces.

Once the storm subsided, Islamic State and Iraqi forces were intermingled in heavy combat in many areas, making it difficult for allied pilots to distinguish friend or foe, the officials said. By that point, the militants had gained an operational momentum that could not be reversed.

“The dust storm at the very least neutralized capabilities that could have been decisive,” said one former senior military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential battle assessments.

Translation, the Iraqi army cannot find its ass with both hands, and needs extensive air support not to fold up like overcooked cabbage.

There is a reason that, “A column of 3,000 Shiite militia fighters, many supported by Iran, has arrived at a military base near Ramadi as part of the effort to reclaim the city,” because the US trained army lacks the competence, leadership, and toughness to successfully prosecute this conflict.

Bush’s folly continues.

Nothing to See Here, Move Along

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6 months after 12 year old Tamir Rice was killed by Cleveland police, and neither the cop who gunned him down nor his partner have been questioned:

Mother Jones has learned that the two officers involved in the shooting—Timothy Loehmann, who fired the shots, and Frank Garmback, who drove the police car—still have not been interviewed by investigators from the sheriff’s department. According to an official familiar with the case, investigators have made more than one attempt to interview Loehmann and Garmback since the Cleveland Police Department handed over the case in January. (Read more about why the sheriff’s department took over the investigation here .)

A county official familiar with the case told Mother Jones that the criminal investigation is focused solely on Loehmann. Garmback, who pulled the police car to within a few feet of Rice right before Loehmann stepped out and shot Rice almost instantly, is currently not under criminal investigation by the sheriff’s department, the official said.

In the surveillance footage, both Loehmann and Garmback can be seen standing around after the shooting while Rice lies bleeding on the ground. About a minute and a half after the shooting, Garmback can be seen tackling Rice’s 14-year-old sister as she tries to run to her wounded brother. Four minutes go by during which Loehmann and Garmback make no attempt to give Rice first aid. An FBI agent in the area then comes to the scene and begins to tend to Rice before an ambulance arrives to take him to the hospital (where he died the next day).

The fact that neither Loehmann or Garmback have been interviewed is a disgrace.

No doubt they have lawyered up, and they won’t be saying anything, but to not even try to interview the officers is mind boggling.

Governor Ratf%$# Will Veto This, of Course

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A bill has passed the Maryland legislature which would grant ex-offenders the right to vote while on parole of probation.  It now goes to the desk of the newly elected Republican Governor Larry Hogan.

Gee, a restriction on voting that applies largely to communities of color that vote for Democrats.

Any guess as to what hizzonner will do?  He’s already trying to defund education in Baltimore City and Prince Georges County, so I don’t think that he is counting on getting much in the way of the Black vote the next time around.

He has until May 30 to veto the bill.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

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Of the more than 100 reforms proposed in the Missouri state legislature, only one passed:

The Missouri legislature ended its session Friday night having passed virtually none of the reforms activists sought in the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown.

Activists had been tracking more than 100 bills related to criminal justice and policing, but just one of substance had made its way out of the legislature, they say.

“This was such an opportunity for the Missouri legislature to step up and do the right thing. The people of the state called on our lawmakers to fix this broken system,” said Denise Lieberman a senior attorney for the Advancement Project, a civil rights group, and co-chair of the Don’t Shoot Coalition, a group formed to address policy reform after Brown’s shooting.

………
The scores of bills — introduced mostly by the legislature’s few Democrats — offered a menu of reforms. They would have developed standards for eyewitness identification, required body cameras, restricted police from racial profiling, required diversity and sensitivity training, and modified state rules governing the use of lethal force, something Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon threw his support behind in his State of the State address.

The legislature did pass one bill advocates had been calling for, which was aimed at limiting municipal reliance on fines for revenue, a practice highlighted in a scathing Justice Department report on Ferguson released earlier this year. The bill lowers the cap on how much revenue a municipality can generate from traffic tickets from 30 percent to 20 percent statewide and to 12.5 percent in St. Louis County, which is plagued by excessive traffic violations and is home to Ferguson. The bill also bans courts from throwing individuals in jail over minor traffic offenses.

Weak tea.

What a surprise.

I will note that without the protests, even this small bit of reform would never have happened.

Unless you make the Powers That Be profoundly uncomfortable, you will never see any reform.

Whiny Bitches

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Top House Republicans believe the business community is blowing its chance to clinch a trade deal.

Unlike unions, they say, Big Business advocates aren’t flooding Capitol phone lines. They’re not winning over skeptical Republicans. And they haven’t made much headway with business-friendly Democrats who are considering voting for the package, either.

That threatens to create a dangerous reality for supporters of a sweeping trade deal with Pacific Rim nations: that it will become more politically tenable for Republicans to be against trade promotion authority legislation than for it.

The chorus of GOP complaints — striking considering the typically close ties between Republican leadership and Big Business — is coming from all over the Capitol. But it’s loudest on the House side.

David Stewart, a top aide to Speaker John Boehner, voiced the frustration of Boehner’s office during a meeting Friday with officials from business lobby groups, telling them their effort is falling short. During the meeting at the offices of the Business Roundtable, Stewart said unions are outworking the business groups on calls to GOP lawmakers’ offices.

“The lobbying effort on the Hill has been abysmal,” one senior GOP aide said. “Calls and letters into member offices are running 10 to 1 against TPA. This is an uphill fight already given the lack of trust in the president and the general unpopularity of TPA, and the current lobbying effort has not made it any easier. If TPA passes in the House it will be despite the downtown coalition and the president, not because of them.”

Of course, trade politics are tricky — the debate over TPA has triggered concerns ranging from job losses in individual House districts to currency manipulation — and it’s not just the business community that’s struggling. President Barack Obama hasn’t yet been able to build enough Democratic support to get the fast-track bill across the finish line. He faces a big obstacle in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who is vehemently opposed to the legislation as it’s currently written.

Gee, do you want some cheese with that whine?

More important, the big business lobbyists have limited effect on the Teabaggers in the base, and the wackdoodle base cannot deal with being on the same side of an issue as a black President.

If anything, the Republican base is even more opposed to TPP and fast track than the Democratic base.

Considering the number of scalps that the Teabaggers have accumulated in primaries, it’s no wonder that big business lobbyists are having difficulty moving the needle.

Russia Resets its Armor

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Click any Image for Popup Slideshow

T-14 Armata Tank, Side View
1
T-14 Armata Tank, Front Qurter View
2

T-14 Armata Tank, Rear Quarter View
3
T-14 Armata T-72 Size Comparison
4

Medium IFV, Kurganets-25
5
T-15 Heavy IFV

6

T-14 vs T-72 on Parade
7
AMX-13 with bustle for autoloader for comparison
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T-14 Armata Tank, Labeled
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T-15 Armata IFV,  Labeled
10

New Wheeled “Boomerang” 8X8
11
Koalitsiya-SV Self Propelled Artillery
12

T-15 Engine and Drive Detail
13
T-15 Engine and Drive

14

Nothing has gotten more buzz across the military journalism sphere than the 75th May 9 VE day parade in Moscow.

It appears that Russia is going with completely new designs for pretty much all of its armor.

There appear to be a completely new tank, a heavy IFV (a vehicle that has never before been in the Russian/Soviet inventory), medium IFV, wheeled IFV, and SP Howitzer.

It appears that the Russians are upgrading their entire armored inventory, with the exception of the light airborne elements, over the next few years.

The T-14 Armata tank is perhaps the most significant departure from past practice, dispensing with a crewed turret, and placing the crew, commander, gunner, and driver, in the hull.

Of note is the rather large bustle on the back of the turret. (Picture 1)

It looks rather, like the bustle arrangement for AMX-13 light tank of the 1960s (Picture 8), but it appears even less integrated.

In the AMX-13, the bustle was used to accommodate magazines for the auto-loader, but there does not appear to be enough volume for this application with Russian 125mm rounds.

My (not particularly educated) guess is that the structure accommodates the mechanism for the auto-loader.

I would also note that the turret has an unfinished appearance to it, and I’m wondering if discussions are still ongoing regarding the level of armor on the turret.

Even with the possibilities for space savings from the new configuration, the T-14 is larger than the T-72 family it succeeds.

My guess it is being driven by the following factors:

  • The platform will be used on a new heavy APC/IFV, the T-15.
  • Additional ground clearance allows for greater resistance to mines and IEDs.
  • More space for survivability, particularly in terms of separating ammunition storage from critical components and crew.
  • Improved crew accommodations and comfort.

Among other things, I think that the new platform indicates a focus on counterinsurgency, particularly as it applies to the T-15, which is a vehicle that has not existed in the Russian arsenal before.

The T-15 is in many ways similar to the Israeli Namer IFV, which is derived from the Merkava main battle tank.

One significant difference though is that it appears that the platform has been turned around for the T-15:  The engine and drive sprockets are in the front for the T-15, and in the rear for the T-14.  (Pictures 1, 6, 10, 13, & 14) (The Merkava and Namer both have front mounted engines and drive sprockets)

The T-15 likely reflects a new strategic vision:  A heavy IFV does not gain one a lot in “Fulda Gap” scenario, where tanks would still likely be able to take them out with impunity, but it would be useful in counterinsurgency and occupation scenarios.

The new medium IFV, in the 25 ton class, is the Kurganets-25, and once again, it is larger than its predecessor, though it carries the same remotely operated turret as the T-15.

It is larger than its BMP predecessors, and has greater ground clearance as well as greater height, indicating easier entrance and egress from the vehicle, which in turn suggests that the vehicle is likely to be deployed like an IFV than an APC.  (Basically troops in the vehicle until much closer to the line of battle)

Like its larger sibling, and unlike the BMP, the engine will be front mounted, which should further aid in deploying troops.

For lighter deployments, the Russians appear to be replacing their BTR with the “Boomerang”.

Much like the other IFVs, the engines have been moved forward to allow for rear dismount, and much like its western counterparts, and unlike the BTR, it has a deep “V” hull for better resistance to mines and IEDs.

Finally, there is the Koalitsiya-SV self propelled howitzer.  It is the only one of the new tanks that is derived from an existing platform, specifically a chassis from the T-80, which is shares with its predecessor, 2S19 Msta-S.

It has an auto-loader, and it is reported to have some sort of fractional propellant system, which could allow for simultaneous rounds on target.

What may be most telling is what we did not see.

Specifically,  the absence of updated airborne armor indicates that the strategic view of the Russian armed forces is significantly different from that of the Soviet ones.

They clearly do not expect to project power much beyond countries on their boarders, which, for example, a heavy IFV makes sense.

If you are looking for world wide operations, the heavy IFV does not make a whole lot of sense, which is why the US Military, which these days is an imperial military, screwed the pooch with their now-abandoned Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV).

As an aside, there is a big difference between a 45-50 ton heavy IFV (the T-15) and a 65-75 ton IFV (GCV) in terms of cost, logistics, maintenance, and support as well.

This is a remarkably ambitious program for the Russian military, and the fact that they actually have something resembling functional hardware in public is remarkable.

In comparison to my experience with the Future Combat Systems Manned Ground Vehicles (MGV), where much of the time was spent on (I am not kidding here) dealing with General’s demands that the PowerPoint slides protection color coding be made more consistent (really, not kidding here) until after more than a decade, it was canceled, the Russians seem to have achieved a remarkably competent military design and procurement process.

Various links I used below, in no particular order:

Russia’s armour revolution – IHS Jane’s 360

Photo Gallery: Red Square Revelations | Aviation Week

New Russian Armor – First analysis – Armata | Defense Update:

New Russian armor – First analysis Part II: Kurganets-25 | Defense Update:

Updated: Russian Armata unveiled: a new family of armored combat vehicles | Defense Update:

New Russian armor – Part III: Boomerang 8×8 AFV | Defense Update:

SNAFU!: Close up, Hi Rez pics of the Armata MBT Turret!

SNAFU!: Size comparison between the Armata and T-72…

Russian Armata unveiled: a new family of armored combat vehicles | Defense Update:

Kurganets-25 – a new family of medium troop carriers from Russia | Defense Update:

SNAFU!: Quick and dirty on the Armata MBT…

SNAFU!: What is with the new Russian Heavy IFV?