Category Archives: Web Article Review

Hillary Clinton speaks

In Foreign Affairs, Hillary Clinton has a laundry list of ideas for U.S. war policy. (I like to say war instead of defense or security. Because that’s what we’re talking about. She talks a little bit about pandemics and climate change early on, but she gets down to war and weapons pretty quickly. This gives us a pretty good idea about what she would have been doing for the last four years.

  • Retire aging weapons systems and close unnecessary bases (as she explains, easier to say than do because each factory and each base supports the economy of some place, and the elected officials representing that place will fight tooth and nail against the cuts. She says one way around this is for Congress to agree on an up or down vote on a comprehensive package of reforms, rather than argue over individual bases or factories.)
  • “Invest in accelerated maintenance and next-generation submarines” rather than new aircraft carriers, which are vulnerable to clouds of cheap missiles and drones.
  • Long range bombers
  • “mechanisms that allow for consultation with China and Russia to reduce the chances that a long-range conventional attack is mistaken for a nuclear strike, which could lead to disastrous escalation.” (Joe here, yeah, we’re coming to bomb you, but it’s just the strongest normal bombs we have, nothing to worry about…)
  • fewer active-duty soldiers and tanks
  • “upgraded intelligence and communications systems” (shuttered tank factories take note, this is the stuff you need to learn about…)
  • “a renewed commitment to diplomacy” (Joe here…yeah, we just want to talk…just talk and maybe we won’t have to blow shit up)
  • “it will make sense for other NATO members to concentrate on strengthening their conventional ground forces so that they can deter incursions in eastern Europe or lead counterterrorism missions in Africa.” (Joe here…no, those aren’t our guns by your border…we just sold them to the guy who lives there…nothing to worry about, just stay away from your border and everything will be okay…)
  • “rebuilding of the country’s industrial and technological strength” (especially things that are useful for war and weapons…) “It’s not enough anymore to prioritize materials and technologies used for weapons systems and semiconductors; the United States’ security also depends on the control of pharmaceuticals, clean energy, 5G networks, and artificial intelligence.” 

Towards the bottom, she gets to nuclear weapons:

Perhaps most important, the United States needs a new approach to nuclear weapons. For starters, it should not be deploying low-yield nuclear warheads on submarines or nuclear-armed cruise missiles, which expand the range of scenarios for the use of nuclear weapons and increase the risk of a misunderstanding escalating quickly into a full-blown nuclear exchange. Nor should the United States spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years on its nuclear arsenal, as is currently planned. Instead, it should significantly reduce its reliance on old intercontinental ballistic missiles, pursue a “newer and fewer” approach to modernization, and revive the arms control diplomacy that the Trump administration scrapped. A top priority should be to extend the New START treaty with Russia, which Ellen Tauscher, the State Department’s top arms control official, and I helped negotiate at the beginning of the Obama administration. It will also be important to persuade China to join nuclear negotiations.

Foreign Affairs

(Joe here…yeah…no, not the small ones, just the really big ones…no, nothing to worry about, they’re so big we would never even think about using them…no…right, we want you to throw yours away…yeah, we’ll throw some of ours away too…right, nothing to worry about, the old ones, not the new, really really big shiny ones, which are so big and pretty we would never even think about blowing them up…yeah, we know we have a lot more of them, just throw some of your new ones away and then maybe we’ll throw some of our old ones away while we’re building the shiny new ones…)

mass incarceration

Maybe I’ve finally put my finger on what bothered me about Black Lives Matter. Of course I’m not in favor of police brutality and nobody should be. Police brutality is a huge problem for the people on the receiving end of it, and it needs to be addressed. Addressing it would only remove drop from the bucket of violence and injustice in this country. We need to identify and address root causes of violence and injustice, but maybe that is too vague a concept for people to be marching in the streets about. Mass incarceration is concrete – we hear the numbers frequently, the U.S. has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. For every 100 or so people you see walking on the street, there is one American in a federal, state, or local jail. And some of those people on the street are on probation and parole. Add in friends and family of all those people, and a huge proportion of the population is affected, certainly enough to get a march together.

So what can we do about it? Just trying to reason it out, I would first identify things that don’t need to be crimes, and don’t make them crimes any more. Drug use and possession come to mind – unless you are selling drugs to children, you are really only hurting yourself and/or other consenting adults, and this should be dealt with through the health care system (we need a health care system!). Go ahead and legalize prostitution. Gambling is pretty much legal already. There might be other things in this category I haven’t thought of. Next, find non-violent ways to treat non-violent crimes. For example, address property crimes by taking away property.

Finally, you come down to just violent crimes, and violent criminals do need to be taken off the streets. But you can try to find ways to reduce and prevent crime rather than just treat the symptoms. Ultimately, as suggested in this Brennan Center for Justice report, the answer is to look at all those approaches and programs that have been tried on a small scale, follow the evidence, and then try to scale up the ones that have been proven to work. Things that have been tried include “deferred-sentencing diversion programs, pre-booking diversion programs, and alternative court models, including mental health and drug courts.”

This is hard, but unlike say, education, mass incarceration is pretty easy to measure and determine if we are making progress or not.

mRNA vaccines

According to Der Spiegel, the mRNA vaccine development technology accelerated to deal with coronavirus could be adapted to protect against some forms of cancer and other diseases. In fact, some scientists working on these other diseases switched temporarily to coronavirus vaccine development, and will eventually go back to their regularly scheduled programming.

The trick is that each patient receives an mDNA that is precisely tailored to the genetic profile of the cancer they are suffering from. These personalized cancer immunotherapies are still considered experimental, but the results of the initial study were so promising that Türeci, Şahin and their team were able to publish their results in July 2017 in Nature, the prominent scientific magazine. Almost two years later, a 52-year-old skin cancer patient in the U.S. received the experimental BioNTech treatment, after which he told Nature: “I was actually witnessing the cancer cells shrinking before my eyes.”

Der Spiegel

If a massive investment can break a log jam that has stymied research progress into a particular problem for decades, why don’t we do it more often? It would seem to support one of our most competitive industries, create jobs and stimulate the economy in the short term, and I would imagine it has a long term economic payoff. It would be nice to have an HIV vaccine and a male contraceptive shot or pill, just to name a couple.

Since this is publicly funded, will the “recipe” be made available to the WHO or other countries’ health agencies for free. That would seem like the moral thing to do. I also wonder though if the technology could be put to nefarious purposes like biological warfare or terrorism.

How could the U.S. end pro-war policies?

The other day I called Biden pro-war, which might seem a little harsh. How would the U.S. actually go about reducing its military commitments, if it wanted to? I think the starting point is to realize that other countries are actually afraid of us. We have the world’s most powerful (most expensive anyway) military, and we use it frequently. The confrontations we are involved in with Russia and China tend to happen very close to those countries’ borders, and yet our rhetoric treats them as the aggressors.

Here is one set of ideas from the Defense Priorities think tank. Now, this think tank is funded by libertarian ideologues like Rand Paul, who just want to starve the government until it goes away, and corporate plutocrats like the Kochs, who just want to starve the government so they can keep all the money in their own pockets. Any money they save would not be reinvested in, say, Social Security if they were in charge. It would just be diverted to the rich and powerful. Nonetheless, the actual ideas for shrinking military commitments seem to be serious, and various factions who normally don’t agree might be able to come to a consensus in the short term, then argue about how to reinvest the proceeds later.

First step is to bring troops home from the Greater Middle East, from Afghanistan to Africa. Obama won a Nobel Prize just for saying he was going to do it. he didn’t do it. Trump said he was going to do it, and he also was not able to do it. Not only that, we blundered into conflicts in Libya and Syria under their administrations that seem intractable and have no obvious benefits, to us or to the people actually in those countries. It’s time to just announce dates for withdrawal and then withdraw.

Second step is to say NATO is done expanding. In retrospect, trying to expand NATO (starting under Bill Clinton) was very threatening to Russia, and we quickly lost their trust and cooperation. The nations of Europe are much more powerful technologically and economically than Russia. We can pull troops back while still supporting them with training and equipment (either giving or selling these things to them, the latter keeping the military-industrial complex here at home happier and less nervous.)

Similarly, in Asia we can pull troops back while supporting with training and equipment. South Korea and Japan are incredibly powerful countries that can fend for themselves day-to-day with some assurance that we would ride to their aid if actual armed conflict breaks out.

Terrorist threats can still be dealt with through intelligence and law enforcement operations. Arguably, our foreign military adventures have probably inspired more potential terrorists than if we had never gone on those adventures. We can make it clear that we are not a threat to other sovereign nations, and then we can spend a decade or two practicing what we preach so that they might actually start to believe what we say.

I might add to this negotiating hard for nuclear arms reductions and nonproliferation, and leading by example on these. Also reengaging and trying to reinvigorate the United Nations. Not being a military threat to other sovereign nations doesn’t mean we ignore human rights abuses within their borders. It means we work in concert with the world community to apply pressure to solve these problems.

how to collect more taxes without raising taxes

This Alternet article explains how the IRS has been defunded and hobbled over the last few decades. The rich are able to lobby for all kinds of loopholes and then find ways to exploit them, of course, but even if they outright cheat they are unlikely to get caught. Working people are audited at much higher rates. Audits for the rich and powerful are way down, and tax fraud prosecutions have been almost nonexistent under Trump. The article estimates $47.5 billion could be collected by auditing rich people. It’s good to keep that in perspective though of the annual federal budget of 4-5 trillion. So it would be a one-time recovery of around 1% of the budget. It would be enough to get a baby bond program going. You could give about $11,000 to each of the 4 million babies born in the U.S. in one year (but only that one year), or you could give less and spread it out over more years, or you could give it just to poor babies and spread it out.

Is Exxon going down?

We saw the value of coal companies collapse a few years ago, and it doesn’t seem like they are coming back. Could oil be next?

The big picture: Today,ExxonMobil is not even in the top 40 most valuable companies in America. It’s losing money, cutting staff, and stretching to maintain an unsustainable dividend…

Exxon has lost 54% of its value this year alone. That’s some $163 billion. By contrast, Chevron is down 42%, or $95 billion, while NextEra is up 23%, or $26 billion.

Felix Salmon, The Week

This drop in value could be a result of the Covid recession, if you ask me, and oil could come roaring back in the medium term, if you ask me. But the longer term story is one of renewables slowly but surely taking over.

Oil is a product that our civilization wants and needs to function. I don’t really blame companies for producing that product. Governments should have put an appropriate tax on the negative social and environmental consequences of it a long time ago. But there is a special level in hell for Exxon and some of its past leaders, because they knew the reality of global warming decades ago, and their decades of propaganda war against the American public have a lot to do with what many people believe about climate change today, and the failure of our political system to prepare and meet the challenge for at least 20 years, if not 50 years.

what’s new with legalizing drugs

I am in favor of legalizing drugs, taxing them, and creating a universal health system able to deal with substance abuse and mental health issues. I believe this would result in a big reduction in violence and the prison population almost immediately. It turns out there is a ballot measure in Oregon to decriminalize possession of small amounts of all types of drugs (which hasn’t been voted on as I write this, but probably will have been when this posts.)

IT’S OVER! CALL IT, YOU PUSSIES!!!

Update: I wrote the post below (and the headline above) around 8:30 a.m. on Saturday, November 7, 2020. All the major networks called the race around 11:30 a.m.

That was a public service announcement to the news media of the United States of America as I write this on Saturday, November 7, 2020. I did kind of describe the almost exact scenario that happened in my official election prediction post the other day. The only thing is, that was my “unexpected” scenario.

In the “I told you so” category, here is what I said on January 31: “I think the odds favor Biden, a Democratic House, and a Republican Senate.”

It’s over. But Trump voters are going to have a hard time accepting the result. Before I judge too harshly, I think back to 2000 when I had a hard time accepting the result and tried to talk myself into believing the election had been stolen. I didn’t quite succeed – that election in Florida was essentially a tie, and the Bush vs. Gore case was so technical I don’t think anyone without a law degree can come close to understanding it.

You can find election coverage elsewhere, I think I have it out of my system! I’m sure I’ll have some thoughts about policy going forward. I think Biden will basically spend a year trying to deal with coronavirus, followed by three years of trying to restore the Obama center-right, pro-business, pro-war status quo. Republicans politician will convince their followers that these center-right policies are far-left, and the wheel will turn. It will be interesting to see if Biden runs for re-election in four years, and interesting to see who the Republicans put up. Please, for the love of Christ, not Donald J. Trump! But we will see if it is a more mainstream pro-business, pro-war, dog-whistle Republican, or if there is someone out there able to speak to the Trump base but with a bit more finesse and charisma. That’s a scary thought.