War in Ukraine 5Apr2024

 

US sanctions are doing some good! An oil refinery was damaged and can’t be fixed without US parts. The damaged component was producing over 400k tons a month of gasoline.

“Today, 350,000 households in Kharkiv are without electricity.” A nuclear facility in Kharkiv was also endangered.

More “double tap” bombing. Three First Responders die.

NATO is 75 years old now.

“’We have assessed over the course of the last couple of months that Russia has almost completely reconstituted militarily,’ said Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell.” Russians have lost 315k soldiers, but defense spending is up 6% of National GDP and Russians have placed their economy on a war footing. China is helping them.

Good news: “armored losses are being replaced by civilian vehicles such as vans, pickup trucks, and other unarmored vehicles.” At a minimum, according to Oryx, which counts only verified losses, Russia has lost over 15k vehicles, which includes 2,856 tanks. Ukraine has also sunk 20 Russian ships, again, Ukraine doesn’t have a Navy.

Congressman Ted Lieu and many other American officials support Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries.

When towns are evacuated, older Ukrainians often stay behind. NPR looks at those who stay behind.

Putin doesn’t believe that there are radical Islamisms in Russia, their presence must be a Western plot!

Many more details about Havana Syndrome than was presented on 60 Minutes the other day.

https://balloon-juice.com/2024/04/04/war-for-ukraine-day-771-the-butchers-bill-from-kharkiv/

Some budget-cutting recommendations

Senator Scott is trying to show that he and his party are not the only ones proposing dramatic changes to Social Security and Medicare. Someone discovered a clip of the current president Joe Biden arguing for serious changes to Social Security. Bit of a problem with using the clip as any sort of evidence is that people, even politicians, can change their minds. If the GOP could show that Biden continued to call for changes to Social Security, then yes, it would be appropriate to call him a hypocrite.

Representative Gaetz demonstrates in his zeal to cut spending that he hates democracy and opposes Western values.

At least Representative Greene has been spending a bit of her time actually looking through the budget so as to make specific proposals. Her budget proposals are based on going line by line through the budget and finding specific items to cut. This, in my own humble opinion, is the only way to approach this job!

Her first recommended cut is to not find a way to build better latrines. This strikes me as the proposal that only a comfortable, middle class woman who has never been outside the US, or at least has never been outside an area that’s been built to be a tourist destination. In the Navy, I’ve been to some non-tourist-type places and believe me, better latrines are a worthwhile project.

Study the emissions of wood heaters? Seems doubtful, but I’d need to see more detail before I could agree or disagree.

“Taxpayers should never be paying unelected bureaucrats to undermine our democracy.” Yeah, okay, but the budget is there as a result of legislators voting on specific projects. Bureaucrats don’t just arbitrarily come up with projects by themselves.

“Global Disinformation Index.” Is there the slightest doubt that the US and the world are awash in disinformation? There may be questions about this project and there may be a need for more oversight and close-up management, but it’s hardly controversial that something needs to be done about rampant disinformation.

Priority: “stopping ALL evil and cruel animal cruelty experiments that are funded by taxpayer dollars.” Yeah, I’ll go with that. Again, I would take a close and careful look at the projects to make sure that that’s what’s happening. The only way “gain-of-function” studies would be dangerous would be if they were carried out under non-scientifically-approved circumstances. That appears to have been the case in Wuhan, China, as the scientists there were apparently rushing through projects without taking the time or spending the money to make sure everything was being done safely.

“We must stop funding war in Ukraine and push for peace!“ Erm, Ukraine is a liberal democracy, Russia is an oppressive, authoritarian, centralized state. Is Greene suggesting that the US doesn’t have a vested interest in supporting democracies when they’re under attack? Is there any reasonable probability that either side is ready to open up peace negotiations? Ukraine wants to regain all of the territory that was lost since Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, Russia wants to rebuild the old Soviet Union, when Ukraine was a Soviet Socialist Republic under the direct control of Moscow.

“We are on the verge of defaulting our country’s debts…” Only and strictly because Republicans insist on playing dangerous games with the debt ceiling! Not because of anything that unavoidable!

Foreign aid has been an easy target since forever. The great majority of it comes immediately and directly back to the US in terms of purchases of arms, food and other types of national assistance. There may indeed be something that can be cut safely without damaging foreign relations, but I’d take a close, careful and detailed look before cutting anything.

“The past 2 yrs Democrats spent more money in history…” Yes, they did, because there was a need for it! Because Republicans have been holding back needed spending since 2011, when the GOP took control of the House and in subsequent years, when they kept control of at least one of the three branches (House, Senate or Presidency). When Democrats finally took control of all three branches, there was a big backlog of spending that needed to be done. Also, Covid required lots of spending.

“It’s easy to cut spending because for decades our government budgets have been the absurdly stuffed with stupid spending.” Ronald Reagan could make a case fo this back in 1981 because Democrats had indeed gotten fat and lazy and had permitted unnecessary spending to occur, but the days of finding “low-hanging fruit,” spending project that can be easily cut, are long gone. Greene made a good attempt, but she has failed to prove otherwise.

Trump's suitability for office

So, on Twitter, I responded that Trump and Putin are, of course, good buddies who completely agree and so that's why World War III didn't happen on Trump's watch. Had Putin said “I'm going to take Ukraine,” Trump would have responded “Why, sure thing, good buddy! Hey, can I wash your car, too?”

Someone responded “Trump and Putin were such good buddies that he told Germany and Europe to get off Russian oil bcs they were too reliant on it ...”

I looked it up, and sure enough, Trump was very critical of Europe for being dependent on Russian oil. “'So we’re supposed to protect you against Russia and you pay billions of dollars to Russia and I think that’s very inappropriate,' Trump said at the residence of the U.S. ambassador in Brussels.”

So okay. Trump had moments when he was thinking clearly and had good insight. Problem is, he never followed up this insight with any policy answer or solution. Clinton, Obama or Biden would have followed up by saying “What can we do to encourage Europe to reject Russian oil? Can the US provide an alternative to Russian oil?” There's no indication Trump ever paid attention to the issue after concluding that Europe was wrong and that he was right.

My solution, of course, would be to encourage Europe to adopt green, alternative energy. The problem with Puerto Rico's energy wasn't that Hurricane Maria had damaged any power plants, but that it tore down miles and miles of heavy cables that carried electricity all over the island. A wind, solar and battery combination is an enormously flexible power solution, It can be scaled from a single household to a small town, without lengthy, heavy cables!

Our dependence on fossil fuels means that we'll always be involved in getting energy from the Middle East and/or Russia. Once we build wind farms off our coasts and set up solar panels over parking lots, we don't have to worry about what Saudi Arabia thinks. We'd be able to, for instance, object to and stop a war on Yemen.

Difference between Ukraine and Palestine

 

A woman named Lizzy Savetsky complains that a fashion model in Vogue drew a parallel between Ukrainians and Palestinians. Her reasons for objecting to the comparison are 1. Russia did not invade Ukraine because Ukraine pose a security threat to Russia. True, Ukraine and Russia were engaged in active, if low-level hostilities since 2014, but the fighting was confined to the far Eastern edge of Ukraine. On the other hand, Palestinians have undertaken many types of attacks on Israel, using all manner of tactics and methods.

2. Ukrainians use very limited forms of violence. Again, true. Fighting in the Donbas has been through standard infantry, air and tank assaults.

3. Israelis have offered peace to Palestinians many times, all of which Palestinians have rejected. True. Palestinians don’t want to live in a “bantustan,” they want a fully independent state with borders they control. Israel feels that their security needs outweigh the need of Palestinians to have such a state.

What is the primary difference in the relationships between Russia and Ukraine versus that of Israel and Palestine? I think Russia-Ukraine had more of a Roman-type model of colonialism. When Rome acquired a colony, it would take over all of the government functions, would draft a portion of the men for its army and would collect taxes.

With “settler colonialism,” on the other hand, like what was practiced in South Africa, the colonists would take over individual parcels of land, pushing the indigenous population into bantustans or over into other countries. There are individual tribes or groups of Palestinians that are administered Roman-style, but others were pushed into Gaza or the West Bank and still others were pushed into neighboring countries, starting with what Palestinians call the “Nakba.”

Palestinians do not, at this time, have anything close to a viable state of their own. Gaza, ruled by Hamas, has been under siege conditions since 2007. Their every entrance and exit for travel and commerce is controlled by Israeli checkpoints. The West Bank isn’t in much better shape, split up into dozens of parcels, each one separated by walls and checkpoints.

It’s difficult to see how Palestinians could form a viable state out of these two parcels. Negotiations would have to produce serious changes in how Palestinian land is configured.

From Wikipedia: “There are also various economic and political restrictions placed on Palestinian people, activities, and institutions which have had a detrimental effect on the Palestinian economy and quality of life. Israel has said repeatedly that these restrictions are necessary due to security concerns ... The key obstacle therefore remains the Israeli demand for security versus Palestinian claims for rights and statehood."

My evolution in thinking about peace

 

Yes, back in 2003, I joined with peaceniks to protest the Iraq War. I concluded from the very start that the younger George Bush was untrustworthy, that he was lying about WMDs in Iraq and that he was exaggerating the human rights abuses that Saddam Hussein was engaged in. But when I was a tween/young teen, nonfiction paperbacks on World War II were popular and I read a number of them.

One of the big lessons I learned was “Don’t think that this war is going to be just like the last one.” The British and French thought that the 1940 battlefield would be just like the 1914-1918 one, with slow, cumbersome infantry divisions doing most of the fighting. Nope, it was dominated by fast, flexible panzer divisions that quickly drove the allies into the sea at Dunkirk. The Soviets figured out by the Battle of Kursk in 1943 how to defeat the German Blitzkrieg tactic, but they suffered some serious setbacks and incurred serious casualties long before that.

Further readings in the 80s showed me that the Vietnam War was essentially a political war and not, as US leaders had assumed, a matter of applying enough soldiers and guns and planes and tanks.

So no, this war between Russia and Ukraine is not necessarily a replay of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I don’t assume that Joe Biden is just like G.W. Bush and that it’s the US leadership that needs to be lobbied and convinced here.

One of the major issues that my fellow peace supporters regularly bring up is the expansion of NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Let’s think in terms of I’m a Ukraine bureaucrat and my president has asked me to draw up a list of reasons for and against joining Russia versus joining the West.

I’d point out that Ukraine was under the authority of Moscow in 1932-1933. Ukraine suffered a man-made famine, the “Holodomo,” a famine that began with the attempted “collectivization” of agriculture and ended with 3.9 million Ukrainian dead.

In Hungary in 1956, Hungarians demanded democracy. “Thousands were killed and wounded and nearly a quarter-million Hungarians fled the country.”

Czechoslovakia in 1968, the “Prague Spring” was ended by Warsaw Pact forces led by Moscow, crushing that revolution.

In 1980, the Polish trade union movement Solidarnosc was successful for awhile, but “The government imposed martial law, a state that continued until 1983, and dramatically restricted civil liberties. Some 10,000 dissidents were detained, and dozens were killed. Solidarnosc had to go underground and was not allowed to register again until 1989.”

In 1994, Moscow fought its first post-communist war against Chechnya. About a million Chechens (Out of a Russian population of some 150 million), tried to carve an independent state out of a landlocked province. The freedoms granted by Russian leader Boris Yeltsin were withdrawn and two wars later, Chechnya was brought under control by Vladimir Putin.

This is not an exhaustive list, but the fact is that Western Europe and NATO simply don’t have this sort of history of having to use armed force to keep their alliance together.

What about Putin’s energy policies? In 2019, Russia produced roughly twice as much in energy resources as it consumed, which means that it exported the rest. Of that total, coal, dry natural gas, petroleum and other fossil fuels made up the vast majority. Nuclear and renewables made up a small fraction. Specifically, the OECD counts hydro, biofuels plus waste burning and geothermal, solar and wind power as constituting less than 4% of Russia’s energy resources. The rest is made up of various fossil fuels. Clearly, Russia is not leading the way to renewable energy!

The American Heritage Foundation uses an “Economic Freedom” index that liberals generally ignore as it makes lots of value judgments that we don’t necessarily share, but it dings Russia on many areas. Property Rights, Judicial Effectiveness, Government Integrity, Business Freedom and Trade Freedom are all given poor marks.

So if I, as a Ukrainian bureaucrat, had to produce a report on whether or not to move more closely to Russia and away from Europe, I think I’d run screaming away from the chance to recommend a closer relationship with Russia! To me, there simply isn’t any mystery as to why NATO has expanded into Eastern Europe over the past 30 years. Nations like to align themselves with successful countries that enjoy a high degree of prosperity, that respect human rights and that are working hard to move away from fossil fuels and towards renewables.

Update (18 May): Piece that essentially agrees with the above, with the idea that people and countries have "agency." The countries of Eastern Europe didn't remain attached to Russia because they didn't think it was in their interest to do so. 

Occam’s Razor

 

The idea of Occam’s Razor is to examine a theory. If the theory is relatively simple and straightforward, it’s more likely to be correct than if it’s really complicated. This was a piece in my local paper, today’s Philadelphia Inquirer (The Inquirer doesn’t like posting the author’s pieces because it attracts too many partisan commenters, so I have to use the AEI site to get an online version of the editorial). The editorialist comes up with what I feel is an overly complex theory.

He feels that President Biden wore a mask to his address to the Joint Session of Congress on the 28^th of last month. Biden also instructed the people at the address to socially distance from each other. But, the editorialist says, everyone there was vaccinated! It must be some sort of conspiracy to create an atmosphere of crisis!

Hmm. Or, perhaps, it could be that the COVID-19 crisis isn’t quite over yet. As we see in these two charts at the top, we’re doing well, but we’re not doing that well! It really isn’t time to break out the champagne just yet. In which case, Biden may be modeling the sort of behavior he’d like to see the rest of us adopt so that we can get out of the crisis faster!

The second theory presented is that Biden wants to spend a humongous amount of money and thereby needs to create a sense of crisis in order to justify that.

Hmm. Or, perhaps Democrats have wanted to spend a lot of money on infrastructure and other items for a long time and Republicans have been standing in the way. Check out how many filibusters they’ve deployed against the legislation that Democrats would like to pass. Filibuster motions filed per two-year periods remained in first the single, then the double digits until the 2007-2008 session. It’s been at least 100 per session since then. Maybe there’s a big backlog of legislation that Democrats would like to pass!

I tend to favor the second, simpler theory in both cases!

Response to "10 Best of Trump"

 This was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer today, though the Inky like to not post Thiessen's work online as that would open it up to too much blowback, so it's online here. Here are my responses: 

10. Yes, Trump inherited a good economy.

9. Yes, Trump improved on his own performance from 2016. But the younger George Bush did better with non-white voters than Trump did.

8. Yep, he joined the anti-choicers in person. Other Republican presidents kept their distance. This is really cool if you're an anti-choicer. 

7. True, the "Blue Wave" focused on Trump and didn't do any damage to down-ballot races.

6. "He shut down travel from China" - Contrary to the off-going President's telling, this was completely non-controversial at the time and remains so today. 

"held Beijing responsible for the pandemic" & "Trump correctly blamed the Chinese regime for unleashing the virus" - It may be satisfying to some to blame China for the coronavirus. China is indeed responsible for hiding and evading some responsibility for a natural disaster that started within their borders, but evidence is that the coronavirus spread across the world well before China was even aware of it.  

"and cracked down on China’s intellectual property theft." Again, this is a completely non-controversial policy objective. 

5. "[Trump] took out Iran’s terrorist Quds force leader Qasem Soleimani." This was an extremely stupid move that resulted in completely unnecessary hostilities. There was no evidence that Soleimani was up to anything in particular and his aerial assassination gave Iran a martyr that gives them a legitimate reason to attack American interests. Was deterrence "restored"? Hardly. The US flew B-52s above the Persian Gulf within the past week precisely because they feared that Iran would try to avenge Soleimani's death.

4. "He put Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court." Which is cool if you're a right-winger. That also meant Republicans made complete hash of their justifications for not seating Merrick Garland four years earlier. We can't blame Trump for that, that was the doing of Republican senators.

3. "[Trump] transformed the Middle East with the Abraham Accords." These accords did nothing significant to affect relations between Israel and Arab countries. These were arms-selling accords with countries that wee not hostile to Israel in the first place. As the columnist suggests, the Palestinians were simply ignored.

2. Yes, the CARES Act was passed on Trump's watch. As with the getting of a new Supreme Court Justice seated, the off-going President was pretty much just a bystander to the CARES Act. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had vastly more to do with that than he did. 

1. "[Trump] launched Operation Warp Speed." True. The operation gave laboratory groups money to pursue a vaccine, which they did. But when it came to the operation actually doing something on its own, y'know, to do more than just hand out money to other organizations, when OWS was called upon to get vaccines into the arms of Americans, it proved to be like every other Trump activity, a pathetic and dismal failure. Among other things, no one in OWS remembered to account for the Anti-Vaxxer Movement. There is no national public relations strategy to counter the Anti-Vaxxers.

Letter to the Editor 10 November

 

 

The letter-writer writes to the Philadelphia Inquirer to express her support for President Trump.

First, she learns from a relative of hers that the relative opposed Trump strictly due to his personality. I agree that this is a really stupid reason to oppose a politician. The younger George Bush was reputed to be a really cool guy to have a beer with. I have no doubt that he would be. Problem is, he ignored warnings about 9-11, launched the completely unnecessary Iraq War, left people stranded after Hurricane Katrina and opposed efforts to work against climate change. Does being a cool guy to have a beer with make up for any of that? Hardly.

She feels businesses are never over-budget. Erm, consumers and businesses both take out bank loans for cars, houses, equipment, paying employees when a business first starts up, etc. That’s exactly how deficit spending works. The government gives itself a loan by selling bonds and pays those bonds off. If she were really serious about how terrible deficit spending was, she would have opposed Trump’s 2017 tax cut that exploded the deficit!

Did he care and try hard to solve national problems? Hardly. A reporter noticed that he couldn’t specify what he had done about COVID-19 during the months of February and March. That’s because he spent that time pretty much just sitting around and twiddling his thumbs, playing golf, conducting rallies and firing people who had crossed him during his impeachment. Obama spent eight years playing 306 golf games. Trump has spent half that time playing, at this point, 297.

The hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) was indeed sent to New York City on 30 March, long after it was clear that there was a worldwide pandemic that required a “All Hands on Deck” approach and as NYC was reaching its peak caseload.

Was President Trump informing us in the daily briefings or would actual scientists giving us detailed facts and figures have done a better job? Was it helpful for Trump to have speculated that for people to have injected themselves with bleach? Or would he have been better off actually attending the meetings of the scientists that happened before each briefing?

Will we “again, be the laughingstock of the world” when Biden takes over? Or did the laughing start under Trump?

Answer to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

 

The Post-Gazette tries to defend the President’s record. They repeat the same, tired old yada-yada about there having been a “boom,” but really, job creation levels have not been terrible, but weren’t spectacular, either.

The piece then talks about lowest Black unemployment, which was clearly due to Obama’s policies.

It talks of trade relations. I don’t follow that closely, but knew that soybeans were the biggest issue for a while. How’s that doing? Oops! “YTD: U.S soybean sales to China lowest in 5 years”

Sending jobs overseas. What has he actually done about that?!?!? Moving the debate is all very fine and well, but actually getting something done on the issue will require focus and attention to detail, neither of which he’s known for.

Being a Democrat, I’m not the slightest bit impressed with his putting “originalists” onto the Supreme Court. Amy Coney Barrett is only “best” if you ignore her extremely rushed confirmation and how completely out of step she is with Americans in general.

Energy? Well, yeah, energy has been going great if you regard burning more fossil fuels as good. That’s obviously NOT good if you know anything about the science of climate change.

This is really sad:

Has Mr. Trump handled the pandemic perfectly? No. But no one masters a pandemic. And the president was and is right that we must not cower before the disease and we have to keep America open and working.

Actually, most of the countries on the planet have handled the pandemic far better than Trump has. The very first thing we desperately needed to do, and which the US miserably failed to do, was to produce Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). This failure is especially sad as producing equipment for wars has been a specialty of the US Government going back at least to the Civil War.

And yes, I agree with and endorse this sentiment 100%!

He is not a unifier. He often acts like the president of his base, not the whole country. He has done nothing to lessen our divisions and has, in fact, often deepened them.

This is probably the single most important job any president can have. To move the country in a direction that’s healthy for all Americans. The people, united, have a wisdom that exceeds that of any one individual or party. The president can move out ahead and can slowly bring people along. See Barack Obama and gays in the military. By moving slowly but purposefully, he repealed the Clinton-era “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and instituted full equality. Trump can’t do anything like that because he simply isn’t disciplined enough to pull it off.

How has Trump done at turning people against DACA or the Dreamers? Not so hot.

In fact, the poll indicates that wide swaths of registered voters support Dreamers regardless of gender, education, income, ethnicity, religion and ideology. That includes 68 percent of Republicans, 71 percent of conservatives and 64 percent of those who approve of the job Trump is doing.

From the very beginning of his presidency, Trump has opposed the Dreamers. At this late date, he clearly hasn’t brought anyone along with him.

The Post-Gazette has a lot of criticisms of Biden, but all of that is based on sheer guesswork and their peering into a crystal ball.

Color me extremely unimpressed! Vote out Trump and put in Biden!

Conversation on occupation of the South in the late 1860s

Had a lengthy and interesting conversation on Facebook with someone who described himself as an amateur historian and appeared to be suggesting that Black people weren’t ready for emancipation in 1865.

He was initially upset by my posting a piece saying that Black Lives Matter people drove off a group of white supremacists, or in his telling, patriotic Georgians who were defending their heritage.

We discussed whether the Civil War was really all about slavery. I replied that yes, it was. As evidence, I supplied a link to the declarations of various Southern states in 1861 that made it very clear that, yes, slavery was the issue that was uppermost in their minds when the war commenced.

We got into a discussion about Black people in the South who died in the years immediately after they were freed from slavery.

Former slaves were left without any livelihood or means of support. They simply moved into the woods and lived a stone-age hunter-gatherer existence. According to a speech given by the Governor of Mississippi, it resulted in the death of one million blacks - dwarfing the combined deaths of Union and Confederate soldiers.

I first encountered this in one of Sierra Club founder John Muir's adventure books. He met such a family while on his thousand-mile walk from Indiana to Florida. His description is appalling.

He supplied a link to a piece that confirmed this after I searched around and found an author who confirmed that yes, perhaps a million Black people died during Reconstruction. He appeared to hint and suggest that Black people just weren’t ready for freedom by suggesting that it was the Emancipation Proclamation that killed them.

My own theory is taken from Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote On War. He lived from 1780 to 1831. The book was published after he died. He was a Prussian general in the Napoleonic wars. Basic idea of the book was that war is politics by another means. What this tells us is that the occupation that follows the fighting can be just as important to victory as the battlefield combat is.

Let’s start with the idea of “40 acres and a mule.” The single most profitable investment a Southerner could make was land and slaves. How much money were Southern landowners putting into land and slaves?

Since planters needed ever more funds to invest in land and labor, they drew on global capital markets; without access to the resources of New York and London, the expansion of slave agriculture in the American South would have been all but impossible.

So then, all of the sudden in 1865, all of the labor that plantation owners had purchased as an investment, walked off the job. Contracts are based on mutual advantage. Slaves weren’t getting any advantage, so there was no reason for them to stay on the job once the force that had been keeping them there was removed.

So the popular idea was to simply confiscate those plots of 40 acres from Southern landowners. That would most likely have required more force than Northerners were willing to deploy. When people who have lost a fortune are pressed further, they’ll strike back.

Now, if I were the George Marshall of the Lincoln Administration (See Marshall Plan of 1948) and was put in charge of planning the post-war reconstruction of the South, I’d give each freed slave money enough to purchase “40 acres and a mule.” That way, Southern landowners would get something out of the deal, even though they’d lose land and might switch to paying laborers as opposed to simply forcing them into working. If the former slave wanted to put money into industry instead, the US was starting up a really expansive phase of the Industrial Revolution, so there were plenty of opportunities there.

Why couldn’t the US do that? Lincoln was assassinated and Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s vice-President, took over. Back in those days, the idea of getting a President and a Vice-President who were on the same page philosophically, the way Harry Truman agreed with Franklin Delano Roosevelt or that Lyndon Johnson agreed with John F. Kennedy, hadn’t really been developed yet. Andrew Johnson didn’t regard Black people as deserving of full civil rights.

Most importantly, Johnson's strong commitment to obstructing political and civil rights for blacks is principally responsible for the failure of Reconstruction to solve the race problem in the South and perhaps in America as well.

So, while the deaths of about a million Black people during Reconstruction is a really terrible thing, it’s not clear there was any obvious solution that the country was willing to accept.

A comparison of the two remaining Democrats

Biden's March 11th speech after winning Super Tuesday.
Sanders' speech, same day.

I went back and compared the two March 11th speeches of Biden and of Senator Sanders. Biden spoke in more general terms, Sanders talked of a laundry list of specific goals.

I found Biden's speech to be much more focused on what he could actually get done as president. Biden was focused on general subjects he would tackle with the idea that specific agendas would have to wait until he was actually in office and actually making decisions on the issues of the day.

Senator Sanders spoke of really big subjects that would take lots and lots of work to accomplish. Getting to Medicare for All, for instance,  would be a really heavy lift. Each one of the subjects Bernie mentioned would take really large amounts of discussion and consultation and working out of details. Doing all of it is way beyond the capability of anyone. If he had the record of getting big bills done, that'd be one thing, but he doesn't.

[Sanders] turned down chats with South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, because why work to win the black vote? “His politics are not my politics,” Sanders said. “There’s no way in god’s Earth he was going to be endorsing me," because the only people worth talking to were the ones endorsing him.

Refusing to even try to broaden your appeal is not a winning strategy! Ain't no way Sanders is going to get any of his big-ticket items through without talking to everybody!

Sure, it's useful to have Sanders acting as a gadfly to the Democratic Party, pushing the party to the left. But let's not let enthusiasm for a romantic figure blind us to the top priority of the moment, making sure that Donald Trump is a one-term President!

Medal of Freedom for Art Laffer

In April 2017, when debate on the tax bill that was signed in December of that year began, an economist wrote about the 43-year history of the Laffer Curve (It was first presented to Donald Rumsfeld in 1974). It has never lived up to its hype! 
From 2012 to 2017, Governor Brownback of Kansas tried mightily to institute the Laffer Curve in Kansas. It was an utter and absolute failure. 
In March of this year, Republicans tried to go back to the way taxes were under Brownback. The new Democratic Governor Laura Kelly held fast and refused to return to the failed past.
In December 2018, the tax cut was clearly a failure at doing anything but making the wealthy wealthier.
So it's difficult to know why Laffer is being awarded a Medal of Freedom by the President unless this is a "gaslighting" sort of thing.

Dealing with Fake News

"Baby boomers share nearly 7 times as many 'fake news' articles on Facebook as adults under 30, new study finds"

Wow! That's pretty sad. Here's my mini-solution to verifying information.

I've had people tell me to check all the sources on a regular basis. Good advice, but too general for me.

I'm currently composing a piece on our march to support Venezuela. Venezuela has a serious problem with its economy. The left-leaning Guardian said that the former president Hugo Chavez imposed price controls on basic food items like flour and that Venezuelan bakers had no economic incentive to produce flour because they couldn't sell flour products at a profit.

I said to myself "Did Venezuela subsidize the production of flour or did they simply slap price controls on it?" I ran a search on "venezuela flour" and checked the right-wing Libertarian website Mises and the more middle-of-the-road NPR. Neither of them mentioned subsidies. NPR provided a good quote from a baker in Caracas where he said something to the effect of "I'd love to produce the more nutritious bread, but I gotta pay workers, gotta pay rent, etc., so I need to produce brownies and cookies that I can sell at a higher price."

So I looked at a good variety of sources and concluded that Venezuela is shooting itself in the foot by imposing price controls without subsidizing the production of basic goods. I search, but in a more organized fashion than to just randomly reading what everybody says about everything.

Are federally-funded pregnancy health centers the answer?

Of course, it's entirely possible for anti-choicers to construct centers that provide medical services for women. Obviously, if Planned Parenthood was serving a wealthy population with cash to spare, Planned Parenthood might never have come into being. Any pregnancy health centers needs to be funded either by voluntary contributions with no expectation of financial returns or they'd need government funding.  But with a little over a million abortions in 2011, is it at all likely that voluntary contributions will be forthcoming on the necessary scale? A major point that anti-choicers made was that they don't need to as there are  federal community health centers.

But Abby Johnson, a Catholic and former Planned Parenthood facility director, told the Register that the nation’s approximately 10,000 federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) could absorb clients from any Planned Parenthood closures. However, she said these health centers are “not the whole package” women need, because they have material, physical and emotional needs that only pro-life medical centers can provide comprehensively. 

Also,

House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan succinctly and calmly laid out the case for redirecting taxpayer dollars from abortion goliath Planned Parenthood to federal community health centers at a CNN townhall Thursday night.  

So hey, not a problem, right? Instead of having women depending on that icky Planned Parenthood for needed pregnancy-related medical health services, just refer them to the federal community health centers. Simple, right? Well, those same centers, while serving around 27 million people at 10,000 centers, are under serious financial pressure and are having to impose hiring freezes and a little over half of them may have to lay off staff.

Planned Parenthood depends on Medicaid reimbursements, but they're not the government and therefore aren't quite as vulnerable to political pressure as the federally-funded health centers are. So no, the anti-choice movement really doesn't have an adequate answer to the pregnancy-related health care services that Planned Parenthood provides.

Pulling the wool over the President's eyes

I thought this statement was kind of fascinating. A reporter asks “Representative Chris Collins (R-NY) to give her just one example of Trump trying to work with Democrats.”

Collins: [President Trump] has had Democrat senators into the White House time and again, early on, talking about health care, attempting –

Tur: In what way did he reach out? Give me one way he reached out on healthcare other than a conversation?

Collins: It starts with conversation, and he was shut down immediately by Senator Schumer and the others, in saying that they weren't going to support anything called a repeal of Obamacare. They worked to put more money into the individual marketplace, but that was it. At which point he had no choice, but to turn to the Republicans, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan. We in the House sent a pretty darn good repeal and replace that didn't get through the Senate, but it takes two people and Senator Schumer –

So Trump “had no choice” but to work with McConnell and Ryan, who agreed with him that the ACA/Obamacare was hopelessly broken and needed to be torn down entirely and replaced wholesale. It wasn't that the Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was stubborn, it was that Schumer didn't agree on the scope or the shape of the problem. Schumer felt that the problems with the ACA were small and fixable. Trump went with the far more dire and apocolyptic view pressed by the Republican Senate and House leaders. How did those two views end up being substantiated? Here's the view presented by Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway in late July, after Trumpcare failed to win passage in the Senate:

CONWAY: The president will not accept those who said it's, quote, time to move on. He wants to help the millions of Americans who have suffered with no coverage. They were lied to by the last president. They couldn't keep the doctor. They couldn't keep their plan.

We’ve met with the ObamaCare victims at the White House several times now. They’re real people, they’re suffering.

Okay so first off, yes, Trumpcare had crashed and burned with unanimous Democratic “No” votes and three rock-solid Republican “No” votes in the Senate, so yes it was and still is “time to move on.”

Second, it's kind of interesting that Conway doesn't cite any problems that require tearing down health care coverage for 20-plus million people. All of the CBO estimates for all of the Republican replacement plans in both the House and Senate called for removing at least 20 million people from their ACA health care plans. Trump apparently just wanted to extend coverage to even more people.

Were the American people lied to by President Obama? Well, that “they couldn't keep their plans” was pretty obvious to anyone who was seriously following the debate over the ACA in the first place. If you had crummy, inadequate individual coverage that had really high deductivles and lots of rules you had to follow in order to make a successful claim, then yes, such plans couldn't be kept. The ACA insisted that plans had to be comprehensive and had to cover a variety of health conditions and deductions were lmited by regulations. The prior individual coverage was good if you were young and healthy and were unlikely to ever make a claim and only really cared about the price you were paying.

Very interesting that Conway feels the need to assert that “Obamacare victims” were “real people.” Apparently, they had to search for people who weren't covered and their numbers appear to have been so small that Conway feels the need to assert that there were indeed such meetings.

Okay, so what about people on the other side of the question, people who urged a “No” vote on ACA repeal? How did ordinary citizens react to the failure of Trumpcare? Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) was one of the three Republican “No” votes and her return to Maine was described in a local paper:

Friday morning, as she wearily walked off her plane at Bangor International Airport, Collins stepped out into a terminal gate packed with passengers waiting to board their outbound flight.

She recognized no one. But several of them recognized her and began to applaud.

Within seconds, the whole terminal was clapping, many people rising to their feet as their sleep-deprived senator passed.

Never before, throughout her two decades and 6,300 votes in the Senate, had Collins received such a spontaneous welcome home.

“It was absolutely extraordinary,” she said. “It was just so affirming of what happens when you do the right thing.”

So yeah, sounds to me as though Trump was given bum information by the Republican House and Senate leaders. Had the amateur president any real knowledge of the situation or the ability to separate BS from real facts, he might have gone with Schumer and the Democrats to achieving a real solution to a real problem. 

Fake News and the sites I use

I posted a link to a Daily Kos piece that praised the NY Times for doing a really good job with a piece that examined Syria’s actions in the chemical attack that President Trump felt obliged to respond to with an attack by 59 drones. Then, I posted a piece from Crooks and Liars that took the NY Times to task as the paper was now supporting a climate change denier. A commenter said: “The NY Times does not promote climate denial.“ and “Do not believe everything you read, especially if the source is a sleazy tabloid like this one.”

I read the piece that C&L criticized and am unimpressed. The author starts off by suggesting that the Hillary Clinton campaign somehow misread or didn’t fully grasp the poll numbers and so was blindsided by the 2016 election results.

But that’s not true. Clinton was maintaining a small, but steady lead over Trump. Trump was trying very hard, but couldn’t bridge that gap. The real problem was that FBI Director Comey came out of the blue with supposedly new emails that he hadn’t yet examined himself. That threw a giant monkey wrench into the campaign and pushed Trump over the top.

From there our author goes on to call into question the authority of climate science and suggests that we should be much more cautious about claims that sound too certain.

My own view on certainty is that if you feel someone is wrong, it’s up to you to show where and how the person is wrong. If you’re simply saying “don’t be too certain,” then you’re just trying to create doubt and confusion and yes, you count as a denier. And yes, back in late 2002, early 2003, the NY Times ran some editorials that were skeptical of the Iraq War, but they also published Judith Miller’s “OMG! Saddam Hussein’s got WMDs!!!” stories on their front pages. So yes, on balance, their promotion of the Judith Miller pieces outweighed their cautious editorials and they promoted the war.

Okay, so how do we properly judge news sources? I regularly check a number of sources that have weird names, Balloon Juice, Hullabaloo, Informed Comment and Talking Points Memo. I once told a right-winger that some information I was presenting came from the magazine called Mother Jones. He thought that was a stupid name and so therefore, my information must not have been any good.

If we say that we can’t tell how good or bad the reporting on a blog is by the name of the blog, in other words, if a quickie, surface examination is insufficient, how are we to tell how reliable a source is?

One major criteria of mine is whether the blog gives you a way to verify what they say. If the blog regularly provides links to their sources and quotes their sources accurately, that’s a very good start. If the blog sometimes just quotes the terribly provocative thing that was said without even bothering to add editorial comments, even better. Media Matters is especially good on this. They’ll frequently just allow the provocative comment to stand by itself without any further editorial comments from them.

Modest editorial language is a plus, but sometimes the provocation really calls for some serious cussing. If a blog generally shows restraint, but occasionally lets loose (Balloon Juice does this) with Not Safe For Work (NSFW) language, then that’s a pretty good sign their information is reliable.

And of course, there’s the matter of track record. Dean Baker was an economist that I became familiar with in the late 1990s. He decided in 2002 that the US had a housing bubble (the bubble had actually started in the late 1990s, it took Baker a while to figure it out). The NY Times columnist Paul Krugman agreed with him. These two became rather tiresome with their constant warnings that when the bubble burst, it was going to be awful. Well, sure enough. It burst in late 2007 and the result was indeed awful. So yeah, I give these two lots and lots of credibility.

There’s no such thing as a source that’s always right. So developing a list of reliable sources is a waste of time. Even the lefty sources that I like and regularly check can be wrong. There are many tests that one can apply to news stories to see whether they’re credible or not. The NY Times is often right, but they can be wrong as well and we can run tests to see whether they’re right or not. I’ve mentioned a few such tests. I’m sure that I regularly apply a few others that I can’t recall at the moment.

Conspiracy theories

Had an online conversation with someone who believed that the Illuminati and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) were exerting immense influence on our politics. I ran a search on “Illuminati Front Group Council on Foreign Relations,“ and the first six pages of results got me lots of authors and publications I never heard of. Wikipedia shows up on the 3rd page, the actual CFR shows up on the 6th. Which establishes, I guess, that even if some people take the Illuminati/CFR theory seriously, they're on the fringes and not part of the usual left-right dialogue.

Snopes is a pretty good debunking site (His answer to Snopes was “Snopes is ran by a Leftist couple out of their home,” which I don't consider a particularly meaningful or relevant response) and they say that Illuminati is a general, catch-all phrase identifying a mysterious, sinister agency where, yes indeed, if you type Illuminati backwards, it does indeed get you to an NSA website. But generally, “Illuminati” is a pretty vague, mysterious reference that doesn't refer to any particular individuals.

Ron Paul is a believer in CFR conspiracies. He says some good, peacenik-supporting stuff here and there, but I generally don't regard him as much of an expert on anything.

Good thinkpiece on the whole subject. The author feels the CFR generally does wish to establish a one-world government, but if they intended to be secretive about it, they're not doing a very good job of that, as it's quite easy to see what they've been saying and doing since they were founded.

As with other conspiracy theories, the CFR theory is plagued by sloppy research. The New American purports to tell us the history of the 1948 Marshall Plan. Slight problem is that it identifies David Rockefeller's study group as the inspiration for the plan, but the Marshall Foundation published a six-page PDF that reviewed the history of how the Marshall Plan came to be. It reproduces several memos, none of which are authored by Rockefeller. In 1999, Rockefeller was awarded a second George C. Marshall Foundation Award for “his long-time commitment to positive international economic development, his humanitarian service to community based on the recognition that a healthy, vibrant society depends upon a sound economic base.“ Nothing about his study group designing the plan. Bio.com doesn't write a terribly lengthy biography of Rockefeller, but it rather notably covers the immediate postwar years by talking entirely about his tenure at the Chase Manhattan Bank. The Rockefeller Center similarly doesn't give him any credit for the Marshall Plan. Sourcewatch draws all sorts of connections between Rockefeller and NAFTA, the Bilderberg society, the Trilateral Commission, etc., but again, nothing about inventing the Marshall Plan. Not sure all this completely debunks the New American theory, but it certainly doesn't give me any confidence that New American knows what it's talking about.

A major problem I have with the idea of secret societies covertly pulling the levers of power and arranging big changes behind the scenes is that it's actually pretty hard to keep lots of things a secret. The Koch brothers are two people who are determined to shape American society to their specifications. Their ideas are truly awful. David Koch ran as the Vice-Presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party in 1980 and the party got about 1% of the vote. In 1984, he founded Americans for Prosperity and has been an outsider-manipulator ever since. The Kochs played a substantial role in creating the Tea Party, for instance.

Now, the Kochs are trying convince people that they're running an “apolitical and altruistic reform movement to enhance the quality of life—as 'a movement for well-being,'“ as opposed to being a crassly materialistic movement that wants to throw the weak and helpless over the side and to reward the already rich and powerful with still more riches and power. It's not working out that well because the higher the profile they get, the more people notice them and the more investigative reporters poke and prod at, and break down, their carefully-constructed and maintained public images.

US Social Forum Philadelphia June 25 - 28

We're very pleased to announce that the upcoming Third US Social Forum (USSF) will be taking place at several sites at Temple University and along American St. in Philadelphia on June 25-28! The USSF is a convergence driven by the understanding that people's movements are what create real social change. This will be an opportunity for regional and issue-specific social justice projects to work towards broader unity and cooperation. 

The Philadelphia USSF is anchored by the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, Disabled In Action, and Youth United for Change, and rooted in the themes of immigration, political democracy, disability, and poverty. As a movement we will create spaces for strategy discussions, political education, People's Movement Assemblies, local actions, art and culture, convergences, movement schools, marches, housing takeovers, community building, healing, and collective empowerment. We know that a better world is possible and that it can be achieved.

Learn more by visiting the Philadelphia USSF website at ussfphilly.org, emailing us at outreach@ussfphilly.org or calling 215-869-4753 for more information.

New York City People's Climate March Sep 21

How big is the upcoming march going to be? The Green Party of Philadelphia has a number of buses going from several points in town. Normally, buses leaving from the city for out-of-town marches and rallies leave from just one central point. Now the Greens are confident they can fill buses from all over. I was on a conference call last month where we discussed people using the floors of churches to put their sleeping bags on. Even back then, all such space was already booked. 350.org has a section on the march which is our go-to, central point of information. Why is the organization named 350? In order for human beings to be safe, the CO₂ in our atmosphere should be at or below 350 parts per million (pre-industrial civilization had around 275 ppm) and we're now above 400 ppm. 

But this issue has been around for awhile. Why is this march now gathering so much enthusiasm and attention? My own thought is that global warming has previously had a direct, observable effect on far-off places, Pacific islands, the Arctic and the Antarctic, etc. Now, Venice, Italy and Norfolk, VA are affected. Both land masses are heavy and weighted down by cities and are thus sinking very slowly into the sea, but that doesn't account for all of the gains that the sea has made on both cities. In both cases, sea levels from global warming are clearly having an effect. Parts of Norfolk, the main US Navy base, are regularly flooding with salt water, so the Navy is very intimately aware of the effect that global warming is having as they can see the sea rising right in their front yard. 

There are many other effects that global warming is having, “Glaciers everywhere are melting and disappearing fast, threatening the primary source of clean water for millions of people. Mosquitoes, who like a warmer world, are spreading into lots of new places, and bringing malaria and dengue fever with them. Drought is becoming much more common, making food harder to grow in many places.” 

Is global warming implicated in violent world events like the Arab Spring? Evidence indicates that warming is a “stressor.” It's not a cause of violence and revolution, but it adds to the volatile mix that causes social upheavals. 

A person prominently featured as a speaker for the march is the reporter Naomi Klein (Author of The Shock Doctrine), who argues that our economic model may not be compatible with human survival.

Conversations with right-wingers

So I had an email conversation with a few right-wingers that finished up on February 10th. One of them proved to be pretty dogged, so I didn't finish up with him until February 20th. Couple of conclusions based on both these and earlier conversations:

1. Right-wingers really, really hate it when they're dealing with straightforward, unapologetic left-wingers:

You can't skirt around the fact that ObamaCare is going to cost jobs (as the non-partisan CBO report clearly spells out (along with many other economic reports), increase costs for many working class people (except the lower-income traditional Democrat voters who receive large subsidies) and not even come close to giving the "45 million uninsured" (a figure manufactured by the left wing) health care coverage. 

Rich, open-mindedness or liberal thought is being open to reading, listening to, or debating other points of view. You have confirmed that you do neither, while I admitted to reading, listening to and watching the left wing-controlled media outlets (MSNBC, PBS, NYT, WP, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc). I also have friends and colleagues who are liberals who I enjoy debating politics with. I highly doubt you found any right wingers in the school where you taught or the Jewish non-profit where you worked - proving that it is you who only consorts with, hears, and are open to one side of the debate. If that is erroneous, prove me wrong. 

I've formed my opinions based on facts about which systems have failed miserably to improve the condition of man (liberalism/socialism/communism) and which have done more to help mankind than any other (conservatism/capitalism/individual freedom). (Think of Lincoln's Republican Party eradicating slavery, and the 1960's GOP passing the Civil Rights Act over the objections of the Southern Democrats). But then, I understand liberals don't look at objective outcomes - because they're ruled by their emotion rather than rational, objective thought processes. 

What feels good isn't always best, otherwise we wouldn't discipline children, right? Regarding your comments on capitalism etc - I believe it needs less regulation, as the stagnant Obamaeconomy is certainly proving, and there already are plenty of non-profits, utilities etc. in our economy. Again, your anti-corporate/capitalism bias comes through loud and clear. Why don't you simply admit to being a socialist?

Tom's view is that because I hold left-wing views, that automatically means I've never read, or listened to or even paid any attention to other views. That's complete nonsense, I simply don't agree with most centrist and right-wing views. (And no, the GOP didn't pass “the Civil Rights Act over the objections of the Southern Democrats.” They helped to pass it, yes. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was pushed by first the Democratic President Kennedy and then by his successor President Johnson. Vote totals show that both parties had their anti-civil-rights minorities, the Democrats had more opponents both by numbers and by proportion, but the majority of both the Democrats and the Republicans voted for the Act.)

2. Right-wingers have a funny definition of what “being in a bubble” means: We discussed the charge that the ACA was going to “cost” America millions of jobs on the 18th (Media Matters explains starting on the 5th paragraph that no one will lose jobs. They will probably give up jobs voluntarily because the ACA means they're no longer locked in to their jobs by health care plans that they don't dare to give up.) As of the 20th, Tom had had plenty of time to research the question, but insisted that I “must” be lying as he simply couldn't imagine (or, obviously, research) any way in which his “fact” could have been debunked. He was just astonished to hear something that contradicted what his right-wing sources were telling him and had no way to even begin to research the question.

According to Tom, my belief in left-wing answers makes me part of a bubble, but to my mind, what Tom and I believe is beside the point. The point is that he had no idea that any viewpoint other than the official Wall Street Journal viewpoint even existed and when he was told that such a viewpoint did exist, hadn't the vaguest clue as to how to go about researching the question.

3. Do right-wingers respect people who hold different viewpoints? Ehhh, not so much. “I'm sure Paul Krudman....err....Krugman can spin something to fool...err....keep all the liberal NYT & MSNBC sheeple in the herd!” Uh, yeah, I can see that Tom reads Krugman's column on a regular basis! [/snark] What it also means is that if I present anything written by the Nobel-Prize winning Professor Paul Krugman who was right more often (In 2007 & 2008) than any other pundit, I'm just presenting the views of some crazy far-left wacko. What this does is to greatly narrow the parameters of any possible debate.

4. Do right-wingers really give a rats ass about the little guy? I located Toms' “500,000 people who will lose their jobs” the next day. That's the estimate on what the minimum wage increase will cost us all. Of course, the number of people who will gain the ability to support themselves on just one 40-hour workweek will outnumber that half a million people who will lose those low-wage jobs. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a really good run-down on the issue and states that “In addition to raising 900,000 working families out of poverty and increasing the earnings of another 16.5 million low-wage workers...” and goes over a number of other benefits.

No, it's not as good a “win-win” solution as we'd all like to see, but it's not a one-sided picture of just plain loss, either. It would be a wonderful thing if there were more policies that produced only winners with no losers, but those policies exist far more in happy-wonderful-fuzzy-bear-la-la land than anywhere in reality. And yeah, it's interesting how the statement: “The only perceivable downside [of TPP] being the loss of non-knowledge-based, low-paying jobs, to countries such as Vietnam (no great loss for the U.S., or it's citizens)” shows such deep concern [/snark] for low wage workers. Funny how that deep concern disappears once the context changes.