Tag Archives: U.S. politics

“tactical” nuclear weapons

This is disturbing. Members of the elected legislature of a democratic country are openly advocating the use of nuclear weapons. This is happening in the only country in the world that has ever used nuclear weapons before. This is from 2013:

Rep. Duncan Hunter Jr., R-Calif., appearing on C-SPAN, encouraged Washington to get ready for war, arguing that “if you have to hit Iran … you do it with tactical nuclear devices and you set them back a decade or two or three. I think that’s the way to do it, with a massive aerial bombardment campaign.” …

Play out Hunter’s proposal and one quickly sees how devastating it would be. While Hunter doesn’t specify what type of “tactical nuclear device” he would propose for such an attack, the Federation of American Scientists notes that launching the least powerful of such weapons would cause nuclear blasts that would “blow out a huge crater of radioactive material, creating a lethal gamma-radiation field over a large area.

“Suppose Hunter would opt for something more lethal. If the United States were to use a more powerful tactical nuclear weapon, like the B-61, it could unleash an explosion many times more powerful than Little Boy, the atomic weapon the United States dropped on Hiroshima. Any such nuclear attack would incinerate untold numbers of Iranian civilians, including those working in Iran’s nuclear power facilities, and those in nearby urban centers.

We’re lucky in this country that the grownups are in charge most of the time. But there are moments when they are not, so while they are they should do whatever they can to idiot-proof the place before our next Lord of the Flies moment arrives.

Cold War III will be fought with sticks and stones…

Germany and Russia again? Seriously?

I feel like Ukraine is not front and center in the U.S. headlines like it was late last year, but I don’t think that means things are any better. It’s just that events in the Middle East are grabbing the headlines. This BBC article is from February:

Nato is to bolster the alliance’s military presence in Eastern Europe in response to increased fighting in eastern Ukraine between government forces and pro-Russia rebels…

The six bases are being set up in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria.

France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Britain are taking the lead in establishing the new rapid reaction “spearhead” force, with its lead units able to deploy at two days’ notice.

climate disinformation?

The New York Times has an article about fossil fuel industry funding of a prominent critic of mainstream climate change science:

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming.

But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests…

Historians and sociologists of science say that since the tobacco wars of the 1960s, corporations trying to block legislation that hurts their interests have employed a strategy of creating the appearance of scientific doubt, usually with the help of ostensibly independent researchers who accept industry funding.

How much of what we believe is really our own conclusions, and how much of it is manufactured and manipulated without us even suspecting?

February 2015 in Review

This blog got 173 hits in February! Pretty cool, considering I really just meant it as a place to collect my own scattered thoughts and refer back to them later. If 173 out of the 6 billion people out there like it, I am flattered. Okay, I understand there may have been a few repeat visitors. Also, judging from the most popular posts, there is one thing I mention occasionally that people really like: robots!

Negative trends and predictions:

  • Fresh Air had an interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction. The idea here is that what humans are doing to other species is equivalent in scope to events that have killed off most life on Earth in the past.
  • The drought in the western U.S. continues to grind on.
  • There are some depressing new books out there about all the bad things that could happen to the world, from nuclear terrorism to pandemics. Also a “financial black hole”, a “major breakdown of the Internet”, “the underpopulation bomb”, the “death of death”, and more!
  • Government fragmentation explains at least part of suburban sprawl and urban decline in U.S. states, with Pennsylvania among the worst.

Positive trends and predictions:

  • Libraries are starting to go high-tech using warehouse robot technology.
  • I had a rambling post on technologies to watch: carbon fiber, the internet of things, self-driving cars and trucks, biotechnology for everything from carbon sequestration to cancer treatment to agriculture, and of course more automation, robots, and artificial intelligence. And yes, Clark W. Griswold’s cereal varnish is a real thing!
  • U.S. utility solar capacity is slowly ramping up.
  • A new study suggests a sudden, catastrophic climate tipping point may not be too likely.
  • Robots can independently develop new drugs.
  • According to Google, self-driving taxis are only 2-5 years away.
  • Complex ecosystems can be designed.
  • Compost toilets may save the world…if we can get over the ick factor and the sawdust problem.
  • There are lots of cheap new options for the aspiring high-tech handymen (and women and children) among us. Even better news, we may have reached the point where if you build a robot with your kid in the basement, and he then tells other kids about it, he might not get beat up on the playground.
  • New York City has some good examples of green stormwater infrastructure integrated in sidewalk and street design.

One thing that strikes me is that we keep hearing about biotechnology, but we haven’t seen big, obvious impacts in most of our daily lives yet. I suspect biotechnology is like computers and robots in the 70s, 80s, and 90s – slow but steady progress was being made in the background, the pressure was building, and then the wave suddenly broke onto the commercial and public consciousness. I suspect biotechnology is the next big wave that is going to break.

Pennsylvania is #1…

…in government fragmentation, according to this 2003 paper by David Rusk at the Brookings Institution.

  • The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has created the nation’s most fragmented system of local government within its metropolitan areas.
  • State policies have contributed to uncontrolled urban sprawl by making its “little boxes” governments so highly dependent on local property taxes, promoting a constant ratables chase. Over the last fifty years Pennsylvania ranks second only to West Virginia in consuming the most land for the least population growth.
  • The combination – constant outward development overlaying a pattern of immutable local government boundaries – has condemned Pennsylvania’s “inelastic” central cities, most boroughs, and many “built-out” townships to population, economic, and fiscal decline.
  • The many governmental “little boxes” actively contribute to the high degree of racial and economic segregation that characterizes Pennsylvania’s metropolitan areas.
  • Whether through costly inefficiencies, high social and economic disparities, or cutthroat inter-municipal competition, Pennsylvania’s governmental system of “little boxes” also retards its economic growth.
  • Sprawl and steady abandonment of “inelastic” central cities, most boroughs, and many “built-out” townships also implicitly means abandonment (or certainly underutilization) of existing physical infrastructure (houses, stores, factories, water and sewer lines, etc.) that cost prior generations a fortune to create originally and is even more expensive to duplicate anew. Discarding this investment is decidedly fiscally wasteful.

The obvious answer would be to reorganize around metropolitan areas. The Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Council is one model of a regional government with real teeth. I am not an expert on state constitutional law, but it may be that Pennsylvania’s “home rule” state constitution makes it difficult to do something similar. Or it may be that the system of representative government gives outsize power to representatives from relatively less populous places, so the state legislature is unlikely to overhaul things even if the constitution would allow it. Even if these problems could be solved at the state level, the Philadelphia metro area would still cover parts of New Jersey and Delaware. So the remaining option is massive changes to the United States Constitution abolishing states entirely in favor of metropolitan areas. I haven’t noticed that in any campaign platforms lately.

 

how U.S. taxes are spent

In a poll of U.S. taxpayers, 95% of respondents had no idea how much the country spends on foreign aid, which is much less than 1%. It just shows that although rational people can disagree on how our tax money should be spent, we are not having a rational debate because most of us have no clue what it is really being spent on. A taxpayer receipt is a simple idea to help cure this problem. Ideally this should be done by the IRS or Treasury Department, but the White House has stepped in to do it since nobody else will.

I picked a hypothetical married couple with children making an income of $80,000 per year. There are a million different ways you can slice it. But no matter what you do, the biggest categories jump out at you. Income tax is only about 40% of what the government takes in from this family, with Social Security and Medicare taxes making up the other 60%. Pensions for retired people make up the majority of how the money is spent, with Social Security alone making up almost half. Even without an offical public health care system, the federal government spends a lot on health care – almost 20% of all the money spent between Medicare (for older people) and programs to help lower-income people (Medicaid and children’s health insurance programs mostly). Of course, state and local governments also tax and spend on health care, which is not reflected here.

The military makes up around 10% of all federal spending. If you add veteran’s benefits (I’m double counting here, since these include retirement and health care) and homeland security, that number comes to more like 13%.

So however you slice it, the big numbers are retirement, health care, and defense. If we want to make significant changes in either the amount of tax, or the outcomes of government programs, we should focus most of our debating energies in these areas.

 

grand bargain?

I don’t normally wade into politics on this blog, and certainly not Middle East politics. Then again, I occasionally discuss issues of war and weapons, because certainly these are important to the future of our civilization. Anyway, this caught my attention in Obama’s state of the union speech:

Our diplomacy is at work with respect to Iran, where, for the first time in a decade, we’ve halted the progress of its nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material. Between now and this spring, we have a chance to negotiate a comprehensive agreement that prevents a nuclear-armed Iran; secures America and our allies – including Israel; while avoiding yet another Middle East conflict.

In other news stories, I have heard him give a 50% chance of a deal with Iran. Around 10 years ago, Iran supposedly proposed a “grand bargain“, in which they would give up any attempts to acquire nuclear weapons, and make peace with Israel, in return for normalized relations with the United States. (Have a look at the various original documents posted with the 2007 New York Times column in the link above, some of which supposedly came directly from the Iranian government at the time.)

Today, we have a much messier situation with a series of loosely related civil wars involving three or four ambiguous sides, and it is not clear whether a deal like this would actually result in more political stability for the region overall. But it certainly would be a nuclear proliferation victory, de-escalating tensions between Iran and Israel, and between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which is rumored to have a small nuclear arsenal on order from Pakistan. From the BBC in 2013:

Saudi Arabia has invested in Pakistani nuclear weapons projects, and believes it could obtain atomic bombs at will, a variety of sources have told BBC Newsnight.

Even scarier than a nuclear conflict between state actors would be if irrational extremists were to gain control of a nuclear arsenal in any one of these countries. When so many people are suffering and dying already, it seems a little selfish to worry about the impacts on those of us in relatively peaceful countries outside the region. But a nuclear winter caused by even a relatively contained nuclear exchange there would be no laughing matter for anyone on Earth. From Scientific American in 2009:

Because as other nations continue to acquire nuclear weapons, smaller, regional nuclear wars could create a similar global catastrophe. New analyses reveal that a conflict between India and Pakistan, for example, in which 100 nuclear bombs were dropped on cities and industrial areas, only 0.4 percent of the world’s more than 25,000 warheads would produce enough smoke to cripple global agriculture. A regional war could cause widespread loss of life even in countries far away from the conflict.

financial regulation

According to Simon Johnson, political momentum may be building in the U.S. for stronger regulation aimed at financial stability:

From the perspective of anyone seeking the nomination of either of America’s political parties, here is an issue that cuts across partisan lines. “Break up Citigroup” is a concrete and powerful idea that would move the financial system in the right direction. It is not a panacea, but the coalition that can break up Citi can also put in place other measures to make the financial system safer – including more effective consumer protection, greater transparency in markets, and higher capital requirements for major banks.

From the left, the emphasis has been on the megabanks’ abuse of power and the great rip-off of the middle class. From the right, the stress is on the hazards of crony capitalism, owing to the massive implicit government subsidies that these banks receive. But both left and right agree on the fundamental asymmetry that the recent “Citigroup Amendment” implies: Bankers get rich whether they win or lose, because the US taxpayer foots the bill when their risky bets fail.

Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and financial stability

Elizabeth Warren continues to warn that another financial crisis may be in the making as big financial companies are able to influence laws shifting large risks onto the taxpayer:

Bernie Sanders also is worried that the big banks have too much influence over policy:

“Over the last several days, it has become abundantly clear that Congress does not regulate Wall Street but Wall Street regulates Congress,” Sanders said. “If Wall Street lobbyists can literally write a provision into law that will allow too-big-to-fail banks to make the same risky bets that nearly destroyed our economy just a few years ago, it should be obvious to all that their incredible economic and political power is a huge danger to our economy and our way of life.”

Sanders said, “Enough is enough…. If Congress cannot regulate Wall Street, there is just one alternative.  It is time to break these too-big-to-fail banks up so that they can never again destroy the jobs, homes, and life savings of the American people.”

the U.S. and the middle east

I can’t fact check everything in this Tom Dispatch article, but even if only half of it were true, the U.S. military footprint and spending in the Middle East is eye opening.

Soon enough, that Rapid Deployment Force grew into the U.S. Central Command, which has now overseen three wars in Iraq (1991-2003, 2003-2011, 2014-); the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2001-); intervention in Lebanon (1982-1984); a series of smaller-scale attacks on Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011); Afghanistan (1998) and Sudan (1998); and the “tanker war” with Iran (1987-1988), which led to the accidental downing of an Iranian civilian airliner, killing 290 passengers. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan during the 1980s, the CIA helped fund and orchestrate a major covert war against the Soviet Union by backing Osama Bin Laden and other extremist mujahidin. The command has also played a role in the drone war in Yemen (2002-) and both overt and covert warfare in Somalia (1992-1994, 2001-).