MEET THE PRESS
Kentucky’s junior senator joins David Gregory to talk Iraq and the prospects for a Hillary Clinton 2016 run.

Over the weekend I read an article on the top 50 annuities. It was the weekly feature in a major financial publication. I can only conclude that someone has to pay to keep the lights on at the publication.

Most investors have a number of investing options they should do first, like max out their 401(k), IRA, Profit Sharing etc., before buying an annuity. The guys that need annuities most tend to have more pressing problems such as whether they should weekend on Nantucket or in the Hamptons. They have money.

Investors that don’t have a lot of money to spare should stay away from annuities, especially variable annuities. This is the worst of the bunch and they’re often sold with a full-court press by a salesman. Variable annuities are the 800 pound gorilla in the living room, comprising 80% of the category’s $142 billion in sales last year. They’re not liquid and they cost a fortune in fees.

A lot of investors will read the article as the Bible on annuities. And they’ll jump in headfirst. That’s a mistake. It was not a genuine piece. A lot of investors are going to end up with this crap in their portfolio because their broker read it.

I’ll give you two examples.

One advisor claims income annuities are better than 30-year bonds. I consider both to be questionable investments today. His reasoning was the bonds could lose value if interest rates go up. That’s true. But investors buying that long maturity should understand duration risk before buying. I don’t like the comparison. And annuities with fixed returns also suffer in comparison as rates rise.

Another broker that sells annuities said the whole model really depends on some dying younger than others. That’s how the model works. Someone has to pay, right? That’s how the math works. But the publication isn’t complaining. Someone has to pay to keeps the lights on.

Your success is a choice.

I, like so many people, come from a long line of bad backs. My grandfather, a fireman in Nashua, NH, was a wiry man with major back issues. I’ve battled congenital sciatica nerve problems for over 40 years. The saving grace in my life has been yoga. About 16 years ago, after needing a regime of steroids to combat the pain, I started seriously practicing yoga. And while I am proud that I can do head and handstands, it’s more important that I can ride my Harley Heritage Classic to Bar Harbor, Maine, which Dick and I just did, via the Hudson Valley, Woodstock, VT, and Portland, ME. Each summer we put on many enjoyable and sometimes challenging miles on our bikes. Read here from the WSJ how good posture contributes to a range of health benefits, from reducing back pain to boosting mood. But even for people in good shape, bad posture habits often need constant vigilance to avoid the slump.

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In order to make some types of organic bread, for example, it is essential to use baking soda, which is nonorganic. Today, more than 250 nonorganic products are on the list allowed by the National Organic Standards Board. Michael Potter, a founder of organic food producer Eden Foods, calls “the certified-organic label a fraud and refuses to put it on Eden’s products.”

Further complicating the issue, the FDA objects to calling a food “natural” only if it contains artificial flavor, color or other synthetic additives. Crops that are GMOs (genetically modified crops), chickens that are caged, food with added “all-natural” sweeteners (high-fructose corn syrup) all can be labeled “natural.” NPR’s The Salt explains here how few the restrictions are to additives in our food and why consumers are confused about the label “natural” versus “organic.”

For fifteen years, Urvashi Rangan, director of consumer safety and sustainability for Consumer Reports, has been pointing out that “natural” is just about the most misleading label that you’ll ever see on a food package. Yet consumers still look for that word, food companies still love to use it and the Food and Drug Administration can’t or won’t define it.

So Rangan now says it’s time to kill the “natural” label. Consumer Reports is about to submit formal petitions to the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, asking them to ban the word from food packages, so that consumers won’t be hornswoggled by empty promises.

It’s the latest turn in a debate that’s gone on for decades, in part because defining naturalness seems to be just as hard as defining beauty.

According to a report from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the FDA told a food manufacturer in 1940 that canned, heat-treated grapefruit juice couldn’t be called natural. “This term should be reserved for fresh juice or juice which has been kept without intervention of any process of heat treatment,” the agency wrote.

But times and technology change. These days, the FDA only objects to calling a food “natural” if it contains artificial flavor, color or other synthetic additives. Otherwise, there are few restrictions.

Farmers can grow crops using pesticides and genetically modified crops, often called GMOs. They can feed antibiotics to animals or keep egg-laying chickens in cages. Food processors can add sugar (an “all-natural” sweetener, after all) or corn starch or anything else derived from plant or animal life to their products. It’s all “natural.”

The neocons aren’t the only group to champion the Iraq War. It was a bipartisan effort going back to 2003 when it was supported by Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Madeline Albright points out Cato’s Gene Healy. And with a 14% success rate for democracy at gunpoint, you’d think we might have learned a thing or two about nation building. Nope. Sen. John McCain sounds like a defeated Pop Warner League football coach when he says, “we had it won.” How stable could it have really been Mr. McCain? Healy writes:

In April 2003, as U.S. forces rolled into Baghdad, the Carnegie Endowment’s Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper warned that “historically, nation-building attempts by outside powers are notable mainly for their bitter disappointments, not their triumphs.” Democratization-at-gunpoint is nearly always a fool’s errand, and especially foolish in a socially fractured basket case like the Iraq of 2003.

In 14 cases of nation-building in underdeveloped societies, Pei and Kaplan noted, the United States achieved its aims only in tiny Panama and Grenada: “a success rate of just 14 percent.” Moreover, they cautioned, “ethnically fragmented countries, such as Iraq, pose extraordinary challenges to nation builders because, lacking a common national identity, various ethnic groups … tend to seize the rare opportunity of outsiders’ intervention to seek complete independence or gain more power. This can trigger national disintegration or a backlash from other ethnic groups, with the outside powers caught in the middle.”

Indeed, “despite what interveners hope,” writes George Washington University’s Alexander B. Downes, “more than 40 percent of states that experience foreign-imposed regime change have a civil war within the next 10 years.”

Obama’s great mistake, then, according to the neoconservatives, was that he missed his chance to have U.S. troops stick around, “caught in the middle.” The idea was to keep a residual force of perhaps 20,000 Americans there indefinitely, taking fire while waiting for the emergence of the Shiite Nelson Mandela. Not a great plan.

If Iraq was a doomed enterprise from outset, who’s to blame? We tend to think of the Iraq War as a neoconservative project, and with good reason. But they weren’t alone.

“The underrated villains in this drama,” Matt Yglesias observes, “are the leading Democratic Party politicians of the 2002-2003 era.” Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Madeline Albright — “the whole crew” — went along. In 2003, center-left opinion on Iraq was dominated by a kettle of “Liberal Hawks” nearly indistinguishable from the neoconservative variety. Brookings scholars proved instrumental as well, playing a key role in getting liberal opinion leaders behind the war.

“The Quagmire in Iraq … Staggering Budget Deficits … and a coming Civil War in the GOP,” all the fireworks one has come to expect from Patrick J. Buchanan and succinctly packaged up with a bow in Where The Right Went Wrong—How Neoconservatives subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency .

Pat asks, “Who are they, the neoconservatives?” He answers, “The first generation were ex-Trotskyites, socialists, leftists, and liberals who backed FDR, Truman, JFK, and LBJ. When the Democratic party was captured by McGovern in 1972—on a platform of cutting defense and ‘Come Home America’—these Cold War liberals found themselves isolated and ignored in their own party. Adrift, they rafted over to the Republican Party and were pulled aboard as conservatism’s long voyage was culminating in the triumph of Reagan. Neoconservatives were the boat people of the McGovern revolution that was itself the political vehicle of the moral, social, and cultural revolution of the 1960s.”

About neocons, Pat continues, “Almost none came out of the Goldwater campaign, the catalyzing event of modern conservatism, or out of the business world or the military.” Pat harks back to a Max Boot Wall Street Journal essay, “What the Heck Is a Neocon?” Boot called support for Israel “a key tenet of neoconservatism.” As Pat notes, it was the only tenet Boot mentioned, adding that Commentary, the magazine of the American Jewish Congress, is the “neocon bible.”

Pat includes two insightful quotes leading off his chapter “The War Party: Highjackers of American Foreign Policy:”

(1) “With the end of the Cold War, what we really need is an obvious ideological and threatening enemy, one worthy of our mettle, one that can unite us in opposition.” (Irving Kristol, 1966)

(2) “I don’t know where the neocons came from. … Somehow, the neocons captured the president. They captured the vice president.”  (Gen. Anthony Zinni, USMC [ret.] Centcom Commander, 1998-2000).

It seems every day there’s a new threat to your digital security. A treasure trove of your personal information is available on your iPhone. You simply can’t ignore it, you must be proactive in your data security efforts. Here a couple “good” hackers show you simple steps to protect yourself from some of the more common ways your information can be stolen or recorded.

Michael Scheuer, former CIA Chief of the bin Laden unit, writes in Marching Toward Hell that the Founders intended the United States to be: noninterventionist, commerce-oriented non-ideological, focused on genuine life-and-death national interests, and undergirded by an inflexible bias toward neutrality in other peoples’ wars.

Scheuer harked back to the words of George Washington, “our greatest president.” “The Constitution vests the power of declaring war in the Congress therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.” Scheuer advises that The U.S. military’s reserve forces, including those commanded by state governors, are key components of America’s war-making ability; without them large, long-duration wars overseas are not possible. Because the federal legislature since 1941 has allowed the president to effectively abrogate the constitutional requirement that Congress declares war, the governors must begin to deny the federal government this vital military manpower for use overseas unless Congress has formerly declared war, thereby negating the ability of a president to take America to war simply because he or she is so inclined. There are, after all, few better definitions of a tyranny than a state, where the decision to go to war rests with one individual. By retaining state military units under their command, the governors will provoke a long-needed constitutional confrontation between the electorate and the federal government that may at last return constitutional sanity to the issue of making war.

As conditions stand in Washington today, among the small handful of individuals who seem to understand the intentions of the Founders under the Constitution are Cato Institute scholars, including Chris Preble, Ben Friedman and Justin Logan, and Senator Rand Paul. Chief among America’s Constitutional violators and/or war agitators for the debacle that is Iraq are President Obama, Dick Cheney, John McCain and Lindsey Graham and the neocon cabal in general. Americans, this fall, will have perhaps the final opportunity to elect Constitutionally compliant representatives to the House and Senate.

All Americans and certainly all those constitutionally based Americans running this fall will find Marching Toward Hell, Cato Institute Chris Preble’s The Power Problem and Pat Buchanan’s Where The Right Went Wrong the perfect foreign policy foundation trilogy. I have previously posted a series of articles on The Power Problem here: Part I, Part II, Part III.

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