Tag Archives: U.S. politics

“arrogant” foreign policy

I would tend to agree with Jeffrey Sachs’s description below of U.S. foreign policy as “arrogant”.

Here is not the place to revisit all of the foreign policy disasters that have resulted from US arrogance towards Russia, but it suffices here to mention a brief and partial chronology of key events.  In 1999, NATO bombed Belgrade for 78 days with the goal of breaking Serbia apart and giving rise to an independent Kosovo, now home to a major NATO base in the Balkans.  In 2002, the US unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty over Russia’s strenuous objections.  In 2003, the US and NATO allies repudiated the UN Security Council by going to war in Iraq on false pretenses.  In 2004, the US continued with NATO enlargement, this time to the Baltic States and countries in the Black Sea region (Bulgaria and Romania) and the Balkans.  In 2008, over Russia’s urgent and strenuous objections, the US pledged to expand NATO to Georgia and Ukraine.

In 2011, the US tasked the CIA to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Russia.  In 2011, NATO bombed Libya in order to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi.  In 2014, the US conspired with Ukrainian nationalist forces to overthrow Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych.  In 2015, the US began to place Aegis anti-ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe(Romania), a short distance from Russia. In 2016-2020, the US supported Ukraine in undermining the Minsk II agreement, despite its unanimous backing by the UN Security Council.  In 2021, the new Biden Administration refused to negotiate with Russia over the question of NATO enlargement to Ukraine.  In April 2022, the US called on Ukraine to withdraw from peace negotiations with Russia.  

Looking back on the events around 1991-93, and to the events that followed, it is clear that the US was determined to say no to Russia’s aspirations for peaceful and mutually respectful integration of Russia and the West.  The end of the Soviet period and the beginning of the Yeltsin Presidency occasioned the rise of the neoconservatives (neocons) to power in the United States. The neocons did not and do not want a mutually respectful relationship with Russia.  They sought and until today seek a unipolar world led by a hegemonic US, in which Russia and other nations will be subservient.  

U.S. foreign policy has been a playground bully. Nobody likes or trusts a bully, but they fear and respect the bully. This works okay for the bully as long as they are perceived as strong. But as soon as they are perceived as weak or at least weaker compared to competitors, they have a problem. They can’t keep others in line through fear or respect any more, and they don’t have friendship or trust to fall back on.

It’s hard to imagine repairing the relationship with Russia right now. Their action in invading a sovereign neighbor cannot be excused no matter what we have done. We can manage the relationship to try to make it less bad going forward, and we can try to learn from our mistakes and not repeat them with China and other (relatively, perceived to be) increasingly powerful countries. We can first put policies in place that can build trust over time. Nobody will trust as at first, but if our actions were to match our promises over a period of decades we could slowly rebuild our relationships. Here are a few ideas to bandy about: (1) a no-first-strike nuclear policy, (2) serious commitments to nuclear weapons reductions, and re-entering or re-establishing of treaties and agreements with other countries that have or potentially seek nuclear weapons, (3) nuclear power for countries that want it, in exchange for a commitment not to seek nuclear weapons and submission to a strict inspection regime, (4) a commitment not to invade sovereign UN member states ever again without a Security Council resolution, (5) a commitment not to interfere in other countries’ elections or seek “regime change” ever again through covert action, only through public diplomatic channels. There are plenty of things I leave off here (biological weapons and pandemic preparedness, food security, carbon emissions to rattle off just a few) but these are some basic war-and-peace ideas, and we need peace to have a shot at solving the other complex problems the world faces right now. Getting politicians to make these commitments or similar ones would be hard, and sticking with them for decades would be harder, but it needs to be done.

the U.S. constitution’s resilience? or rigidity?

Flexible things can bend without breaking, while strong, rigid things can withstand a lot of force up to a point, then break catastrophically. Is the U.S. Constitution the latter? This Lawfare podcast on the Constitution made some interesting points, and I wish they would post a transcript.

  • The U.S. Constitution is just outdated. Countries around the world looking to write a new constitution used to look to the U.S. Constitution as a model, but this is no longer the case. One U.S. Supreme Court justice in an interview suggested South Africa’s latest constitution as a good modern model.
  • Constitutions around the world are amended on average about every 20 years. Some even lay out regular time tables for review and updating.
  • The U.S. Constitution is the world’s hardest constitution to amend. Newer constitutions tend to make the most important rights hard to amend, but less important details easier to amend, with a few tiers of how large a majority is needed to approve various proposed amendments.
  • The U.S. Constitution mostly lays out negative rights, in other words things the government can’t do to you like take away your gun. Newer constitutions include positive rights, like a right to health care or a clean environment.
  • Interestingly, individual U.S. state constitutions are much more modern in terms of rights, and many are updated regularly.

The Congressional Research Service did a report in 2016 on the constitutional convention process, which is one way the constitution can be amended, theoretically by the states and outside the direct control of Congress. Here are a couple interesting paragraphs:

From the 1960s through the early 1980s, supporters of Article V conventions mounted vigorous unsuccessful campaigns to call conventions to consider then-contentious issues of national policy, including a ban on school busing to achieve racial balance, restrictions on abortions, apportionment of state legislatures, and, most prominently, a requirement that the federal budget be balanced, except in wartime or other extraordinary circumstances. Although they came close to the constitutional requirement, none of these campaigns attained applications from 34 states.

With the failure of these efforts, interest in the Article V Convention alternative declined for more than 20 years, but over the past decade, there has been a gradual resurgence of attention to and support for a convention. Advocacy groups across a broad range of the political spectrum have embraced the convention mechanism as an alternative to perceived policy deadlock at the federal level. Using the Internet and social media to build campaigns and coalitions that once took much longer to assemble, they are pushing for a convention or conventions to consider various amendments, including the well-known balanced budget requirement, restrictions on the authority of the federal government, repeal of the corporate political contributions elements of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and others.

Sure, Citizens United has to go. Rather than the ghosts of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson whispering in the ears of our nine unelected Supreme Leaders to tell us what the First Amendment and all the other amendments mean in 2024, we should come to consensus on new words that say clearly what we want them to say. But even more fundamental would be to amend the constitution to make it easier to amend in the future. Reviewing constitutions around the world for modern best practices sounds like a great idea. Instituting tiers for the level of consensus needed to pass various types of amendments sounds like a great idea. And adding a time table for regular review of the constitution seems like a good idea. For example, maybe Congress would have to vote on amendments proposed by the states at least once per session or once every X years, or else a constitutional convention would automatically be triggered.

September 1 U.S. election check-in

Here’s my “official” take on the U.S. election for September 1. Sure, I admit I look at the polls almost every day. But I figure writing down the numbers and puzzling over them a bit once a month helps me to filter out some of the noise. So here goes. I still lean on the “Silver” numbers as probably reflecting the most well-thought-out adjustments of poll numbers to something close to reality. The 538 numbers are interesting to give a sense of how much small decisions about these adjustments matter, and the RCP numbers show what unadjusted (i.e., heavily biased) numbers would look like.

STATE2020 RESULTSilver Bulletin (August 1)Silver Bulletin (September 1)538 (September 1)RCP (September 1)
ArizonaBiden +0.4%Trump +2.7%Trump +0.6%Harris +0.3%Trump +0.5%
GeorgiaBiden +0.3%Trump +2.2%Harris +0.9%Harris +0.5%Trump +0.2%
WisconsinBiden +0.6%Harris +0.4%Harris +3.2%Harris +3.2%Harris +1.4%
North CarolinaTrump +1.3%Trump +2.2%Trump +0.4%Trump +0.3%Trump +0.6%
PennsylvaniaBiden +1.2%Trump +0.2%Harris +1.3%Harris +1.2%Harris +0.5%
MichiganBiden +2.8%Harris +2.6%Harris +1.9%Harris +2.4%Harris +1.1%
NevadaBiden +2.4%Trump +2.2%Harris +0.9%Harris +0.7%TIE

So going with the Silver numbers, the electoral college would be Harris 292, Trump 246.

270towin.com

Both Arizona and North Carolina have been in the Harris column during the month of August and flipped back over, while the numbers in Pennsylvania (>:-() seem like they might have tightened over the past two weeks. On the other hand, Georgia and Nevada are huge wins for the Harris campaign if they come through. Move Nevada and Georgia back into the Trump column and Harris still wins 270-268, with recount hilarity likely to ensue of course. This happens to match the RCP polling results above, if you give the Nevada tie to Trump. Surprisingly, she could lose Pennsylvania and still win the electoral college if everything else in the map above were to hold. But these things tend to be correlated and any event that moved Pennsylvania a whole point toward Trump would tend to move other states too. Unless we are talking some serious voter suppression or outright cheating by people in Harrisburg with pointy white hats in the back of their closets.

In the betting markets, PredictIt has Harris at a 56% chance of winning (the electoral college) vs. 47% for Trump (well actually $0.56 to $0.47 with about $0.08 given to other candidates, so apparently they don’t intend for these to add up close to 100%). Polymarket however has Trump at 51% to 48% for Harris. So whoever is betting on that site thinks they know something the rest of us do not.

So, my overall verdict is things look pretty good for Harris at the moment with two months to go. I think this election is hers to lose.

The time is now!!! (err…2016)

Bernie Sanders 2016

We’re not going to get Bernie Sanders as President of the United States. If we are lucky, we are going to get the next-in-line representative of the pro-big-business, pro-war center-right consensus, rather than the nuclear war and climate change treaty breaking, science denying, bigoted serial rapist. We are not going to get health care, child care, and education for the vast majority of hard working citizens any time soon.

Who is the next Bernie Sanders? It is not Kamala Harris. I don’t think it’s a member of the “squad”, who seem mostly caught up in rhetoric and symbolic action around race and gender, not benefits for working people. Bernie is not the most articulate or charismatic politician out there, he is just extraordinarily authentic and straightforward. He showed us the formula, now some talented leaders should be able to emerge and follow his example.

July 2024 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Joe Biden’s depressing decline in the international spotlight, and our failed political system that could let such a thing happen. Not much more I can say about it that has not been said. The “election trifecta” – non-partisan, single ballot primaries; ranked-choice general elections; and non-partisan redistricting – is one promising proposal for improving this system.

Most hopeful story: A universal flu vaccine may be close, the same technology might work for other diseases like Covid, HIV, and tuberculosis.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Maybe we could replace congress with AI agents working tirelessly on behalf of us voters. Or maybe we could just have AI agents tirelessly paying attention to what the humans we have elected are doing, and communicating in both directions.

August 1 U.S. election check-in!

Well, we’ve gone from an almost unspeakably boring election to a pretty exciting one in just over a month. We had the fateful Biden-Trump debate on June 27, the Trump assassination attempt on July 13, Biden’s announcement that he was dropping out of the race on July 21, and now the Democratic Party seemingly selecting Kamala Harris as its candidate.

Polls are a little crazy. 538 does not seem to be producing its typical weighted polling averages at this point, while Nate Silver’s substack is now posting some weighted polling averages for public consumption. Real Clear Politics unweighted polling averages are…there. One question is whether to include any polls from before July 21 in the averages. I am not going to do any math though, and just report the averages as these two sites are showing them on August 1 in my local time (11 hours ahead of EDT).

STATE2020 RESULT538 (TRUMP/BIDEN,
July 1)		Silver Bulletin (August 1)RCP (August 1)
ArizonaBiden +0.4%Trump +4.8%Trump +2.7%Trump +4.2%
GeorgiaBiden +0.3%Trump +6.3%Trump +2.2%Trump +3.6%
WisconsinBiden +0.6%Trump +0.8%Harris +0.4%Trump +0.2%
North CarolinaTrump +1.3%Trump +7.3%Trump +2.2%Trump +5.5%
PennsylvaniaBiden +1.2%Trump +2.0%Trump +0.2%Trump +2.7%
MichiganBiden +2.8%Trump +1.8%Harris +2.6%Harris +2.0%
NevadaBiden +2.4%Trump +3.8%Trump +2.2%Trump +4.0%

I tend to trust the Nate Silver numbers here, since they are weighted for recency and things have changed very recently. Based on his numbers, the electoral college as it stands today would be Trump 287, Harris 251. So despite Harris’s “momentum”, which the media is playing up because they want us to watch commercials, Trump still has it at this very moment. On the other hand, Pennsylvania is all but tied, and if it goes for Harris the electoral college would be Harris 270, Trump 268.

The momentum is clearly there – there has been a decisive shift toward Harris across the board compared to where Biden was a month ago. On the other hand, she is slightly underperforming Biden 2020 across the board. To me, Harris is a fairly bland center-right Democrat with less baggage than 2024 Biden or 2016 Hillary, so this all makes some sense to me. Being a mixed-race stepmother doesn’t really change my personal impression of her political leadership skills one way or the other, but perhaps it will affect turnout. For what it’s worth Polymarket gives a 55% chance of Trump winning and a 44% chance of Harris winning. Which seems consistent. Predictit seems to be blocked as an online gambling site in the jurisdiction I currently find myself in.

So, maybe more crazy things will happen, or maybe it will come down to economic trends and turnout, like it usually does.

the “election trifecta”

This Freakonomics podcast describes an “election trifecta” three ideas to greatly improve US elections.

  1. Non-partisan, single ballot primaries, with the top four vote getters moving on to the general election
  2. ranked-choice voting in the general election
  3. non-partisan redistricting

This all sounds pretty good. The two major parties are not producing good candidates for leadership of our country, and they are preventing more talented potential leaders from competing.

I am a registered Democrat in a state with closed primaries, and I wrote in Bernie Sanders in the primary. I would have voted for Joe Biden in the general, but then again I would have voted and will vote for anyone who is not a serial rapist, convicted felon, and traitor who led a violent attack on the United States Congress.

New York to Boston in 100 minutes?

I’ve taken Amtrak from New York to Boston. It takes about four hours, and is more or less the best the United States has to offer when it comes to passenger rail connecting major population centers. I live in Philadelphia, which along with New York and Boston, built some of the world’s first subway systems very early in the 20th century (trivia answer: even earlier subways were London, which people might guess, and Budapest, which they might not.) Before World War II, Philadelphia had an ambitious plan on paper to build out its subway system. It never happened – today, we have two dirty, old, and unreliable subway lines connecting a fraction of our city, and we are lucky to have what we have compared to most U.S. cities. I also lived in Singapore from 2010-2013. Singapore is not a utopia in every way, despite what their highly effective government propaganda might suggest, but in terms of public infrastructure and particularly transportation infrastructure, it was astonishing at the time. Well, no longer. After visiting Singapore this week for the first time since I left in 2013, it has gone from astonishing to science fiction. They have nearly doubled the size of their system in the time since I left. But what gave me this sense of science fiction is simply a decade of progress in another part of the world, while the United States has been more or less standing still. We are simply not an advanced country in comparison, and the gap is growing.

What do I think Singapore’s secret is? Not some secret high-tech technology. They nurture domestic industry to some extent, while purposely exposing them to competition from foreign competitors. When I was here as an engineering consultant a decade ago, the subway lines under construction were being managed by a German firm and a South Korean firm, which were in turn managed by the state transit agency, the Land Transportation Authority. The other secret is low-cost labor from developing countries. The Singapore-born population is shrinking, so they focus on educating their population for high value-added careers and allow in motivated and willing migrant workers to do the lower-tech stuff. This entails long hours of hard work in the tropical sun, but in Singapore at least labor and environmental standards are pretty reasonable (you can compare their construction site accident data to ours for example and it is very favorable to them, unless you believe there is some cover up. Middle Eastern countries may be a different story however.)

So the moral of the story here is that coddling inefficient domestic U.S. firms and high-cost U.S. labor to build our infrastructure is going to limit what we can accomplish. The winners will be some subset of domestic firms and workers, while the losers are everyone and the entire economy that would benefit from frictionless infrastructure. In a rational world, we might let in efficient foreign firms and low-cost foreign workers, boost our economy, institute a value-added tax, and use the proceeds to education our next generation and anyone in this generation left behind because we brought in the foreign workers. But our politics are clearly not headed in this direction.

Interestingly, the American Society of Civil Engineers has a new video called “Cities of the Future”, which largely showcases Singapore.

why the U.S. can’t have nice things, like health insurance

According to this article in Vox, The United Nations has a goal of achieving universal health coverage in all countries by 2030. I doubt they were really thinking of the United States when they came up with that, but here we are.

I tend to blame the the situation on lobbying by the insurance industry, because they see public health insurance as an existential threat, and in this country of legalized corruption, big business gets to write our laws in its favor. I knew the American Medical Association, the special interest lobby for doctors, played a role, but I didn’t realize it was as soaked in disinformation and propaganda as this article makes it sound.

The AMA-WB campaign had two key components. First, they used mass advertising to associate NHI with socialism, while the private (or voluntary) insurance option was described as the “American Way”. These advertising efforts of the AMA were complemented by tie-in advertising from other industries fearing a return to war-time price controls. In addition, the strategy called on AMA doctors to discuss private health insurance with their patients and to distribute pamphlets echoing the individualistic advertising message (see Figure 1). Through local and state medical organizations, physicians looking to defray medical costs had organised their own insurance product, which came to be known as Blue Shield, and they were eager for enrolees. All told, approximately $250 million (in current terms) was spent to sway voters, an unprecedented amount for the time. Doctors were also instructed to use their prestige to urge local civic organisations to pass resolutions against national health insurance.

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/why-us-doesnt-have-national-health-insurance-political-role-ama

“WB” is a public relations, aka propaganda firm.

I still like to think that individually, most doctors chose the field because they care about human beings. But somehow, as an organized group, they can add up to something evil. And before I cast the first stone, yes I am also thinking about my own profession of engineering (what could be more wholesome than public infrastructure and public health – yes, water treatment probably saves more lives than all the world’s medicine, but that’s a digression) and our unholy alliance with the highway/auto/sprawl industry.

This article also takes aim at unions. By its telling, they wanted to saddle the private sector with the cost of the health care system so they had something to negotiate on behalf of their members (and therefore get people to want to be members). This is also twisted and evil.

What puzzles me a bit is that if big business is really so powerful, why don’t they want to be freed from the burden of providing health insurance? It would seem only to benefit a fairly narrow slice of the finance industry. But it appears that this slice, along with the organized lobbies of doctors and unions, has been powerful enough to keep the American public from having a real health care system for over half a century now.

June 2024 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Some self-labeled “conservatives” in the United States want to do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Census Bureau, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education, and possibly even the Federal Reserve. All these are needed to have a competent, stable government and society and to be prepared to respond and recover from the shocks that are coming, so I would call this nihilist and not “conservative” at all. How is it conservative to want to destroy the institutions that have underpinned the success of our nation thus far? On the other hand, they also want to double down on the unimaginative pro-big-business, pro-war consensus of the two major parties over the last 50 years or so, which has also gotten us to where we are today. And it looks like the amateurs and psychopaths have the upper hand at the moment in terms of our November election. This is certainly not “morning in America”.

Most hopeful story: Computer-controlled cars are slowly but surely attaining widespread commercial rollout. I don’t care what the cynics say – this will save land, money and lives. And combined with renewable and/or nuclear energy, it could play a big role in turning the corner on the climate crisis.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I had a misconception that if the world reduces greenhouse gases today, the benefits will not kick in for decades. Happily, scientists’ understanding of this has been updated and I will update my own understanding along with that. The key is the ocean’s ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere relatively quickly. (I am not sure this is good for the ocean itself, but it is somewhat hopeful for temperatures here on land.) And it is not all or nothing – any emissions reductions will help, so the failure to act in the past is not an excuse to continue to fail to act.