Tag Archives: U.S. politics

2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: Writing in 1984, Isaac Asimov thought we would be approaching world peace, living lives of leisure, children would love school, and we would be mining the moon and manufacturing things in orbital factories by now.
  • FEBRUARY: Cyber-attacking may be a lot easier than cyber-defending. Also, nuclear proliferation is back partly thanks to diplomatic unforced errors by the United States.
  • MARCH: Invoking of emergency powers was the first step down the slippery slope for the democratic Weimar Republic. New research suggests that climate change can be the trigger that pushes a society over the edge.
  • APRIL: The most frightening and/or depressing story often involves nuclear weapons and/or climate change, because these are the near-term existential threats we face. Oliver Stone has added a new chapter to his 2012 book The Untold History of the United States making a case that we have lost serious ground on both these issues since then. In a somewhat related depressing story, the massive New Orleans levy redesign in response to Hurricane Katrina does not appear to have made use of the latest climate science.
  • MAY: Without improvements in battery design, the demand for materials needed to make the batteries might negate the environmental benefits of the batteries. I’m not really all that frightened or depressed about this because I assume designs will improve. Like I said, it was slim pickings this month.
  • JUNE: The world economy appears to be slowing, even though U.S. GDP is growing as the result of the post-2007 recovery finally taking hold, juiced by a heavy dose of pro-cyclical government spending. The worry is that if and when there is eventually a shock to the system, there will be little room for either fiscal or monetary policy to respond. Personally, the partisan in me is thinking any time before November 2020 is as good a time for any for a recession to hit the U.S. I am a couple decades from retirement, and picturing that bumper sticker “Lord, Just Give Me One More Bubble”. Of course, this is selfish thinking when there are many people close to retirement and many families struggling to get by out there. And short-term GDP growth is not the only metric. The U.S. is falling behind its developed peers on a wide range of metrics that matter to people lives, including infrastructure, health care costs and outcomes, life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, addiction, suicide, poverty, and hunger. And it’s not just that we are no longer in the lead on these metrics, we are below average and falling. Which is why I am leading the charge to Make America Average Again!
  • JULY: The water situation in India, and the major city of Chennai in particular, sounds really bad.
  • AUGUST: Drought is a significant factor causing migration from Central America to the United States. Drought in the Mekong basin may put the food supply for a billion people in tropical Asia at risk. One thing that can cause drought is deliberately lying to the public for 50 years while materially changing the atmosphere in a way that enriches a wealthy few at everyone else’s expense. Burning what is left of the Amazon can’t help. 
  • SEPTEMBER: Being a TSA air marshal may be the worst job ever.
  • OCTOBER: A third of all of North America’s birds may have disappeared since the 1970s. (Truth be told, it was hard to pick a single most depressing story line in a month when I covered propaganda, pandemic, new class divisions created by genetic engineering, and nuclear war. But while those are scary risks for the near future, it appears the world is right in the middle of an ongoing and obvious ecological collapse, and not talking much about it.)
  • NOVEMBER: The Darling, a major river system in Australia, has essentially dried up.
  • DECEMBER: Pilots occasionally go crazy and crash planes on purpose.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: The dream of fusion power is not dead. There is even some hope of new advancements in fission power.
  • FEBRUARY: Here is the boringly simple western European formula for social and economic success: “public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making.” There’s even a glimmer of hope that U.S. politicians could manage to put some of these ideas into action. Seriously, I’m trying hard not to be cynical.
  • MARCH: The Green New Deal, if fleshed out into a serious plan, has potential to slow or reverse the decline of the United States.
  • APRIL: There is forward progress on a male birth control pill.
  • MAY: Planting native plants in your garden really can make a difference for biodiversity.
  • JUNE: There have been a number of serious proposals and plans for disarmament and world peace in the past, even since World War II. We have just forgotten about them or never heard of them.
  • JULY: Deliberate practice is how you get better at something.
  • AUGUST: I explored an idea for automatic fiscal stabilizers as part of a bold infrastructure investment plan. I’m not all that hopeful but a person can dream.
  • SEPTEMBER: I think Elizabeth Warren has a shot at becoming the U.S. President, and of the candidates she and Bernie Sanders understand the climate change problem best. This could be a plus for the world. I suggested an emergency plan for the U.S. to deal with climate change: Focus on disaster preparedness and disaster response capabilities, the long term reliability and stability of the food system, and tackle our systemic corruption problems. I forgot to mention coming up with a plan to save our coastal cities, or possibly save most of them while abandoning portions of some of them in a gradual, orderly fashion. By the way, we should reduce carbon emissions and move to clean energy, but these are more doing our part to try to make sure the planet is habitable a century from now, while the other measures I am suggesting are true emergency measures that have to start now if we are going to get through the next few decades.
  • OCTOBER: I’ll go with hard shell tacos. They are one of the good things in this life, whether they are authentic Mexican food or “trailer park cuisine” as I tagged the story! 
  • NOVEMBER: There is progress on carbon capture technology. Also, just restoring soil on previously degraded farm and grazing land could provide large benefits worldwide. There may also be real progress on fusion power.
  • DECEMBER: Deep inside me is a little boy who still likes bugs, and I spotted some cool bugs in my 2019 garden, including endangered Monarch butterflies. So at least I made that small difference for biodiversity in a small urban garden, and others can do the same.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • JANUARY: Some in the U.S. Senate and military take UFOs seriously.
  • FEBRUARY: We could theoretically create a race of humans with Einstein-level intelligence using in-vitro fertilization techniques available today. They might use their intelligence to create even smarter artificial intelligence which would quickly render them (not to mention, any ordinary average intelligence humans) obsolete.
  • MARCH: China is looking into space-based solar arrays. Also, injecting sulfate dust into the atmosphere could actually boost rice yields because rice is more sensitive to temperature than light, at least within the ranges studied. This all suggests that solutions to climate change that do not necessarily involve an end to fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions are possible with existing or very near future technology.
  • APRIL: Genetic engineering of humans might have to play a big role in eventual colonization of other planets, because the human body as it now exists may just not be cut out for long space journeys. In farther future space colonization news, I linked to a video about the concept of a “Dyson swarm“.
  • MAY: Joseph Stiglitz suggested an idea for a “free college” program where college is funded by a progressive tax on post-graduation earnings.
  • JUNE: In technology news, Elon Musk is planning to launch thousands of satellites. And I learned a new acronym, DARQ: “distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR) and quantum computing”. And in urban planning news, I am sick and tired of the Dutch just doing everything right.
  • JULY: I laid out the platform for my non-existent Presidential campaign.
  • AUGUST: Liquid hydrogen could theoretically be used as a jet fuel.
  • SEPTEMBER: I mentioned an article by a Marine special operator (I didn’t even know those existed) on how to fix a broken organizational culture: acknowledge the problem, employ trusted agents, rein in cultural power brokers, win the population.
  • OCTOBER: A list of “jobs of the future” includes algorithms, automation, and AI; customer experience; environmental; fitness and wellness; health care; legal and financial services; transportation; and work culture. I’ll oversimplify this list as computer scientist, engineer, doctor, lawyer, banker, which don’t sound all that different than the jobs of the past. But it occurs to me that these are jobs where the actual tools people are using and day-to-day work tasks evolve with the times, even if the intended outcomes are basically the same. What might be new is that even in these jobs, you need to make an effort to keep learning every day throughout your career and life if you want to keep up.
  • NOVEMBER: Google claims to have achieved “quantum supremacy“. This may allow us all to live lives of Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
  • DECEMBER: Estonia is supposedly the most digitally advanced country in the world. Finland has posted a free AI literacy course.

I want to give the reader some brilliant synthesis of all that, but you could probably go back to my past year in review posts and find that I am saying pretty much the same things each year. Well, here goes.

There is a list of serious risks that are being acknowledged but not effectively addressed. These include climate change, nuclear war, drought, rainforest loss, loss of freedom and human rights, economic recession, cyberwarfare, and automation leading to job loss. Climate change, drought, and rainforest loss are clearly intertwined. Solutions are largely known and just not being implemented due to dysfunctional politics at the national level and lack of international cooperation. These trends seem to be going in the wrong direction at the moment unfortunately.

Other than rainforest loss, the ongoing catastrophic loss of biodiversity, biomass and ecosystem function is mostly not even being acknowledged, let alone addressed. Biodiversity is a somewhat esoteric concept to most people, but hearing about mammals and birds and even insects just vanishing on a mass scale really starts to get to me emotionally. I don’t hear others in my social circles talking about these issues much, so I wonder if they just haven’t heard the same facts and figures I have or if they just don’t have the same response. Politicians are certainly not talking about these issues.

The risk of catastrophic war is very real. The world is in a very cynical place right now, but we have made progress on this before and we can do it again.

Recession and automation have an interesting relationship, where recession is a short- to medium-term reversal of economic growth, and automation, at least in theory, should lead to a longer-term acceleration of it. Of course, even if the acceleration happens it will benefit the majority of workers only if the wealth is shared. I’ll just repeat what I said above: “Here is the boringly simple western European formula for social and economic success: “public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making.” Or just copy the Dutch because they seem to know what they’re doing, the smug bastards.

You could accuse my blog of being US-centric, and I would accept that criticism. I am living in the US after all. I’ve lived and worked abroad though, and came to appreciate the strengths of my country more when I spent some time away from it. The US is still a good country to live in as a middle class professional person, but we are cruising along on the momentum of our past extraordinary success. We have lost momentum and begun to slip not only out of the leadership position among our developed country peers, but below the middle of the pack. The hard evidence on this is clear. We have politicians that just tell us that we are “great again”, because that is what we want to hear, without taking any necessary steps that would at least help us to keep up. 2020 is an election year and we have a chance to make some changes. We need to deal first and foremost with our systemic corruption problem which causes our government to respond to wealthy and powerful interests rather than citizens. We need real, inspiring, once-in-a-generation leadership to make this happen. I have decided to support Bernie Sanders for this reason, even though I don’t agree with every one of his stated policy positions.

There are some interesting and even astonishing technologies in the list above, from fusion power to micro-satellites to quantum computing to genetic engineering. It is 2020 after all.

And finally, when I’m not thinking and worrying about the world at large, I’ll be tending to my garden and my family and eating my hard shell tacos, and reminding myself that life here in the United States on the planet Earth is actually pretty good.

socialism by the numbers

We can argue about the ideology of “socialism” vs. “capitalism”, often without even clearly defining these terms. It’s harder to argue with an avalanche of clearly presented evidence. This article from Current Affairs lays out the numbers showing the United States gradually slipping behind it’s developed country peer group in all areas. Consistently, the Scandinavian and Northern European countries that combine high productivity with policies to redistribute some of the wealth do the best. Our Anglo-American cousins the UK, Canada and Australia tend to do a little better than the U.S. but have still fallen behind the leaders of the pack.

The U.S. does well on measures of average income and wealth, but very poorly on measures of median income and wealth. We do poorly on measures of free time, infant and maternal mortality, life satisfaction, and innovation. I’m sure you can argue about how some of these indicators are defined and measured, but the overall trend is clear – we are creating financial wealth, but not sharing it and not creating satisfying or healthy lives for the majority, and we are continuing to slip behind our peers.

what urban and rural voters have in common

This article in Governing is mostly about what urban and rural voters do not have in common, why rural voters have a disproportionate share of politic power relative to their numbers, and why politicians therefore cater to them and tend to downplay urban issues, which are the issues that affect the vast majority of citizens. However, the article included a couple of paragraphs on what urban and rural voters have in common, which I thought were insightful.

Low-income residents of urban neighborhoods who know they’ll never be able to afford to live in the glitzy new apartment building that’s going up are, economically speaking, in a similar boat as rural residents who’ve seen the factory shut down and the area left behind by the global economy. “Urban neighborhoods that are dealing with population loss are dealing with the same issues of abandonment as low-income rural counties,” says Hill, the Ohio State professor. “The problems are the same: drug abuse, abandoned factories, losing kids to places with rising opportunity.”

Governing

I can actually attest to this, originally being from an Appalachian factory town, then from a former Pennsylvania coal town, and now living in central Philadelphia. The problems of poor people, and the problems of middle class working people, and the problems of working parents, and the problems of the disabled and the retired, etc. are pretty much the same everywhere. The difference is that urban areas are where most of the productive economic activity that can be taxed come from. And investments in infrastructure and programs in relatively dense population centers can just serve a lot more people for the money spent compared to less dense areas. And finally, denser areas with universities and startup companies and corporate R&D centers are where people come together to learn and solve problems.

Of course, one party in particular is good at playing to the emotions of rural voters and convincing them that they are the only real Americans, that people in the cities are not like them, are a threat to them and are draining resources away from them, when in fact the opposite is true. Sometimes they even convince suburban voters that their interests do not lie with other voters in the metropolitan areas they are a part of.

how defense cuts could fund Medicare for all

This New York Times op-ed goes through a series of defense cuts that could save $300 billion per year, enough to fund Medicare for All. The big ones are shutting down the big wars that are accomplishing little or nothing (or worse, creating future enemies and risks), closing foreign bases (and/or asking the foreign countries to fund them if they actually want them there), and phasing out most or all nuclear weapons.

I personally am indifferent between paying a monthly insurance premium vs. a monthly payroll tax to provide the same care at the same cost. But if we could get part of the way there with no tax increases at all, that is even better. Or, we could have a serious discussion about where else some of those current defense dollars could be spent (by the government) that would make us safer, richer, or healthier in the future.

my campaign platform for Philadelphia

I have to figure out who to vote for in local elections on Tuesday (I’m writing this on Sunday, November 3), so I like to think about what I would do if I were somehow put it charge. Now, I focus on policy rather than politics, and good policy is probably not good politics, so if you are trying to get elected you should take my advice with a grain of salt.

Policies that I would support at the federal and state level do not translate well to the local level in my mind. Looking at the whole country, a fair distribution of the wealth we have is important. At the local level, we have concentrated poverty within a narrow political jurisdiction, so there may not be enough wealth to go around, and if you try to grab what wealth there is and redistribute it, you may just scare the wealth across the jurisdictional border, which is just a couple miles away in any direction. So you have to focus on growing the pie if you want to have a chance at helping the poor. The local Democrats don’t do this – they are all about redistribution, skin color, sexual orientation, etc. The local Republicans are mostly racist jerks. There are a few independents who support pieces and parts of an agenda I could get behind, but nobody comes close to supporting a complete agenda to really explore real solutions to systemic problems.

So I thought about it and here is what I came up with:

  • Improve management of all city services and departments. Does this even need to be said? Yes, absolutely. We have a political and bureaucratic culture that resists learning and is tolerant of amateurism. We need to be open to learning about and adopting best practices from elsewhere, in all areas of government. We need to recruit, train, and retain talented individuals at all levels. We need to develop the leaders of tomorrow. The end result can be better services at lower cost.
  • Grow the work force and tax base. We can make it easy to start, license, and operate new businesses. We can connect the public, private and education sectors to provide education and training that matches actual skills with actual jobs. We can expand the innovation ecosystem to encourage startups and incubators, research and development, particularly in the biotech sector which is a local strength. None of this requires huge public spending. Philadelphia was a city of 2 million that has shrunk to about 1.5. We have room for at least half a million more workers and taxpayers, even more if we are willing to densify some neighborhoods. The gentrification issue makes this hard to talk about, but these could be highly productive, educated, talented professional people. Growing the pie with new taxpayers of some financial means would ultimately be good for everyone. Perhaps the gentrification issue could be somewhat defused if these new people were encouraged to spread out across many neighborhoods, all with excellent and equal transportation, education and other city services.
  • Replace regressive taxes with progressive ones, without increasing the overall tax burden. With the overall tax base growing, we could finally think about how to make it more fair and less burdensome to hardworking people and productive businesses. I don’t have all the answers here because this is not my area of expertise, but we need to follow the evidence, best practices from elsewhere, and try to at least bring local taxes in line with the larger metro area. We need to chip away at the public pension funding problem, because that will eventually come back to bite us if we don’t.
  • Law enforcement, criminal justice, and incarceration reform. I don’t have all the answers here, but again, look at best practices from elsewhere and follow the evidence. There are enormous potential financial savings here.
  • Preschool to community college education reform. Do I have to say it again? Learn about best practices, follow the evidence and innovate continuously. This is enormously difficult in the United States, but we have to keep chipping away at it.

Bannon propaganda techniques

From Fresh Air, here’s some insight into how Steve Bannon manipulates people:

Conservative strategist Steve Bannon, who later worked in President Trump’s White House, became involved with the SCL subsidiary Cambridge Analytica. Wylie, who served as Cambridge Analytica’s research director for a year and a half, watched as his group began to use of data from Facebook and other online sources to target users for disinformation campaigns.

“They targeted people who were more prone to conspiratorial thinking,” Wylie says. “They used that data, and they used social media more broadly, to first identify those people, and then engage those people, and really begin to craft what, in my view, was an insurgency in the United States.”

The interview describes how they would identify people prone to conspiratorial thinking, target them with online ads, then convince them to attend real world events with other people who had been targeted by the same ads. They would choose small gathering places to give people a sense of crowding and that there were a lot of people attending the events. Then at the events, they would talk to other people with similar views and reinforce each other. Then they would get the sense that a lot of people believed whatever the conspiracy was and that it was a conspiracy that they didn’t see it in the mainstream media.

Maybe if more people understand how they are being manipulated, fewer will be manipulated. One can hope.

Koch propaganda techniques

It’s human nature to adjust your beliefs to justify actions that benefit you. That’s why the Koch brothers probably don’t (didn’t, since one passed away recently) think they are evil. But here is how they conspired to murder your grandchildren, and my grandchildren, and possibly their own great-grandchildren, although of course the ultra-rich will tend to fare better in a world of storms, fires, floods and food shortages than the rest of us.

So when you look at this equation of what would happen if we put a price on carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions, the real threat is that that might reduce demand for fossil fuels going out five, 10, 20 years. If that happens, the sunk value of this massive, industrial, globe-spanning infrastructure, the value of it, declines dramatically. And I interviewed a Koch Industries attorney who worked in the lobbying shop back in 2009 who told me, you know, Koch saw the efforts to put a price on carbon emissions as an existential threat to the company.

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(wow, this version of WordPress is complete garbage, there is no way to get rid of this white space without messing up the paragraph above or below)

So here’s what they did. They created a fake non-profit group to organize fake grass-roots protests that lawmakers considering voting for the cap and trade bill would see. They basically paid people to attend.

They also created a fake research organization to do fake studies about cap and trade. Then they paid for political ads that cited the fake research done by their fake organization, and again targeted lawmakers who supported cap and trade.

And it worked. There was bipartisan support for cap and trade based on a real understanding of the science and risk represented by climate change. A concerted campaign of lies masquerading as a citizen movement was able to derail it, all in support of cynically maximizing profits for evil, mega-rich people at the expense of everyone else on the planet for generations to come.

September 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Most hopeful story:
  • I think Elizabeth Warren has a shot at becoming the U.S. President, and of the candidates she and Bernie Sanders understand the climate change problem best. This could be a plus for the world. I suggested an emergency plan for the U.S. to deal with climate change: Focus on disaster preparedness and disaster response capabilities, the long term reliability and stability of the food system, and tackle our systemic corruption problems. I forgot to mention coming up with a plan to save our coastal cities, or possibly save most of them while abandoning portions of some of them in a gradual, orderly fashion. By the way, we should reduce carbon emissions and move to clean energy, but these are more doing our part to try to make sure the planet is habitable a century from now, while the other measures I am suggesting are true emergency measures that have to start now if we are going to get through the next few decades.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • I mentioned an article by a Marine special operator (I didn’t even know those existed) on how to fix a broken organizational culture: acknowledge the problem, employ trusted agents, rein in cultural power brokers, win the population.

the climate town hall

A blog called “DeSmogBlog” has a pretty good run-down of the Democrats’ “town hall meeting” on climate change. I have to admit, I have not watched the whole thing, or very much at all.

Here’s my take. First, there are short- to medium-term practical issues that need to be tackled immediately and simultaneously. The first is disaster preparedness and disaster response – storms, fires, floods, droughts. We need to be ready for a major earthquake, plague or terrorist attack too although we can’t blame the climate directly for these. The second is the long-term stability of the food system under projected temperature and water supply trends. The third is dealing with the systemic corruption that has allowed the fossil fuel industry to buy and control our politicians for decades.

I think Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren understand these issues best. I don’t think other candidates understand them at all. I think they divorce them from larger socioeconomic issues to a certain extent, and that is a mistake. It should be possible to take advantage of fluctuations in the economy, employment, and financial system to make the right investments at the right time and minimize the pain.

Beyond these, we need to deal with our interwined land use, energy, transportation, food, and ecosystem issues. It could be done in ways that would be a win for everyone. Invest in the right kinds of infrastructure, education and training for workers, and innovation. It is unlikely to be done because our education system does not provide the public with the mental tools needed to understand systems, and therefore we do not elect politicians who understand systems and have workable ideas on how to fix them. This will still be true even if the corruption issues can somehow be solved.

yes, media bias exists

I didn’t really believe in media bias until the 2003 Iraq invasion, when it was just so blatantly obvious it couldn’t be ignored. But this article explains how Bernie Sanders can be right that subtler but still insidious forms of bias and censorship exist. I recently listened to a podcast (which I can’t find again…) on how relevant Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent remains today, and I am as sold now as when I originally read it. Here’s a summary of his “five filters” along with my personal take.

The five points are a direct quote by the way. Shame on this awful version of WordPress that I can’t figure out how to make a block quote.

1. Media Ownership—The endgame of all mass media orgs is profit. “It is in their interest to push for whatever guarantees that profit.”

  • My take: this is what Bernie Sanders is talking about. Employees of any orgnanization are unlikely to challenge the interests of their owners and managers. They have to feed their families and pay their bills. They don’t have to lie, they can just avoid certain topics.

2. Advertising—Media costs more than consumers will pay: Advertisers fill the gap. What do advertisers pay for? Access to audiences. “It isn’t just that the media is selling you a product. They’re also selling advertisers a product: you.”

  • A business does not want to lose its advertisers. No mystery here. They don’t have to lie, they can just avoid certain topics.

3. Media Elite—“Journalism cannot be a check on power, because the very system encourages complicity. Governments, corporations, and big institutions know how to influence the media. They feed it scoops and interviews with supposed experts. They make themselves crucial to the process of journalism. If you want to challenge power, you’ll be pushed to the margins…. You won’t be getting in. You’ll have lost your access.”

  • I believe part of this is laziness and penny pinching. Publishing government and corporate press releases with minimal editing is just easy and cheap. But government and corporations can lean on the press when they want to, as we saw most clearly during the Iraq invasion.

4. Flack—“When the story is inconvenient for the powers that be, you’ll see the flack machine in action: discrediting sources, trashing stories, and diverting the conversation.”

  • Trump has made this more obvious and ugly, but it was there before.

5. The Common Enemy—“To manufacture consent, you need an enemy, a target: Communism, terrorists, immigrants… a boogeyman to fear helps corral public opinion.”

  • Don’t forget Muslims and Mexicans.