Tag Archives: U.S. politics

The Moscow Midterms?

Back in April 2018, Clare Malone from Five Thirty Eight wrote a sort of speculative fiction piece about how Russian intelligence agents could attempt to hijack the November (2018) U.S. midterm elections. Now that we have just found out a lot more facts about how they did in fact successfully influence the 2016 election, this is no longer so speculative.

In my view, interfering with another country’s election is something more than an act of intelligence gathering but something less than an act of war. We can act all shocked and surprised that a hostile foreign intelligence agencies would dare to interfere with our elections. But the fact is, hostile foreign intelligence agencies do this, and the U.S. has done it to others, particularly during the Cold War and particularly in the developing world, a lot. So we don’t exactly have the moral high ground. Shame on the FBI and our other counter-intelligence agencies for letting the Russians get away with this. Then again, going back to the Cold War, we should remember this is the KGB and they have always had our number.

So we now know that Russian intelligence interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, and we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they communicated with members of Trump’s campaign team. The evidence for these things is clear, disinformation and propaganda to the contrary. It remains to be seen whether there is clear evidence that people in the Trump campaign new they were talking to Russian agents and actively accepted their help or even helped them. If this can be shown, then the people involved are enemies of our country and need to be treated as such. And if Trump himself was involved or knew his campaign was involved, he is an enemy of the country and needs to be treated as such.

Now, if this evidence is produced, it seems unlikely that the immoral, cowardly farce that the Republican party has become will act on the evidence if they are in charge. At that point, I think the rule of law will truly be lost. Trump’s people might be convicted, he might pardon them, and Congress might stand by and let it happen. If the Democrats are in charge and this evidence is produced, I hope they have the courage to impeach. Impeachment would make sure the evidence sees the light of day in full public view, even if a cowardly Republican Senate ultimately refused to convict. So this midterm election really is important, and it really is critical that our government do a competent job of counterintelligence leading up to it.

Trump wants to invade Venezuela

According to the AP, Trump has repeatedly pressed his aides to consider invading Venezuela. Any claim that this could be about democracy or human rights simply is not credible. Regional stability? Venezuela’s neighbors seemed aghast at the suggestion. Oil? That must be it, although the former CEO of Exxon was Secretary of State at the time and was also aghast. We’re in year 2 and counting of the Trump presidency with no war – can we make it to the end?

Who’s really crossing the U.S. border?

This article is from Lawfare, and the answer is interesting.

First off, while the current administration has tried to tie Central American migrants to MS-13, government data reveals that gang members crossing irregularly are the rare exceptions. Since the Trump administration took office, the Border Patrol has detected fewer gang members crossing irregularly than during the Obama administration. In FY2017, these detections amounted to 0.075 percent of the total number of migrants (228 MS-13 members out of 303,916 total migrants). When combined with MS-13’s rival, the Barrio 18 gang, the number rises only slightly to 0.095 percent. This is far from the “infestation” of violent gang members described by the president…

The face of migration has also changed. Back in 2000, Mexican nationals made up 98 percent of the total migrants and Central Americans (referring to Honduran, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran migrants) only one percent. Today, Central Americans make up closer to 50 percent.

A declining Mexican birth rate, a stable economy, and the U.S. border buildup have all contributed to the decrease in migration from Mexico. But as Mexican irregular migration has plummeted, Central American migration has simultaneously picked up. Until 2011, Central Americans constituted less than ten percent of total U.S.-Mexico border apprehensions, but by 2012 they constituted 25 percent, and by 2014 they numbered half of all illicit border crossers. While migration from each country within the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) has fluctuated over time, each country has sent roughly similar numbers of people in the aggregate. From FY1995 to FY2016, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended around 500,000 citizens from each country. In other words, it’s not a coincidence that most recent news stories about migrant parents separated from their children feature families from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

People from Honduras and El Salvador are often fleeing urban gang violence, while those from Guatemala are often fleeing rural poverty.

 

Trump may bail out obsolete coal-fired power plants

According to Bloomberg, the Trump administration is about to subsidize obsolete, inefficient, and polluting coal-fired power plants. Remember the Republican sound bite about “picking winners and losers”? Hypocrites.

The plan cuts to the heart of a debate over the reliability and resiliency of a rapidly evolving U.S. electricity grid. Nuclear and coal-fired power plants are struggling to compete against cheap natural gas and renewable electricity. As nuclear and coal plants are decommissioned, regulators have been grappling with how to ensure that the nation’s power system can withstand extreme weather events and cyber-attacks…

The Energy Department would be relying partly on the Federal Power Act — the so-called Section 202 authority — that lets the administration order guaranteed profits for power plants that can store large amounts of fuel on site. And the Energy Department would be tapping the 68-year-old Defense Production Act, a Cold War-era statute once invoked by President Harry Truman to help the steel industry…

The issue is a priority for some of the president’s top supporters, including coal moguls Robert E. Murray and Joseph Craft of Alliance Resource Partners, who donated a million dollars to the president’s inauguration. The move would be one of the most direct efforts by Trump to make good on campaign promises to revive the nation’s shrinking coal industry…

May 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

Most hopeful stories:

  • There are some new ideas for detecting the potential for rapid ecological change or collapse of ecosystems.
  • Psychedelics might produce similar benefits to meditation.
  • Microgrids, renewables combined with the latest generation of batteries, are being tested in Puerto Rico.

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

how about a war tax?

Part of the reason the U.S. public accepts continuous war as normal is that we don’t realize how much we are paying for it. The idea of a war tax sounds politically crazy, but is is? It used to be pretty standard. Congress would declare war, ordinary people would be drafted and taxed, and people would generally be supportive but expect the war to end and things to go back to the way they were.

Until the Vietnam War, American presidents regularly introduced war taxes, seemingly less worried about offending the people than about financing the war. In some cases, the government had to work to elicit fiscal sacrifice, for example, with a pro-tax Disney cartoon in 1943 that touted “Taxes to Beat the Axis” during World War II. In most cases, the taxes did not actually offend the people…

In 2009, during debates about the Afghanistan surge, House Appropriations Committee Chair David Obey proposed a tax that would require homes with incomes between $30,000 and $150,000 to pay 1 percent on top of their existing taxes, and higher levels for the wealthier. Veterans of both Iraq and Afghanistan would be exempt: “We’re just trying to keep in the forefront what the financial costs are.”

Indeed, a study of the costs of these wars showed that the public is blissfully disconnected. In 2014, I surveyed 350 Americans and asked them to estimate the costs of the Afghanistan war to that point. Responses ranged from a million dollars to “probably $10 trillion. A lot more than we can afford.” The typical response was “I have no idea — $100 million?” The real answer at that point was $686 billion. Americans cannot make sense of such enormous figures. They can, however, make sense of their own budgets, which is why the connection with taxes is so much tighter, and why individuals become invested in the conduct of the war when war taxes are levied. As both Tilly and Smith observed, the visibility and intrusiveness of taxes are exactly what make individuals scrutinize the service for which the resources are being used. In the case of war, it means paying more scrupulous attention to its duration, goals, and cost.

running out of bombs?

The military-industrial complex needs to engage in continuous war so it can be ready in case a war starts. Or so I interpret the logic. Is this part of some vast, hidden conspiracy? Well, no, apparently they put a report out about it periodically.

The Pentagon plans to invest more than $20 billion in munitions in its next budget. But whether the industrial base will be there to support such massive buys in the future is up in the air — at a time when America is expending munitions at increasingly intense rates.

The annual Industrial Capabilities report, put out by the Pentagon’s Office of Manufacturing and Industrial Base Policy, has concluded that the industrial base of the munitions sector is particularly strained, something the report blames on the start-and-stop nature of munitions procurement over the last 20 years, as well as the lack of new designs being internally developed…

All this is happening as the U.S. is expending munitions at a rapid rate. For instance, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction concluded that 1,186 munitions were dropped in that country during the first quarter of 2018 ― the highest number recorded for the first three months of the year since tracking began in 2013; that number is also more than two and a half times the amount dropped in the first quarter of 2017.

Interesting, and I thought the Afghanistan war was more or less over. It seems like wars don’t really end any more, and the public now accepts ongoing regional wars as normal.

@RealObamaCareForecast

The Congressional Budget Office has a new forecast of the fate of Obama care over the next 10 years. And the verdict is…the system is not in a death spiral. Premiums are forecast to rise faster than inflation, which is bad, and the number of people without insurance is forecast to rise slightly, which is bad unless you believe for some reason that these people are not entitled to the same human rights you are entitled to, for whatever reason, but that system is “stable”, i.e. not in a “death spiral”

The paragraph below caught my eye for a couple reasons. First, Obama care is only 10% of all government health care expenditures. Medicare is also only about 10%, which is amazing and I suspect almost everyone has the wrong idea about that. Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program are a whopping 40%.  Subsidies for corporate health insurance are the remaining 40%.

Net federal subsidies for insured people in 2018 will total $685 billion.
That amount is projected to reach $1.2 trillion in 2028. Medicaid and the
Children’s Health Insurance Program account for about 40 percent of that
total, as do subsidies in the form of tax benefits for work-related insurance.
Medicare accounts for about 10 percent, as do subsidies for coverage
obtained through the marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act
or through the Basic Health Program.

So what surprises me is that we are covering the elderly pretty thoroughly and pretty cost-effectively, while coverage for the poor seems to be both inadequate and extremely cost inefficient. And certainly, the system of hidden tax subsidies for corporate workers is grossly inefficient. So why does the public put up with all this? First, old people love to complain but at the end of the day they are reasonably well taken care of at a reasonable price. Upper-middle-class professional workers receive high quality care and don’t realize how heavily-subsidized and cost-inefficient that care is. These two groups make up a lot of the swing voters. The majority of those swing voters have bought into the decades of neo-fascist propaganda that the poor are undeserving for one reason or another, and therefore their sense of natural human empathy is damped down. and the poor themselves are not politically mobilized. Big business in general might be just as happy for government to take the responsibility for health coverage off their shoulders, but they are not really disadvantaged financially by the present system so they don’t fight it. The big exception of course is the insurance/finance industry which benefits directly from the inefficiencies of the current system, and certainly is politically mobilized.

“delusions of merit”

This long article describes how people who have made it tend to have have “delusions of merit“. In other words, they believe they have earned their place in society through effort or self-discipline, that those less fortunate have not made the effort or do not have the self-discipline, and therefore they feel no moral obligation to help those beneath them. The problem is, we are not talking about a vast middle class refusing to help a small underclass here. We are talking about a small minority failing to feel compassion for the vast majority of fellow people.