California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

Should we Have a Second Pentagon ... Devoted to Peace?

by John Lawrence

So we have a Pentagon of War. We should have an equally funded Pentagon of Peace, a huge 5-sided building where all they do is plan and seek to implement various peace scenarios. Unimaginable? That's because the human race has so little imagination, and the result is ... continuous warfare since the dawn of civilization and before including the wiping out of another species, the Neanderthals, by our species, homo sapiens. The history of the human race is one of war with some technological progress in the interstices. Let's face it. Human beings especially of the masculine variety get off on war. Most warmongers are completely bored by peace. They can't wait to get back into action and cover themselves in glory on the battlefield, to prove their mettle, to prove their masculinity. Right now the US spends close to a trillion dollars a year on war, the weapons of war and planning for war. We spend a pittance on peace, the implementation of peace and planning for peace. As a result the human race has been heading for some time to Mutually Assured Destruction. We will probably get there whether or not it happens by means of a nuclear holocaust or whether it happens by neglect of the things that need to be done to forestall climate change.

The war in Ukraine and the looming Cold (and maybe even Hot) War between the two sides that are lining up represents at least a dithering while the planet heats up and eventually burns becoming a Venus like uninhabitable hellscape. So we have the US and Europe on one side and Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea on the other. Of the not quite aligned nations, most of Africa is siding with the Chinese. Why? Because the Chinese have put great energy into developing African infrastructure with their Belt and Road initiative. The US on the other hand has put great energy into building military bases all around the world. "There are roughly 750 US foreign military bases; they are spread across 80 nations! After the U.S is the UK, but they only have 145 bases. Russia has about 3 dozen bases, and China just five. This implies that the U.S has three times as many bases as all other countries combined." So this goes to show the relative priorities of the various countries. The priorities of peace vs the priorities of war. Helping improve the economies of other people directly is something that the Pentagon of Peace should be about. Sad to say China did that first, but there's always hope. As my Dad used to say, you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Sure China's goal was to make friends and influence people with its Belt and Road initiative. What's the US doing in the meantime ... building military bases.

The Peace Pentagon should have a budget equal to the War Pentagon's budget - roughly a trillion dollars. I'm not saying do away with the Department of War and become defenseless. No, keep a robust defense but counterbalance it with a robust Department of Peace. So if possible peace initiatives will carry the day, but, if worse comes to worse, well there's always the fantastic array of weapons of war that the US already possesses. The war capabilities are enormous. The peace capabilities are meager. There's a difference between pursuing our interests by becoming friends with other people and pursuing our interests by guarding ourselves from other people. One of the ways to avoid war is to recognize the legitimate interests of other countries as stated by them. The war in Ukraine could have been avoided if NATO and the US had acknowledged Russia's stated security interest in Ukraine's not becoming a member of NATO. But that interest was totally discarded by the West - not even put on the table, not even some sort of compromise which would have recognized that stated interest. I'm not saying if that interest was legitimate or not - only that that was the stated interest on the Russian side that was completely ignored and never even negotiated. The result of that non-negotiation and non-compromise was the mess in Ukraine right now - a grinding war of attrition in which only Ukraine civilian lives and only Ukraine real estate are being destroyed. Ukraine would like nothing better than to have advanced weapons such as F-16 fighter jets which would allow them to spread the war into Russian territory, and then you have World War III. That seems to be where we are heading.

Off the Top of My Head

The Glory of War

by John Lawrence

Throughout history men have gone to war to cover themselves in glory and prove their masculinity. In World War I, many young British men were gung ho for going to war. They intended to cover themselves in glory and be home before Christmas. Instead many of them died face down in muddy trenches or were impaled on barbed wire. According to historycrunch.com: "...one of the main reasons for the excitement of the war was that many viewed it as an adventure. They read stories about soldiers bravely marching into battle and dying heroically on the battlefields for their countries. For many of these young soldiers, they viewed the Great War as their opportunity to play a role in the ‘glory of war’ and follow in the path of earlier soldiers in earlier European conflicts. To them, war seemed adventurous and a show of bravery that many claimed they ‘did not want to miss’." It was forever so but in general only the victors were able to cover themselves in glory.

War, I would contend, is primarily a masculine pursuit. It represents an attempt by men to prove their manhood. Even some American Indian tribes cultivated a warrior tradition. Their women would have nothing to do with men until they had proved themselves in war. According to Wikipedia: "What evolved among the Plains Native Americans from the 17th to the late 19th century was warfare as both a means of livelihood and a sport. Young men gained both prestige and plunder by fighting as warriors, and this individualistic style of warfare ensured that success in individual combat and capturing trophies of war were highly esteemed." Not for nothing were they called Braves. Martina Sprague in her book The Glory of War: The Way to Historical Immortality writes:  "What motivates men to go to war? The answer is the desire for recognition and the opportunity to gain eternal fame. War is perhaps the most common way in which a man can become a hero. We tend to romanticize war. War is portrayed as a daring adventure for a sacred cause, where the soldier will ultimately reach the highest level of self-actualization. As demonstrated by the great military figures in history, the promise of honor and heroism can help a man conquer the world."

Covering oneself in glory, proving one's masculinity, becoming a hero, these are ultimately traps which cause the perpetuation of war. Some men become addicted to war, the excitement of war. If one war ends, they will seek out the next one. Life is never so dull as life without war. It is the ultimate football game because the stakes - life or death - are so high. Witness the volunteers from other countries who are putting their lives on the line in Ukraine. The problem is that the pursuit of peace is never as exciting as the pursuit of war. Until peacemaking becomes as noble and glorious a pursuit as war, there is no hope for the human race to live peaceably and cooperatively side by side with each other. Until they give out as many medals and honors for peace heroes as they do for war heroes, the human race will go down fighting and ultimately extinguish each other.

I'm afraid that the war in Ukraine is only the latest example of people preoccupied with the excitement of war. Sure it was a clumsy and ignoble thing for Russia to do to so overtly invade Ukraine. They should have taken a page out of the CIA's book and been more subtle and covert about it. For example, the CIA undermined the democratically elected regime of Salvador Allende in Chile because he was a socialist and a Marxist ushering in the regime of Augusto Pinochet and his reign of terror. "According to the Chilean government, the number of executions and forced disappearances was at least 3,095 [under Pinochet]. Operation Condor, a U.S.-supported terror operation focusing on South America, was founded at the behest of the Pinochet regime in late November 1975, his 60th birthday." I'm afraid that Zelensky is following the same playbook of promoting the war based on 'glory for Ukraine' and his David and Goliath symbolism. His insatiable lust for American artillery shells and other advanced weaponry is duly granted by President Biden and the European allies with the goal of "winning the war." No one except the Chinese seem the least interested in creating a peaceful solution to the war. Instead the war will only be escalated when Ukraine gets F-15 fighter jets. Then they will be able to hit Russian targets in Russia escalating the war even further. Until now tragically it's only Ukrainian civilian lives and property that are being destroyed.

It seems like revenge, hatred for Russia and glory for Ukraine are the ultimate factors at work here not a search for compromise which both sides can live with. Does Russia have any legitimate national security interests in Ukraine's not becoming a member of NATO? Did the US have any legitimate national security interests in Chile nor becoming a socialist and Marxist state? There are always many reasons for war, but few for peace. Meanwhile, a lack of cooperation among the world's nations is hastening the day in which global warming will put an end to human civilization unless we can wake up and see that peace and cooperation are more glorious than war.

Off the Top of My Head

Let's All Go Plant Some Trees

by John Lawrence

"Let's Go Fly a Kite" is a song from the1964 film, Mary Poppins, sung by George Banks when he realizes his family is more important than his job. Now the planet earth's survivability trumps even that concern so "let's go plant some trees" should be our new motto. China designated March 12 as National Tree Planting Day in 1979. The National People's Congress, China's top legislature, launched a nationwide voluntary tree-planting campaign in 1981, stipulating that every able-bodied citizen above 11 should plant three to five trees each year. Why not join China in a good natured spirit of saving earth by planting more trees? God in heaven, should this even be controversial? The narrative is that China and the US are big rivals and the best we can do is "compete" with each other. No one in a position of power is suggesting, God forbid, that we should cooperate with each other not even to save the planet from the ravages of global warming that we're already starting to experience. It just goes to show the sickness and the sorriness of the human race when peoples and countries cannot cooperate not even to prevent Mutually Assured Destruction which is the outcome for the human species and many other species if we don't get a handle on global warming. Instead we have global warmongering.

At the World Economic Forum in May 2022:

During his speech at the Forum’s 2022 Annual Meeting in Davos, Xie Zhenhua said: ‘China's forest cover and forest stock volume have been growing in the last 30 years, and China accounts for more than 25% of the world's new green areas. China responds actively to contribute to the 1t.org initiative from the World Economic Forum, and I am announcing here that China aims to plant and conserve 70 billion trees within 10 years to green our planet, combat climate change, and increase forest carbon sinks.’

 

In support of this bold contribution, Chairman Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum said:

‘We appreciate China’s effort in supporting the 1t.org initiative of the World Economic Forum and relevant UN initiatives, we highly appreciate China’s practices upholding relative international commitment such as the Paris Agreement and Biodiversity target through Nature-Based Solutions.’

If the 1.4 billion people of China each plant 3 trees a year, that's 4.2 billion tree planted per year or 42 billion trees planted per decade. If the 332 million people of the US took the same pledge to each plant 3 trees a year, that's approximately another billion trees per year or 10 billion trees per decade. Trees are a carbon sink. They extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It is the natural way to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, consequently, the harmful effects of global warming. So why isn't there an effort in the US to emulate China in this regard? Shouldn't there be a shared interest here? What if the entire 8 billion people populating planet Earth committed to planting 3 trees a year. A single mature tree can absorb 22 lbs. of carbon a year, and makes enough clean oxygen for 4 people to breathe fresh air. A previous special report by IPCC stated that tree-planting could sequester around 1.1–1.6 GT of CO2 per year. A GT is one billion tons. Approximately 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere every year. Clearly, a lot of trees need to be planted to balance carbon dioxide emissions and sequester 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, but every tree helps. We can reduce the tonnage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere one tree at a time.

So let's join China this March 12 and declare a worldwide national tree planting day or just a global tree planting day in the spirit of cooperation among nations to create peace and save our planet from Mutually Assured Destruction which is the path we are on.

Off the Top of My Head

The Way to Cure Inflation: More Immigrant Workers

by John Lawrence

There is a supply shortage which means that there is not enough supply to meet consumer demand. At the same time there is a worker shortage. The worker shortage causes the supply shortage as companies have to cut back on their supply of product because they don't have enough workers to make more. They have to pay workers more because they are in a competition for workers. So there is a gap between supply and demand because there is a gap between available jobs and the supply of workers. The solution: increase the supply of immigrants to fill the demand for workers. Then companies could ramp up supply to meet demand, and wage price spirals would diminish. Instead, the government has restricted immigration. This limits the supply of workers especially those who are in demand for the lower skilled jobs. Republicans are all concerned about immigration when the solution to the inflation problem is to let more immigrants into the country to fulfill the need for essential workers. This would fill the void in the job market and increase supply of goods and services. This in turn would lower prices and go a long way to taming inflation. The Fed cannot solve the problem of inadequate supply of workers by raising interest rates. This will only tend to rein in asset prices which in and of itself is a good thing since housing and rents are too expensive. But it will not increase the supply of commodities for which there is more demand than supply.

After noting that reversing the Trump tariffs on Chinese products would lower inflation, Fareed Zakaria also noted the following:

The second one, he noted, would be immigration reform. This is the time to reverse more of Trump’s restrictions on immigration, many done by executive action and hundreds of which are still in effect, which have caused severe worker shortages in industries such as farming, construction and health care.

The problem, however, is not one relating to facts or logic. No one seriously disputes the validity of these claims. During the campaign, Biden lambasted Trump’s tariffs on China and much of his immigration policy. Yet after entering office, the Biden White House has behaved on these issues like a deer caught in the headlights — paralyzed by fear that any major shifts might get attacked by Republicans.

I also might add that cranking up the Cold War rhetoric regarding China is not the way to lower the price of consumer products most of which are manufactured in China. China is learning the lesson that Russia learned during their ongoing war with Ukraine. If you have a product or commodity that the west wants or needs, you can cause a lot of damage by withholding that product or in other ways making it more expensive. As Russia has made the price of gas more expensive, they have directly caused inflation in the US and Europe. One could also point out that sanctions on Russian oil by western governments have contributed to rising inflation so in that sense the Biden administration has shot itself in the foot. China could take a page out of Russia's book, and increase costs to western consumers. In fact it already has as container ships (wholly owned by Chinese companies) have raised their prices to transport goods from China to the US. The US needs to cooperate with China if it wants the trade relationships so vital to consumer spending, which is 70% of the US economy, to remain on a salutary basis.

It is to be noted that China turned the tables on the US by sanctioning Nancy Pelosi and her family after her trip to Taiwan. It's as if they're saying, "See, you guys aren't the only ones that can do sanctions." China could get into a sanctions war with the US if tensions between the two countries continue to escalate. China could take steps to increase the cost of Chinese produced consumer goods which are essential to the functioning of the US economy. Or it could even withhold some essential manufactured goods altogether. As Russia has us over a barrel with regard to gas prices, China could put us over a barrel with respect to any number of consumer goods that we are dependent on them for. On the other hand, if we cooperated rather than competed with China, that might go a long way to solve the climate change problem. Ditto for Russia. Those 2 countries have a lot to do with whether or not planet earth gets a handle on climate change. Can we afford not to cooperate. In the long run the fate of Taiwan or Ukraine is less important than the fate of the whole planet.

Off the Top of My Head

We Need a Department of Peace to Balance and Offset our War Department

by John Lawrence

Let's face it. the Department of Defense is a euphemism. It was called the Department of War until 1949. So let's call it what it really is. Don't get me wrong. There are times when war is necessary as occurred in WW II. However, we spend about $1 trillion on our War Department while spending little or nothing on peace. Is there really a Peace Corps? Yes, and its budget is about $400 million. That's about 4 ten thousandths of the War Department budget. My point is that we should be making at least the same effort towards peace as we're making towards war, and we should be putting our money where our mouth is. This doesn't mean we totally disarm ourselves. It means that we are making an effort towards creating peace in the world if at all possible and are willing to devote an equal amount of resources towards it. In our present state it's all about threatening war in order to to create a state of peace. It's Pax Americana similar to the Pax Romana which meant that you didn't mess with Rome or else you were threatened with violence. Instead of creating peace by means of a threat of war, we should be actively pursuing a peaceful world instead.

What would a Department of Peace actually do? Well, diplomacy would be under this department instead of the State Department for starters. Second, the American equivalent of China's Belt and Road initiative. Building infrastructure around the world just as China is doing. But what's most important at the present time is converting the world to green infrastructure. The middle class in India is growing. They want to live just like Americans. As more Indians enter the middle class they are consuming more fossil fuels to provide the energy to do so. This is contributing to the looming climate disaster. Just what we don't need is more carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere as a result of more people gentrifying into the middle class. Therefore, a Department of Peace, which should include the Peace Corps, would step up the efforts not only to change the fossil fuel habit in the US, but to actively change it around the world. About a half a trillion dollar budget would be about right while decreasing the War (Defense) budget which is 10 times the combined budgets of the rest of the world to half a trillion.

President Biden wants a Civilian Climate Corps reminiscent of the Civilian Conservation Corps which President Roosevelt established to build parks and plant trees during the Great Depression. An excellent idea in view of the fact that planting a trillion trees would suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Unless we do that there is already enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 410 ppm to melt both poles. Why not require participation in the Civilian Conservation Corps for people receiving welfare benefits who aren't otherwise employed or who are unemployable in the prevailing economy. I'm thinking about the homeless and others for whom this might be a first step to getting back on their feet in the so-called real world. I'm in favor of the government being the employer of last resort, and employment in a Civilian Climate Corps is the perfect solution both for them and for the environment.

Building the elements of peace around the world would entail looking out for the health care needs of people outside the US in our era of pandemics. This is also good sense in a selfish way since viruses can transmit world wide in a matter of days if not hours. They don't respect national boundaries. People to people cultural contacts with people of other nations brings about understanding and the realization that, no matter what the religious or ethnic differences seem to be, human beings are all essentially the same deep down and all have the same needs and aspirations. Helping others to realize their aspirations creates peace in the world. Cultural and educational exchanges are an important way to increase mutual understanding. There are many ways to create peace in the world. The US shouldn't be always taking the stance of trying to put down those peoples and countries who don't follow the US way of life. Others might have a different way of setting up their societies, but rather than taking this as a threat, we should engage diplomatically and peacefully if at all possible knowing that in the final analysis, if push came to shove, we also have the means to defend ourselves. A Department of Peace and a Department of War should go hand in hand. Today it is lopsided in favor of war.

Off the Top of My Head

Why the Fed's Raising Interest Rates Won't Work

by John Lawrence

Inflation is a supply and demand problem. The Fed only sees it as a demand problem: there is too much demand. Therefore, it seeks to reduce the public's ability to demand by reducing wages and creating more unemployment. Problem is that businesses are short staffed. They are trying to hire more workers, not laying them off. There is no "industrial reserve army" of people competing for jobs. Businesses are competing for workers. The reason why prices are going up (hence inflation) is not that there is too much demand, but that there is too little supply. This is caused by supply chain problems which comes down to the fact that most things Americans consume are produced overseas, mainly in China. Also the sanctions on Russian gas and oil combined with Russia cutting off supplies even beyond the sanctions means that everything that is transported including consumer goods is even more expensive. The problem is that the US does not produce much of what it consumes. Again it's a supply problem. Container ships coming from China raise their rates because gas is more expensive. This makes the goods they transport more expensive. When the major things Americans consume come from China (consumer goods) and Russia (energy costs), America is at the behest of countries that it considers enemies. And so is Europe.

The traditional way of fighting inflation is for the Fed to raise interest rates and drive up unemployment. When unemployment increases, demand decreases because unemployed people don't have as much money to spend. In other words money is withdrawn from the economy. This is of course to the detriment of the unemployed people which are usually those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder. But as we've seen during the pandemic, those at the bottom of the economic ladder are usually those who are indispensable workers - grocery workers, agricultural workers, truck drivers, nurses, caregivers. The economy cannot function for anyone without their services. So the only way the Fed can achieve its goal is to drive businesses into bankruptcy. Then all those workers will be in the ranks of the unemployed and be forced to underconsume. Actually, the more that Americans consume, the more greenhouse gasses are created. Underconsumption could have a very salutary effect on the atmosphere and the environment.

Another way to withdraw money from the economy in order to reduce demand is to raise taxes. Again taxes are usually raised on the poor and middle class further immiserizing them. Congress refuses to raise taxes on the rich which Joe Biden has proposed doing. This would help inflation to some extent, but the rich don't consume basic items to the extent that the middle class and poor do. So in order to reduce demand to the point where it is more or less equal to supply, money must be taken out of the pockets of the poor and middle class. The other alternative is to increase supply. But since the US is dependent on supply from foreign suppliers, this is not that easy to do. Long range, the solution is for the US to make more stuff, but corporations have settled on a model of getting stuff produced where labor is cheapest and that means overseas.

Off the Top of My Head

Biden Could Solve the Gas Crisis Today by Taking Sanctions Off Russian Oil

by John Lawrence

Sanctions on Russian oil have been an abysmal failure. Russian oil profits are up 50% from last year! Just as American and British oil corporations have been scoring record profits, so has Russia. Oil prices are set on the world market and soaring prices result in record profits for Russia. If Putin had designed the sanctions himself, he couldn't have wreaked more havoc on the US and European economies. It's time for Biden to admit that his policy of sancti0ns against Russia has failed. They haven't deterred Russia from pursuing a war of attrition against Ukraine. They have demonstrated the abject failure of using US sanctions to control the actions of other countries. They are a total lost cause now and in the future. That's the lesson of the war in Ukraine for the west.

Bloomberg reported:

Russia’s oil revenues are up 50% this year even as trade restrictions following the invasion of Ukraine spurred many refiners to shun its supplies, the International Energy Agency said.

Moscow earned roughly $20 billion each month in 2022 from combined sales of crude and products amounting to about 8 million barrels a day, the Paris-based IEA said in its monthly market report. 

Russian shipments have continued to flow even as the European Union edges towards an import ban, and international oil majors such as Shell Plc and TotalEnergies SE pledge to cease purchases. Asia has remained a keen customer, with China and India picking up cargoes no longer wanted in Europe.

The IEA, which advises major economies, kept its outlook for world oil markets largely unchanged in the report. Global fuel markets are tight and may face further strain in the months ahead as Chinese demand rebounds following a spate of new Covid lockdowns, it said. 

Reduced flows of Russian refined products such as diesel, fuel oil and naphtha have aggravated tightness in global markets, the agency noted. Stockpiles have declined for seven consecutive quarters, with reserves of so-called middle distillates at their lowest since 2008.

But for all the disruption, Moscow has continued to enjoy a financial windfall compared with the first four months of 2021. Despite the EU’s public censure of the Kremlin’s aggression, total oil export revenues were up 50% this year. 

The bloc remained the largest market for Russian exports in April, taking 43% of the country’s exports, the IEA said.

So where is this "world market" that is setting the price of oil? Is it on Wall Street? I'd like to have a word with whoever is in charge of this "world market." Lord knows the US produces enough oil to supply all the US' gas needs so why not take US oil production off the world market and just sell it to the American people at a reasonable price? Oh, I guess that's not how capitalism works. Ironic, isn't it, that a formerly communist country like Russia is now profiting from capitalist markets! So even if the US, Canada and Europe are having record inflation with recessions predicted in the near future, Biden won't take the sanctions off of Russian oil, and basically this is all for spite, all because he hates Putin so much. Biden has staked American prestige on fighting a proxy war with Russia based on the almighty dollar and the power it supposedly possesses over every financial transaction going on in the world. Problem is that all the sanctions on Russia have only proven the weakness and futility of using sanctions to achieve policy goals. Russia has demonstrated that the sanctions just don't work. They haven't deterred Russia in the least. China and India have taken up the slack in Russian oil purchases.

Besides that, what Biden fails to understand is that like the US, Russia's currency, the ruble, is a fiat currency. That means that unlike China, it is not pegged to the US dollar. Russia's central bank can print as many rubles as it wants without asking US permission. The US can of course do the same thing - print as many dollars as it wants except the limiting factor is inflation. So the US can't print dollars right now, but Russia can still print rubles. That means that Russia controls Russian investment in Russia and Russian control of internal consumer markets. Imported products come mainly from China, and China is Russia's friend. Russia is demanding payment for its gas in rubles rather than dollars, and this supports the value of the ruble as a convertible currency just as Nixon's demand that the Saudis price their oil in dollars supported the value of the dollar and made the dollar the world's reserve currency.

All this boils down to the fact that Russia is in the driver's seat with respect to the war in Ukraine. It's hard to see how the unending supply of western weapons is sufficient to win the war for Ukraine now that the policy of sanctions has failed. Demonizing Putin is not a policy that is likely to have an effect on the war one way or other. Putin still has a lot of friends in the world and US inflation, while being primarily a function of sanctions on Russian oil, is also dependent on the supply chain of products coming from China, Russia's friend. Biden should be careful about whom he demonizes. After demonizing MBS, he's now about to get back in bed with him and the Saudis. Biden's Build Back Better policy could have helped the American people, and even now could fight inflation, but alas, after promising that it would be passed "in tandem" with the bipartisan infrastructure bill, it never was. What up with that?

Off the Top of My Head

Russia Stands to Profit From Global Warming

by John Lawrence

With half the Arctic coastline, Russia is in a position to dominate the Arctic region as sea ice disappears. Ships will soon be able to sail directly across the top of the world, bringing new commercial, political, and economic opportunities for the Arctic region, while substantially reducing transit times between Asia and Europe by up to a third compared with taking the Suez Canal. Also there is $1 trillion worth of precious metals and minerals under the ice, along with the biggest area of untapped petroleum deposits left on the planet. While the rest of the world suffers from global warming, Russia will profit from the opening of the Northern route across the Arctic region and a wealth of natural resources that it will be possible to extract. Siberia could become the world’s next breadbasket. Time magazine reports:

"The Russian government is already positioning itself as a net beneficiary of global warming, writing in its 2020 Arctic Strategy that “climate change contributes to the emergence of new economic opportunities.” With half the Arctic coastline under its control, it’s not hard to see why. Led by Rosatom, a state-owned nuclear technology and infrastructure enterprise, the country has invested approximately $10 billion to develop ports and other facilities along a 3,000 nautical-mile-long shipping lane that stretches from Murmansk, near the Finnish border, to the Bering Strait. The Northern Sea Route offers the shortest passage between Europe and Asia, shaving nearly two weeks off a journey around India, while saving fuel, limiting vessel wear and tear, and reducing emissions. The investments are already paying dividends. In 2010 international cargo shippers made only one full Northern Sea Route transit. In 2021 there were 71, according to Norway’s Nord University’s Centre for High North Logistics.

"Russia is building up its existing 40-strong icebreaking fleet by commissioning at least half a dozen nuclear-powered heavy icebreakers at a cost of $400 million each. When the first of the newest batch—the world’s biggest and most powerful, according to Russian officials—launched its maiden voyage in 2020, Russia hailed it as the start of a new era of Arctic dominance. In 2021, commercial tankers, equipped with special ice-hardened hulls, started transporting natural gas between Russia’s Arctic coast oil installations and Chinese ports in the middle of winter—a strategic advance that results in a timely lifeline for Moscow if European nations follow through on threats to cut off purchases of Russian gas because of the conflict in Ukraine. “The creation of a modern nuclear icebreaker fleet capable of ensuring regular year-round and safe navigation through the entire Northern Sea Route is a strategic task for our country,” said Vyacheslav Ruksha, head of Rosatom’s Northern Sea Route Directorate, in a statement."

The war in Ukraine may pale in significance compared to the climate change issues which Russia is in a position to exploit. While the rest of the world is trying to slow down climate change, Russia just may be trying to accelerate it. The more climate change the better according to them because it will make for an ice free Arctic, an ice free passage across the Arctic via the Northern Sea Route connecting Europe with Asia and the ability to extract trillions of dollars of natural resources. Part of the route goes very close to Nome, Alaska which could bring the US and Russia into direct military contact.

Because of the changes brought about by global warming, It makes it even more important to not make Russia a pariah nation but to bring it into the community of nations. The Northern Sea Route will bring Russia and China even closer together as China also profits from shorter shipping routes to Europe. Rather than helping to get the world off of fossil fuels, Russia will profit immensely from their continued use. They certainly will not look kindly on supplications to limit the exploitation of fossil fuels if the western world considers them to be a pariah nation. The lack of cooperation among major world powers or even major blocs of power would be enough to doom the earth to greenhouse gas oblivion which eventually would destroy Russia and China too although Russia would probably be the last nation to succumb.

Off the Top of My Head

How Are We Doing With Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

by John Lawrence

In 2009 President Obama pledged that the United States would cut carbon emissions “in the range of seventeen per cent by 2020". Let's see if the US succeeded. In 2009 the US produced 6772 million metric tons of greenhouse gas equivalents. In 2020 US totaled 5981 million metric tons of greenhouse gas equivalents. 17% of 6772 is 1151. So for Obama's pledge to be fulfilled greenhouse gas emissions for 2020 would have to have been about 5621 million metric tons. His pledge was almost but not quite fulfilled thanks to the fact that the pandemic decreased greenhouse gas emissions from 2019 to 2020 by 11%. In 2019 greenhouse gas emissions were 6571 million metric tons down only 3% from 2009! One might conclude that the pandemic was good for the environment, and also that Obama's pledge would not have been fulfilled except for the fact that so many cars were off the road due to the pandemic. More people worked remotely. This kept cars off the road. Going forward as many people who can work from home should continue to do so in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible. In addition conversion to electric vehicles needs to be done posthaste.

The Copenhagen climate conference of 2009 was widely considered a disaster since no country would commit to actual reductions of greenhouse gasses. The Guardian reported:

"The UN climate summit reached a weak outline of a global agreement in Copenhagen tonight, falling far short of what Britain and many poor countries were seeking and leaving months of tough negotiations to come.

"After eight draft texts and all-day talks between 115 world leaders, it was left to Barack Obama and Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, to broker a political agreement. The so-called Copenhagen accord "recognises" the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2C but does not contain commitments to emissions reductions to achieve that goal.

"American officials spun the deal as a "meaningful agreement", but even Obama said: "This progress is not enough."

"We have come a long way, but we have much further to go," he added."

At this point in time it seems like a fool's errand to get all the countries of the world to cooperate to save planet earth from becoming uninhabitable for our species at least. With war raging in Ukraine and the world lining up on one side or the other, all hope of cooperation seems lost especially when Russia, the second largest producer of fossil fuels, is widely considered a pariah. Getting nations like Russia whose economy is dependent on the production of fuels which produce greenhouse gasses to cooperate seemed a stretch even before war broke out. Production of fossil fuels means money is at stake as long as there is a market for them, and that market doesn't seem to be going away any time soon. In fact the war has uped the ante for increased production. China and India need energy and they are dependent on the consumption of coal and Russian oil. They will not be cooperative with wealthy western nations to diminish dependency on fossil fuels especially if there is little trust between east and west. It would take Jesus Christ Himself to bring all parties together in a mutually beneficial agreement to save earth from global warming. But I think that God has left it up to humanity to figure this out without divine intervention, and if the human species can't figure it out, it's one more species that will go extinct.

As US Funds Pentagon Bloat, China Investments in Green Energy Soar

A staff member charges an electric bus at a charging station on April 1, 2022 in Wuhan, Hubei Province of China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

In the first quarter of 2022, China is expected to take 65% of the global market in new-energy vehicles.

 

Juan Cole

April 8, 2022 by Informed Comment

China is beating the pants off the United States in the burgeoning new energy vehicle market, out-producing and out-selling America with regard to plug-in vehicles by a massive margin. Whereas the Chinese government is supporting this new industry, the US government is still subsidizing fossil fuels and is spending $728.5 billion a year on the Pentagon at a time when the US is not even at war. The result is bloated and problematic engines of destruction like the failed F-35.

In 2021, about 4 million EVs were produced around the world. That year, China made 57.4% of them.

In the first quarter of 2022, China is expected to take 65% of the global market in new-energy vehicles, according to Yang Yang at China Daily.

China exported about 500,000 new-energy cars in 2021, 2.6 times more than the previous year,. China's EV exports to Europe rose fivefold to 230,000 units write Akashi Kawakami, Yohei Muramatsu and Saki Shirai at Nikkei Asia.

You know whose EV exports to Europe did not increase five times in 2021? America's.

In contrast, the US automakers accounted for just 12% of global EV sales in 2021, Nikkei Asia says, Worse, the US lost market share in this sector compared to 2020. We're not only not at the forefront of this industry, we are falling behind.

The US Republican Party and their plus-one, Sen. Joe Manchin, are preventing the US from becoming the dominant automaker in the world in this decade by consistently shooting down the green energy and transportation provisions of the now-moribund Build Back Better bill backed by President Biden.

The major Chinese automaker BYD announced Sunday that it now no longer even produces gasoline-driven vehicles using internal combustion engines (ICE). The US looks increasingly like a backward, lumbering dinosaur in this new, green technological environment.

Inside China, EVs had been 6% of new vehicle purchases at the beginning of 2021, but skyrocketed to 22% by the end of last year. That is an increase of 1.3% a month every month, Yang points out.

In absolute numbers, in January 2021, China sold 173,000 new energy cars. In January, 2022, 372,615 new plug-in vehicles were registered. That is more than double—115%.

This are incredible numbers.

In 2021, about 4 million EVs were produced around the world. That year, China made 57.4% of them. This year its market share is increasing significantly.

Chinese firms are aggressively invading formerly Japanese-dominated car markets such as Thailand, Nikkei Asia says. The country's largest producer of automobiles, SAIC Motor, sells its MG EP new-energy car in Thailand for 30% less than the price of a Nissan Leaf EV.

---

© 2021 Juan Cole

Juan Cole

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His newest book, "Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires" was published in 2020. He is also the author of  "The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East" (2015) and "Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East" (2008).  He has appeared widely on television, radio, and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. 

Off the Top of My Head

Two Contradictions in the Narrative About the War

by John Lawrence

1) That Saudi Arabia is a good friend. Then why do they refuse to pump more oil to relieve the gas crisis? 2) That it's a war between democracy and autocracy. Then why is the world's largest democracy, India, on the side of Russia? Let's take #1 first. If Saudi Arabia is our great friend, they could end the gas crisis tomorrow simply by pumping more oil. This they refuse to do. So whose side are they on? For all the criticism of Putin as a butcher, we forget that Mohammed bin Salman, affectionately known as MBS, had Jamal Khasoggi butchered. Khashoggi, 59, was a Saudi citizen living in Northern Virginia and writing columns for The Washington Post that were often critical of the Saudi monarchy. He was killed during a visit to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018. His body was dismembered, and his remains have never been found. Then Donald Trump, defying Congress, proceeded to sell billions of dollars worth of weapons to the Saudis. Reuters reported:

"The Trump administration informed congressional committees that it will go ahead with 22 military sales to the Saudis, United Arab Emirates and Jordan, infuriating lawmakers by circumventing a long-standing precedent for congressional review of major weapons sales.

"Members of Congress had been blocking sales of offensive military equipment to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for months, angry about the huge civilian toll from their air campaign in Yemen, as well as human rights abuses such as the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at a Saudi consulate in Turkey."

I repeat whose side are they on, and what values do they and our vaunted "western values" have in common? But enough on the Saudis.

Let's take #2. India, I repeat, the world's largest democracy, is on the side of Russia. At least they have not sided with the US, NATO and the west even though they supposedly share our democratic values which are totally at odds with "autocratic values." The narrative that the war in Ukraine represents a war between democratic values and autocratic values is totally bogus. India has long been a purchaser of Russian military equipment and was an ally with Russian support in its war with Pakistan. India’s friendship with the then-Soviet Union became official in 1971, after the two countries signed a Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation. That year, the Soviets backed India in a war with Pakistan that ultimately led to the independence of Bangladesh. The US backed Pakistan. Now India is taking up the slack by buying more Russian oil, oil that isn't being sold to the western world which needs it badly to get gas prices back to normal. China is buying more Russian Ural crude oil as well.

As the world rallies to condemn Russia, India remains silent on the sideline. In addition to India some other countries siding with Russia or at least remaining neutral are China, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Belarus, Eritrea, North Korea, Vietnam, Libya, Algeria, South Africa, Angola, Morocco. Nearly half of all the countries that abstained from condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine at the U.N. General Assembly are in Africa, and many are reluctant to join sanctions against Russia. In fact, only 28 out of the 54 African countries (just over 51 percent) represented in the U.N. voted in favor of the resolution. So not all countries are willing to turn Putin into a pariah and Russia into a pariah state. Even South Africa, which has a parliamentary democracy and is a strategic partner of the United States, was not willing to condemn Putin.

However, the war ends, it is important for world peace and the fight against climate change, let alone globalized markets, that some sort of constructive alliance among all countries be enacted taking the security interests of all countries into account. The problem with NATO is that it didn't do that. In fact the expansion of NATO eastward rubbed Russia's nose in the fact that it had lost the Cold War. Some American leaders gloated over that fact. Instead Russia should have been accepted into the community of nations. If Finland right on Russia's border can remain nonaligned and neutral without threat of invasion, perhaps that would have been the best course for other nations on Russia's border as well.

 

Off the Top of My Head

China Takes Vaccine Mandates to a Whole New Level

by John Lawrence

If you think that it's a good idea to get the pandemic over ASAP, then you want everybody to get vaccinated. If you want the economy to get running full steam ahead, then you want everybody to get vaccinated. While in the US population, there is a lot of vaccine hesitancy thus prolonging the pandemic, in China, if you don't get vaccinated voluntarily, they'll hold you down and jab you whether you like it or not. In China the public good supersedes private good. People are free up until the point that their actions harm society as a whole! What a revolutionary idea! In the US people are free even if their actions or lack thereof harm society as a whole.  In the US there is lawsuit after lawsuit and court after court dealing with Joe Biden's mandates, and those mandates are very carefully nuanced. They certainly do not apply to every citizen. China says in effect to hell with this shit everybody needs to get vaccinated or else. No wishy washing around.

The LA Times reported:

"At the end of August, police in China’s Hunan province came to the home of Zhang Jianping. They questioned him about why he had not been vaccinated against COVID-19, and took him by car to a hospital.

"In a social media post that included photos and videos to back up his story, Zhang said he was very clear that he did not want to be immunized. “I am not informed. I do not consent,” he says he told the authorities. But they held down his arms and legs and forcibly injected him.

"According to Yaqiu Wang, the researcher at Human Rights Watch who saw Zhang’s post, the local police and healthcare officials were acting in response to President Xi Jinping’s call for the vaccination of 80% of the country’s population by the end of October. Even though the central government in Beijing says that “informed consent” is the rule and injections must be voluntary, Wang says many such complaints of compelled vaccination have appeared on social media."

Many Americans cry crocodile tears over forcing anyone to get vaccinated. But they didn't cry crocodile tears or file lawsuit after lawsuit when young men were drafted to go to war in World War 2. There was no arguing with the government when it came to war in those days. It was compulsory and mandated. Conscientious objectors were not well tolerated. But when it comes to public health and the prevention of more deaths from COVID, well everybody has an opinion and personal freedom dictates that everyone's opinion should be heard and tolerated even if it causes more death. To date about 780,000 Americans have died from COVID. 675,000 Americans died of the flu in 1918 about 10 times as many as died in World War 1. 405,000 Americans died in World War 2. So although participation in those wars was mandatory, we don't want to infringe on anyone's personal freedom to fight a war on COVID which has already claimed more American lives than either world war or the 1918 flu pandemic for which there was no vaccine!

What fools these mortals be! And then there's global warming. Finally, I ask you - which economy will be operating full speed first? Well, obviously, the one that rids itself of the pandemic first. The other one will be mired in COVID for the foreseeable future.

Off the Top of My Head

Don't Be Fooled: The Chinese Communist Party Has Taken Capitalism to a Whole New Level

by John Lawrence

In 2021, Forbes listed Beijing with the most billionaires at 100 people, followed by New York City with 99 billionaires, and Hong Kong in third place with 80 billionaires. Does this sound like communism? But it is not traditional capitalism either. China has eliminated poverty among its 1.5 billion people while traditionally capitalist countries like the US tolerate large rates of poverty and homelessness. In the US in 2020, there were 37.2 million people in poverty, approximately 3.3 million more than in 2019. There were also 580 million people homeless living on the streets in unsanitary conditions. This is the price we've been taught that Americans have to pay in order for us to live in a free capitalist country. So what is the difference between the US version of capitalism and the Chinese version? It is basically that the Chinese central government directs the tools of capitalism while in the US there is little or no government direction. Whatever any individual can devise as a way to make money is acceptable. In China the government directs capitalist entrepreneurialism and energy. So Chinese society is much more unified; American society is much more diverse.

Stability and cohesiveness is very important to the Chinese government and Chinese society in general. That's why dissidents are cracked down upon. Their attitude is why risk the great progress Chinese society has made and is making in order that a few people can speak freely and perhaps create a dissident movement which could bring it all down around their ears. Hence the crackdown in Hong Long. Hence the crackdown on the Uighurs. Xi fears that what happened to the Soviet Union could happen to China. It could fall apart. The US tolerates unlimited amounts of free speech with the result that the US is a very unstable society as witnessed by the January 6 insurrection. The US came very close to a ooup d'etat and an overthrow of the elected government. The US definition of freedom is leading to a society which maximizes freedom at the expense of stability and cohesiveness while the Chinese limit freedom in the interests of stability and cohesiveness. Which model is better? The world is watching.

Perhaps there is a middle ground between Chinese authoritarianism and US anarchy. Is this the social welfare democracies of Scandinavia? Perhaps. While the US has divided itself into 2 tribes at total odds with each other, China has become not only very prosperous but they are all, for the most part, on the same page. They are unified while the US is divided. Perhaps China has overdone the limitation of individual freedom, but most Chinese would probably trade off some loss of freedom for the huge increase in prosperity that the average Chinese is experiencing. Would Americans trade off some loss of freedom in order to get out of the malaise they are experiencing? Even though there are more rich Chinese than rich Americans at least in terms of the relative numbers of billionaires, there are no poor Chinese while the economic divide in the US grows bigger with every passing day.

The question Americans have to ask themselves is is a society teetering on the brink of collapse worth the American definition of freedom or could perhaps a slightly less free society, say one with a corresponding ethic of social responsibility, lead to a better society in terms of a better and more humane quality of life for the greatest number of citizens? Has America taken the concept of individual freedom too far at the expense of social cohesiveness?

Off the Top of My Head

Problems of American Democracy - Part 1

by John Lawrence

When my father was a high school teacher in Highland Park, NJ, he taught a course - Problems in American Democracy. So I'm hopefully carrying on a family tradition by trying to elucidate these problems which, to put it mildly, are probably much different today than they were in 1941! The big problem today is that so many people are detached from reality in terms of being in touch with what the real problems are. One of the real problems is climate change, how to get from here to net zero carbon emissions before planet earth becomes uninhabitable. Another real problem is homelessness and affordability of housing. Another real problem is the 80 million refugees in the world. Another real problem is for Americans to be concerned about world problems and not just confine their attention to what goes on inside the borders of the US.  Another real problem is physical and social infrastructure which will be addressed by Biden's Build Back Better bills. But the biggest problem of all, as I see it, is that elections every 2 years make continuity of direction for the US impossible especially when the 2 parties have become diametrically opposed. So today we have the reality that the American government could possibly swing back and forth between Trumpism and what we might call Bidenism. Back and forth between ignorance and enlightenment. To boot the American people are no longer tuned in to authoritative news sources. Too many are only tuned into social media which is greatly responsible for cultivating the divide between two American tribes - the no nothings and the do somethings.

People in the Trump camp could care less about voting for or against their own economic interests. You would think a lot of them would benefit from the initiatives that the Democrats have put forward. But either they are ignorant of them or are willing to vote against their interests just because of the tribe they belong to or out of spite. They are completely irrational. Rationality is not even on the table. Their hate and their spite rules everything as far as they are concerned. They are willing to go down numerous rabbit holes and believe all kinds of conspiracy theories because critical thinking or a concern about human welfare, their own and others, has no place in their consciousness. Their concern and understanding remains at the level of symbols like the American flag. A deeper understanding or analysis of situations is beyond them. What's more this misinformed and ignorant part of the population is significant in number and can easily be responsible for electing ignorant and conspiracy theory infused lawmakers who will do whatever is necessary to pander to their constituents. Thus America as a nation could swerve back and forth between ignorance and rationality as exemplified by Trump's withdrawal from Obama's climate initiatives like the Paris accords and Biden's reinstating them.

Contrast the instability of American democracy with the Chinese system of government in which stability is of utmost importance. They don't want anyone rocking the boat including tennis stars. While this heavy handedness does curtail some of the aspects of western notions of freedom, it preserves the priorities of the long term interests of China itself which has been going in what most experts concede is a very positive direction. According to the World Bank: "Since China began to open up and reform its economy in 1978, GDP growth has averaged almost 10 percent a year, and more than 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty. There have also been significant improvements in access to health, education, and other services over the same period." China has had the goal of eliminating poverty altogether and claims as of 2021 to have done so. According to a Chinese source which admittedly may be biased: "Through continuous efforts, the final 98.99 million impoverished rural residents in China had all been lifted out of poverty, and all 832 impoverished counties and 128,000 villages had been removed from the poverty list by the end of 2020. The strategy of targeted poverty alleviation is China's strongest "weapon" in its final battle against poverty, and a major innovation in the theory and practice of poverty reduction. China's success in poverty alleviation has proven that the problem of poverty, in essence, is how the people should be treated: the people-centered philosophy is the fundamental driving force behind this cause." Independent confirmation of these claims is unclear. The World Bank which is an unbiased source essentially agrees with the Chinese government at to its elimination of poverty: "In 1990 there were more than 750 million people in China living below the international poverty line - about two-thirds of the population. By 2012, that had fallen to fewer than 90 million, and by 2016 - the most recent year for which World Bank figures are available - it had fallen to 7.2 million people (0.5% of the population). So clearly, even in 2016 China was well on the way to reaching its target. This suggests that overall, 745 million fewer people were living in extreme poverty in China than there were 30 years ago. World Bank figures do not take us to the present day, but the trend is certainly in line with the Chinese government's announcement."

So what weapons does the US have in its arsenal for the alleviation of poverty and homelessness? Not many. Biden's Build Back Better plan will help, but the US in recent years has been more interested in funding weapons systems built by the military-industrial complex, weapons that destroy rather than weapons that build. It's only "progressives" that even care about solving the problems of poverty and homelessness in America or in doing something about climate change or about the refugee problem in the world and not just at our southern border. I note that not one Republican voted for Biden's Build Back Better bill in the House. Instead Republican leader Kevin McCarthy went on an 8 hour diatribe in a futile attempt to prevent the bill's passage.

Off the Top of My Head

Use the National Guard to Free Up the Supply Chain

by John Lawrence

We are 80,000 truck drivers short. We should use the National Guard on an emergency basis to drive trucks to get the contents of those containers out of port and on their way to consumers. Then there will be room for the waiting container ships to offload their contents. Why not? The National Guard has been used in other emergency situations. Why not this one? Marx theorized that the "industrial reserve army" was a necessary part of capitalism, and was composed of out of work people looking for work. This kept the cost of labor down. Only now the reverse situation is in effect. There are more jobs than people looking for them. Therefore, labor is in the driver's seat. Capital needs to pay labor more in order to get them to work. However, at the present time, although wages have come up somewhat, they have not come up enough to attract the needed truck drivers back into the work force. This will all eventually be ironed out as self-driving trucks which are already on the roads will increase substantially.

While the US has been sitting on its duff investing in the world's biggest military, China has been investing in infrastructure - ports and container ships in particular. According to Wikipedia:

"In 1961 China established a state-run maritime shipping company and subsequently signed shipping agreements with many countries, laying the foundation for developing the country's ocean transport. That organization developed into the present-day China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company (COSCO). The Chinese government also invested heavily in water transport infrastructure, constructing new ports and rebuilding and enlarging older facilities. The number of container units handled by Chinese ports in 2011 reached more than 150 million. The country also manufactures 90% of the world's containers. The throughput of cargo and containers at China's ports has been the largest in the world for the past five years, with an annual growth rate of 35%."

China also manufactures more than 80 percent of the world’s ship-to-shore cranes, and own seven of the ten busiest ports in the world (including Hong Kong). The message is clear. While the US invested in battleships, China invested in container ships. The goods in those container ships are mainly manufactured in China. The US is addicted to them. Foreign demand for Chinese-made products has remained strong — both by companies’ accounts and official data. The customs agency said in the first half of this year, exports to the European Union rose 35.9% from a year ago to $233 billion, while those to the U.S. climbed 42.6% to $252.86 billion. The handwriting (and handwringing) is on the wall. The US can't continue to base its economy on a military-industrial complex while not producing the goods the American consumer economy wants to buy. By default China has sold many of the consumer goods into the ravenous American consumer economy which is 70% of the American economy while the US has invested in nothing but war. Now as the US has withdrawn from forever wars, the military is trying to gin up a Cold War with China. It won't work. Americans depend on China for consumer goods and get very mad when they're not readily available forcing prices up as we've seen from the container ship debacle.

The US has ceded leadership in many areas including ports, shipping and infrastructure while it has conducted its losing wars. Spending $300 million a day in Afghanistan only enriched defense contractors and corrupt politicians. With all that money being spent, today most Afghanis are simply begging for food. If that money had been spent on the Afghani people instead, today Afghani citizens would be enjoying a robust economy and a decent way of life. All that money was poured down a rat hole. Wasted money and time has only let China become the leader in the manufacture and transport of consumer goods. Climate change demands that the US and China cooperate - not compete - with each other. We need adults in the US government, and the only adults in the room are Democrats. Republicans have gone down the rabbit hole of Trumpism.

Off the Top of My Head

While General Milley Seeks to Bolster Pentagon Budget, Citing Threats from China, Cooperation Between the US and China on Climate Change Might Negate His Playbook

by John Lawrence

General Milley is out to justify his $200,000 a year paycheck by encouraging Congress and the American people not to cut the Pentagon budget. When the fate of the earth is at stake from global warming, Milley is more concerned about stoking tensions with China. Fortunately, despite the new Cold War some are trying to create, the US and China are actually cooperating on climate change. In an article, "US-China deal on emissions welcomed by global figures and climate experts," the Guardian points out that at the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow, progress was made in resolving these tensions:

"An unexpected agreement between the US and China to work together on cutting emissions has been broadly welcomed by leaders and climate experts.

"The world’s two biggest emitters appeared to put aside their differences at the Cop26 climate summit and on Wednesday unveiled a joint declaration that would see close cooperation on emissions cuts that scientists say are needed in the next 10 years to stay within 1.5C.

"The agreement calls for “concrete and pragmatic” regulations in decarbonisation, reducing methane emissions and fighting deforestation, Chinese climate envoy Xie Zhenhua said in Glasgow.

"The two countries will revive a working group that will “meet regularly to address the climate crisis and advance the multilateral process, focusing on enhancing concrete actions in this decade,” the joint declaration said."

"Advancing the Multilateral process"? General Milley doesn't want to hear that. It means cuts in the Pentagon's budget. His job is to stoke fears of China's prowess. The article continues:

"A US-China bilateral agreement in 2014 gave a huge push to the creation of the historic Paris accord the following year, but that cooperation stopped with the Trump administration, which pulled America out of the pact.

“While this is not a gamechanger in the way the 2014 US-China climate deal was, in many ways it’s just as much of a step forward given the geopolitical state of the relationship,” said Thom Woodroofe, an expert in US-China climate talks. “It means the intense level of US-China dialogue on climate can now begin to translate into cooperation.”

"EU climate policy chief Frans Timmermans agreed the pact gave room for hope. “It shows … that the US and China know this subject transcends other issues. And it certainly helps us here at Cop26 to come to an agreement,” Timmermans told Reuters."

Yes, China and the US must transcend "other issues" like fighting each other in order to cooperate and save the earth from being devoured by climate change thus bringing the human experiment involving future generations to a disastrous end.

General Milley is right about the "fundamental change to the character of war" since the period preceding World War II, citing new widely available technologies like drones and artificial intelligence and the rise of China as a superpower. US News reports, ""Milley is trying to sustain the case for what he considers adequate levels of defense spending," says Michael O'Hanlon, director of research at The Brookings Institution. "But he is also trying to keep pressure on the Pentagon and services to innovate and to avoid fixation on previous types of weapons, forces and operational concepts.""

Countering these new technologies of war will not require new billion dollar airplanes and battle ships. The Pentagon budget, therefore, should be reduced as these new technologies are developed in order to remain vigilant against modern era threats to the US and our allies. It's hard to make the case against China as a major threat to the US when the Chinese defense budget in 2020t was about $196 billion. America's, on the other hand, was a hearty $778 billion, about 4 times as great. Cooperation with China on climate change and other issues might actually have the salubrious effect of bringing both country's defense budgets down. Could cooperation on a common enemy, climate change, actually bring about peace on earth?

 

Off the Top of My Head

Cooperation Among Virtual Enemies on Climate Change Next to Impossible

by John Lawrence

Can we stop fighting as the human race has been doing for millenia because we have a common problem that calls for cooperation: climate change? The human race and in particular nation states have never been able to cooperate on a world wide basis. What's more almost every aspect of contemporary society needs to be changed in order for planet earth to be rescued. For instance, the third largest greenhouse gas polluter after the US and China is cattle. Yes, cattle worldwide emit more carbon dioxide equivalents in the form of methane than any country on earth with the exception of the US and China. We should all stop eating beef immediately. How likely is that to happen? And then there's cooperation between the US and China, between the US and Russia. We can't chastise and sanction these countries and then expect them to cooperate with the western world when it comes to climate change.  Time magazine reported:

"From his first months as Secretary of State under Obama, Kerry set out to build a bridge to China on climate while tensions festered on other matters, putting the issue at the center of the relationship. In 2014, in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Barack Obama, with Kerry by his side, announced agenda-setting plans to cut emissions, effectively inviting other countries to get on the same page. On the back of Kerry’s climate diplomacy, Obama and Xi feted each other a year later at a state dinner in Washington—perhaps the zenith of relations between the two countries in recent years. In the early days of the Biden Administration, longtime watchers of international climate politics speculated about whether Kerry would try to repeat that effort. Kerry told me that from the outset he knew that wouldn’t be possible—the Trump presidency had spoiled the well, and, while less vociferous, Biden hasn’t sought to placate China. “It’s a very, very different time now,” Kerry says. “It’s a very different set of political circumstances.”

"Instead, he sought a subtler form of rapprochement, traveling to China in April, becoming the first senior U.S. official to visit since the start of the pandemic. His message, he says, was to create a lane for climate collaboration amid the iciness. The reception was a sharp contrast from the jubilant atmosphere at the state dinner six years earlier. The two parties released a joint statement, agreeing to cooperate but not much more. Then in September, after making the 7,000-mile trip to Tianjin, Kerry encountered even more tense feelings. Despite the long journey, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi only met with him virtually, and said that climate collaboration could not be an “oasis” away from the other rifts in the relationship. “If the oasis is surrounded by desert, sooner or later the oasis will also become desert,” he said."

The crucial points are "Trump spoiled the well" and “If the oasis is surrounded by desert, sooner or later the oasis will also become desert”. Trump set the world back years when it comes to climate change. What will he do if elected President in 2024? The Chinese Foreign Minister's point is that you can't seek cooperation on climate change while at the same time fomenting a chilly relationship verging on a Cold War which the Pentagon is trying to do. For that matter how can we rely on China to produce the major amount of consumer goods for the US while trying to give China orders about how it is to conduct itself on the world stage. It just doesn't compute. You can't compartmentalize a relationship to that extent.

The other point is that how can the rest of the world believe what we say about the urgency of doing something about climate change which entails sacrifice while at the same time holding open the possibility that a climate change denier might be elected President in 2024?

Off the Top of My Head

The Dumbing Down of the American Electorate

by John Lawrence

It seems that about half the American people want rational, competent government which advances the interests of the American people and plays a constructive role on the world stage. The other half wants a government based on their pet peeves. They are amenable to being swayed by conspiracy theories and misinformation. The former are mainly Democrats; the latter, Republicans. This is nowhere better exemplified than the 2016 election in which competence and experience in the form of Hillary Clinton was defeated by resentment and lies in the form of Donald Trump. In contrast to China which promotes the best and brightest to high positions in its government, the US form of democracy allows for politicians to appeal to the lowest common denominator which has no knowledge or information about anything beyond the worship of symbols like the American flag. This is clear from the visuals of the January 6 insurrection in which the American flag was displayed ad infinitum as if that is what made these people true patriots who could demand that their hero, Donald Trump, should be President in defiance of every provision of American constitutional democracy.

Republican politicians pander to this group of no nothings and stoke resentment against intelligence and rationality which they define as elitism. Joe Six Pack is easily swayed to vote for someone like himself, a high school graduate who flunked civics class if he was even required to take a civics class. American history was taught from the point of view of white Europeans with hardly a mention of the lands stolen from Native Americans nor the travails of African American slaves who provided the labor to build most of the country and make white southern plantation owners rich. The diaspora of southern Confederate attitudes to much of the rest of the country other than the coasts has provided the grist for Republican politicians to convince this diaspora to vote against their own economic interests and to fully indulge their anger and resentment against those they call elitists who have much more knowledge, education and intelligence while at the same time really smart lawyers and operatives work to advance the interests of the very rich unbeknownst to the Joe Six Packs who voted for them.

When half the country votes based on conspiracy theories which the Republican party amplifies, what is the solution? More education for one thing. The January 6 insurrectionists sent to jail for their crimes need to be reeducated. They should be required to take a course on contemporary issues of American society and also a course on World Problems. Many Americans are so insular that they never even stop to consider what's going on in the rest of the world. It's not enough to start educating children; many adults need to be reeducated. If this smacks of what the Chinese are doing to the Uighurs, it bears the similarity in the sense that many American adults do need to be reeducated, and their sentences should require it because many of them have been miseducated in southern schools which elevate states' rights to a primary position in American democracy. Problems of American Democracy, a course my father taught at Highland Park High School, should be required from kindergarten through college. The American people need to become more sophisticated as citizens if democracy is to have a future. Otherwise, Republican politicians will continue to pander to the least common denominator stoking their resentments while stealing their futures unbeknownst to them. Competence, intelligence and good hearts will continue to be defeated. Republican politicians' skill set consists of getting their followers to vote against their own interests while pandering to their resentments. Democratic politicians, for the most part, actually want to help the American people and not just the ultra rich.

When one country promotes smart people to high positions in government, and another country is prone to electing people based on lies and conspiracy theories, which country do you think will prevail on the world stage? One party in this country is acting intelligently trying to advance the interests of the average American while the other party does everything in its power to stands in its way while basing its appeal on misinformation, lies and conspiracy theories. How did democracy ever descend to this level?

Off the Top of My Head

The Shortcomings of Democracy

by John Lawrence

What other countries are concerned about is the specter of Trump coming back in 2024 and reversing everything Biden will have accomplished specially with regard to climate change. An American government no matter how well intentioned and competent cannot maintain itself in power for a long time. It can be replaced by a malevolent and incompetent one in relatively short order. It almost makes you look on other forms of government with envy. Angela Merkel was in power in Germany for 16 years. She was a steady hand on the tiller. Trump tried to rip the tiller out of the ship and he may come back to try and do it again. It's not only China which has long term stability, but China has been pretty consistent in delivering for the Chinese people over a fairly long term. Their government is stable no matter what else you want to say about it. They also promote the best and the brightest to high positions in the government. Trump put in place agency heads that were dedicated to destroying the agencies they were in charge of and many were incompetent political cronies to boot.

Coherence, cohesion - these are values that do not apply to the American people. The American people are freedom fanatics, freedomaholics. In most other advanced societies the value of freedom is balanced by the value of social responsibility. When freedom is way out of proportion with other values, you have a society that can come apart at the seams which is what is happening to American society. The American system engenders a two party system by its very nature, and almost inevitably it develops into two parties which are diametrically opposed to each other. A parliamentary system of government gives rise to  many parties, and that is less likely to devolve into a major societal divisions.

The other thing that contributes to the divisiveness of American society is the American predilection for guns. The supposed right of every American to own and use a gun creates a situation where angry people with a penchant for freedom are more likely to use their gun if they don't get their own way. If they sense that some people are on the other side of a divided society, they feel justified and entitled to use their guns to demand that society conform to their values much in the some way that a divided society resorted eventually to a civil war in America's past. Right now militias and paramilitary units roam the streets similar to the situation in Germany that predated World War II. If a society can't control or prohibit the private accumulation of guns, if it even encourages it, nothing good can come from this situation. All the preliminary conditions are in play for eventual uprisings which, if organized and controlled from above, can have disastrous consequences for civil society.

Off the Top of My Head

If Future Generations Are to Be Saved From the Ravages of Climate Change, the US and China Must Cooperate

by John Lawrence

What is more important: habitability of the planet or who "owns" Taiwan? Hawaii is 2500 miles from the US mainland; Taiwan is 100 miles from the Chinese mainland. Yet the US Pentagon is willing to have a war over Taiwan thus precluding any cooperation over climate change thus dooming human civilization on earth. Make sense? We should adopt a reverse Monroe Doctrine and let China "own" Taiwan. What would that mean? Basically a few politicians would lose their jobs. That's all. The Taiwanese would go on making millions of dollars just as the mainland Chinese have. Their lifestyles would not change. What would they have to give up? Basically, nothing. But conservative forces in the US want a Cold War with China. This precludes cooperation on climate change. The US and China are the two biggest greenhouse gas polluters. The US has polluted much longer than has China which has only developed rapidly in only the last 40 years or so. Most of the carbon in the atmosphere is due to US emissions.

The Monroe Doctrine was a United States policy that opposed European colonialism in the Americas. It argued that any intervention in the politics of the Americas by foreign powers was a potentially hostile act against the United States. It has been used to keep foreign powers out of the western hemisphere. The argument has been extended to mean that the US has exclusive rights to what goes on anywhere near its shores. Yet the US "owns" Hawaii, 2500 miles from the mainland US. It also "owns" three Pacific territories: the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and American Samoa. Are the Chinese entitled to their own version of the Monroe Doctrine? If so, the western world should keep its nose out of concerns over Taiwan and any other issues regarding territory close to the Chinese mainland like the South China Sea. Cooperation with regard to climate change demands it. If we win this battle over what is legitimate Chinese territory but lose the war on climate change, all is lost not just for the US but for all peoples on the planet. We need to let nationalism subside.

Would we let a Russian affiliate control an island 100 miles off our shore? Cuba is a good example. It's about the same distance off our shore that Taiwan is from mainland China. Yet a nuclear war was almost fought to eliminate Russian influence in Cuba again citing the Monroe Doctrine. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Let the UN broker a deal to let China peacefully take control of Taiwan. I don't think anything much will change either for the mainland Chinese or the Taiwanese Chinese. If situations like these can be resolved peacefully, the US and China together can lead the world away from Armageddon, away from a fiery hellish demise caused by humans' inability to get along. Cooperation is paramount not only for peaceful relations among the various  nations and peoples of the earth, but crucially for the very existence of the human species.

Off the Top of My Head

Why Coal is So Hard to Get Rid Of

by John Lawrence

To forestall climate change we must get rid of coal yet coal is the cheapest and most abundant source of energy for power generating plants worldwide. China is building coal fired generating plants in India as India develops into a middle class country. As COP26 aims to banish coal. Asia is building hundreds of power plants to burn it. Millions of tons of coal each year will be imported to fuel a giant power plant that will burn the fuel for at least 30 years to generate power for the more than 70 million people that live in India's Tamil Nadu state. This plant is one of nearly 200 coal-fired power stations under construction in Asia, including 95 in China, 28 in India and 23 in Indonesia, according to data from U.S. nonprofit Global Energy Monitor (GEM). While the US is primarily responsible for the billions of tons of carbon dioxide already present in the atmosphere, developing countries don't want to hinder their emerging development since they aren't the ones that contributed most of the CO₂ so far. Asia is home to 60% of the world's population and about half of global manufacturing, and coal's use is growing rather than shrinking as rapidly developing countries seek to meet booming demand for power.

Reuters reported:

"In 2020, more than 35% of the world's power came from coal, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy. Roughly 25% came from natural gas, 16% from hydro dams, 10% from nuclear and 12% from renewables like solar and wind. This year, coal demand is set for a new record, driving prices to all-time highs and contributing to a worldwide scramble for fuel.

"Record coal demand is contributing to a rapid rise in emissions in 2021 after a fall last year, when restrictions on movement for billions of people to slow the pandemic caused fuel use to plummet. While some of the new coal plants under construction will replace older, more polluting stations, together they will add to total emissions. "The completion of the capacity that is already under construction in these countries will drive up coal demand and emissions," said Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst with the Centre for Research on Energy and Clear Air.

"The carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the new plants alone will be close to 28 billion tonnes over their 30-year lifespans, according to GEM."

While India will continue to pollute with coal, their emissions will be dwarfed by China, the top global coal miner, consumer and emitter, whose leader, President Xi Jinping, is not expected to attend COP26. More than 1,000 coal plants are in operation, almost 240 planned or already under construction. Together, coal plants in the world's second-largest economy will emit 170 billion tons of carbon in their lifetime - more than all global CO₂ emissions between 2016 and 2020.

The solution is that the advanced countries like the US have to spend the money to rapidly convert Asia's fossil fuel energy plants to non polluters. Wind and solar are not enough to fill the bill. In order to get off fossil fuels quickly, nuclear power is the only feasible solution, and these plants must be funded and constructed in Asia by the US and the European Union. Bill Gates had plans to build an advanced digital nuclear test plant in China which were nixed by the Trump administration which was a global warming denier. What the rest of the developed world worries about is whether or not Trumpism will come back in the next election. If the earth is not to burn up from global warming, cooperation between the US and China is paramount. Yet the Pentagon continues to advocate for a Cold War with China, and even Biden's administration is ready to cast doubts warily on China. Yet there is no other way. We need to take resources away from the US military establishment which wants to keep itself in business by creating the pretext for war with China while turning China and Russia into pariahs and enemies of the western world. This is a huge mistake if we want our grandchildren to live on a habitable and sustainable planet.

Off the Top of My Head

The Good Things the Biden Administration is Doing That You Never Hear About

by John Lawrence

Even CNN goes on and on trying to create excitement over the differences withing the Democratic Party between the Moderates and the Progressives without talking about 3 great things the Biden Administration has done recently. They are

(1) EPA will slash the use and production of hydrofluorocarbons which one of the most toxic of greenhouse gasses — often found to be leaking from U.S. supermarket freezers — by 85 percent over the next 15 years; (2) the US will end its involvement in the war in Yemen and (3) the US has recently exchanged prisoners with China involving Huawei Technologies’ chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou. Instead of touting these very significant accomplishments, CNN goes on and on trying to create excitement over the divisions within the Democratic party and Biden's lowering approval ratings. So I say to CNN: so what, who cares? Approval ratings mean Nada. Any President is presented with situations not of his own making and the government agencies tasked with responding to said situations don't always do it in the best possible fashion. Case in point: the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The significant point is that he ended it. Let's move on.

The New York Times reported:

A top executive and daughter of the founder of the Chinese tech giant Huawei was arrested on Saturday in Canada at the request of the United States, in a move likely to escalate tensions between the two countries at a delicate moment.

The arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer, unfolded on the same night that President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China dined together in Buenos Aires and agreed to a 90-day trade truce. The two countries are set to begin tense negotiations in hopes of ending a trade war that has been pummeling both economies.

So Biden is still unwinding some of Trump's self-inflicted messes. At a time when cooperation with China is imperative in order to prevent the worst exigencies of global warming, arresting a top Chinese executive was not likely to help. Releasing her is.

The Washington Post reported:

The Biden administration finalized its first new climate rule Thursday, slashing the use of powerful greenhouse gases widely used in home refrigerators and air conditioners and often found to be leaking from U.S. supermarket freezers.

The regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency establishes a program to cut the use and production of chemicals known as hydrofluorocarbons by 85 percent over the next 15 years.

Curbing these super-pollutants is a rare climate issue with broad bipartisan support. When emitted, the chemicals can warm the planet at a rate hundreds to thousands of times higher than carbon dioxide. The new rule implements a law passed by Congress last year.

White House officials said the new rule tackles global warming while supporting jobs to manufacture new alternatives.

The Biden administration is committed to doing good work on precventing and mitigating cimate cange. This is just another example the likes of which frequently go unbreported in the mass media because it doesn't creat the necessary excitement to support all their advertisers of which CNN has tons who come on the tube for 4 and a half minutes after every few minutes of "news." CNN must be making a forune and it show since they have money to support the making of CNN "films" on a weekly basis.

Common Dreams reported:

Anti-war groups on Thursday welcomed the U.S. House's passage of an amendment to the annual defense bill that would cut off the flow to Saudi Arabia of U.S. logistical support and weapons "that are bombing civilians" in Yemen. "This is BIG," tweeted the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) following the afternoon 219-207 vote, which fell largely along party lines, with just 11 Democrats voting "no." At issue was Rep. Ro Khanna's (D-Calif.) amendment to H.R. 4350, the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It's one of dozens of amendments to the NDAA under consideration by the House this week. According to Khanna, the vote "sent a clear message to the Saudis: end the bombing in Yemen and lift the blockade." Speaking on the House floor Wednesday, he made a succinct case for why the measure is so needed.  Khanna said his amendment "would end all U.S. logistical support and transfer of spare parts for Saudi warplanes that are bombing Yemen, that are bombing schools, that are killing children, that are bombing civilians in the largest humanitarian crisis around the world."

Back in February Biden had ended at least some of the support for that war as reported by the New York Times:

It didn’t happen in 2016, after a Saudi jet had dropped American-made bombs on a funeral in the Yemeni capital, Sana, killing more than 140 people. It didn’t happen in 2018, after a Saudi jet hit a Yemeni school bus with an American-made bomb, killing 44 boys on a field trip. But on Thursday, nearly six years after Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies launched a punishing military intervention in the Arab world’s poorest country, President Biden announced that he was ending U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, including some arms sales. “This war has to end,” Mr. Biden said, calling it a “humanitarian and strategic catastrophe.”

Now the Democrat controlled Congress has finalized this. Trump, of course, was excited about the prospect of sales of weapons to Saudi Arabia. He welcomed the influx of dollars into the US Treasury without caring a hoot about innocent Yemeni victims of the bombing with US made bombs. As an Uber driver I picked up once a Saudi pilot who was being trained over here. Now the Biden administration along with Democrats in Congress has put the kibosh on aiding and abeting Saudi Arabia in their nasty war. Bien has shown his dedication to peace and has made efforts to bring peace to the world in the recent prisoner exchange with China and with doing what he can to end war in Yemen.

Off the Top of My Head

Good on President Biden for Using His Visit to the Flood Zones to Give a Tutorial on Climate Change

by John Lawrence

Previously, after a natural disaster no one mentioned climate change. There was much bemoaning and commiserating, but Biden took a different tack. He lectured the American people about climate change and how it contributed to the disasters that had befallen the unfortunate. What's more he said they would continue and get worse unless we undertake to do something about it. No more attributing the disasters to one in 500 year events. That language is totally out the window. No more statements like "I've never seen anything like this my entire life." Get used to it. People are going to see a lot more of these climate disasters from now on. As President Biden said, we can't prevent these disasters from happening on a regular basis, but we can do something about them getting a lot worse. Meanwhile the fossil fuel industry is running ads on TV about how wonderful the oil and gas industry is, and they are lobbying their evil little hearts out to get politicians on their side.

“The nation and the world are in peril,” President Biden said after touring storm damage in New York and Jersey. “And that’s not hyperbole. That is a fact.”

"Folks — and we have to take some bold action now to tackle the accelerating effects of climate. If we don’t act — now I’m going to be heading, as Chuck knows, as the senator knows, I’m going to be heading from here to Glasgow, Scotland, for the COP meeting [United Nations Climate Change Conference], which is all the nations of the world getting together to decide what we are going to do about climate change. And John Kerry, the former secretary of state, is leading our effort, putting it together.

"We are determined, we are determined that we are going to deal with climate change and have zero emissions, net emissions by 2050. By 2020 [sic] (he meant 2030), make sure all our electricity is zero emissions. We’re going to be able to do these things. But we’ve got to move. We’ve got to move. And we’ve got to move the rest of the world. It’s not just the United States of America.

"And so, folks, this summer alone, communities with over 100 million Americans — 100 million Americans call home — have been struck by extreme weather. One in every three Americans has been victimized by severe weather. The hurricanes along the Gulf, the East Coast, up through this community. And I saw the human and physical cost firsthand, as I said, in Louisiana.

"And, folks, the evidence is clear. Climate change poses an existential threat to our lives, to our economy, and the threat is here, it’s not going to get any better. The question: Can it get worse? We can stop it from getting worse.

"And when I talk about building back better — and Chuck is fighting for my program, for our program on the Hill — when I talk about building back better, I mean you can’t build to what it was before this last storm. You got to build better so that if the storm occurred again, there would be no damage. There would be.

"But that’s not going to stop us, though, because if we just do that, it’s just going to get worse and worse and worse. Because the storms are going to get worse and worse and worse. And so, folks, we’ve got to listen to the scientists and the economists and the national security experts. They all tell us this is code red.

"The nation and the world are in peril. And that’s not hyperbole. That is a fact. They’ve been warning us the extreme weather would get more extreme over the decade, and we’re living in it real time now."

Biden is telling it like it is. The American people are in for a lot more of these climate disasters, and we can't stop them immediately. It's going to take decades to get this problem under control, and that's only if we go full steam ahead by taking measures to get it under control. Meanwhile, there are measures which can be taken to mitigate the costs both human and financial from these climate disasters. People must move out of flood plains and areas prone to forest fires. We must underground utilities so that the power doesn't go out during hurricanes and wildfires. That goes for cell phones and cable TV too. People have to have secure means of communication even during a climate disaster. Building codes need to be upgraded. Water management needs to improve so that torrential rains do not just become runoff that turns into floods. That water is precious and needs to be transported to parts of the country that are in more or less perpetual drought. The power grid needs to be hardened. Transportation needs to be electrified. Power generation needs to use renewable sources, and advanced nuclear needs to be developed. Ways of making steel and concrete need to be developed that don't use fossil fuels and the methods of doing so need to be scaled up and spread throughout the whole world. Agriculture needs to be made organic and factory farms eliminated. It's not enough for the US and the developed world to do the right things. Green infrastructure must be developed and spread to the whole world. We must partner with China in a Green Belt and Road Initiative. They are very advanced in building infrastructure throughout the world. While the US has been fighting needless wars, China has been building infrastructure albeit not green infrastructure. From now on coal fired power plants in India and China need to be eliminated and replaced with renewable energy and advanced nuclear power generation.

Off the Top of My Head

Why Were There Tens of Thousands of American Citizens and Foreign Nationals in Afghanistan?

by John Lawrence

There were only 2500 American military and 50,000 American citizens? What's wrong with this picture? And now a ragtag group is taking over the whole country having defeated the world's mightiest military force? What's wrong with this picture? This is totally F-ed up. I assume that all these civilians were there to make money. Maybe there were a few who genuinely wanted to help the Afghan people, but sending in the US military to facilitate that is not the way to do it. The US should be providing aid to people in the world that have less than we do. When you have a hammer, it seems like every problem is a nail. When you have the world's mightiest military every problem seems to have a solution by sending in the military to solve it. Having 50,000 American citizens in a war zone is completely nuts. and then the only way to extract ourselves from the situation is to have a massive, chaotic airlift as we are experiencing now?

So now Biden has at least established the principal that the US military doesn't have to remain forever in every country it invades. But that seems to be the MO. There are almost 40,000 troops in Germany, 28,000 in Korea and 55,000 in Japan. The military of the United States is deployed in most countries around the world, with between 150,000 to 200,000 of its active-duty personnel stationed outside the United States and its territories. The US military maintains close to 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad. So is it even possible for the world to function without the presence of the US military in practically every country? What if they just all were withdrawn? Would the world's economic and political structure, such that it is, completely collapse?

Every empire in world history has collapsed due to its being overextended. The Roman Empire which lasted for about 1000 years (compared to the US' less than 100) collapsed because it extended itself into northern Europe instead of being content with just controlling lands around he Mediterranean. While the US vision of the world is that the US military will effectively occupy almost every country with the notable exceptions of China, Russia, Iran and now eventually Afghanistan, China's vision seems to be its Belt and Road initiative which ties many countries of the world to China economically. Can the US pivot from military occupation to peaceful economic and humanitarian development? Or even pivot to being a constructive force to ameliorate climate change in cooperation with China and Russia? Military assets could be converted to more peaceful purposes and be integrated into the Peace Corps. But that would take the incentives for glory and patriotism out of the equation. Could purple hearts ever be given to members of the Peace Corps? The principal that Biden has established that the US can leave a country is a game changer. It doesn't mean that the US will never have anything to do with Afghanistan again. It means that US involvement will be more along the lines of humanitarian assistance.

Off the Top of My Head

1.9 Billion Fully Vaccinated in China. Only 170 Million in US

by John Lawrence

About 70% of the Chinese people have been vaccinated. There have been 94,631 cases and 4,636 coronavirus-related deaths reported in China since the pandemic began. In the US there have been 37,744,654 cases and 628,000 deaths.  About 170 million people or 51 percent of the total U.S. population, have now been fully vaccinated. China developed its own vaccines which are now being used in other mainly poor countries. Nature.com reported:

"The World Health Organization (WHO) has authorized the first of China’s COVID-19 vaccines for emergency use, and another could be listed in the coming days, opening the door to wide distribution in lower-income nations through the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) initiative.

"The listing will boost global confidence in these vaccines, say scientists. China's five different vaccines have not been used widely in wealthy nations, but are already sustaining immunization campaigns in the global south.

“There is big demand for the Chinese vaccines,” says Firdausi Qadri, an immunologist at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, in Dhaka.

"The first vaccine to be listed is made in Beijing by Chinese state-owned firm Sinopharm. The other under review — named CoronaVac — is produced by private company Sinovac, also based in Beijing. Five COVID-19 vaccines are already authorized by the WHO, but unlike these, the Chinese ones use inactivated virus and are not widely used in Western nations.

"Sinopharm and Sinovac’s vaccines account for the bulk of shots given in China, which has so far inoculated 243 million people. More than 45 countries have already approved their use, but the WHO is among the first stringent regulatory authorities to review the data."

The Chinese vaccines, which use inactivated virus and not the newer mRNA technology used in western vaccines, are not quite as effective as the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Yet they are sufficiently effective to ward off the virus and are much more available to the rest of the world. Because China has effectively contained the virus compared to the US, China is surging ahead economically and also with respect to winning friends in the rest of the world. CNN reported:

"Since China curbed its initial outbreak, the ruling Communist Party has held up the country's effective containment efforts as proof of the supposed superiority of its authoritarian political system. The success of its zero-Covid strategy is hailed as an ideological and moral victory over the faltering response of the US and other Western democracies, which had struggled to control surging cases and deaths."

China has made rapid strides in bringing its people out of poverty and into a middle class lifestyle. Since 1980 China has lifted about 800 million people out of poverty. It has done this by becoming a capitalist nation under Communist party leadership which seems like a contradiction in terms! China's version of capitalism is state capitalism while the US version is shareholder capitalism. In the US companies are only beholden to their shareholders; in China companies are ultimately beholden to the Chinese state. The Chinese communist party has its fingers in every capitalist pie so to speak.And their model, which is being exported to other Asian countries, is working. According to some measures, 2020 was the first time in 2 centuries that Asian GDP, as a share of world GDP at purchasing power parity, was higher than that of the rest of the world.

Off the Top of My Head

Will There be Another Bin Laden?

by John Lawrence

Pundits worry that Al Qaeda might reconstitute itself now that the Taliban control Afdghanistan. Bin Laden's attack on 9/11 wasn't dependent on geography. It was based on an ingenious, but evil, idea and a plan that could have been developed anywhere. All he needed was a plan and 20 hijackers, 15 of which were Saudi citizens as was bin Laden himself. Bin Laden's plan could have taken root anywhere. He didn't need Afghanistan to formulate it. He just needed a plan that was brilliant enough to fool  US intelligence. So whether or not the Taliban will allow terrorists to come into their country is irrelevant. Bin Laden's plan might just as likely have been developed in Saudi Arabia. The key thing is to have people in the service of US intelligence to anticipate and thwart plans developed by the likes of bin Laden who was smart enough to outwit US intelligence.

It was never necessary to invade Afghanistan in order to get bin Laden. US invasions and wars have been fruitless ever since the Korean war which left a nuclear armed dictator in the north. Attacks of the future will not be based on brute force but on intelligent evasions of US intelligence which is exactly what bin Laden did. George W Bush wanted to be a war time President. You don't get to be a war time President by conducting a special ops operation to get bin Laden. You need to invade a country. He invaded two - Iraq and Afghanistan - and both have become unmitigated disasters. Afghanistan alone has cost $2 trillion plus 2400 American lives. Iraq which was an enemy of our enemy, Iran, under Saddam became an ally of Iran under a democratically elected government since the majority of Iraqis are Shiites and Iran is a Shiite country. From a geopolitical perspective turning over Iraq to a Shiite majority controlled government was a huge mistake. Saddam, who was Sunni, was a barrier to Iranian influence in the Middle East.

Now China will become allied with Afghanistan. It practically abuts on Afghanistan. The two countries are only separated by Tajikistan. Reportedly, China has already recognized the Taliban government. NPR reports:

"China has reportedly promised big investments in energy and infrastructure projects, including the building of a road network in Afghanistan and is also eyeing the country's vast, untapped, rare-earth mineral deposits. And Beijing was already reportedly preparing to formally recognize the Taliban before the group seized control of the country."

Afghanistan will become an integral part of its Belt and Road initiative, and make big investments in the country as opposed to the US presence which was supposed to convert the Afghan government into a Little America with western institutions. This has never worked. Indigenous people want their own form of government. The US didn't learn the lesson in Vietnam and Afghanistan is just a repeat of Vietnam albeit taking longer for the final denouement. What the US should do is partner with China to make investments in Afghanistan to bring it into the modern world. We need to partner with China if there is ever to be a solution to the global warming crisis. This might be a start of that relationship which is necessary to save planet Earth. And if we are worried about Afghanistan going back to a medieval society, the best prevention of that scenario is to make investments in Afghanistan's infrastructure including human infrastructure. The Taliban might even welcome that.

America’s Greatest Danger isn’t China. It’s Much Closer to Home.

by Robert Reich

Sunday, June 20, 2021

China’s increasingly aggressive geopolitical and economic stance in the world is unleashing a fierce bipartisan backlash in America. That’s fine if it leads to more public investment in basic research, education, and infrastructure – as did the Sputnik shock of the late 1950s. But it poses dangers as well.

More than 60 years ago, the sudden and palpable fear that the Soviet Union was lurching ahead of us shook America out of a postwar complacency and caused the nation to do what it should have been doing for many years. Even though we did it under the pretext of national defense – we called it the National Defense Education Act and the National Defense Highway Act and relied on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration for basic research leading to semiconductors, satellite technology, and the Internet – the result was to boost US productivity and American wages for a generation.

When the Soviet Union began to implode, America found its next foil in Japan. Japanese-made cars were taking market share away from the Big Three automakers. Meanwhile, Mitsubishi bought a substantial interest in the Rockefeller Center, Sony purchased Columbia Pictures, and Nintendo considered buying the Seattle Mariners. By the late 1980s and start of the 1990s, countless congressional hearings were held on the Japanese “challenge” to American competitiveness and the Japanese “threat” to American jobs.

A tide of books demonized Japan – Pat Choate’s Agents of Influence alleged Tokyo’s alleged payoffs to influential Americans were designed to achieve “effective political domination over the United States.“ Clyde Prestowitz’s Trading Places argued that because of our failure to respond adequately to the Japanese challenge “the power of the United States and the quality of American life is diminishing rapidly in every respect.” William S Dietrich’s In the Shadow of the Rising Sun claimed Japan “threatens our way of life and ultimately our freedoms as much as past dangers from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.“

Robert Zielinski and Nigel Holloway’s Unequal Equities argued that Japan rigged its capital markets to undermine American corporations. Daniel Burstein’s Yen! Japan’s New Financial Empire and Its Threat to America asserted that Japan’s growing power put the United States at risk of falling prey to a “hostile Japanese … world order.”

And on it went: The Japanese Power Game,The Coming War with Japan, Zaibatsu America: How Japanese Firms are Colonizing Vital US Industries, The Silent War, Trade Wars.

But there was no vicious plot. We failed to notice that Japan had invested heavily in its own education and infrastructure – which enabled it to make high-quality products that American consumers wanted to buy. We didn’t see that our own financial system resembled a casino and demanded immediate profits. We overlooked that our educational system left almost 80% of our young people unable to comprehend a news magazine and many others unprepared for work. And our infrastructure of unsafe bridges and potholed roads were draining our productivity.

In the present case of China, the geopolitical rivalry is palpable. Yet at the same time, American corporations and investors are quietly making bundles by running low-wage factories there and selling technology to their Chinese “partners.” And American banks and venture capitalists are busily underwriting deals in China.

I don’t mean to downplay the challenge China represents to the United States. But throughout America’s postwar history it has been easier to blame others than to blame ourselves.

The greatest danger we face today is not coming from China. It is our drift toward proto-fascism. We must be careful not to demonize China so much that we encourage a new paranoia that further distorts our priorities, encourages nativism and xenophobia, and leads to larger military outlays rather than public investments in education, infrastructure, and basic research on which America’s future prosperity and security critically depend.

The central question for America – an ever more diverse America, whose economy and culture are rapidly fusing with the economies and cultures of the rest of the globe – is whether it is possible to rediscover our identity and our mutual responsibility without creating another enemy.

Off the Top of My Head

Can Too Much Freedom Be Toxic?

by John Lawrence

When liberty isn't balance by responsibility or concern for others, it can quickly get toxic. There can be too much liberty in a society, and that is taking place when a super market cashier gets murdered over her request for a customer to wear a mask. The non-maskers and non-vaxxers who say that their liberty trumps any responsibility to society have demonstrated that the US has emphasized liberty to the exclusion of anything else. What are reasonable limits to liberty?

Justin Holt writes in an article "What are reasonable limits to liberty?": "in the absence of a political order, our liberty is boundless, but a limitless liberty is self-canceling. If we can do anything, so can everyone else; thus, nothing can be done which is enduring and dependable. Second, in order to have enduring and dependable liberties, our range of action must be limited. For example, in order for property to exist, the actions of others to use this particular property must be limited. Third, these limitations on our actions provide a liberty that is fruitful, because our actions can be guaranteed to be enduring and dependable."

The general idea is that there is a private sphere in which full liberty is appropriate and a public sphere in which a citizen should defer to what is appropriate for the benefit of society. Where does a society draw this line? The US may draw it in one place and a society like China or Russia may draw it in a different place. The US has been verging on chaos while China values stability and continuity and draws the line in a different place. Even Russia draws the line differently. How much chaos is supported by free speech is almost out of control in the US. Free speech in the US makes possible what other countries might consider sedition. Clearly, what happened on January 6 was seditious. Sedition is defined as overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that tends toward rebellion against the established order. Speech on social media by organized right wing groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys was clearly seditious prior to the Januray 6 insurrection as was Trump's incitement to riot on that day. The US is very lenient on these issues as no one in that riot is being charged with sedition which is a more serious crime than mere trespassing.

What most people don't understand is that China and Russia as well as other societies draw the line in a much stricter place regarding sedition. What the US would call human rights, another society might call sedition. Other societies value stability and continuity a lot more than the US does. And then the US criticizes those societies based on its own values of free speech which resulted in a resurrection on January 6. Seditious speech on social media was tolerated by the US when it should have been sanctioned. While Joe Biden can call Putin a killer, according to public opinion surveys conducted by NGO Levada Center, Putin's approval rating was 60% in July 2020, and the highest of any leader in the world. This is not taken into account by US politicians and media. Clearly, the majority of the Russian people are very pleased with Putin's job performance. Also, while the US considers that Navalny has a human right to free speech, Russia draws the line on what is free speech and what is seditious speech in a different place. So while Joe Biden criticizes Russia on its treatment of Navalny, Putin has every right in the world to point out how free speech in the US led to the January 6 insurrection. According to Pew Research: "Russians are as satisfied with their country’s overall direction as they have been since Pew Research Center began polling Russia in 2002. A majority (58%) of Russians are satisfied with the way things are going in their country, while 37% report being dissatisfied." As for gun crime in Russia, NPR reports:

"It's illegal for Russian citizens to own automatic and semi-automatic guns. It's possible to apply for a handgun or shotgun license, though citizens are required to provide reasons such as hunting or target shooting. Applicants face strict background checks, including criminal history, a full psychological evaluation and a medical exam. They must pass a test on firearm laws and safety. Each weapon is then registered by the police during a home visit. Police take bullet patterns, test bullets and cartridges so bullets can be matched if the gun is used in a crime. A license lasts five years, after which applicants must go through the whole process again."

Pew Research reports similar approval ratings in China: "A broad majority of Chinese (89%) think things are going well with their economy, making them the happiest on this measure compared with all other 43 countries surveyed this year. And they believe things will only get better. Eight-in-ten say the economy will continue to improve over the next 12 months. And 85% think the younger generation will be better off financially than their parents. This optimism stands in stark contrast to findings in Europe and the U.S., where widespread majorities believe their children will be worse off going forward." Is everything perfect there? No, but a majority of Chinese value stability and continuity above free speech. Furthermore, in the People's Republic of China, access by the general public to firearms is subject to some of the strictest control measures in the world. With the exception of individuals with hunting permits and some ethnic minorities, civilian firearm ownership is restricted to non-individual entities. The result is a very low incidence of gun deaths although stabbings make up some of the difference. Still one can do a lot more damage with an AK-47 than they can with a knife.

Societies and governments survive by virtue of the approval of a majority of its citizens. Isn't that what democracy is all about - majority rule? Or at least majority approval of whatever form of government is ruling? The US interpretation of free speech led us to the January 6 insurrection because seditious speech was tolerated as free speech. Freedom gets toxic when citizens think they have free rein to do whatever they want without regard for others. At that point a society loses its cohesiveness and becomes unstable. The US has almost gotten to that point both in terms of the toleration of seditious speech combined with a toleration of gun violence based on the Second Amendment. The founders meant this amendment to apply to militias which were a well defined entity in the founders' day. They later became the National Guard so that the meaning of militia was lost with the result of misinterpretation of the Second Amendment and the uncontrolled proliferation of guns. So, in my opinion, the First and Second Amendments have both become toxic and need to be reformed and redefined.

Off the Top of My Head

The Infrastructure Bill and How to Pay for It Are Two Separate and Distinct Issues That Have Nothing to Do With Each Other

by John Lawrence

We know that the US government does not have to tax in order to spend since the US has a sovereign currency (See Modern Monetary Theory), and the Federal Reserve can just place the requisite amount of money for the infrastructure bill in the Treasury's account at the Fed. The problem is that, according to US law, if there is not enough money in the Treasury's account to pay for stuff, it must issue and sell Treasury bonds to make up the difference. These bonds then contribute to the deficit which is added to the national debt. We also know that the national debt never needs to be paid off, but Treasury bonds do need to be paid when the holder asks for the money when they come due. In addition interest does need to be paid on them. If the Fed keeps the interest rate for Treasuries at zero, this is not a problem. So why would anyone purchase Treasury bonds if they get zero interest? Well, countries that peg their currencies to the dollar (like China) need dollars in order to conduct business. Besides if someone comes to them with a basket full of renminbi and asks for US dollars, they have to be able to pay them the dollars and accept the renminbi. So there is always a market for US Treasury bonds. Even if there wasn't, the Fed would end up purchasing them and taking them onto its balance sheet where they would essentially disappear into a black hole never having to be paid back.

So what is the problem with just having the Fed create the money and place it in the Treasury's account without "paying for" it with taxes. No problem really. Joe Biden just wants to kill two birds with one stone. The first bird is the money for infrastructure. The second bird is doing something about the widening economic inequality by taxing the rich. There is no actual need to issue Treasuries in the first place except that US law requires it. The money could just go directly on the Fed's balance sheet without the intermediate step of selling Treasuries. There are however some good reasons for not taking too much advantage of this possibility. One is inflation. As more money floods into the economy through deficit spending, inflation could heat up whether or not the money comes from taxes. The other issue is that as other countries accumulate more and more Treasury bonds with or without interest being paid on them, they start to have the ability to use those dollars to purchase US assets. It's not inconceivable that a particular country - let's say China - couldn't accumulate enough Treasuries to buy up cities.

New York City has the most valuable real estate in the U.S. at $2.8 trillion — slightly more than the entire GDP of the United Kingdom for 2019. In fact, this is greater than the GDP of all but just five countries — India, Germany, Japan, China and the United States. The value of New York is comparable to the combined market value of tech giants Apple and Microsoft. China owns about $1.1 trillion in US Treasuries. If they demanded it all tomorrow, the Fed would have no problem paying them, but then they could buy up more than a third of New York City or almost all of San Francisco valued at $1.3 trillion. This could eventually become a problem so it would be better not to even make up the difference by issuing Treasuries in the first place. The alternative is for the Fed just to create the money and place it in the Treasury's account as authorized by Congress without the Treasury having to sell bonds to make up the difference between the amount of taxes and the amount of the authorization.

Then the issue becomes inflation. There is already wage inflation as employers are forced to pay more for employees, for a number of reasons, thus raising the price of products and services. This is "good" inflation since wage earners have not seen an increase in their income for 40 years. There is also "bad" inflation in that the increasing wealth of the upper 10% , and especially the upper 1%, is causing asset inflation in terms of the increasing cost of real estate and rent. Asset inflation is also happening in the stock market although it's hard to see how this is a bad thing except for the fact that about 50% of the people don't own stocks so that gap between rich and poor is only increasing. The third form of inflation occurs when there is too much money chasing too few goods and services. This could be caused by too much deficit spending. The fourth kind is the "super bad" inflation known as hyperinflation. This is the kind of inflation that affected the Weimar republic in Germany before the Second World War and also affects poor countries. It also recently affected Greece because Greece gave up its sovereign currency when it adopted the euro. Hyperinflation occurs when a country needs to borrow money from the capital markets subject to increasing interest rates. As their economy declines interest rates go up until finally they are paying more in interest than their economies can keep up with. The US can never be put in this position since it never has to go to the capital markets to borrow money. The Federal Reserve can just issue whatever money is needed and can set its own interest rate since the US dollar is a sovereign currency.

So while there are limits to the amount of prudent deficit spending, one of them is not paying for it through taxes. The US Federal government never has to tax in order to spend. It can pass a bill to build infrastructure with the only limitation being the physical and material resources that are available to do it.

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/03/01/stephanie-kelton-explains-modern-monetary-theory.html

 

Off the Top of My Head

Joe Biden: "China is Eating Our Lunch"

by John Lawrence

There are many reasons for this. #1) China is a basically unified nation. The US is a divided nation. #2) China has consistent policies over the long term. The US is subject to a radical change of government every 2 years. #3) China puts the best and brightest in high government positions. The US is prone to elect celebrities and entertainers with little or no experience or expertise. #4) The Chinese government has strong centralized control. The US is fragmented into a multiplicity of different states and districts with states contradicting the central government because they think states' rights are paramount. There are 4 different districts for state assemblyman, state senator, national House representative and national Senator. Central government and state governments are at odds with each other with no entity having overriding authority.

This fragmentation of authority in the US affects many things including the response to pandemics and global warming. Americans can not even agree on the wearing of masks during a pandemic much less whether global warming is real or a hoax. Republicans fan the flames of these divisions encouraging their followers to believe lies and falsehoods. Americans can not even agree on the truth. China has no such problems. If the central government says that the Chinese people should wear masks, by God, they surely will or else face dire consequences. Americans have a freedom fetish. They think they are free to do whatever the hell they please regardless of the consequences to others. Americans will choose to get vaccinated or not based on their own whims when not getting vaccinated could prolong the pandemic or even make it worse.

Gun ownership is another American fetish which is destroying the country while China maintains strict standards of gun control. In the People's Republic of China, access by the general public to firearms is subject to some of the strictest control measures in the world. With the exception of individuals with hunting permits and some ethnic minorities, civilian firearm ownership is restricted to non-individual entities. In this regard China is like much of the developed world whose governments do not give their citizens free access to guns. The Constitution's Second Amendment is literally killing Americans on a daily basis. Mass shootings are proliferating and even children are able to get their hands on weapons of war.

William Nordhaus in The Spirit of Green writes: "One of the American disadvantages in fighting pandemics is its federal structure. Many of the most important decisions and legal authority on public health reside at the state and local levels while the federal government has resources, expertise, and central command. The CDC organizes and authorizes testing but has tiny fiscal resources; states and localities have authority for shutdowns and quarantines but are uncoordinated, have little expertise, and are perennially fiscally stressed."

Lack of coordination, fragmentation and outright hostility to doing what experts and authority figures say is the right course means that Americans are working at odds with each other. Each entity is rowing in a different direction. Some states mandate mask wearing while others pass laws outlawing mask wearing. Americans assert their right not to wear a mask and not to get vaccinated when medical experts tell them that those things will minimize the negative outcomes for themselves and their neighbors. Less variants will materialize which at some point may overcome the effect of vaccines to control them if they follow simple public health recommendations.

Americans think that their Constitutionally derived freedom gives them the right not to follow any authority figure no matter how well intentioned, expert and unbiased even though their actions may cause harm to themselves and others. China would never condone placing self interest over the interest of the community. China is full steam ahead with everyone rowing in the same direction. Americans are at odds with each other flying off into different directions simultaneously. The American ship of state is rudderless.

Off the Top of My Head

Future Generations Will Analyze This Era and Judge Whether Autocracy or Democracy Was More Successful

by John Lawrence

So far autocracy is winning. The vast majority of the Chinese people are on the same page as the Chinese government while the US is a nation divided - one half diametrically opposed to the other half. The Constitution itself needs to be revised as its First and Second amendments are causing many of the problems. The Second amendment is contributing to the US being the mass murder capitol of the world, but the First amendment is also insidious as it has morphed into something perverted and toxic in the form of social media and spun out of control allowing the spread of vicious gossip and lies gone viral. This has given vent to the worst impulses among the American people. Facebook's very business model has contributed mightily to this outcome as it allows hate groups to identify one another and come together on a common platform provided all too profitably by Facebook.

Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state warns of the danger to democracy of lies flourishing online – and says big tech’s wings must be clipped in an article in The Guardian. She of course has been the victim of outrageous character assassination perpetrated by lies on social media over the course of 30 years or more. The Guardian reports:

"Her bid for the White House was engulfed by a tidal wave of fabricated news and false conspiracy theories. Now Hillary Clinton is calling for a “global reckoning” with disinformation that includes reining in the power of big tech.

"The former secretary of state and first lady warns that the breakdown of a shared truth, and the divisiveness that surely follows, poses a danger to democracy at a moment when China is selling the conceit that autocracy works."

Uncontrolled social media makes more money by perpetrating lies than it does the truth because the truth is often boring, bu lies especially when shared by a large group of people are often very entertaining, and the American people demand constantly to be entertained. Maybe this is because their lives are otherwise quite boring. Anyway boredom is the crux of the matter. The “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which made the preposterous claim that Clinton ran a child sex trafficking ring at a Washington pizza restaurant, entertained the masses in a viral manner. This segment of society loves them a reality show TV star like Donald Trump or even a B movie star like Ronald Reagan. They would rather have the impersonation of a competent leader than a competent leader him or herself, but then Hitler was very entertaining as well. So are most autocrats. Social media represents the First amendment run amok.

The Guardian continues:

"Far-right Republicans have become openly anti-democratic, endorsing Trump’s falsehoods and seeking to suppress voters of color.

"The traditional the-truth-is-somewhere-in-the-middle approach will no longer do, Clinton argues.

“They’ve got to rid themselves of both-sidesism,” she says. “It is not the same to say something critical of somebody on the other side of the aisle and to instigate an attack on the Capitol and to vote against certifying the election. Those are not comparable, and it goes back to the problem of the press actually coming to grips with how out of bounds and dangerous the new political philosophy on the right happens to be.”

"The press cannot be expected to restore a common baseline of truth on its own, however.

“The technology platforms are so much more powerful than any organ of the so-called mainstream press, and I do think that there has to be not just an American reckoning but a global reckoning with the disinformation, with the monopolistic power and control, with the lack of accountability that the platforms currently enjoy,” Clinton said."

News shows on TV need sponsors and sponsors want eyeballs glued to the tube. What is more gluing than some outrageous lie such as the ones Qanon perpetrates. So the "business of America is business" crowd is out there perpetrating lies because that is more profitable than perpetrating the boring truth. Entertainment is everything. We are entertained to death and that had resulted prepandemic in a full employment society where the lower 50% serve, bartend, cater, cook, work as baristas, housekeep, provide security, take tickets for the upper 50%. Profitable business decisions have made lies and deception profitable. Every day during the Trump administration, the media covered Trump's outrageous lies and behavior because it was more profitable than reporting the dull facts. Even Trump's adulterous affairs were "forgiven" because they made him a more vivid character providing juicy gossipy entertainment even for the tsk tsk crowd.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argued presciently 35 years ago that television was reshaping our culture and trivializing public life—news, politics, religion, education, and business—by turning it into entertainment. He warned that we would become so inundated with irrelevant information that we’d lose sight of what was important—even worse, we wouldn’t care as long as we felt entertained. With the proliferation of digital media today and worries about excessive “screen time,” his analysis still resonates.

Hillary added: “In particular Facebook, which has the worst track record for enabling mistruths, misinformation, extremism, conspiracy, for goodness’ sake, even genocide in Myanmar against the Rohingya. So governments are going to have to decide right now that the platforms have to be held to some kind of standard, and it’s tricky.” So do the Chinese have a better idea to control the out of control lies perpetrated in the West? For one thing they wouldn't stand for it. Freedom of speech has morphed into something sinister and out of control. The same could be said about the Second Amendment. Maybe the moral of the story is that constitutions need to be updated at least once a century in order to keep up with new technological developments. The US Constitution is 233 years old.

Off the Top of My Head

Our Grandchildren Won't Have to Pay Back Money Spent on a Green New Deal, But They Will Pay With Their Lives if We Don't Do It Now

by John Lawrence

It's a myth that a sovereign country with a sovereign currency and a floating exchange rate has to borrow money to pay its bills. The US can just issue the money. It doesn't need to tax in order to spend. So why isn't the US as well as all the other nations with sovereign currencies such as Japan, Britain and China going all out to supply as much money as necessary to prevent global warming from "going viral" as they say? The only restraint is the question of whether the human and physical resources to do the work are available. In a society such as China, if the government wanted its people to stop whatever they were doing and become part of the work force to forestall global warming, it would be done. In the US it would not be so easy to commandeer workers to leave their jobs as servers, bartenders, chefs, dealers, workers at Disneyland, workers on cruise ships etc to leave their jobs and go to work in Joe Biden's global warming and infrastructure rebuilding work force. The businesses large and small would have a conniption fit like they're having now getting these workers back to work because their pandemic unemployment has not run out.

The only time when workers went all out to solve a major global problem was World War II. Rosie the Riveter and all the others joined the work force to defeat Hitler. They even were willing to defer consumption so that the financial and material resources that were necessary weren't spent in the consumption market thus letting the necessary physical resources be available for the war effort. Today we have a nation consisting of a bunch of spoiled brats who wouldn't do anything the government asked them to do crying that their "freedom" to do whatever they wanted was paramount. We live in a society composed of consumers who demand to be endlessly entertained by movies, TV, theme parks cruise ships, athletes, restaurants, social media and Las Vegas. Half the country works as servers, baristas, bartenders, housekeepers, actors, athletes, dealers, entertainers and such like jobs to entertain the top half. Some of these are highly paid; most are not. Such was the nature of the "full employment" society before COVID hit. It was a full employment society consisting of trivial jobs at minimum wages for the most part. Biden will have to persuade workers to leave their jobs in the "entertainment" industry in order to create actual results in the real world such as building green infrastructure. The entertainment industry will not be pleased nor will the upper half of society which demands to be continually entertained. 70% of US GNP is consumption and a lot of what people want to consume is encompassed by sports bars, travel and tourism, the leisure and hospitality industry in general. The spoiled brats think its their birthright to have such services available, and the last thing they want to do is to roll up their sleeves and join a union.

Together with the presumed right to be entertained, we have a large percentage of the country that has been processed through the military and developed this consciousness that military prerogatives should prevail uber alles. These are the insurrectionists and Trump supporters that want civilian society to reinforce military values such as command and control. They want an autocrat for President. Freedom is the only value that counts for them. Democracy, equality, fraternity, social equity don't matter. They want to preserve the American way of life which, in addition to a right to be entertained wherever and whenever they have the resources to consume, includes also the right to exclude the prerogatives of minorities for social justice. Is it any wonder that the insurrectionists in January 6 contained a large number of current and former members of the military and police forces? Their attitude is that whatever is good for the military is good for American society in general. The military has become a way of life and consciousness for them. They think that, because they served, they are entitled. Spoiled brat militarists I'll call them. The endless wars, bloated military-industrial complex budget and the military bases in practically every country in the world provides the economic and job base of the nation unfortunately.

Biden thinks he is out to prove that American democracy can compete in the civilian world on an equally competent basis with other countries. That will be a hard nut to crack. The US is dooming itself in two ways: the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. Let's take the Second Amendment first. In no other major country in the world do citizens have a right to unlimited uncontrolled gun ownership including military style weapons. This is producing news cycles when, hardly is one mass murder out of the way, than another one comes along to dominate the news. The news channels can hardly keep up with them all. No other society including The US' major competitors would tolerate such a situation. The Second Amendment has become toxic and perverted, and in and of itself is enough to doom the US to second class status. In addition to that the First Amendment has become toxic and perverted, and the major reason for that is social media. Social media makes possible the vicious spread of toxic lies and untruths. Witness Trump's use of Twitter to corral and consolidate his followers around the thesis that he, not Biden, actually won the election. Social media allowed him to rally his supporters based on angry themes and memes connected with white supremacy and a return to the good old days when white, Protestant Anglo Saxons ran the country, the good old days when Negroes knew their place in society, the good old days when you didn't have multiple nationalities and religious groups asserting their rights under the Constitution to live freely and enjoy all the perquisites of American society, the good old days when gas guzzlers were the only vehicles in town and no one need be concerned about anything except maximizing their profits and living the American Dream, where the American Dream consisted of having more stuff than your parents did.

Joe Biden's first 100 days have been remarkable in that he has been able to get as much accomplished with slim majorities in both Houses of Congress. Is this enough though to move America forward at the pace that China, for instance, is moving? China is a more or less unified society. 99% or more of Chinese citizens are on the same page as the Chinese government. China is winning friends and allies all over the world with its Belt and Road initiative while the US withers away its resources on endless wars and confuses its allies with the possibility of radical swings with each change of administrations. China's military budget of $183.5 billion is dwarfed by a US military budget 5 times that amount. The US is a divided country where one of the major parties base their appeal on lies and deception, and its supporters are only too willing to eat it up because it's entertaining and represents military values of command and control. Good government, as Biden has illustrated, is somewhat boring because it is based on solving real human problems. Let's hope that Biden's version of reality based on truth and problem solving wins out over the lies based reality of the other side, and the US, even if it doesn't remain the world's dominant power, can become a constructive member of the world community helping to solve problems at home and abroad.

Off the Top of My Head

America to End Forever War in Afghanistan Thanks to Joe Biden

by John Lawrence, April 15, 2021

So far Biden is making all the right moves, and I'm sure he has more up his sleeve. He's playing 3 dimensional chess while the Republicans haven't even learned to play checkers yet. The military-industrial complex is crying, "Oh, no," because they justify the huge expenditures on them by the need for continuance of forever wars. They are aghast at the prospect that their trillion dollar annual budget will be inevitably reduced. It has become obvious that the biggest threat to the US is not international terrorism but domestic terrorism. The FBI and the National Guard will deal with that very nicely; they don't need the Pentagon. The FBI is doing a remarkable job cleaning up the terrorists who took part in the January 6 bungled coup attempt. Over 400 arrests and counting so far. The idiots self videoed their own arrest warrants.

The US spends more on defense than the next 10 countries combined. As an added service they also train the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and the Three Percenters. The military-industrial complex has done a lot to militarize the consciousnesses of young Americans, especially young non-college bound Americans. College graduates, especially in engineering, often end up, like I did, in the military-industrial complex working for companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman and General Dynamics. As a country we have been spending our money in all the wrong places, but the military-industrial complex wants to hang on to its prerogatives. When I was an employee of General Dynamics many years ago, they encouraged you to vote Republican. Otherwise their budgets might be cut and there might be a RIF (Reduction in Force). When the military-industrial complex is cut down to size, right sized as they say, the Republican party will lose its raison d'être, its justification, because that's all in reality that it stands for - large defense budgets and tax cuts for the wealthy.

If we really want to compete with China, then we should cut our defense budget down to the size of China's and spend our money in more constructive ways like China is doing like building infrastructure with its Belt and Road initiative. The only infrastructure the US has been doing in foreign countries has been the building of military bases of which there are approximately 800 in practically every country in the world. Meanwhile, China has one military base in a foreign country - in Djibouti! If the US wants to compete with China, it will take a page out of China's book and build infrastructure not military bases. China and the US need to cooperate on problems facing the whole earth like global warming. It's no consolation to win the competitive war while the home we all live in goes up in flames or drowns as the case may be.

Republicans want Biden to tell them how he's going to pay for all his ambitious social programs? Let's see. Let me count the ways. Taxes on the rich - that's a good one. Reduce the size of the military-industrial complex budget. Even better. Military contractors, among others, provide the campaign donations for the Republican party as long as the guys they are providing the financial jet fuel for are hardliners for a "strong" defense. Well now, maybe they should stand up for transferring the money to the FBI so they can deal with domestic terrorism instead of a useless military engaged in forever wars which are only killing civilians, destroying real estate and creating refugees. The world doesn't need an America which thinks it has the self-appointed job of being the world's policeman or moral arbiter. There is something in the Bible about taking the beam out of our own eye before telling our neighbor to take the mote out of theirs.

The US bloated military is wasting our money while militarizing the consciousness of our young men many of whom think their patriotism justifies invading and laying waste to our Capitol. Lawmakers were shocked, shocked to find out that the invaders of the People's House were present and former members of the military and police forces! Patriots! This is what happens when you define patriotism in military terms. The true patriots are the doctors and nurses, supermarket workers, delivery drivers, meat packers and others who put their lives at risk to help us get through this pandemic. True patriotism consists of reducing our military-industrial complex and defense budget to a reasonable size comparative with other countries and the real threats in the world while building up our infrastructure assets and social safety net programs as every other advanced country has already done. Joe Biden is on the road to doing this. May he prosper and prevail. And God bless our doctors and nurses.

Off the Top of My Head

If Republican Voters Want the Infrastructure Bill, Why Don't Republican Lawmakers?

by John Lawrence, April 12, 2021

Is this a failure of representative democracy? Polls show that a majority of Republican voters support Biden's infrastructure plan including the "care" components thereof. Yet Republican Senators are dead set against it, and the bill will probably not garner one Republican vote. It can still pass the Senate based on budget reconciliation which only requires a majority vote as long as all Democrats vote for it. Other Biden proposals involving voter's rights and gun control would require at least 10 Republican votes in the Senate under the current rules which involve the filibuster for non-budgetary items. In a representative democracy, a party should represent its voters. Otherwise, you don't really have a representative democracy which the US purports itself to be. So at present the US is in the position of being a government swerving back and forth from a representative democracy as long as Democrats control both Houses of Congress and the Presidency and a dictatorship of an elite when Republicans control either party or the Presidency.

The same applies to other issues like gun control, voter's rights and immigration which aren't subject to budgetary reconciliation and must garner 60 votes in the Senate. One of the minimum elements of democracy is majority rule. Because the filibuster is anti-majoritarian, this leaves the American democracy in the position of not really being a democracy at all in terms of non-budgetary items. So the US is on its way to being an authoritarian regime if Republicans control the Presidency and both Houses of Congress. All that would be necessary is a President like Trump with authoritarian tendencies. Then the US government becomes a government that's all about the use of power to get its way internationally and domestically, not about making the world a better place. Unfortunately, this leaves the US in the eyes of other nations as being untrustworthy since there is no consistent policy going forward. Other countries have more consistent leadership and hence are considered more trustworthy.

China, on the other hand, has very consistent policies going far into the future. China isn't perfect but most of the Chinese people and the leadership are on the same wavelength. US leadership likes to make a big deal of the plight of the Uyghurs, a Chinese minority that represents less than 1% of the Chinese population. So it's pretty remarkable that the only problem China seems to have with a minority that resents Chinese leadership  is with a minority that composes 0.31% of the population. The US should be so lucky yet the US harps on the Chinese over this situation of which little is actually know by the western world. China has pilled 800 million people out of poverty since 1990, one of the outstanding feats in human history, yet the US leadership continues to harp about the Uyghurs while giving no credit to China on poverty reduction. During the same time period the wages of US workers has stagnated. Kishore Mahbubani, author of the book, "Has China Won" writes: "In contrast to America's stagnation, China's culture, self-concept, and morale are being transformed at a rapid pace - mostly for the better." Rather than China's recent success being an assessment of the comparative values of Marxist-Leninist doctrines vis a vis American democracy, The Chinese Communist Party could more appropriately be called the Chinese Civilization Party since it reflects the 2000 year history of China more than it does Communist ideology.

So the response of the US to the progress of China in the last 30 years, instead of congratulating them on their remarkable accomplishments, is to be fearful that China is getting ahead of us. Well, duh, if you compare a society that is mostly all on the same wavelength and making remarkable steps forward with one that is divided and experienced a certain segment almost accomplishing a coup d'etat in a recent insurrection which threatened the lives of lawmakers in the seat of democracy itself. However, rather than viewing the world situation as a competition between the US and China, a more fruitful approach would be to cooperate with China with regard to climate change and pandemics, two things that affect the whole world and which require fast action, not a lackadaisical approach in which maybe we'll cooperate down the road, but in the meantime we have to compete. There's no time for that. The planet earth has almost passed an inflection point after which there will be no more time available.

Off the Top of My Head

Joe Manchin Is Living in La La Land

by John Lawrence, April 8, 2021

Joe Manchin is not facing the reality that exists in the US today. He is nostalgic for a day when a bipartisan consensus was possible. Today it's not. The best we can do is to go ahead with Joe Biden's agenda with the slim majority Democrats possess in the Senate, but Manchin is essentially siding with Republicans, the Party of No. Manchin wants stability in American governing, but his vision of stability is one in which Republicans will negate every attempt Biden makes to bring the US into the 21st century and effectively compete with China. Yes, America will swerve back and forth policywise if Federal control switches between parties. But that's the best that American democracy is capable of at this point in time. The alternative that Manchin suggests is a stability of no progress. China has no such problem. Their society is basically all on the same long term wavelength. They will go full steam ahead with progress.

In his recent op-ed in the Washington Post, Manchin states: "The time has come to end these political games, and to usher a new era of bipartisanship where we find common ground on the major policy debates facing our nation." Is he kidding? "usher a new era of bipartisanship where we find common ground" There is no way that is going to happen in the current political environment. There is very little to no common ground. Democrats want to get things done for the American people to improve their lot. Republicans only seek political power because their personal fortunes go up to the extent that they hold political power, and all they care about is their personal power and fortunes. Republicans have determined that their personal power increases to the extent that they make the Democratic agenda fail. Mitch McConnell actually stated this when Obama was President. McConnell was quoted as saying: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." That's pretty clear. It's not about helping the American people except for the wealthy class of which they themselves are members. It's about making the other party fail.

So Joe Manchin has his head up his ass if he thinks there is going to be a new age of bipartisan consensus. It's wishful thinking. It's not going to happen right now or any time in the near future. Maybe some day, but right now the best hope is for the Democrats to go ahead and make improvements in American society while they hold power. Any other course only dooms the US to fall further behind the rest of the world, doom earth to catastrophic climate change and lets China zoom ahead in making progress. Joe Manchin is incredibly naive or else he wants to be the main power broker in the US Senate. "Generations of senators who came before us put their heads down and their pride aside to solve the complex issues facing our country. We must do the same. The issues facing our democracy today are not insurmountable if we choose to tackle them together." Doesn't he realize that the only issue Republicans want to face is how to make themselves and the rich even richer? Doesn't he realize that the only thing Republicans are interested in is political power? They will lie and cheat, create conspiracy theories and do anything that's even quasi legal to achieve and maintain political power.

Manchin is playing his role as the skunk at the party which is too bad. Biden's job is not trying to form a bipartisan consensus with Republicans. It's trying to appease Joe Manchin in order to get anything done. The only hope for America is to go big when Democrats hold power which they do only by a miracle in the fact that two Democratic Senators were elected in runoffs in the state of Georgia. Somehow Biden will get Manchin to go along with most of his agenda that Republicans will not be able to undo if and when they control the Federal government again. The atmosphere has already set the record this year of 420 parts per million of carbon dioxide making it unlikely that our planet will not face the worst consequences of global warming. Only cooperation with China, not only on this but on future pandemicsand other issues, will give our grandchildren the slightest chance at a decent life. To the extent Republicans control the Federal government this chance will be reduced to zero.

 

 

Off the Top of My Head

Republicans Are Restricting Voting Laws

by John Lawrence, February27, 2021

Republicans know that, if all eligible voters actually vote, they will lose. So they are busy at work at the state level to enact more restrictive voting laws making it as difficult as possible for people to vote. This will primarily affect Democratic voters, and they know that. They have been using voter suppression techniques ever since black people won the right to vote. They know that making voting easier will encourage more Democratic voters because many of them can't take a day off to go to the polls. So mail-in voting which was facilitated in many states because of the pandemic worked to their disadvantage. They are hurrying to correct that. Since Republicans control many state legislatures which set the voting rules, they are having a field day changing the laws so that they don't suffer any more humiliating defeats.

So Joe Biden needs to make the best of the two years he has during which Democrats control both Houses of Congress. Assuming that a Republican will be elected President in 2024, the nation will swerve to the right and disassemble all the Executive orders Biden has put in place. As a result of this division America will be seen, if it's not seen that way already, as unstable and inconsistent. World leaders will increasingly turn towards China for leadership because what China values most in consistency and stability. The US can't decide whether it wants to be a democracy or a republic. Democrats want a democracy in which it would seem appropriate that every citizen over the age of 18 should cast a vote. This should be made as easy and accessible as possible. Republicans, on the other hand, want a republic in which the levers of power are controlled by white Americans of European descant like they always have been and which the time honored methods of voter suppression of minorities and poor people remain fully in effect.

Paul Weyrich was an American conservative political activist and commentator, most notable for co-founding the Heritage Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation, both conservative think tanks.He famously said: "So many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome: good government. They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." Quite a revealing quote. He identifies with "Christians" but chastens them that they shouldn't want everyone to vote. The question I ask is 'what would Jesus say?' Would Jesus want everyone to vote or not? Probably Jesus would be in favor of democracy as compared with a conservative minority that wants everything kept the way it has always been "from the beginning of our country." It makes me doubt the validity of the Christian religion as practiced by the "moral majority" of right wing Christians in this country. Jesus was for the poor and disenfranchised. They're not.

America can not remain a great country on the world stage if it swerves back and forth every two years between Democrats who genuinely want to make America and the world a better place and "America First" Republicans who don't give a hoot about the rest of the world except to dominate it with an outsized military establishment. The US is veering on the edge of autocracy if 74 million voters want Trump as their President in 2024 and Republicans are successful in suppressing 7 million voters because that was the margin between Biden and Trump. Trump did considerable damage not only to the US reputation vis a vis the rest of the world, but also within the US itself. It is a question of whether the US is a fact based country run by intelligent people or a no nothing country based on lies and conspiracy theories while the rich steal everything in sight and Republicans give their hoi polloi supporters political entertainment to keep their anger stoked. The rest of the world has looked to America as the Rock of Gibralter in the past because of its consistency and stability and its promotion of human rights (except the human rights having to do with economic rights). They may be looking now towards China for stability and consistency and be more concerned about intelligent leadership and economic human rights, especially if they observe that America's touting of human rights eliminates those of black people.

Off the Top of My Head

Why Should Blue Collar Workers Have to Pay Taxes to Bail Out White Collar Student Loan Debt?

by John Lawrence

Short answer: There is no need for the Federal government to tax in order to spend. That has been demonstrated by Modern Monetary Theory. However, taxation, if imposed in order to fight inflation, needs to be imposed primarily on the rich and upper middle class, not on the poor or lower middle class. The smart thing for the Biden administration to do would be to decrease taxes on the lower middle class ^i.e. blue collar workers before 2022 thus drawing them away from the Trump camp. In general the American people need to be educated that deficits don't matter except just as accounting entries on the Fed's balance sheet. Biden's COVID relief initiative of $1.9 billion will not raise taxes nor will his follow-on trillion dollar initiative for the build-out of green infrastructure.

The question, "Can We Afford to Pay for the Green New Deal?" is equivalent to the question "Can We Afford to Pay the Costs of Avoiding Annihilation?". In the past we have been able to afford a massive build-up to pay for the Second World War. The climate challenge is the moral equivalent of war. If we lose this war we lose not just our freedom. We lose the habitability of the entire planet. Various attempts have been made to cost out the components of a Green New Deal. Green power generation and transportation are not sufficient in themselves to get to net zero carbon emission, but they are a start. As Bill Gates has pointed out in his recent book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, major industrial processes also generate much greenhouse gas emission. For instance, every ton of cement that is produced contributes one ton of carbon dioxide which goes into the atmosphere. Every ton of steel produced results in 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, and every ton of plastics produced emits 1.3 tons of carbon dioxide. So it's not enough just to deal with green transportation (electric vehicles) and green power generation (solar and wind).

The cost of "greening" these industrial processes is pretty steep. Capturing carbon dioxide at the site of the manufacturing process is possible, but there is no cheap way to do it. Bill Gates is investing in promising start-ups and is counting on innovation to come up with new processes and materials which will not result in so much carbon dioxide being released into the air. Gates points out that we need to electrify every possible manufacturing process and make sure that all that electricity is generated cleanly. He advocates a new generation of nuclear power sources as wind and solar can not possible fill every energy need mainly because they are intermittent. Nuclear can fill the gap for consistent power generation when solar and/or wind are offline. Smart nuclear power which Bill Gates has been instrumental in developing would solve the problems encountered so far of explosion and what to do with nuclear waste. As a last resort Direct Air Capture of carbon dioxide from the air is possible but also costly.

What it all boils down to is this: we will need on the order of a trillion dollars a year for 10 years commitment to address climate change if we have a prayer for avoiding the worst consequences. What's more a lot of this commitment must be made in cooperation with China which is one of the worst polluters. Rivalry and even a Cold War must be set aside if the world is to avoid the worst outcome from global warming. India and China are building coal fired power generation plants at a rapid pace because coal fired power plants are so cheap comparatively and those countries are developing so quickly. It's not enough just to "green" the US. It has to be cooperation on a world wide basis. Competition has to be set aside and replaced by cooperation. The ownership of intellectual property is irrelevant when it comes to saving the planet.

A national budget for a Green New Deal shouldn't contribute to inflation since there are currently so many unemployed people available for work, and particularly because so many of the small businesses that were lost during the pandemic are not coming back. Also further robotizing of manufacturing processes will eliminate whatever blue collar workers are left working in those fields. In World War II there was some postponement of consumption in order to fight inflation. That may be necessary for the moral equivalent of war which the Green New Deal represents. If so, workers in certain nonessential industries may have to be repurposed and retrained for industries involved in combating climate change.

Off the Top of My Head

China Has Been Taking Over the World ... Peacefully

by John Lawrence, February 11, 2021

As Trump was retreating from multilateralism with his America First approach, China was winning friends and influencing people by building infrastruture in countries around the world with its Belt and Road initiative. This model put excess Chinese labor to work pulling their families out of poverty and set up the groundwork for increased trade and friendly relations with with other countries. Latest example: Latin America. Meanwhile, the US has not even been able to build infrastructure in its own country. Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) publishes The Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, which grades the current state of national infrastructure categories on a scale of A through F. In 2017, the U.S. infrastructure earned a D+ average. Stay tuned for a new report later this year. Infrastructure looms large because now it must be built out as green infrastructure replacing fossil fuel infrastructure.

In Latin America, America's so-called back yard, 19 countries have signed up for China's Belt and Road Initiative. The value of trade between China and Brazil, Latin America's largest country is $100 billion. China is South America's largest trading partner. Only Paraguay is not on board because they're the only South American country that recognizes Taiwan and not Beijing as the legitimate Chinese government. In 2019 Chinese companies invested $12.8 billion in Latin America concentrating on regional infrastructure such as ports, roads, dams and railways. Meanwhile, America was focused on its entertainment and consumerist economy, now partially defunct due to COVID. Chinese purchases of minerals and agricultural commodities helped South America get through the worst effects of the 2008 financial crisis. While the US had an orgy of financial speculation that created the 2008 financial crisis, China was powering on keeping its shoulder to the wheel, ear to the ground and nose to the grindstone building infrastructure and providing full employment for the Chinese people. As the US was relying on its military power to maintain its influence in the world, China was employing peaceful means to expand its influence. In 2020 the US spent $738 billion on defense, an additional $35 billion on nuclear weapons and and additional $80 billion on intelligence programs, none of which by the way provided intelligence on the assault on the Capitol although it had been discussed widely and openly on the web in prior weeks. Meanwhile, China's 2020 defense budget was $178 billion.

China's Cosco Shipping is building a new $3 billion port in Peru, and there are plans for a transcontinental railroad linking South America's Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Diplomatic opportunities for China have also been opened up due to COVID since China produces most of the world's PPE. The US was caught flat footed because it had to go hat in hand to China for PPE not much of which is manufactured domestically. Mask diplomacy has caused Washington to worry that China is gaining influence during the pandemic as China has provided PPE to 150 countries and 7 international organizations around the globe. While the US struggles to get vaccine into the arms of Americans, China has agreed to provide Pakistan with half a million doses of its Sinopharm vaccine free of charge. Time magazine reported:

"Yet China has won influence not by wielding sticks but by deftly distributing carrots. In Brazil, the region’s largest economy, bilateral trade with China rose from $2 billion in 2000 to $100 billion last year. Today, Brazil sends 30% of all exports to China, including 80% of its soybean crop and 60% of its iron ore. These entanglements are typically tightest with nations with goods to sell; China has supplied over $17 billion in financing to Argentina since 2007, according to Inter-American Dialogue, and is the world’s top importer of Argentine soybeans and beef.

"China is also now a preferred lender across the region. It hosts two international development banks–the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Development Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank (NDB) in Shanghai–that are both expanding their remit across the region. “Infrastructure development has shrunk the distance between Asia and Latin America,” AIIB president Jin Liqun tells TIME in his Beijing headquarters."

While China was deftly distributing carrots, the US was wielding sticks with Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo bullying the rest of the world to get them to fall in line behind the US. The US needs to cooperate with China to stave off the next big crisis - global warming - not start a new Cold War in an effort to overtake or compete with China. For the most part China has already won any competition to speak of by gaining cooperation and friendship with the rest of the world and achieving the world's largest economy while the US still struggles with COVID, its economy in shambles. "No country has put itself in a better position to become the world's renewable energy superpower than China,"says a recent report by the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation. In Brazil China's State Grid Corp. is the largest power generation and distribution company, while China's Three Gorges, the world's largest hydropower provider, controls 17 out of 48 hydro plants and 11 wind farms.

Joe Biden is doing his best to backtrack from Trump's disastrous America First policy, but American foreign policy is still on the track that it views China as a competitor rather than a nation that should be cooperated with in order to meet the challenge of global warming. Rather than gearing up for a military confrontation or quibbling and squabbling over human rights, the US must adopt a less belligerent foreign policy and learn to get along with the other nations of the world even those who have not been historic allies. The US should cut back on its bloated military and military-complex spending and devote the savings to virus research and green infrastructure implementation at home and around the world in cooperation with China and other nations.

Off the Top of My Head

Republicans' New Definition of Socialism: Any Government Program That Would Help Black People

by John Lawrence, February 2, 2021

Republicans are worried that the US will become a socialist country. The public sector will come to dominate the private sector. Well, the private sector has been helpless at solving the big outstanding problems: global warming and the pandemic. If the private sector could solve these problems, well, that would be great, but they're not capable of doing it. Therefore, government is left by default to deal with global warming and the pandemic as well as a host of other systemic problems like health care, poverty, economic inequality and racism. So what does capitalism stand for at this point: fossil fuel dependency and business as usual which means more and more income and wealth inequality. With capitalism there is no "we" there, only an accumulation of "I"s.

What Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has shown is that the Republican accusation of Democrats - "tax and spend" - is a discredited misnomer because US government spending does not depend on taxation. In fact a Green New Deal and Medicare for All could all be accomplished without increasing taxes on anyone. That's because the US central bank aka the Federal Reserve can just create money with a few keystrokes on a computer the way it did to save the banking industry during the Great Recession when it gave the Big Banks several trillion dollars without any consequences whatsoever for deficit spending or increased taxes to pay for it. This facility should be used responsibly, however, just like the use of alcohol. Used irresponsibly this money creation facility could increase inflation.

So what is the responsible use of government spending? Obviously, during a pandemic and incipient global warming, it would be responsible for the government to spend money to solve these huge worldwide problems which not only affect the US, but affect the whole world. One of the lessons of this situation is that, if we want to contribute to the solution of global warming, we must become friends with the world's biggest GHG emitter which is China. China and the US are the world's first and second largest GHG emitters and the first and second largest economies. We can't afford not to be partners in the solution of this problem. China and US continued rivalry even amounting to a Cold War will guarantee that the earth is destroyed as a habitable living place for humans. So we have no other choice. Either we can continue our petty squabbles with China or we can cooperate with them to solve problems. We are truly all in this together. Either we hang together or we hang as nations separately.

The second lesson of MMT is that Medicare for All (M4A) could be part of the solution for global warming. If M4A were to be implemented, the US could have a much better health care system with better outcomes health wise at a far cheaper price. This has been shown in study after study. What's more M4A would be deflationary in financial terms. Deflation as well as inflation is bad for the economy. The fight against global warming would be inflationary because of the huge expenditures that must be made so it could offset the deflation caused by M4A. In fact we find in How to Pay for the Green New Deal, working paper 931 by Yeva Nersisyan and L. Randall Wray:

"To be clear, we do recognize that implementation of the GND will shift spending from the private sector to the government sector. However, unless there is an a priori reason to believe this would—by itself—be inflationary, we take the position that in the general case it makes no difference in terms of inflation whether the dollar spent to hire resources comes from the government or from the private sector, which is also the method used by Keynes. As Stephanie Kelton says, cash registers do not discriminate. Indeed, as we report below, there is strong evidence that at least in the healthcare sector a dollar of government spending buys more care than a dollar of private spending—so shifting toward government as the single payer would produce disinflationary pressure."

So while the US government can create as much money as it needs for a GND by means of the Federal Reserve's money creation powers without increasing taxes, the need to forestall inflation could be offset by M4A which would in addition provide a health care system with better outcomes for Americans at a lower price. The only reason then to raise taxes would be to diminish economic inequality which could be ameliorated by only taxing the rich.

Off the Top of My Head

We Should Take the Beam Out of Our Own Eye Before We Criticize the Mote in Our Brother's Eye

by John Lawrence, January 28, 2021

Biblical passages never lose their relevance. This is from Matthew 7:5. Before we start preaching to other countries about how they should reform themselves, we need as a country to remove the cancer that is threatening to overthrow our own democracy. We have met the enemy, and it is us. Homegrown Americans with all the benefits of a public school education are threatening legislators so that they don't even feel safe at work without security details. The Department of Homeland Security is more concerned with domestic terrorists than they are with foreign terrorists. Social media is a menace to society. There is something wrong when people can make millions or even billions of dollars threatening democracy and the rule of law. In my opinion media that proliferates lies, conspiracy theories and hate speech should be shut down. Other societies would not stand for it. Hate speech is not free speech.

Yet the US tries to preach to the rest of the world about their shortcomings. The US has criticized China, for example, for its treatment of the Uyghers, its annexation of Hong Kong, trade policies vis a vis the US etc. The US ignores, however, that for the vast majority of Chinese, their government is doing just fine. It's not as if the US has always treated minorities fairly whether they be Native Americans, Black Americans or Asian Americans. And now we are seeing how freedom of speech and freedom of assembly combined with freedom of gun ownership can result in a toxic cocktail that can explode at any minute. But some Americans are apoplectic that China, a purported Communist country, is now out competing the US to become the world's largest economy. Measured by the more refined yardstick that both the IMF and CIA now judge to be the single best metric for comparing national economies, the IMF Report shows that China's economy is one-sixth larger than America's ($24.2 trillion versus the U.S.'s $20.8 trillion).

The National Register reports:

"So what? If this were simply a contest for bragging rights, picking a measuring rod that allows Americans to feel better about ourselves has a certain logic. But in the real world, a nation’s GDP is the substructure of its global power. Over the past generation, as China has created the largest economy in the world, it has displaced the U.S. as the largest trading partner of nearly every major nation (just last year adding Germany to that list). It has become the manufacturing workshop of the world, including for face masks and other protective equipment as we are now seeing in the coronavirus crisis. Thanks to double-digit growth in its defense budget, its military forces have steadily shifted the seesaw of power in potential regional conflicts, in particular over Taiwan. And this year, China will surpass the U.S. in R&D spending, leading the U.S. to a “tipping point in R&D” and future competitiveness."

In addition China has pulled 850 million people out of poverty in the last 40 years. In that same time frame, US wages have stagnated and the US has had a growing homelessness problem. Most Chinese are very happy with these developments. In the book, Has China Won?, the author, Kishore Mahbubani states: "The Chinese people fear chaos. It is the one force that in the past brought China to its knees and brought misery to the Chinese people. Clearly, America is suffering chaos now. President Donald Trump has been a polarizing and divisive figure. American society has never been as divided since the Civil War ... Chinese culture values social harmony over individual empowerment. American culture is the opposite."

Kishore argues that the Chinese Communist Party should be called the Chinese Civilization Party because it clearly values the 2000 year Chinese history much more than it values Marxist-Leninist ideology. Most of the Chinese people value their growing prosperity and freedom within their own personal sphere much more than they resent the Chinese government for exerting a heavier hand while the American government allows more freedom to its citizens which has led recently to chaos. Stability, for the Chinese, is an overriding value. It behooves the US, at this juncture in history, to get its own house in order. Joe Biden is trying to do just that. In addition to the chaos created by Donald Trump, there are immense challenges in terms of the pandemic and global warming. These issues require global cooperation not another Cold War. The US should celebrate China's obvious success instead of chiding it for human rights especially in light of the historical and ongoing human rights violations of the United States itself.

China: Enemy Du Jour? But Why?

Counterpunch, January 27, 2021

by Melvin Goodman

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Photograph Source: Karl Schumacher – Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library – Public Domain

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has not faced an existential threat—nothing to justify the trillions of dollars given to the Pentagon to maintain military predominance over the entire global community.  The United States requires a foil for its foreign policy declarations and for maintaining the allegiance of the U.S. citizenry.  Has China become that foil?

When the absence of the Soviet Union could no longer justify bloated defense spending, we pursued a Global War on Terror that led to two decades of warfare in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.  Counter-terrorism can no longer justify increased military spending, so will we settle on China (and Russia) as threats to U.S. security?   The Trump administration did so, driving China and Russia into each other’s arms as they have created their closest bilateral relations since the 1950s.  U.S. strategists previously worried about Sino-Soviet cooperation, even exaggerating that threat to justify the Vietnam War.  Now, no one in a sensitive policy position has such concerns even though U.S. relations with both China and Russia have deteriorated.

President Joe Biden will be somewhat hamstrung in his efforts toward China because of his own caustic language toward Beijing during the presidential campaign.  In addition to hard-line appointments in the national security field, he will have to contend with a strong bipartisan push in the Congress to increase defense spending against the China threat.  Congress is a major reason for the creation of the national security state that we have become, allowing the militarization of national security policy and the “forever wars” of the past two decades.  China, of course, financed those wars.

The mainstream media is doing its part to justify military engagement by applying polemicized descriptions of U.S. adversaries, particularly China.  The New York Times and the Washington Post cannot write about China without labeling the country as “increasingly muscular;” Russia is always described as “aggressive;” Iran is that “looming threat;” and Afghanistan is the “protracted conflict” that requires a U.S. military presence even after two decades of feckless occupation.

Biden’s national security team for China seems similar to the Trump team in terms of its hard-liner attitude toward China.  Trump’s Asia coordinator and deputy national security adviser was Matthew Pottinger.  Pottinger was recognized as a hard-liner within the National Security Council, so his prescient warnings about Covid-19 a year ago were dismissed as part of his polemical agenda regarding Beijing. (Biden also appointed a hard-liner on Russia from the Obama administration, Victoria Nuland, to the number three position at the Department of State, which will be discussed in a subsequent column.)

Biden’s Asia coordinator and deputy national security adviser is Kurt Campbell, who was the architect of the “pivot” toward the Pacific in the Obama administration.  The so-called “pivot” initiated the downturn in Sino-American relations.  In 2011, in order to distract attention from its withdrawal from Iraq, including withdrawal from our largest base in Iraq, the ironically-named Camp Victory, the Obama administration declared that its attention and resources would move from the Middle East to the Pacific.  China interpreted the “pivot” as the beginning of a policy of containment, which Chinese leader Xi Jinping has opposed.

President Barack Obama’s administration, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, supported the “pivot.”  Clinton and Gates shared Cold War positions on both China and Russia; Gates even proclaimed that Beijing was pursuing a policy of “world conquest.”  (Gates used a similar expression in the 1980s against the Soviet Union when he was deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency—even as the Soviet Union was melting down and pursuing improved relations with the United States.)  The “pivot” appeared to be a foolish reprise of “containment,” but containing a very weak and unstable Soviet Union was a reasonable task.  Containing a very strong and stable China is unlikely, a pipe dream on the part of Biden’s national security team.

In additional to placing Campbell in an influential position in the National Security Council, Biden named Ely Ratner to be the special assistant to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin who has no experience with Asian policy issues.  Campbell and Ratner have coauthored pieces on China that can only be described as truculent.  The new deputy to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations is Jeffrey Prescott, another hardliner.  The Council on Foreign Relations’s Julian Gewirtz has been named a China director for the national security team.  The views of these appointees on China appear unified, preparing the way for group think.

Biden should name a more conciliatory figure regarding China to the national security team.  A seasoned professional such as Professor David Shambaugh of George Washington University could serve in a policy position.  A younger professional who has written widely on diplomatic initiatives toward China is Lyle Goldstein, a research professor at the Naval War College.

From the start in 2011, the policy of the “pivot” was a bridge too far.  It meant that the United States would focus less attention and fewer military resources to the Middle East, and that our focus and forces would be shifted to the Pacific.  As for the Middle East, it has been our briar patch for the past five decades, and we have never seriously grappled with what amounts to even a partial withdrawal from the area.  Given our continuing commitments there, it is unlikely that we could move sufficient military resources from the Middle East to significantly affect the Pacific region and thus elicit Bejing’s attention.

In fact, there is nothing to be gained from adding to our Pacific presence in view of the more than sufficient military power we already maintain there.  We have an expansive network of bases and facilities in the Far East as well as sophisticated naval and air power. Moreover, our Pacific allies do not want a Sino-American arms race in their backyard.  They realize that when the elephants tangle, it is the grass that gets trampled.  Additional tactical military maneuvers are unnecessary.

The best answer to China’s clumsy diplomacy and provocative maneuvers in the region is to engage in more sophisticated diplomacy.  A U.S. effort to bolster its bilateral ties with China’s neighbors such as Vietnam would be a natural counter.  We should strengthen our ties within the so-called Quad—the United States, Australia, India, and Japan.  Our participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership would signal the goal of competing economically with China.  At the same time, we could signal working with China on our many shared interests such as the environment, non-proliferation, and confidence-building-measures.  Arms control and disarmament were central to launching a detente with the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s; the environmental challenge could be the key to a serious and institutionalized Sino-American dialogue.

There are potential points of confrontation between the United States and China, but they have nothing to do with U.S. national security concerns.  We may be troubled by China’s hard-line policies toward Tibet, the Uighurs, and Hong Kong, but these are Beijing’s internal problems and we have little ability to affect them. Beijing will not bend to our will over domestic policy. There are more relevant concerns with Beijing’s external problems on the border with India or with regard to Taiwan, but here again the answer is to use diplomacy.  We must stop the gratuitous aspects of our engagement with Taiwan or we could find ourselves sleepwalking into a confrontation that would benefit no one.

President Biden should follow his own instincts regarding the importance of the power of our example, and demonstrate far less concern for the example of U.S. power.

---

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent book is “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing), and he is the author of the forthcoming “The Dangerous National Security State” (2020).” Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

Off the Top of My Head

Mitt Romney Doesn't Want to Go Into More Debt With China: Is This a Problem?

by John Lawrence

In short: No. The trade deficit with China means that US consumers' dollars ended up in the People's Bank of China's account at the Federal Reserve. The PBOC has two accounts at the Fed which amount to a checking account and a savings account. The savings account consists of Treasuries which pay a small interest. Since the Fed controls the interest rate which is approximately zero, interest charges are very low. The US is not like Greece which had to borrow money on the open market which is subject to interest rate fluctuations. Greece, unlike the US, does not issue its own currency. It is part of the Euro Zone so when it borrows money it cannot just issue the money like it could have when it has its own sovereign currency, the drachma. Therefore, it got itself in a debt trap in which the more it borrowed, the higher interest rates it had to pay. The US can never be in that position because the US is a sovereign currency issuer.

China needs to keep US dollars in its account because the Chinese currency is pegged to the dollar. Therefore, it is pledged to exchange Chinese yuan for dollars in much the same way that the US dollar formerly had pledged US dollars to gold at the rate of $35 dollars to an ounce of gold. The US dollar, on the other hand, is now a fiat currency with a floating exchange rate so a dollar is worth a dollar and that's it. No one can demand that the US government exchange a dollar for something else. So the Chinese government needs to keep a lot of dollars on hand. So when China buys US debt (Treasury bonds), what happens is that China's checking account at the Fed is debited and its savings account at the Fed is credited. The money never leaves the Federal Reserve! Stephanie Kelton writes in The Deficit Myth: "To pay back China, the Fed simply reverses the accounting entries, marking down the number in its securities [savings] account and marking up the number in its reserve [checking] account. It's all accomplished using nothing more than a keyboard at the New York Federal Reserve Bank."

So what would happen if China or Japan refused to buy any more US Treasuries? If Treasury bonds cannot be sold to investors, domestic or foreign, they end up on the accounts of the "primary dealers", mainly big Wall Street banks, which are obligated to buy them. If this takes too much liquidity out of the system, meaning those banks don't have enough cash on their balance sheets because they have so many Treasuries, the Fed merely steps in and adds liquidity to the system meaning that they take the Treasuries onto the Fed's balance sheet and exchanges the Treasuries for cash paid to the banks. So by a roundabout process the US debt ends up on the Fed's balance sheet where it can stay forever. And don't worry about the interest paid on those Treasures. Any interest the Fed makes is remitted to the government which means that it is paid to the US Treasury account at the Fed by means of a few keystrokes. So it amounts to interest free debt. Those Treasuries may be sold back into the market at some time or they could stay on the Fed's balance sheet forever. There is absolutely no urgency for the Fed to get rid of them.

So Mitt Romney's concerns that the US might add more debt to China is unfounded. He should probably, like a lot of politicians, study up on Modern Monetary Theory and try to understand how the Federal Reserve, which is the US' central bank, really works. It is the loaner of last resort to the banks and, by a roundabout process, to the Federal government. It has the ability to create money by a few keystrokes on a computer because the US currency is a sovereign fiat currency. It is the loaner of last resort to the banking system, and, since the primary dealers are obligated to buy Treasury bonds, effectively, it is the loaner of last resort to the Federal government. The import of cheap products from China, which adds to the trade deficit, keeps the consumer price index low in the US. If those same products were produced in the US with higher priced labor, prices for US consumers would go up considerably. On the other hand, Chinese investors have been the biggest purchasers of U.S. residential real estate for six consecutive years. This drives up the asset price of US real estate and makes housing more expensive. This is the downside of the Chinese accumulation of dollars, but the same is true for trade deficits with other countries.

Off the Top of My Head

The US Central Bank Can Print Money; The State of California Can't

by John Lawrence, December 27, 2020

One of the central tenets of Modern Monetary Currency (MMT) as explained in Stephanie Kelton's book, The Deficit Myth, is that a nation with a sovereign currency can always pay its debts by a few keystrokes on a computer at its central bank - the Federal Reserve in the US' case. A nation or a state without a sovereign currency must pay its debts by taxes or out of income. She dispels the myth that the US government pays its debts out of taxes or by Treasury bonds. However, the state of California must pay its debts the old fashioned way out of taxes and income. This reality hit hard in recent years in the case of Greece which gave up its sovereign currency, the drachma, when its joined the European Union. Unlike the UK which maintained its sovereign currency, the pound, Greece has to borrow money from private investors and pay its debts from the collection of taxes. Eventually, after much hardship the IMF and the European Central Bank helped Greece get back on its feet.

It's a myth that the US national debt must be paid off by our children or grandchildren or that we must suffer because of all the money owed via US Treasury bonds to China or Japan. Unlike Greece which saw its situation go from bad to worse as private investors demanded higher and higher rates of interest, the US Federal Reserve sets the interest rate (currently around zero) on the bonds it offers for sale. Other countries buy them because most of the world's business is conducted in dollars, and those countries need dollars which they get from Treasury bonds to conduct business. The US government is not competing with private corporations for loans because, when it needs money, it just prints it. Right now the way the rules are written the Fed can print money and give it to the banks, the way it did during the Great Recession when it just gave the banking system $4.5 trillion, but it cannot print money and give it to the US government without Congressional approval. It can provide direct relief to the banks, but it cannot provide direct relief to the American people. That's why the COVID relief package is being held up because, even though Congress did give it its stamp of approval, the law also requires that the President sign the bill which he has not.

In "The Deficit Myth" Kelton writes:

You've probably already seen MMT's central insights in action. ... Whenever the topic of Social Security comes up, or when someone in Congress wants to put more money into education or health care, there's a lot of talk about how everything must be "paid for" to avoid adding to the federal deficit. But have you noticed this never seems to be a problem when it comes to the defense budget, bailing out banks, or giving huge tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans, even when these measures significantly raise the deficit.? As long as the votes are there, the federal government can always fund its priorities. That's how it works. Deficits didn't stop FDR from implementing the New Deal in the 1930s. They didn't dissuade John F. Kennedy from landing a man on the moon. And they never once stopped Congress from going to war.

In fact deficits don't matter as Kelton proclaims over and over again in her book. There are limits however. That limit has yet to be met as the huge bailouts of the 21st century for the Great Recession and COVID relief have yet to cause the least bit of inflation. Other big projects like a Green New Deal are pooh poohed by Congress because Congress is controlled by wealthy interests so tax breaks for the rich is no problem nor is going to war which benefits defense contractors, but anything that represents the interests of the average American is not favored by Congress. If and when Congress is controlled by the middle class, we will see large projects which promote the health and welfare of the American people in general and not just wealthy business interests.

The Chinese are building huge infrastructure projects all over China and even the rest of the world with its Belt and Road Initiative. They can do this because the Chinese renminbi is a sovereign currency and the money is available to keep the Chinese people fully employed doing constructive things. They have bought into MMT and know that Deficits Don't Matter. Besides they don't have to subject themselves to the whims of Congress. If the government wants to do it, it's full steam ahead. It seems to have worked for them as they have brought 850 million Chinese people out of poverty in the last 40 years. But as Pew Research reported, "But despite the strong labor market, wage growth has lagged economists’ expectations. In fact, despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers." So to put a fine point on it, 850 million Chinese brought out of poverty in last 40 years; average Americans no wage growth in last 40 years.

It has become clear that the old way of thinking that national deficits have to be repaid out of taxes and Treasury bonds is incorrect. Any country with a sovereign currency can just print money by a few keystrokes on its central bank's computer. The US Fed does just that. The conversion to Green Infrastructure could easily be funded in this way if Congress approved. At the same time many good paying jobs could be created. Instead of competing with China by military threats or sanctions, we could instead compete by building Green infrastructure in the US and the rest of the world. Or maybe we could cooperate in saving the world from the ravages of global warming and also providing the same benefits to the average American which the average Chinese is increasingly able to enjoy.

Off the Top of My Head

We Need a Crash Course in CO2 Reduction to Get to Net Zero by 2030

by John Lawrence, December 22, 2020

Right now the world is emitting roughly 40 gigatons of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) per year. We need to reduce that by an average of 4 GtCO2 per year for the next 10 years to get to net zero emissions by 2030. We need to do this in order to keep earth's average temperature from rising more than 1.5˚C which would be catastrophic for future generations. So we need to get started immediately because the result of not doing it would be worse than the current pandemic by a factor of 100 or more. In order to get the job done we need worldwide cooperation especially among the world's highest emitting countries which are the US and China. This means that we can't afford to have a hostile or even an adversarial relationship with China. What is more important - quibbling about the defects of their system or saving the planet as a habitable place for future generations.

China was the driver of most of the rise in global emissions in 2019, with an increase of 0.26 GtCO2 compared to 2018. Meanwhile, US emissions declined by 0.09 GtCO2 and those in the EU fell by 0.05 GtCO2, whereas Indian emissions increased by 0.04 GtCO2. The rest of the world’s rose 0.08 GtCO2. 2020 will probably see a decline in worldwide CO2 emissions due to the pandemic, but the reductions for the US and EU are minuscule compared to the kind or reductions needed. They are orders or magnitude too small - less than .1 GtCO2 compared to the 4 GtCO2 necessary to achieve net zero by 2030. The kind of effort needed is probably 100 times the effort of the WW 2 war effort. That's why a Green New Deal is necessary. The larger effort over ten years means that a huge amount of money is necessary to fund it.

In Paying Ourselves to Save the Planet, a Layman's Explanation of Modern Money Theory, J.D. Alt writes, "Five years after the initial agreements of the Paris Accords - and 35 years after initiating the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - carbon-dioxide levels have continued to rise rapidly in the earth's atmosphere. Virtually nothing has been undertaken, or even planned, to reverse what is now recognized, with growing alarm, as an existential threat - within the lifetimes of our children - to life on earth as we currently live it." Alt deals with the reality that an adequate response to the global warming crisis - and it is a crisis, probably the greatest that the human race has ever faced - will require trillions of dollars. This kind of money is more than the conventional means of funding - taxes or Treasury bonds - could ever come up with.

Fortunately, the problem can be solved by means of a new understanding about how money is actually created. We have seen how the Federal Reserve has printed money to bail out the banking industry during and after the Great Recession of 2008. This money did not add to the national deficit or debt. Since the US dollar is a sovereign fiat currency - it is not backed by gold or anything but faith and trust in the US government - it could be created by the Federal Reserve for other purposes than just bailing out the Big Banks. The only restrictions at this time are legal, psychological and political. While the Fed can just create money with a few keystrokes on a computer and give it to the banks, it can't just give it to the US government to be spent on programs like a Green New Deal. To make the money necessary to cope with global warming, certain legal restrictions would have to be changed so that the money could just be spent into the economy like Lincoln did to fund the Civil War, the only restriction being that it be used for a good cause and that only that amount needs to be created at any time that can be spent productively with respect to the available resources. That's the key in order not to increase inflation.

Resources including human resources can be marshaled in a big way during a crisis as they were in World War II when Ford's great World War II aircraft factory, the Willow Run B‐24 plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan, produced 14 bombers per day. Liberty ships also were produced at great rates - 3 ships a day. This is the kind of effort that could be brought to bear to forestall global warming. In addition cooperation with China is essential. China's banking structure is capable of marshaling huge resources both human and material as it has done with its Belt and Road Initiative and the fact that it has pulled more than 850 million Chinese people out of extreme poverty in the past 40 years, according to the World Bank. The country's poverty rate – defined as the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day – fell from 88 per cent in 1981 to 0.7 per cent in 2015. China is capable of performing the same kind of miracles with respect to global warming, but cooperation between the two largest emitting nations and the world's largest two economies is essential.

Off the Top of My Head

China is the only country to land successfully on the moon in the 21st century, and has done it three times

by John Lawrence, December 19, 2020

While the US is in the midst of the greatest public health and economic crisis it has ever faced, China is surging ahead economically and in the space race. This December 2020 China's Chang’e-5 spacecraft gathered about 4.4 pounds of lunar samples in a three-week operation that underlined China’s growing prowess and ambition in space. It was China’s most successful mission to date; yet there was nothing reported about it on the nightly news. What has been reported on the nightly news is the fact that Russia has hacked into our defense department and other sensitive institutions. The fact that this is even happening represents sheer stupidity on behalf of the Defense Department. The internet is a public space that represents, as far as the Defense Department is concerned, a direct pipeline between itself and Russian hackers. It is asking for trouble.

Why hasn't the Defense Department detached itself from the internet and created a private intranet disconnected from anything Russian hackers could access? They could have an intranet which would just be a connection among those American actors and institutions that would need to interact with each other. If they need to interact with people in other parts of the world, they have had secure communication networks at least for the last 70 years. No one hacked them during the Second World War although the British were able to hack the Nazis. For American sensitive institutions to be using the public internet or even to be connected to the public internet is a travesty. There are different levels of internet communications that could be used. For nonsensitve communications and data storage a more public internet can be used, but for sensitive systems a private internet not connected to the public internet that Russian hackers have access to is more appropriate. Then hacking is a non-issue.

The US is falling behind China economically and in many other ways. China has mastered the art of using its public banks to build infrastructure at home and abroad. It has lifted 800 million people out of poverty in the last 30 years. Meanwhile, US infrastructure is rated a D+ by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Ellen Brown writes:

A publicly-owned national infrastructure bank, on the other hand, would be mandated to lend into the real economy; and if the loans were of the “self funding” sort characterizing most infrastructure projects (generating fees to pay off the loans), they would be repaid, canceling out the debt by which the money was created. That is how China built 12,000 miles of high-speed rail in a decade: credit created on the books of government-owned banks was advanced to pay for workers and materials, and the loans were repaid with profits from passenger fees. 

Unlike the QE pumped into financial markets, which creates asset bubbles in stocks and housing, this sort of public credit mechanism is not inflationary. Credit money advanced for productive purposes balances the circulating money supply with new goods and services in the real economy. Supply and demand rise together, keeping prices stable. China increased its money supply by nearly 1800% over 24 years (from 1996 to 2020) without driving up price inflation, by increasing GDP in step with the money supply.

In the US the Federal Reserve has poured money into banks, hedge funds and various other financial entities but is forbidden by law from helping average Americans or Main Street businesses. There is Quantitative Easing for the banks, but not Quantitative Easing for the People. China has no such legal barriers for their central bank and public banks. While the US Congress quibbles endlessly over minuscule issues, China is going full steam ahead with economic development which benefits large majorities of its people as well as people outside of China with its Belt and Road initiative. The World Bank reports: "If implemented fully, the initiative could lift 32 million people out of moderate poverty—those who live on less than $3.20 a day, the analysis found. It could boost global trade by up to 6.2 percent, and up to 9.7 percent for corridor economies. Global income could increase by as much 2.9 percent. For low-income corridor economies, foreign direct investment could rise by as much as 7.6 percent."

While China has mastered the technique of generating money for infrastructure development inside and outside of China while also increasing world trade and economic well being, the US has only increased poverty and destroyed infrastructure with its never ending wars. It has squandered money on a military infrastructure which is larger than the next 10 countries combined. The US dollar is still the world's reserve currency and major world financial institutions like the IMF are still oriented towards the dollar. This could all change, however, as the Chinese renminbi gains ground. The US has a chance to reconstruct itself under a Biden administration and reorient itself towards a middle class democratic society which benefits its people rather than its elite. It's a tall order but maybe Joe Biden and his appointees can pull it off. A Green New Deal is necessary not only for the sake of reestablishing the middle class but also for saving the planet from global warming.

Off the Top of My Head

"We're Only going To Be Secure If Everyone Is Secure"

by John Lawrence, December 13, 2020

These words spoken by Fareed Zakaria regarding the pandemic could as well apply to war as well. What a novel idea! If everyone is secure with access to a vaccine, the pandemic will be gone. Perhaps if every nation is secure in their relations with other nations, war will be gone. Of course there will a colossal drop in GDP if the war industry goes away and an increase in unemployment if everyone in the military is civilianized. War and the threat of war is caused by mistrust and insecurity with regards to the intentions and good (or bad) will of other nations towards us. That's why it's important to build friendship and trust between and among nations instead of threatening other nations by economic means such as sanctions or in terms of direct military threats.

Nations who have solved the pandemic problem within their borders are surging back economically. This year the US will decline in GDP relative to last year while China will have positive growth in its economy. While Trump backed out of the Trans-Pacific partnership which would have brought about free trade among 12 countries, China has recently signed the world's largest free trade agreement - the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement - among 15 countries. The signatory states account for 30% of global GDP, larger than NAFTA or the EU. In addition China's massive Belt and Road initiative is an agreement with 70 countries for China to build infrastructure which will enable greater trade relationships among those countries benefiting China the most. Also China owns about $1.1 trillion in US debt. It seems that the only advantage the US has is the fact that the dollar is the world's reserve currency. But that situation is subject to change especially as nations find ways to outmaneuver US sanctions. It seems that China is becoming the world's preeminent nation not by virtue of its military prowess but by virtue of its aggressive trade and infrastructure building policies. Washington has not been able to respond except by threats and sanctions. Sanctioning Tik Tok and Huawei is a pathetic response to China's bid for world leadership.

Vaccine development for COVID-19 is a massive cooperative effort among scientists and companies throughout the world. Most of the PPE used in America was manufactured abroad. Global supply chains have been absolutely crucial in supplying the US with needed products which aren't manufactured here. One of the hallmarks of capitalism is free trade. It represents the idea of free markets applied to international trade. So while China has exemplified leadership in increasing free trade, the US under Trump has backed off from free trade, invoked protectionism, and hence negated its free market capitalist principles. However, that's about to change under a Biden administration. We can expect a lot more global cooperation and diplomacy rather than the bullying policies represented by Pompeo and Trump. It's especially important now that global warming is a looming global threat. Biden wants a $1.7 trillion deal to combat global warming.

China, the world's largest emitter of carbon, has vowed to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Joe Biden has vowed to achieve carbon neutrality in the US, the world's second largest emitter, by 2050. The EU has agreed to spend a half a trillion dollars on global warming projects. If all these massive commitments are actually followed through on, the world might limit the increase in global warming to 2.1 degrees Celsius which is about what they had agreed on in the Paris Accords was necessary to prevent disaster. A lot will depend on whether Biden can get his programs through Congress. If the Senate is controlled by Republicans, all bets are off. That is why the run-offs in Georgia for two Senate seats are so important.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/fareed-zakaria/

 

Off the Top of My Head

Trump's Scattershot Foreign Policy

by John Lawrence, November

Trump never had a foreign policy per se just a lot of disconnected impulses and hunches some of which might have borne fruit if there had been some coherent plan for following up. Take Kim Jong Un for instance. I think it was a good thing that he managed to have a personal relationship with him. But nothing came of it because there was no attempt to continue the relationship with any concrete plan. Trump's latest move is to withdraw more troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. But he should have gone ahead and withdrawn them all and ended those ongoing disasters once and for all. Instead he leaves a "token" force there. This is the US military establishment's basic problem; they want a token force in every country of the world. If Trump wanted to be consistent, he would have removed the 50,000 troops from Germany and the 30,000 troops from South Korea. There is no need to occupy all these countries - at great expense to American taxpayers, I might add - since the US has excellent intelligence of all kinds including satellite and human intelligence so that it knows what's happening anywhere in the world and can react almost instantaneously if the need be. A troop presence is unnecessary. Remember the drones?

Trump made a point that NATO - meaning basically Germany - was not paying its fair share. They should have been paying more and doing more to defend themselves and not relying so much on the US. So far, so good. He did get Germany to increase its defense budget, but then he turns around and increases the US defense budget instead of reducing it commensurately. Plus he could have withdrawn the 50,000 US troops from Germany saving a ton of money. Trump's inconsistency is the hallmark of his foreign policy since to call it even a policy is a stretch. A policy connotes some kind of intelligent forethought and planning neither of which were in Trump's skill set.

As far as becoming friends with Vladimir Putin, I think this was a good thing. It is better to have warm personal relationships with the leaders of countries with whom we have potentially tense or adversarial relationships. It is important also not to let those leaders take advantage of or manipulate the US by means of these relationships. It's not clear if this was what was happening. Trump started out with China on the same wavelength which was also a good thing until he decided that it was in his interests to blame China for the "China virus" and start another cold war with China. It is extremely important to have good relationships with Russia and China at this point because cooperation on global warming is essential. Also China is going to come out of the pandemic with the world's leading economy. America will be relegated to number 2. It was more or less tied before the pandemic, but China got the pandemic under control and reopened its economy several months ago.

Trump's attitude towards Iran is not constructive. He withdrew from the JCPOA, and is now contemplating evidently a strike on Iran which would be disastrous. Despite Trump's possible personal business interests in Russia and/or China which led him to be initially more friendly towards those countries, I still think that his detente with them was a positive thing. The Democratic leadership on the other hand seems intent on demonizing Vladimir Putin instead of working with him in a more friendly fashion. I suspect that a Biden administration will try to have a more constructive and positive relationship with China than the Trump relationship devolved into. The boneheaded attempts by Trump to compete with China by demonizing Tik Tok and Huawei will come to an end, I hope. Again the importance of cooperation with regard to global warming between the world's two largest economies cannot be overstated.

Trump's delight in selling billions of dollars worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia was just abhorrent. Fanning the flames of war because it's good for the economy is reprehensible. Let us hope that the Biden administration takes a more constructive approach to reducing the US' occupation forces in many countries of the world, reducing the US footprint, ending finally by means of a total troop withdrawal the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and working cooperatively with the major countries of the world with whom somewhat adversarial relationships have been developing unfortunately. Cooperation and diplomacy should be the watchwords as we try to repair the harm that that US military forces have inflicted in the Middle East and elsewhere putting more emphasis on constructively rebuilding those countries and resettling the millions of refugees that these wars have caused.

Off the Top of My Head

If You Thought American Inequality Was Bad Before COVID, You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

by John Lawrence, October 19, 2020

Pandemics should be the great equalizer, but COVID has exacerbated inequality. The rich have gotten richer. The poor have not only gotten poorer, they've slipped into poverty and homelessness. Around the world the Economist estimates that about 100 million people are falling back into extreme poverty, that is they are living on less than $2 a day. In the US between 6 and 8 million people have been pushed into extreme poverty within the last few months. CNBC reported that nearly 40% of cash-strapped Americans can't last a month on their savings. But there are success stories if you want to call them that. Amazon has seen its market cap increase by $750 billion to around $1.7 trillion. Jeff Bezos' net worth is now around $200 billion. Clearly the COVID economic depression has not been bad for everyone.

Americans are not encouraged to save for a rainy day, and 2020 has seen a series of the all time rainiest of days. We are encouraged to consume, consume, consume. Consumption is 70% of GDP in the US, much higher than the 51% share in Europe and 57% in China. The problem now is that Americans can't consume if they don't have the money to do it. That is why the CARES Act  was so important and why a further relief package is as important. If people don't spend to consume, the US will go into a depression. Consumer spending is important for the US economy much more so than elsewhere in the world.

China's economy will be the only one to grow this year while the US economy shrinks. China got COVID under control months ago, and its economy now is in full swing. It goes to show the wisdom of getting COVID under control first no matter how severe the measures that have to be taken to do so. Then the economy can open with no problem. The US, under the leadership of President Trump, did a half ass job of getting COVID under control with the result that opening the economy was done in a half ass way also. Now COVID is on the upswing in the US, and Trump is holding super spreader event rallies as he seemingly wants to take his supporters down with him if he fails to win on election day. The economy is on a roller coaster of half openings and half closings.

Clearly, there has been a K shaped recovery with the rich doing very well and the poor slipping into poverty. Poor essential workers such as meat packers and agricultural workers presumably still have their jobs. Nonessential poor workers such as maids in the hospitality industry and restaurant and bar workers have lost their jobs as those industries have either shut down or are struggling. The worst thing for these struggling industries would be to have to shut down completely again although that may be necessary if COVID cases continue to spike. Although the situation is bad for poor people in the US, it's worse in the rest of the world. The World Bank has revised its analysis of the effects of COVID, and they now estimate that the COVID pandemic is likely to push between 88 and 115 million people into extreme poverty in 2020, setting back poverty reduction by around three years. Meanwhile, billionaires saw their wealth climb 27.5% to $10.2 trillion from April to July this year, according to a report from Swiss bank UBS.

The US' response to COVID has been among the poorest in the world with the result that America's influence in the world, already on the downswing, is further eroding. Inevitably China will take over as the world's largest economy just based on its superior response to the COVID pandemic alone. That makes this year's elections crucial to resuming some semblance of American influence and respect in the world community. Not to mention that if Trump is reelected there is no hope for a remediated response to global warming and climate change. Either the US will get on the right track in several different dimensions with Joe Biden as President or Trump, if he serves another 4 years, will take America and the world down with him.

Off the Top of My Head

Has China Won?

by John Lawrence, October 16, 2020

Ian Bremmer wrote in Time magazine: "You might think 2020 had been a pretty good year for China, at least when compared with the West. Though COVID-19 began its global march there, China’s recovery has been remarkable. The government’s unprecedented capacity for surveillance, large-scale testing, contact tracing and quarantine helped contain the outbreak inside China within two months. That success allowed for the restart of supply chains and enabled a state investment-led rebound. China could be the world’s only large economy to grow this year. And as second waves of COVID-19 appear in Europe and the U.S., China hasn’t had any serious outbreaks over the past month. Life there is nearly back to normal."

The Chinese and the US economies were neck and neck prior to COVID. The fact that China has handled its response much better than has the US means that China will emerge as the world's largest economy by 2021. In his book, "Has China Won?", author Kishore Mahbubani sums up the strengths and weaknesses of both societies. He contends that the "Chinese Communist Party" is a misnomer. It should be called the Chinese Civilization Party as it owes more to China's 3000 year civilization than it does to communism. China values stability over chaos. It has pulled 800,000 Chinese citizens out of poverty in the last 40 years, largely because it has privatized large swaths of its society. Chinese citizens are well satisfied with their lot in life because among other things they have access to as wide a variety consumer goods as do the developed western societies.

So what has been the US response to China's rapid economic growth and expansion particularly with regard to its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which is building infrastructure all over the world with the intention of recreating the ancient Silk Road trade route? Obama initiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which would have been a trade alliance rivaling the BRI. Trump immediately withdrew from the TPP as well as withdrawing from other global initiatives and alliances under his America First go-it-alone philosophy with the result that even US allies are giving Xi Jinping and China more credibility than the US. Under the Trump administration the response to China's rise has been to try and put roadblocks in the way of Chinese corporations. They had Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei, China's largest privately held company, arrested on December 1, 2018 in Canada under the pretext that Huawei had sold equipment to Iran violating US sanctions. Subsequently, she was extradited to the US. On February 13, 2020 Meng was personally indicted by the DOJ on charges of trade secrets theft which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years' imprisonment.

Similarly, the Trump administration sought to prohibit the popular Chinese app Tik Tok from being downloaded by American consumers. Tik Tok, however, received a reprieve in September 2020 from an American federal court when a judge put a temporary stop to the Trump administration's ban. The government had argued that Tik Tok may have a "back door" through which it could share American data with the Chinese government. A ban would “be no different from the government locking the doors to a public forum,” said John Hall, a lawyer for TikTok. “We’re pleased that the court agreed with our legal arguments and issued an injunction preventing the implementation of the TikTok app ban,” a spokesman for TikTok said after the judge’s decision.

The American response to the success of Chinese private corporations might have been to cheer the at least partial privatization of the Chinese economy, a laudable development in accordance with US free enterprise, capitalistic principles. Instead, the US under Trump has sought to hinder Chinese corporations every step of the way even when they have won competitions fair and square. It is what I would call the Tonya Harding response. In January 1994, skater Tonya Harding became embroiled in controversy when her ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, orchestrated an attack on her fellow U.S. skating rival Nancy Kerrigan. Both women then competed in the February 1994 Winter Olympics, where Kerrigan won the silver medal and Harding finished eighth. Harding was later banned from the sport. The US response to China over China's pulling ahead of it is reminiscent of Tonya's response to Kerrigan. If you can't beat your opponent with your natural talent, try to injure them (in this case sanction or ban them) instead.

This leaves aside the legitimacy of the US use of sanctions to demand that another country (in this case China) must not do business with some other country if the US says it can't. A Biden administration would reenter the Iran nuclear agreement which reduced sanctions against Iran, and, supposedly, Meng would be released. Tik Tok also would be allowed to continue its ability to sell its app all over the world. The US should engage constructively and diplomatically with China to allay any fears about "back doors." Diplomatic treaties and agreements are the way to go, not retaliation over imagined and ill defined fears. It's important that the US and China cooperate especially when it comes to global warming. They are the 2 largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters, and their cooperation is necessary in working with the rest of the world (in particular India) in bringing GHG emissions to net zero in the shortest time. The destructive effects of global warming are manifesting themselves now all over the world in addition to the wildfires on the US west coast and hurricanes in the Gulf states.

Off the Top of My Head

China Back to Normal. US COVID Surging.

by John Lawrence,, October 14, 2020

According to The Lancet: "As of Oct 4, 2020, China had confirmed 90,604 cases of COVID-19 and 4739 deaths, while the USA had registered 7,382,194 cases and 209,382 deaths." Clearly, China has had a much better response to the pandemic than has the US. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, offered “deepest congratulations...to the front-line health workers in China and the population who worked together tirelessly to bring the disease to this very low level”. Fareed Zakaria in his excellent book, "Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World," writes:

The pandemic has accelerated America's selfish turn - its abandonment of its role as leader of the free world and provider of public goods within the multilateral system. Perhaps the most striking example came with its vaccine strategy. Far from coordinating a global effort, or even encouraging its allies to pool resources, the Trump administration was simply looking to "win," edging out other countries in a race to get the vaccine first. The German press reported that the American government offered "large sums of money" to secure a German company's vaccine "for the US only." Meanwhile, partners like France, Brazil and Canada accused the US of swooping in on deals to acquire critical medical equipment and outbidding them, or even blocking shipments.

But it has been to no avail. The Trump administration's botched handling of its response to the pandemic has landed the US up in the situation that COVID is on the upsurge 9 months after Trump first knew about it. The denouement is that China is surging ahead with its economy while the US is surging ahead with the virus. What's more is that people are dying at a rate of some 700 a day  while the President himself, having caught the virus, was given Regeneron's monoclonal antibodies cocktail which seems to have killed off the virus in short order. Unfortunately, that treatment isn't available to everybody.

Zakaria opines on the US relationship with China. Trump can't condemn China too much as a huge amount of American products from American corporations are manufactured in and imported from China. The two countries are intertwined despite Trump's "Made in America" push. American corporations will not make their products in America as long as they can get cheaper labor elsewhere. After all their imperative is the bottom line and maximizing profits. Wall Street has told them this is what they must do, patriotism be damned.

Zakaria details the US response to the rise of China, its growing influence in the world even among US traditional allies, who seem to have more respect for Xi Jinping than for Trump. Trump is considered a loose cannon in the world today. The US can degenerate into Cold War II with China or America can play a more constructive role with its chief rival, which rivalry has come about rather suddenly. For example, the US can quibble with China about the situation in the Xinjiang region with the Uighurs, an Islamic minority, while ignoring its own history of forcing the Indians off their lands and onto reservations. In the long run, more is at stake in the US-China relationship them petty rivalries. As the two largest emitters of greenhouse gasses (GHGs), the US and China must cooperate to achieve net zero carbon emissions in short order or the earth will become uninhabitable. Scientists think Venus was inhabitable for billions of years before runaway GHGs made it uninhabitable. The same thing could happen to earth unless we take the situation seriously. For this reason the US and China must cooperate, not compete. We must avoid Cold War II or else the winner of this rivalry will win nothing more than a scorched earth.