Tag Archives: U.S. politics

more on the Green New Deal

I’m reading a lot about the Green New Deal today. But after reading about it, I decided to just go and read the actual thing itself. It’s easy to be cynical about something like this by saying it has not been developed into an implementable plan or set of projects yet (even though it mentions “projects”, it doesn’t really contain any), and that would be true. It’s really a vision and goal-setting document. Getting people on board with a vision is the first step in a successful plan. It’s a hard step and it appears to have been done pretty well in a pretty short period of time.

The second step is developing an implementable plan to achieve the vision and goals. This is a harder step. Some people are comparing this to the 2008 stimulus program, but that was not a plan because it had no clearly articulated objectives or goals other than to throw a lot of money at a lot of projects that had already been defined by someone in the past according to whatever their goals were at the time. There was no time to develop a plan in that case – in fact, the projects had to be “shovel ready” meaning taking the time to plan anything was explicitly forbidden. This time, there actually is the possibility of taking the time to develop a plan. Developing a really good plan takes some time though. To do it well, you have to look at an enormous number of projects, policies, and other measures, consider them in various combinations, and pick a set of them that is reasonably technologically and economically efficient at achieving your goals, acceptable to your major stakeholders even if not their first choice, and implementable. I think some of this planning would have to be done at the local and regional level, preferably at the metro-area scale, although the states could maybe be involved in agriculture and inter-city transportation planning.

Finally, there is implementation. This is the hardest step. Complex institutions have to be created or existing ones repurposed; money has to be disbursed; contracts have to be written, awarded, and administered; job descriptions have to be written and people hired and trained and deployed; projects have to be managed; progress has to be tracked and laws have to be enforced. A critical mass of people involved at all levels has to understand and buy into those goals and how their little cog in the massive machine contributes to them. They have to make all kinds of little decisions and course corrections every day that keep the whole massive enterprise aimed at those goals.

So hard, harder, hardest. But like I said, the hard part is already done! In my career, I’ve seen groups of intelligent and well-educated people try to jump into implementing a bunch of projects without defining goals or having a plan for how they are supposed to tie together and meet the goals. I’ve also seen a brilliant vision translated into a reasonably technologically and economically workable, implementable plan, and then fail because key stakeholders were not on board, or because the people responsible for implementing the plan never understood the vision or how their little piece fit into it, so their millions of small daily decisions gradually caused the program to drift away from a path that was aimed at the goals, and there was no mechanism to bring it back to the path. But to end on a brighter note, if you come up with a brilliant vision, a brilliant plan to achieve it, and then you only implement 25% or even 10% of it, you have achieved something that never would have been achieved if you hadn’t come up with the vision and plan. And you show that it can be done and give others a chance to pick up the fight after you have moved on.

If I have time, I’ll try to tease out in another post what I think the vision and goals actually are, and how I think they could be achieved if I were somehow made emperor.

George McGovern’s Green New Deal

George McGovern proposed something similar to the current idea of a Green New Deal in the 1960s. A Yale historian says it had some momentum but was derailed when the Vietnam War broke out.


In 1964, McGovern sponsored legislation for the creation of a National Economic Conversion Commission (NECC) to transfer jobs in defense to peacetime work, for example, civil engineering and commercial manufacturing. On the surface, the NECC’s purpose was rather simple: to help unemployed defense workers find jobs. But McGovern’s ulterior motive for the commission was to reallocate military spending to fight environmental problems, to give defense workers “green jobs,” to use an anachronistic term…

But then came Vietnam. President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to escalate the war in Southeast Asia derailed McGovern’s vision. Whereas in 1963 the world seemed at the precipice of a new era in the Cold War, Vietnam revived ideological tensions between Democratic proponents and opponents of Cold War foreign policy. Hawkish Democrats became enemies to the NECC, afraid of diverting monies away from the war. The stiffest opposition to the plan came from the Johnson administration, which criticized McGovern’s idea for a 10 percent cut to a $300 billion-dollar defense budget as “radical.” Moreover, defense contractors failed to see the utility of McGovern’s commission as they were now awash in new, albeit temporary, defense contracts to fight the war. When the NECC would be revived over two decades later as the Cold War was finally coming to an end, it would be a smaller, private endeavor focused on public education about economic conversion and disarmament and stripped of its earlier environmentalist goals.

I’m sensing some urgency this time around over climate change, which is good, but military and national security spending seems to be largely unquestioned. For that to change, I suspect it would take some bold action in Congress like a war tax and/or an insistence that war must be declared before American troops or equipment are committed abroad. Ironically, I think maybe a compromise could be based on stepped-up border security in exchange for closing foreign military bases. That would seem to have something for everyone.

(U.S.) national security stories of 2018 (The Intercept)

The Intercept, which doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a left-leaning investigative news organization, has a round-up of national security stories from 2018. The biggest bombshell is a well-sourced claim that Saudi Arabia and UAE were on the verge of launching a military invasion of Qatar and were talked out of it by Rex Tillerson, who was then fired under pressure for Saudi and UAE lobbyists in Washington. Another interesting one claims that large AT&T buildings in major cities are hubs for NSA surveillance, including domestic surveillance. That’s just the tip of an iceberg consisting of allegations of lots of war crimes and torture, all backed up by a fair amount of evidence.

Citizens United caused John Paul Stevens to have a stroke

This article in Abovethelaw.com (quoting the New York Times) says that John Paul Stevens suffered a mini-stroke the day the Citizens United decision was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, legalizing unlimited campaign contributions and essentially legalizing corporate bribery of politicians.

I found this quote interesting:

his missteps that day led him to seek medical advice and after learning of the stroke, he made the decision to quit. Justice Stevens made the responsible move under the circumstances, because if Citizens United tested his health — and he tells Liptak that he views that opinion along with Heller and the whack-a-doodle reasoning of Bush v. Gore as the three worst mistakes for the Supreme Court in his tenure — one can imagine how he’d have reacted to some of the doozies to come out of the Court since 2010.

I looked up Heller and it was a gun control case.

the death toll in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan

According to this article from Brown University, around a half million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan since the U.S. invasions, around half of them civilians. For me, this continues to bring doubt on the idea that here is any such thing as a humanitarian war that helps more people than it hurts.

This total is only people killed by violence – it does not include “indirect deaths” due to “loss of access to food, water, health facilities, electricity or other infrastructure.”

Obviously, it doesn’t include horrible conflicts the U.S. is less directly involved in (but still involved in) such as Syria and Yemen.

I also read this depressing article in Foreign Policy in Focus saying the ongoing civil war in South Sudan is much nastier than I realized, with a death toll around 400,000 and counting.

statistical analysis of the Supreme Court

A statistical analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court suggests that it is not all that partisan after all. Okay, I admit it, I am really just pretending to understand half the words in the abstract below. It’s always kind of fun when physicists dabble in fields outside their usual boundaries, like economics or politics.

Partisan Intuition Belies Strong, Institutional Consensus and Wide Zipf’s Law for Voting Blocs in US Supreme Court

The US Supreme Court throughout the twentieth century has been characterized as being divided between liberals and conservatives, suggesting that ideologically similar justices would have voted similarly had they overlapped in tenure. What if they had? I build a minimal, pairwise maximum entropy model to infer how 36 justices from 1946–2016 would have all voted on a Super Court. The model is strikingly consistent with a standard voting model from political science, W-Nominate, despite using 105 less parameters and fitting the observed statistics better. I find that consensus dominates the Super Court and strong correlations in voting span nearly 100 years, defining an emergent institutional timescale that surpasses the tenure of any single justice. Thus, the collective behavior of the Court over time reveals a stable institution insulated from the seemingly rapid pace of political change. Beyond consensus, I discover a rich structure of dissenting blocs with a heavy-tailed, scale-free distribution consistent with data from the Second Rehnquist Court. Consequently, a low-dimensional description of voting with a fixed number of ideological modes is inherently misleading because even votes that defy such a description are probable. Instead of assuming that strong higher order correlations like voting blocs are induced by features of the cases, the institution, and the justices, I show that such complexity can be expressed in a minimal model relying only on pairwise correlations in voting.

The Onion weighs in on Saudi killings

This one is pretty brilliantly on the mark, in my opinion.

“The potential murder of a high-profile journalist critical of their regime raises grave concerns for us, and we appeal to the leaders of Saudi Arabia to restrict their extrajudicial murders to Yemeni people who don’t have any public platform,” said President Trump, adding that the White House would not sit idly by as the Saudis caused the deaths of innocent people unless they were Yemeni children in a school bus or a group of Yemeni people attending a wedding. “The United States asks Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to content himself with killings that don’t affect business deals or call our diplomatic ties into question, such as airstrikes on Yemeni infrastructure, fueling mass cholera outbreaks, or blocking food and medical supplies from reaching civilians. Look, we don’t even mind if you dismember and murder people inside the Turkish consulate, as long as they’re unknown Yemenis whose deaths won’t cause an international scandal. For the sake of all parties, we demand that the Saudis only kill people who hardly anyone in America cares about.”

democrats likely to run for President in 2020

Five Thirty Eight has a list of who they think is currently serious about a run for President in 2020. It’s a long list. I’ve added their ages in parentheses.

  • Lawyer Michael Avenatti (47)
  • South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg (36)
  • Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (52)
  • former Vice President Joe Biden (75)
  • New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker (49)
  • former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro (44)
  • Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (66)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (47)
  • New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (51)
  • California Sen. Kamala Harris (53)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder (67)
  • former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu (58)
  • Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon (61)
  • former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (55)
  • Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts (39)
  • Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio (45)
  • Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (77)
  • Rep. Eric Swalwell of California (37)
  • businessman and pro-impeachment activist Tom Steyer (61)
  • Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (69)

To break it down a little:

  • 20 candidates
  • by age: 3 in their 30s, 5 in their 40s, 5 in their 50s, 5 in their 60s, 2 in their 70s
  • by gender: 3 women, 17 men
  • by ethnicity: 4 black or Hispanic people, 16 white people (from a very quick scan, and I could easily have missed someone)

I can really only say I am familiar with five of these names: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Eric Holder, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker. At least there is some variety in the list. Maybe the DNC learned a lesson last time – not to put their thumb on the scale and try to force a particular candidate, rather than just letting the primary process play out.

Trump still has a number of challenges between now and when he faces one of these people in two years: criminal prosecution of close associates and possibly even family members or himself, possible impeachment by a majority Democratic House of Representatives, and possible challengers in the Republican Primary. It seems like a lot, but you have to admit Trump is a man who has tended to get his away against the odds and I have learned not to underestimate him.

making people disappear is wrong

This article in Project Syndicate is called The New Disappeared and is about dictatorships around the world that are making political opponents disappear, including Saudi Arabia. It’s certainly wrong, but it’s not only dictatorships doing it. Let’s not forget “extraordinary rendition”, where the U.S. kidnapped people off the street in friendly democratic countries, drugged them and bundled them onto airplanes, then delivered them to be tortured and murdered in secret prisons in places like Thailand and Egypt, all without any sort of due process.

more reasons to worry about the global financial system

William White, formerly with the Bank of Canada among other jobs, has another cheery list of reasons to worry about a new financial crisis.

  • large increases in dollar-denominated debt in the private sectors of emerging market economies,
  • high property prices in many countries,
  • asset-management and private equity firms acting as lenders in place in traditional banks, with less regulation and fewer limits on risk taking,
  • disparities in interest rates between countries leading to capital movement
  • flash crashes,
  • algorithmic trading,
  • passive investing, and
  • the possibility of slower growth, higher inflation, and political meddling in monetary policy in the U.S. caused in part by Trump’s misguided policies.