First, read this jeremiad from Adm. Will H. McRaven at the Washington Post. In light of these elements of the UCMJ:

Retired military officers are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) under Article 2 of the UCMJ, which extends the jurisdiction of military law to “Retired members of a regular component of the armed forces who are entitled to pay.” “Retirees are subject to the UCMJ and may be tried by court-martial for violations … that occurred … while in a retired status.

and this from Article 88:

contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State.

should Adm. McRaven be courtmartialed?

What should be clear from those two passages is that military officers including retired military officers must tread very lightly when becoming involved in politics. IMO Adm. McRaven has overstepped. Whether you like Trump or not, disapprove of what he is doing or not, or are afraid of what he may do does not justify throwing everything else overboard. If it does what the heck are you defending?

I actually agree with the kernel of the argument that E. J. Dionne is making in his Washington Post column. I think that the U. S. is on a slippery slope towards autocracy:

Begin with those much-touted checks and balances. Their health depends — as my colleagues Norman Ornstein, Thomas Mann and I argued in our book, “One Nation After Trump” — on the willingness of those in the legislative and judicial branches to put their institutional loyalties and their stewardship of the system as a whole above their partisan loyalties.

The opposite is happening in the GOP-led Congress. With the exception of a few Republican elected officials at the periphery, Congress has worked to enable Trump’s abuses (witness the behavior of California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes to undercut special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation) and to minimize the outrageousness of his conduct.

However, I disagree with Mr. Dionne’s implication that it began with Trump, that Trump is the greatest threat we face, or that the Congressional Republicans are somehow peculiarly awful. I think that slope towards autocracy began before I was born. The Supreme Court’s deciding as it did in Wickard V. Filburn that a farmer raising wheat on his own land for his own use was subject to Congressional control under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause was a step towards autocracy.

The Congress’s delegation of its war-making powers to the president, as it most certainly has done on a very nearly continuous basis over the period of the last 60 years, is a step towards autocracy. So is legislation that relies mostly on the executive branch to determine its scope as is the case with the Affordable Care Act.

The narrow majoritarianism embraced by the Pelosi-Reid Congress to enact major social legislation was a step towards autocracy.

Relying on the Supreme Court to impose your social preferences by judicial fiat on the barest pretext of legal reasoning is a step towards autocracy.

Seeing the other guy’s partisanship as a problem but not your own is a step towards autocracy.

In her Washington Post column Megan McArdle touches on the subject I mentioned the other day, Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to force companies to put labor union representation on their company boards:

It is the dream of practically every American to be their own boss. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is offering a plan to make that a reality — sort of — for many workers by requiring firms with more than $1 billion in revenue to acquire a federal charter and fill at least 40 percent of their board seats with employee representatives.

The idea, known as co-determination, is already reality in Germany and Scandinavia. And as socialists talking of “democratic workplaces” surge in popularity, apparently it’s gaining traction here.

She continues by pointing out a few things:

• The conditions in Germany and Sweden are different than those that prevail here.
• Employee ownership has a spotty record here.
• Unions are actually in competition with one another which complicates things.

A few more issues with the proposal that have been mentioned here:

• The workers may not want the responsibility that comes with control via the Board of Directors.
• Ownership bears risk and workers may not have an appetite for risk.

and one damning problem that I don’t believe has been mentioned: Sen. Warren’s plan is probably an uncompensated “taking”, something prohibited by the Constitution.

As I’ve said before, I’m completely in favor of workers having more say in how companies are run but I think that control should be accomplished through ownership. Having skin in the game is a necessity. It also bears mentioning that one size need not fit all. Some workers may elect to shoulder more responsibility; others may not. They would have the freedom to choose.

I leave with one question. Why don’t workers in the U. S. have some sort of rights interest in their jobs? We are practically unique in the world in the dominance of “at will employment” here. In other countries employers may fire for cause but not just because they feel like it. And Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are not exactly socialist hellholes.

This morning James Clapper is whining at The Hill about John Brennan being a loose cannon.

I have a question. Was Trump right or wrong to rescind John Brennan’s security clearance? There’s no question he has the authority to do it and the complaints about it being some sort of authoritarian move is bushwah. We don’t have an Official Secrets Act. Things are classified or declassified and security clearances granted or withdrawn under the authority of the president. If you want it to be otherwise, pass a law.

I’m the wrong person to provide an answer about either Brennan or Clapper for that matter since I think that both of them should be behind bars for perjury. They have each given conflicting answers to Congress in sworn testimony. No matter how you cut it that’s perjury.

Of the many editorials, op-eds, and other opinion pieces on the sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy scandal that is so troubling to me and many other Catholics, I think I like this Washington Post op-ed by Lawrence Downes the best. I agree with this passage:

I’ll pray and wait for more priests and bishops and cardinals to go to prison, for state legislators to suspend statutes of limitations and throw the courthouses open to civil suits, so survivors can take the attackers and the enablers for all they’ve got.

I will wait for acts of public penitence by the leaders of the church, for them to kneel in front of their victims and beg forgiveness, starting with my own recently retired local bishop, William Murphy.

And I guess I’ll go to Mass. I’ll be there on Long Island on Sunday morning, at 10:30, with my sister-in-law and all us other sinners. Some of us will be listening, waiting for the priest to confront what is surely the worst crisis in this church in his and our lifetimes. We in the pews are all part of the body of Christ, but he is the one up front, God’s representative on Earth and the bishop’s employee , the one with the paycheck and the uniform, the one who runs our weekly meetings, 52 times a year, to celebrate the sacrament and guide us on issues of faith and morals.

It’s his job to lead us through this, to help us understand the church’s failings, to explain what happened and how justice will be done — if it will be done — and to tell this to our faces.

I commend the piece to our attention. It is free of many of the flaws of other pieces.

If you’ve ever wondered why I keep harping on China’s failure to live up to the terms of its joining the World Trade Organization and loosing its hold on its banking system, Michael Pettis’s remarks at Bloomberg View might give you a hint:

In China, the government sets the GDP growth rate early in the year at a level thought adequate to accommodate its social and political objectives, among which is to keep unemployment low. The political nature of the target modifies the standard economic constraints, encouraging local governments to generate whatever additional economic activity is required so that, along with the economic activity of the private and real-estate sectors, the target is reached (within a few tenths of a percentage point).

Two factors unique to China are critical for this system to work. First, till now local governments haven’t been subject to hard budget constraints. They can engage in near-unlimited amounts of non-productive economic activity unconstrained by worries about remaining solvent.

Second, and necessary for the first, local governments control most credit creation within the banking system. Because such loans are directly or indirectly guaranteed, banks don’t have to write down loans when the projects they fund cannot service the debt. This allows the banks to extend as much new credit as local governments need to meet their targets.

China’s debt-to-GDP ratio is pushing 300%. Much of this debt is non-productive and some considerable amount is just plain corruption. It has maintained a high GDP growth rate through increasing its debt rapidly. Can it maintain that indefinitely? No one knows. If it doesn’t, it won’t be good for any of us.

On the tenth anniversary of the brief but significant war, I want to commend Michael Kofman’s retrospective on the Russo-Georgian War of 2008 at War on the Rocks to your attention. Here’s a snippet:

As Thomas de Waal explains, “Many people are busy rewriting the history of 2008 in light of Ukraine.” The story that Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili was simply reckless in ordering an attack on South Ossetia, and the Russian peacekeeper contingent isn’t true, but he certainly miscalculated and bears considerable blame for the conflict. Neither is the prevailing simplistic narrative that “Russia invaded Georgia” as though Georgia, and its political leadership, were an empty outline on a map with no role to play in starting this war. The conversation is demonstrative of a line from George Orwell’s 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” It’s important to recapture that history from the trenches of the current political debate, because the Russo-Georgian War holds lessons for future potential conflicts with Russia, and enduring ones for the U.S. practice of statecraft in foreign policy.

My account of the war would be very close to Mr. Kofman’s: the Georgians, egged on by the United States, provoked Russia into war.

While we fulminate over Russian malice, we might take a little time to consider whether Russia has foreign policy interests of its own and whether admitting Georgia to NATO would actually have promoted U. S. security.

One of my college professors made a wisecrack that has stayed with me over the half century or so since I heard it. Rather than talking about “multiple choice tests” he called them “single choice multiple response tests”. That thought came back to me as I read the introduction to Richard Reeves’s thought provoking report at Brookings, “A Little Respect: Can We Restore Relational Equality?” Here’s the opening:

Equality can be thought of in three different ways: Basic equality, granted to all in the form of political or legal rights; material equality, measured principally in terms of economic and other resources; and relational equality, which is earned through respect of oneself and of others.

A primary source of relational equality is work. But workers in America are struggling. Many are out of work, and for many more paid workers, wages have remained stagnant as income inequality has widened. There has also been an erosion in the quality of work, especially with regard to autonomy, voice, status, and security.

As a result, the U.S. is becoming more unequal, both in resource and relational terms, especially along class lines. This widening respect gap not only means that the winners—those in the upper class—have less respect for the losers—those who are less successful, it also means the losers have less self-respect.

Two alternatives are presented:

• Restore work as a basis of status and respect
• Replace work as basis of status and respect

Either of these is a tall order, requiring not just a social program but an overturning of present society. We are increasingly a plutocracy, something particularly apparent to me sitting here in Illinois where two billionaires contend with one another to be our next governor. But it’s not limited to the political sphere. Consider, for example, the Kardashian-Jenner clan. They are not merely “famous for being famous”. They are influential through extreme sexuality and conspicuous consumption, practically a microcosm of our society. Wealth and notoriety leading to more wealth.

When status and respect are based on money how can one promote equality? What level of redistribution will promote equality without discouraging work? I don’t believe there is one.

When I was beginning my working life, a corporate CEO earned about 17 times what the workers working for him did. Now it’s 350 times. That change occurred as a consequence of policy.

Furthermore we already have models for what happens when work is replaced as the basis for status respect on the South and West Sides of Chicago. Work is not replaced by elevated leisure—creating works of art, playing chess, or engaging in discourse. It’s replaced by substance abuse, protecting one’s turf, and killing one’s opponents.

For those who think that Elizabeth Warren’s notion of expropriating and redistributing corporate equity is the solution, I have a question. Why don’t labor unions hold their pension funds as equity stakes in the companies for which their members work? Under modern conditions when most people work for somebody else, I don’t see how equality can be fostered without workers having a property interest in their jobs. That either means holding equity in their companies or the end of at will employment, a revolution of its own.

This story begins with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, with his characteristic tact, blaming the homicides on the South and West Sides of Chicago on “lack of morals”. As reported by the Chicago Tribune this has prompted a heated response from Illinois state senator Kwame Raoul, presently contending for the job of the state’s attorney general:

Democratic attorney general candidate Kwame Raoul on Thursday criticized Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s focus on a lack of morals in African-American communities struggling with gun violence, calling that approach “outright wrong.”

During an appearance at the Illinois State Fair, the Democratic state senator from the South Side also disagreed with Emanuel’s opposition to a proposal that would require Chicago police officers to document every instance in which they point a gun at someone.

The criticism represents a prominent establishment African-American distancing himself from some of the mayor’s positions on policing and gun violence at a time when he and African-American opponent, Republican Erika Harold, are courting black voters across the state. Raoul’s comments also come at a time when Emanuel is working to rebuild his once-solid support among black voters, which has waned following the Laquan McDonald police shooting controversy.

Emanuel has called for more attention to be paid to the lack of morals behind gangs and continued gun violence on the city’s South and West sides, saying it often makes it difficult to apprehend shooters.

During Democrat Day at the Illinois State Fair, Raoul was asked if the mayor’s remarks amounted to the mayor “talking down to black people.”

“I think for the mayor to make a generalization about a community is more than just misspoken, it’s outright wrong,” said Raoul, who holds former President Barack Obama’s old state Senate seat and has received his endorsement in the attorney general race.

“We have communities that have not been invested in. We have communities where mental health services have been depleted. We have communities that have suffered as a result of the budget impasse in Springfield. All of these combined, along with the closing of schools, what does one expect?” Raoul said. “What does one expect to evolve from these communities if you don’t invest in these communities and you don’t invest in the children within those communities?”

I think that both of them are right and both of them are wrong. It can hardly be denied that the communities on the South and West Sides of Chicago where nearly all of the homicides are taking place have experienced the closing of mental health facilities and had schools consolidate, a consequence of declining enrollment and, too, the mayor’s apparently conscious strategy of devoting an increased amount of the city’s resources to encouraging gentrification.

But Mayor Emanuel has a point, too. The homicides are the work of gangs. The gangs aren’t amateur theatrical societies. They’re criminal groups engaged in illegal and immoral activities. Why do the gangs hold such sway? At the very least a partial factor is the decline of the family in the black community.

In 1940 14% of black children were born to single mothers. By 1960 that had risen to 25%. Now it’s over 75%. Call that immoral or call that a life choice but it’s a dysfunctional one. It is not working for black folk and the death tolls in the Austin and Englewood neighborhoods are grim testimony to its consequences.

I have a question for Mr. Raoul. Citywide the on time high school graduation rate is 75%. In the neighborhoods most affected by violence, it’s closer to 60%. How will more empty seats in schools—because that’s what he’s talking about—change that? What services will help people who won’t avail themselves of them?

Another factor, unmentioned by either Mr. Emanuel or Mr. Raoul is the lack of jobs. Our economy is creating too few entry level jobs or jobs requiring only a high school education for the number of people seeking entry level jobs or those requiring only a high school education through a combination of trade and immigration policies and the vast subsidies being given to jobs that require greater skills.

We need a change to the ways in which our policies are structured. Environmental and workplace regulations are good but when instead of mining and processing coal or rare earth metals here we import them from places that have looser environmental regulations than we do, we aren’t improving things. We’re just putting the abuses delicately out of sight.

The population that we already have and the distribution of ability within that population tells us that we need more jobs for people with entry level skills or high school-only educations not fewer, even at the expense of jobs that require PhDs. Failing to address that problem will result in the homicide rates rising in cities other than Chicago, Baltimore, and St. Louis.