Tag Archives: U.S. politics

January 2017 in Review

I just realized I forgot to do a month in review post in January. Well, I had a lot going on in my personal life in January, most notably the arrival of a tiny new human being. Blog posts are not the only thing I forgot – I forgot to pay some important bills and to do some important paperwork at my job too.

3 most frightening stories

  • Cheetahs are in serious trouble.
  • The U.S. government may be “planning to roll back or dilute many of the provisions of Dodd-Frank, particularly those that protect consumers from toxic financial products and those that impose restrictions on banks”.
  • “Between 1946 and 2000, the US and the Soviet Union/Russia have intervened in about one of every nine competitive national-level executive elections.” The “Great Game” is back in Afghanistan.

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

apps for pestering Congress

Here are some apps you can use to pester your elected representatives semi-automatically. Please, do not use them for revenge, stalking, or other nefarious purposes.

  • Countable – sets up a website app to email all your elected representatives the same message with a few clicks (I don’t think this is free though…)
  • Democracy.io – similar email app and free (I think)
  • FaxZero – similar, for faxes

Calling is supposed to be the most effective. If you have the time and motivation to do that, here are a couple articles: Call the Halls and and this Wired article called Congress’ Phone System Is Broken—But It’s Still Your Best Shot.

what Americans believe

Apparently Survey Monkey does a weekly poll of what actual Americans actually believe. Respondents are self-selected, but Survey Monkey tries to use demographic weighting to obtain representative results. A few interesting outcomes from the February 22 edition:

  • 54% disapprove of Trump, and 43% strongly disapprove.
  • 55% disapprove of Democrats in Congress and 59% disapprove of Republicans.
  • 60% have confidence in the judicial system.
  • 52% have a favorable impression of the Affordable Care Act.
  • 56% oppose building a border wall with Mexico.
  • 47% would like to see National Parks expanded, and only 9% would like to see them shrunk.
  • 68% oppose taxpayer-funded vouchers for private school.
  • 80% support NATO.
  • 66% are worried about a major war in the next four years.
  • 58% have a family member or close acquaintance who is an immigrant.

If I had more time I wouldn’t mind having a more thorough understanding of the sampling and weighting involved, but on their face these numbers just support the idea that our politics is broken. Our politicians are not delivering policies that a majority of Americans would support, which suggests our voting system is not delivering politicians who really represent us.

U.S. Endangered Species Act

The Los Angeles Times says a Trump administration attack on the Endangered Species Act could be coming. The last paragraph of the article has a links to number of (sincere) criticisms of the act and ideas for how it could be improved.

The act does have its shortcomings. The focus is on habitat preservation, which is important, but scientists now believe there need to be more adaptive solutions, such as public-private partnerships to integrate wildlife habitats with development, and more efficient use of the act as the nation adapts to changing habitats. That should be the road map for revising the act, and conservationists from the left and right need to pressure Congress to ensure pro-development forces don’t destroy the act under the guise of fixing it.

banking deregulation is back

Remember that financial crisis thing in 2008 where U.S. financial firms almost destroyed the world economy? No, neither does anyone in Congress, because they are dead set on destroying the regulations put in place after the crisis to try to keep it from happening again. Here is a long article from the Center for Public Integrity.

U.S. ground troops to Syria?

According to CNN, the U.S. is considering sending regular combat ground troops to Syria, supposedly to fight ISIS. The article doesn’t say how many. There are already advisers and special forces there.

This reminds me of the description in The Best and the Brightest of how the Vietnam War started and later escalated. And there would be some similarities in fighting a shadowy and ill-defined enemy. The strange thing though is that by fighting rebels who are fighting the Syrian government, we would be helping the Syrian government, which is allied with Iran and Russia, supposedly our enemies and the enemies of our allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia. It’s all very murky and confusing, and kind of obviously a bad idea.

a class on how to consume news

SUNY Stonybrook and the University of Hong Kong have a course on Coursera called Making Sense of the News: News Literacy Lessons for Digital Citizens. I wouldn’t have thought I needed a course on how to consume the news, but maybe a refresher on the basics of journalism and how to spot propaganda, whether government or corporate or something else, is not a bad idea. Prior to 2003 or so, I tended to trust the New York Times. After the weapons of mass destruction debacle, I widened my sources of news. But I stuck to professional journalistic sources, along with some of the emerging aggregators of journalistic sources, like Slate’s Todays Papers, which were a relatively new idea at the time. So the lesson I learned back then was that professional journalistic sources can be susceptible to propaganda. (Noam Chomsky explained pretty well why this is a long time ago in Manufacturing Consent – basically the cheapest and lowest-risk thing to do from a business perspective is to parrot government and corporate press releases.)

Today I find myself reading a wide range of aggregators, magazines and blogs, some making no pretense of avoiding overtly partisan language. Some of the stuffy but venerable old sources like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Economist are behind pay walls and I am not willing to pay for those when there are so many sources of free information. I’ve dropped the BBC because it seems lean heavily on videos these days and I have no time for those, and likewise I don’t have time for NPR or podcasts in general.

When I have occasionally read the New York Times lately, I am surprised at the openly disrespectful language they are using to cover the Trump administration. While I don’t think the individuals they are covering are worthy of respect, the office still is. And by using this kind of language they are walking into the trap of appearing partisan, when they are actually presenting facts and analysis in a reasonably fair and ethical way. I guess Fox News started the process of lowering the bar for everyone, which is a shame. I would even put John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver in this category – even though I tend to agree with them and find them funny, I am uncomfortable with the idea of serious news as entertainment. I would rather keep the two separate.

Basically my strategy is to take in a wide range of information and let my brain do the sifting. I tend to trust my own brain above most others, but I have some nagging doubts whether the biases in what goes in ultimately affect what comes out the other end, which is my internal world view or mental model of the world. And in turn that is what determines my views on the issues, who I vote for, and what issues I am willing to invest precious time, money or effort in trying to influence.

how a U.S.-China war could happen

A full-blown U.S.-China war seems so stupid for both countries and the entire world as to be unthinkable. But it is thinkable because both countries may think they have something to gain from brinksmanship, and the Trump administration seems willing to take a lot of risks and to be unlikely to back down. Here is a scenario described in Foreign Policy:

Consider the testimony offered by Trump’s Secretary of State pick Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, in his Senate confirmation hearing on Jan. 11, as he warned of a more confrontational South China Sea policy: “We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops and, second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed.” There are only so many ways the Trump team can go about sending such signals given its vow to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which America’s allies had been hoping the United States would complete. By preemptively eliminating tools like economic statecraft from its foreign-policy toolbox, the Trump administration will be leaving itself with only hard power to counteract China’s ambitions. That would probably mean an attempted military blockade against the Chinese navy in the South China Sea…

Trump’s demonstrated willingness to toss out the rulebook on the one-China policy, with his phone call with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, has already ratcheted up tensions with Beijing to a level not seen since 1996, when President Bill Clinton sent two carrier battle groups through the Taiwan Strait. The passage of China’s Liaoning aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait at the end of December was largely interpreted as a stern indictment directed at Taipei and the incoming Trump administration. The carrier group then transited past Okinawa, which hosts more than half of the 50,000 American troops in Japan, into the South China Sea. A simultaneous op-ed appearing in China’s state-affiliate mouthpiece, the Global Times, warned, “If the fleet is able to enter areas where the US has core interests, the situation when the US unilaterally imposes pressure on China will change…”

Moving more U.S. naval assets into the Pacific will add to Beijing’s perceptions of U.S. containment while increasing the odds that a minor accident or hostile encounter could trigger armed conflict. One could imagine China deploying underwater submarine detection defenses in the South or East China Sea to monitor U.S. Navy movements. If Washington were to seek to destroy these assets to preempt Chinese primacy or look to extend American military superiority in the region, Beijing would feel compelled to retaliate. Trump’s team might then be tempted to think a shocking use of force could deter Beijing from escalating conflict. It’s not clear at what point Trump would decide the costs of conflict outweigh the benefits of winning such a clash.

free trade and big ag

When I think of the controversial side of trade, I tend to think of manufactured goods being produced cheaply abroad and imported to the U.S. But there is also a huge global trade in food and agriculture, and the U.S. is a huge player in it, both in exports and imports. It is not only big business but big politics too. This industry has lobbied heavily for trade deals like NAFTA and TPP. This Mother Jones article has a lot of interesting facts and figures. Okay, maybe Mother Jones is not a completely apolitical non-partisan voice, but this article has a lot of links you can follow up on if you want to draw your own conclusions from the raw data.

It’s interesting, we have a nominally business-friendly administration elected by voters in rural states that seems hostile to the priorities of politicians bought and paid for by the biggest and most powerful business lobby in those same rural states.