California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

While China Builds Infrastructure in the Americas, the US is Disconcerted

by John Lawrence

How dare they, the Chinese that is, build infrastructure in South America! Why, that's our back yard, our sphere of influence. China is building an elaborate $3 billion port in Chancay, Peru. It wasn't that long ago that the US was complicit in a plot to overthrow the democratically elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende who was a socialist. Be that as it may, many countries are turning to China preferring the building of infrastructure to the building of military bases of which the US has constructed about 750 in some 80 countries throughout the world. China is even bailing out Argentina financially. According to Reuters, Argentina's central bank said on [October 18, 2023] that China has cleared a currency swap line totaling a freely accessible $6.5 billion, part of a broader deal the South American country has been using to help it defend the embattled local peso. Many countries throughout the world are effectively saying to the US, "What have you done for us lately?" So the question is how can the US compete with a country who is building economic assets in other countries while all the US has to offer is the construction of military bases? Is it the world's policeman versus the world's builder, and which role will be more appealing?

"In the district of Chancay, Huaral province, approximately 80 kilometers from the Peruvian capital, Lima, a major private investment project is being developed that promises to change the logistics landscape in Latin America. It is the New Multipurpose Port Terminal of Chancay, a joint project by the Chinese company COSCO Shipping Ports Limited (CSPL), which owns a 60 percent share, and the Peruvian company Volcan Compañía Minera, with the remaining 40 percent.

"With an investment budget of over $3 billion, this ambitious project is in the development stage, over 40 percent complete. Construction began in 2011, and the terminal is expected to start operations in the last quarter of 2024."

Back to Argentina: "China has increased the amount and instead of $5 billion we are getting $6.5 billion," Argentine President Alberto Fernandez told Radio 10 from the Asian country, where he is for an official trip.

"Every time we went through difficult times, Xi Jinping's government gave us its support," Fernandez added. "This is an important step so that production (in Argentina) does not stop."

This is the second swap line with China activated during Fernandez's presidency. According to an official bank source, the total amount of the swap line stood at 47 billion yuans .

The move comes as Argentines head to the ballots on Sunday for a presidential election. Libertarian Javier Milei, who has vowed to dollarize the economy and shut down the central bank, is seen as the front-runner.

Well, Javier Milei won the election. It's unclear whether Milei's tough talk regarding China will mean that he will not let China bail them out! " According to Reuters, "Argentinian president-elect Javier Milei has criticised China and Brazil, which are among his country's most important trading partners. A few months ago, Milei even likened the Chinese government to an "assassin" and said the people of China were "not free". Milei's tough talk on China stands in sharp contrast with a vow of cooperation by the outgoing president, Alberto Fernandez, who visited Beijing last month and hailed China as a "true friend" of Argentina."

China is South America’s top trading partner and a major source of both foreign direct investment and lending in energy and infrastructure, including through its massive Belt and Road Initiative. Can the US compete? China has surpassed the United States as South America’s largest trading partner. Beijing has also expanded its diplomatic, cultural, and military presence throughout the region. Most recently, it leveraged its support amid the COVID-19 pandemic, supplying the region with medical equipment, loans, and hundreds of millions of vaccine doses. U.S. President Joe Biden, who sees China as a “strategic competitor” in the region, has pledged greater economic cooperation with Latin America, but some analysts argue the United States should be doing more.

But will the US do more? It can't even get modest amounts of aid for Israel and Ukraine passed by the Republican controlled House of Representatives. The Trumpist American Firsters don't want to spend money on other countries. However, they don't mind the trillion dollar military-industrial complex budgets. They are baked in the cake especially because all the financial and economic incentives align for the various interests. Lobbyists will make sure there is no reduction in that budget.

But China’s push comes as American wars overseas, unstable foreign policy election-to-election, and deep political polarization have intensified questions about US global leadership. Meanwhile, pressing issues like climate change, Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s assault on Gaza have sharpened discussion over whether the West is taking the right approach to respond.

All this coincides with longstanding calls from countries across the developing world for an international system where they have more say.

Many of those countries have substantially enhanced their economic ties with Beijing during Xi’s rule, including under a decade of his up to $1 trillion global infrastructure building drive, which leaders gathered to celebrate last month in the Chinese capital.

Economics tends to transcend politics in international relations. Up to now the economic success of the west and in particular the United States has exerted a pull on countries around the world. However, it can't be ignored that currently China is outpacing the US with its investments in other countries particularly with its Belt and Road initiative. Its alternative vision for economic development is very appealing. Its live and let live policy regarding lecturing other nations on their internal political systems also is seen by many as a refreshing alternative to the US' insistence that other countries should structure their political systems similarly to the US'.

Off the Top of My Head

Will There Ever Be a Department of Peace?

by John Lawrence

Let's face it. The US Department of Defense is really a misnomer. It's true name is the Department of War. Why not call it what it really is. That's its mission. That's its raison d'etre. In fact the United States Department of War, also called the War Department (and occasionally War Office in the early years), was the United States Cabinet department originally responsible for the operation and maintenance of the United States Army, also bearing responsibility for naval affairs until the establishment of the Navy Department in 1798, and for most land-based air forces until the creation of the Department of the Air Force on September 18, 1947. The Secretary of War, a civilian with such responsibilities as finance and purchases and a minor role in directing military affairs, headed the War Department throughout its existence. The War Department existed from August 7, 1789 until September 18, 1947, when it split into the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force. The Department of the Army and Department of the Air Force later joined the Department of the Navy under the United States Department of Defense in 1949.

But there is no countervailing Department of Peace! I'm proposing one. Furthermore, the trillion dollar annual budget for the Department of War should be divided in two with half going to the Department of Peace. So $500 billion for war; $500 billion for peace. Please note that I'm not advocating doing away with the war department. I'm just advocating balancing it with a Department of Peace. Halving the Defense Department budget will still leave it with a larger military budget than any other country in the world. So when will it be a good idea to actively pursue peace if not now? Can the human mind even visualize what a Department of Peace would encompass or be involved in? Part of its mission would be to do just that - imagine what peace would look like. How do you spend the allotted resources in such a way as to bring about peace in the world? Dare I say that eliminating poverty and disease in the world, assuring educational opportunities and building infrastructure would be a good place to start. The Peace Corps would be incorporated into a Department of Peace, and its budget made commensurate with the budgets of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Space Force. Instead of extracting resources from what used to be called the Third World, the Department of Peace should be in the business of providing resources to the Third World. Instead of being totally focused on US interests, how about focusing on the interests of others particularly those who have been exploited by more technically advanced nations.

Bear in mind I'm not proposing defunding the Defense Department, just halving its budget and spending the rest on peace. The Defense Department would always stand ready to fight and win any war if all efforts for peace fail. But efforts at peace should take place preemptively and proactively long before tensions fester. Part of creating peace just consists of showing respect for all parties. That costs nothing. As an example of what not to do consider Israel's relationship with the Palestinians. They let it fester until the horrible recent events resulting in much destruction, death and suffering on both sides. Israel, the US and other interested parties had years to come up with a solution that was fair to both sides. But, admittedly, there was some trying especially by President Clinton, who almost got Israel and the Palestinian Authority to agree to peace. Yasser Arafat just refused at the last minute to say yes. But wars have been fought by human beings for millennia. Homo Sapiens probably wiped out the Neanderthals and other humanoid species. Why should we believe anything else given the history of human warfare in most cases based on religion and/or ethnicity?

China, at least, is building infrastructure throughout the world, and in particular in Africa with its Belt and Road initiative. This is a peace building exercise which is not recognized or given credit by the US. The US is a Johnny-come-lately to the idea of building infrastructure in the Third World. It can hardly accomplish this at home. If it wasn't for Biden's excellent diplomatic skills, nothing in that regard would be happening in the US itself. The US can barely keep its government open. It's not a good prognosis for the leader of the free world especially in light of the fact that a multiply indicted authoritarian who tried to overthrow the government is favored to win the next election straight out of the German playbook circa 1932.

Off the Top of My Head

The Absence of War is Not Peace

by John Lawrence

Human beings do not use the absence of war to create peace. They use the absence of war to prepare for the next war. The time between wars could be used in a more constructive way and that is to do everything possible to prevent the next war. Instead what we do is to build up our offensive and defensive capacities so that whatever side we are on prevails in the next war. The US military-industrial complex is allotted almost a trillion dollars a year whether or not there is war or absence of war. There is never ever really peacetime. It's sole purpose is to prepare for the next war. Meanwhile the Peace Corps is allotted next to nothing in order to create the conditions that might prevent the next war. What are those conditions you might ask? They are very simple: creating educational opportunities for the undereducated, creating economic opportunities for those in poverty, creating hospitals and clinics for those whose health is at risk, building infrastructure for those lacking access to modern infrastructure. In other words building more successful societies from the ground up for those lacking what the most advanced societies already have. Above all poverty and lack of healthful conditions must be alleviated all over the world including in the advanced nations themselves before anything approaching world peace can be achieved.

So what is the lesson of the Israeli-Gaza war? It is that in the time period before the war, nobody did nothing to create the conditions for a lasting peace which would have been the two state solution. Instead people just stood back content to have the Palestinians live miserable lives without political or economic rights. Nobody cared. Nobody worked hard to correct or ameliorate the situation. People were content just to let the situation fester until the next violence broke out, and then it did with very dramatic and horrific results. When there was an absence of war, people just said ho hum, there's no urgency to create the conditions for a lasting peace. Then when war breaks out everyone gets very excited and upset, horrible things happen to children and old people. People want revenge. Hate proliferates. War is exciting. Peace is dull and undramatic. People get bored with the absence of war. People's senses come alive during war. During the absence of war in which there is no real peace, people pursue their self interest or in other words lining their purses. During war they get all excited. There is nonstop news coverage. People get upset by (wo)man's inhumanity to (wo)man as if people doing horrible things to other people is unimaginable. It's not. People's senses come alive and they come out of their collective stupors.

If the US just spent half its defense budget on war and the other half on peace, it would still have a larger defense budget than any other country in the world, and just think what the Peace Corps could do with a $500 billion budget. Why it could even compete with China's Belt and Road initiative which is building infrastructure in parts of the world where inadequate infrastructure exists. The two largest world economies could compete creating peace in the world instead of trying to out compete each other with larger and better weapons and more vitriolic and challenging rhetoric. However, this is not OK with conservatives who feel very threatened by the Chinese COMMUNIST Party although the Chinese system brought 800 million people out of poverty in 40 years primarily by adopting a free enterprise capitalistic system. Oh but it is still authoritarian politically, you say. That is subject to interpretation as the Chinese political system is based on Confucianism which promotes a meritocracy unlike the US where any bozo can become President.

So where is the American Department of Peace? We have the Department of Defense(Offense). We have the Department of Homeland Security. We have the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). What agencies of the Federal government are devoted to creating a more peaceful world? Basically, none, and so is it any wonder that, while the human race continues to invent a plethora of gadgets, it can do hardly anything to create world peace? Peace depends on mutual respect among the leaders of the various nations of the world. Instead US authorities criticize and lord it over the leaders of other nations because they are not exactly like us. Instead of walking a mile in their shoes, they insist that every other nation walks a mile in our shoes.

Off the Top of My Head

These Two Things Do Not Compute: Shutting Down the American Government and Lecturing the World About the Virtues of American Democracy

by John Lawrence

The US power structure dominates the world in terms of its military bases. The US controls about 750 bases in at least 80 countries worldwide and spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined. The US also controls the world's financial transactions. The dollar’s role as the primary reserve currency for the global economy allows the United States to borrow money more easily and impose painful financial sanctions. With the US' dominant position in world affairs, you would think that it would be impossible for a handful of representatives in Congress to shut down the entire US government. But that is exactly the situation the US and the world is in. The US is the leader in world affairs. Yet the leader can't even keep the lights on. Other countries are looking at this. Nixon called the US a pitiful, helpless giant. He said, "If, when the chips are down, the worlds most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world." So what is the US when its government shuts down? Exactly that: a pitiful, helpless giant. Its military personnel on the 750 military bases won't get paid. How's that for demoralizing the military? Service members will continue to report for duty, though they will not get paid during a shutdown. And many of the hundreds of thousands of civilians who work for the Department of Defense will likely be furloughed, says White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby. Air traffic controllers will not get paid either although they will be required to report for work as well. Does that portend more close calls at airports?

The world is watching. American diplomats are fond of lecturing other world leaders about the pitfalls and shortcomings of their governments. However, their governments probably would not be caught in the pickle of a complete government shutdown. Nor would the governments of the civilized world, with the exception of the US, contemplate putting a person with 91 criminal indictments into the position of their President. The US is much in the need of updating. It is giving democracy a bad name in the sense that the national dialogue is turning into a clown show. Trump's rallies are providing entertainment for his base which is an audience that is more addicted to being entertained than it is to supporting a leader who is devoted to improving their lives. This reminds me of Hitler's rallies which were designed as pageantry for its entertainment value. It sure enthralled the German people. People are loyal to a leader who entertains them, who moves them, not one who will use the legitimate levers of government to improve their lives or to make the country and/or the world a better place. Joe Biden is the opposite. He has made the country and the world a better place despite not being very entertaining. That's why he's not leading Trump in the poles. Trump's base (cult) are excited by Trump. Biden's base, if you could call it a base, are ho hum. Oh well, I guess he's done some good, but I'm not excited. For Trump's base excitement is the sine qua non.

Getting back to the military NPR reports the following:

Separately, the Department of Defense says post and base services would be closed or limited, while elective surgeries and procedures in its medical and dental facilities would have to be postponed. Commissaries would remain open overseas but close in the U.S.

And certain Pentagon activities, like operational planning and military recruitment, will be paused.

Defense officials warned earlier this week that a shutdown would strategically "play into the hands of U.S. competitors" because it would cost time as well as money. Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh called it "the worst thing that could happen."

"The U.S. military's going to continue to do its job and protect our national security interests, and of our allies and partners as well," she said, adding that a shutdown would make those efforts harder. "When you don't have your full operating capacity to be able to help with the mission, to be able to conduct an exercise or training, of course, that gets to our national security and readiness."

Kirby agrees that a prolonged shutdown could harm national security, especially when it comes to delayed management of DOD contracts for things like maintenance, logistics and procurement.

So five Republican representatives can act collectively as dictators to threaten national security as well as domestic tranquillity, and there's absolutely nothing anybody can do about it. This is democracy in action? This is the vaunted "rule of law"? What exactly is this except a fly in the ointment of democracy or in any system that purports to be a democracy and what does this say about the world's military and financial leader? Other countries are watching this spectacle.

Off the Top of My Head

Is the World Engaged in “A Battle Between Democracy and Autocracy”?

by John Lawrence

Joe Biden thinks so. Here's what he said: "But we emerged anew in the great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force." Politicians tend to look at the world in binary terms. It's all black and white. Their system is bad; ours is good. In reality there's a lot of gray; it's not simply black or white. If Biden were to be absolutely truthful, he would have to say that the US has a version of democracy and so does China. America's version would be decried by the founders who were totally against what they called "factionalism." Jefferson abhorred political parties. This is from history.com:

"Today, it may seem impossible to imagine the U.S. government without its two leading political parties, Democrats and Republicans. But in 1787, when delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia to hash out the foundations of their new government, they entirely omitted political parties from the new nation’s founding document.

"This was no accident. The framers of the new Constitution desperately wanted to avoid the divisions that had ripped England apart in the bloody civil wars of the 17th century. Many of them saw parties—or “factions,” as they called them—as corrupt relics of the monarchical British system that they wanted to discard in favor of a truly democratic government."

The US' version of democracy is based on a two party system with a voting system called first-past-the-post. Neither parties or voting systems are mentioned in the Constitution. The first-past-the-post voting system essentially precludes third parties. The effect of a third party candidate is that of a "spoiler." He or she takes votes away from the party he or she is most closely associated with which tends to elect the least popular candidate if the third popular candidate were not running. This has had disastrous effects on American popular elections as it did in 2000 when Ralph Nader running as a third party candidate took votes away from Al Gore with the result that George W Bush, who subsequently lied us into the Iraq war, was elected President. Gore would have gotten the US further along the road of climate change mitigation.

The European parliamentary multi-party system is arguably more democratic than the US two party system because more parties with varied interests can be represented. Their head of government, the Prime Minister, equivalent to the US President, is not popularly elected but is elected by members of parliament. The US tends to identify heads of government not popularly elected with undemocratic systems yet Presidents in the US were not popularly elected until the 17th Amendment was passed in 1912. China has a version of democracy in which the President is not popularly elected but is elected by the highest legislative body - the National People's Congress. Yet the US keeps insisting that China is an autocracy but the parliamentary systems of Europe are OK as was the US before 1912. China has multiple political parties but is dominated by one party - the Chinese Communist Party. The question is to what extent is the Chinese one party system less democratic than the American two party system in the sense of which system most closely represents the needs and wants of its people.

Democratic elections are held in China at the local or county level. These Congresses elect officials at the provincial level and they in turn elect the National People's Congress. The people vote democratically for officials only at the local level. Officials at higher levels are only indirectly democratically elected similar to the US system before 1912 or the parliamentary system. Voters have selected U.S. senators in the privacy of the voting booth since 1913. This system of “direct election” was not what the framers of the U.S. Constitution had in mind, however, when they met at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Article I, section 3 of the U.S. Constitution, as written by the framers, provided for election of senators by state legislatures, something Donald Trump sought to exploit. Election of officials by the democratic vote of a body that was democratically elected by the people is arguably democratic in some sense just as the election of head of government by a parliament is arguably democratic. Therefore, it can be argued that China has some version of democracy. Moreover, eight minor political parties in addition to the Chinese Communist Party exist.

One can quibble about how democratic a political system is. The point is that there is no absolute version of democracy so different systems have to be judged on their own merits. A one party system is not necessarily less democratic than a two party system which is not necessarily less democratic than a multi-party system, all things considered. How well the system functions to meet the needs of its own people, the historical evolution of the present system and how well established is the rule of law which exists in conjunction with the democratic election of leaders and representatives should also be considered. For instance, in China stability is a primary value whereas in the US freedom is a primary value. According to Keyu Jin in The New China Playbook, the Chinese people don't mind video surveillance in public because it minimizes street crime. On the other hand in the US video public surveillance is considered an infringement of freedom even though much street crime has been solved by both public and private video cameras .

Off the Top of My Head

Should the President Be Popularly Elected by Direct Vote of the People?

by John Lawrence

In the US the President is popularly elected by the people after having been filtered through the archaic electoral college. In a parliamentary democracy the head of government equivalent to the US President is indirectly elected by the parliament not by a direct vote of the people. In China the president is also elected by a majority vote of the National People's Congress, the highest legislative body very similarly to how the heads of government are elected in parliamentary democracies. In Russia the President is nominally elected by a popular vote of the people similarly to the US although the system has been manipulated in such a way as to keep Putin in power. So what are the drawbacks of a popularly elected President by a vote of the people? The main drawback IMHO is that in the US an incompetent but popular boob like Donald Trump can be elected to the most powerful office in the land and arguably in the whole world. The election for President of the US is a popularity contest, and there is no requirement of experience or competency. In parliamentary democracies as well as China, supposedly the indirect election of President or its equivalent, "head of state," is an election by a meritocratic body of lawmakers. Therefore, it is more likely that a competent President or head of government will be elected.

In recent history in the US, the least competent but most popular person has been elected President based more on their personality and charisma than on their competency or knowledge of the job. It is more likely that a guy who "you would like to have a beer with" is elected President than someone who is more experienced and/or intelligent. Adlai Stevenson was branded as an "egghead" which effectively ended his political career. The leading Democratic figure of the 1950s, Stevenson was known for his wit, intellectual speeches, and liberal political convictions. For many Americans in the mid-twentieth century, he symbolized conscience in politics. Stevenson lost the Presidential election twice to Dwight Eisenhower, the World War II war hero. In 2000 Al Gore lost the election to George W Bush who promptly lied the US into war with Iraq. Gore, who was a staunch advocate for climate change mitigation, presumably would have employed government resources in that direction rather than fighting a fruitless war. Gore actually won the popular vote but was defeated by a combination of the Electoral College and the Supreme Court.

Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House that were then taken down by Ronald Reagan. So much for science taking precedence over popular ignorance and prejudice. Reagan also ran up the national debt substantially as did George W Bush and Donald Trump. Then when Democrats are elected President, Republicans cry bloody murder over the national debt while doing their best to prevent Democrats from spending any government money to actually help people. Fortunately, Joe Biden has been very successful in getting legislation passed to mitigate climate change among other accomplishments. But, his popularity as a candidate in 2024 in on the line as a majority of the American people don't want him to run again. Trump, despite 91 criminal indictments, is running neck and neck with Biden, one of the most accomplished Presidents in American history. One wonders whether the sclerotic American electoral system can withstand the challenges brought by popular but unscrupulous candidates for the Presidency by those you'd "like to have a beer with." Finally, the electoral College has all the disadvantages of indirect elections and none of the advantages.

Off the Top of My Head

Does China Have Some Version of Democracy and Capitalism?

by John Lawrence

The Chinese Communist Party in reality is just the Chinese Party. It is communist in name only. Kishore Mahbuboni in the book, Has China Won, says "...is America making a fundamental error of perception when it views the CCP as a Chinese Communist Party? This would imply that the soul of the CCP is embedded in its communist roots. Yet, in the eyes of many objective Asian observers, the CCP actually functions as the Chinese Civilization Party. Its soul is not rooted in the foreign ideology of Marxism-Leninism but in the Chinese civilization." China has had a capitalist economic system ever since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in 1978. China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty in about 40 years mainly due to the component of its system that represents private enterprise. It also has state owned enterprises but they have not been mainly responsible for China's rapid growth in GDP.

Xi Jinping has been President of the people's Republic of China since 2013. He is not popularly elected by the general public. Instead, he is elected by the National People's Congress (NPC), constitutionally China's highest state body, which also has the power to remove the president and other state officers from office. Elections and removals are decided by majority vote. This is not dissimilar to how the head of parliamentary democracies, the Prime Minister is elected. The British head of government is not elected by a popular election of the people either. He is elected by members of Parliament similar to most other parliamentary democracies. The US also originally had a system in which the President and Senators were not elected by a popular election of the people. Passed by Congress on May 13, 1912, and ratified on April 8, 1913, the 17th Amendment modified Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution by allowing voters to cast direct votes for U.S. Senators and the President. Prior to its passage, the President and Senators were chosen by state legislatures. The Chinese government has been based on a meritocratic bureaucracy for thousands of years. The popular vote elects the first representative body who elects the next higher body until the National People's Congress elects the President.

The cleavage between communism and capitalism is basically an historic artifact. Capitalism won. Almost all nations of the world have capitalistic economic systems including China. None of them have systems that are identical to the US. They all have some versions of capitalism and democracy. Prior to 1912 the US had a system similar to China's in that the President was not popularly elected but was elected by a vote of the states' senates. Today in order to maintain international tensions, US politicians keep up the dichotomy between the US and China by insisting that China's leaders are not elected democratically and that China has a communist economic system. The truth is that China has a version of democracy and a version of capitalism just as the US does. Vested interests in the US are responsible for maintaining the fiction that Chinese is communist and autocratic. In fact US democracy is vulnerable to being overthrown by a demagogue like Donald Trump which almost happened on January 6, 2020. The US is still vulnerable as a near majority of Americans prefer Trump to Joe Biden, a man who has passed landmark legislation like only a very few American Presidents have accomplished.

US democracy is also vulnerable in the sense that its first past the post voting system almost guarantees that third party candidates will be spoilers as happened in 2000 when Ralph Nader took votes away from Al Gore. Despite that Gore won the popular vote. If Nader had not been in the election, Gore would have overwhelmingly won the popular vote. However in the electoral college, which is an outdated feature of American democracy, it came down to who won the popular vote in Florida. The Supreme Court stopped the hand recount giving Bush the Presidency. There is still controversy over who would have won if that hadn't happened. In any case the Bush administration lied us into the disastrous Iraq war, something Gore probably would not have done. Also Bush was a fossil fuel guy while Gore was knowledgeable about global warming and would have pursued that agenda . History might have turned out differently, and more importantly the future history of planet Earth might turn out differently if Gore had won.

Chinese philosophy is based on Confucianism which emphasizes duty to family while the US is based on individualistic ethics emphasizing individual freedom. Keyu Jin writes in The New China Playbook, "According to the World Values Survey, which explores people's beliefs and values in more than 100 countries, 93% of Chinese participants value security over freedom, as compared to only 28 % of Americans. Such differences can be fully understood only by taking culture and history into account. In China, an interventionist state is rooted in paternalism, a hallmark of government in China since Confucian times, more than 2500 years ago;..." Although China's private enterprise capitalism has resulted in the fact that 800 million people have been pulled out of poverty in 40 years, GDP growth is not the sine qua non of Chinese capitalism. Under Xi China is turning a corner and reining in certain aspects of unbridled growth in order to mitigate certain unsalutary aspects of unfettered enterprise while emphasizing producing economic benefits for the 13% of the Chinese population still in poverty. So China is much more apt to put its finger on the economic scale while the US has more of a hands off policy on private enterprise. The downside of this is the unregulated growth of toxic social media and potentially artificial intelligence in the US. The US could mitigate the spoiler effect of third party candidates for President by adopting a different voting system. The current first past the post voting system practically guarantees that there will be a 2 party system with third parties acting as spoilers, something which could result in a second Trump Presidency despite 91 criminal indictments. Replacing first past the post with a voting system such as approval voting would eliminate the spoiler effects of third parties. It could be implemented simply by a vote of Congress since it would not violate any aspect of the Constitution. However, in the sclerotic American Congress it is unlikely that there will be any major changes in the US Constitution which is well past its "use by" date.

Off the Top of My Head

The Best Democracy May Not Be One Achieved by Elections

by John Lawrence

For a truly democratic system we would have to go back to ancient Greece and the system developed by Aristotle: sortition. Sortition is the selection of a legislative body randomly by lot. If the American House of Representatives truly represented the American people it would be chosen in this way. There is no more representative way of choosing a democratic legislative body. In the ancient Greek legislative body known as the Council of 500, each representative was chosen by lot. If the American House was chosen in this way, it would a) eliminate the need for money in American politics and b) eliminate the need for political parties in American politics. People have been brainwashed to believe that only a government in which there are elections for the representatives is a true democracy. It's not the only or even the best way. Representatives chosen by lot are more representative of the American people than representatives chosen by election. So at least for the purposes of selecting this body, with sortition the two party system would go by the wayside.

So what would this say about the relative merits of a democracy in which the representative body was chosen by lot and a one party system such as the Chinese government. In other words how would a no party system compare to a one party system , and is a no party system more democratic than a one party system. Yes, certainly it would be. But is a two party system such as the US currently has necessarily more democratic than a one party system. In the Chinese system the lowest deliberative body is voted on by the people. Then there are 3 levels of elections. The first is for the municipal people's Congress which elects the people's congresses of provinces which elects the highest level the National People's Congress. If the National People's Congress were to be selected by lot, then the Chinese system would be truly democratic just as the American system would be if the House of Representatives were selected by lot. Based on this analysis one could argue that the Chinese one party system is just as much a version of democracy as the American two party system and that if both systems used sortition instead of elections by vote, both systems would be arguably more democratic. Whether a system is a one party system, a two party system or a multiparty system such as they have in Europe, the various systems should only be compared on the actual results the system is capable of manifesting and how much their various bodies reflect the wishes of the people.

The American system is currently on the brink of systemic failure due to the fact that there is such a great divisive split between the two parties.The American system notably does not always elect the best and brightest candidates. The Chinese system arguably is more merit based than the US system. In the US a clown and no nothing like Trump can be elected and cause great havoc. In fact he almost instigated a complete overthrow of the American system of democracy. People with money or financial backing stand a better chance of being elected than people of merit or good will. The First Amendment allows candidates to lie about virtually anything, and, if they can convince enough voters that their alternative facts are the true facts, they can win elections. While the Chinese system does not represent the ultimate democratic form of government, neither does the American system. Both systems could be reformed to allow more truly representative government and more successful and capable government. In fact in the US if the House of Representatives were formed by sortition and the Senate were formed by voting or sortition based on a pool of candidates that had at least minimal background, experience and educational requirements, the American system would be quite a bit more democratic than it is right now. The ideal system might be one that approaches as closely as possible to a no party system.

Off the Top of My Head

Who Would Have Thunk It: China is the World's Leading Exporter of Cars!

by John Lawrence

In an article by Fareed Zakaria entitled, The rest of the world doesn’t see China the same way we do, there is this: "Ten years ago, China exported a relatively small number of cars. Today, it is the world’s leading exporter of automobiles, handily ousting Japan from that position. It is especially strong in electric vehicles. Two of every three EVs made in the world are made in China." So far Chinese cars have not shown up in the US, but they will. American car manufacturers are playing catch up. "As you enter a car showroom in Berlin, you see what looks like a Bugatti or a Ferrari, except more stylish. It’s an EP9, a top-of-the-line race car that has been sold to a handful of customers for about $3 million each. The company behind it is Nio, one of China’s new carmakers, which is going to take the world by storm."

The economies of the western world including the US and Europe are inextricably intertwined with that of China. The difference is that the US under Biden's leadership is taking a semi-belligerent attitude towards China while Europe is taking a much more deferential and mutually respectful approach. Biden's latest gaffe is referring to Xi Jinping as a "dictator" just after Secretary of State Antony Blinken just returned from China having tried to stop the downward spiral of US-China relationship. One of the problems is that the US insists on insulting China and the Chinese leadership. They really can't afford to do that any more if they want to create a mutually respectful relationship. Respect in nation to nation relationships is of the utmost importance. It could be argued that the lack of respect toward Russia was a precursor to the war in Ukraine. What is true among individuals - that mutual respect is important for creating and maintaining salubrious relationships is important - is equally true with respect to nations. Why doesn't the US leadership get this?

Former British prime minister Gordon Brown explained the European dilemma. “Europe needs an industrial policy, but it cannot afford to mimic the [Biden] administration’s protectionism,” he told me. “For Europe, trade is vital; its prosperity is dependent on trade with the rest of the world, including China, in a way that America’s is not. [Unlike America, Europe] imports energy and is not self-sufficient. Despite the surface agreement across the Atlantic, this could become a growing divide.” He acknowledged that the Biden administration has made moves to expand trade ties, but he expressed concern that all of them are bilateral or regional efforts that might undercut global trade. They come, he said, “at the expense of any real discussion of what a modern multilateralist order would look like.” Helle Thorning-Schmidt, former prime minister of Denmark, concurred. “Europe cannot divorce itself from China,” she explained. “That would be the end of globalization. That is why we want to de-risk, not decouple.” “De-risking,” a term famously used by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, is the hottest buzzword in diplomacy these days. Even the Biden administration now says it also wants to de-risk rather than decouple. But many I spoke with in Europe said they worry that this is just a rhetorical change and that U.S. policies — and Chinese responses — will keeping moving the ratchet up.

"Kishore Mahbubani, the former Singaporean diplomat and author of “The Asian 21st Century,” pointed out that discussions in the West often forget that the world’s growth is mostly coming from Asia. He used his own region as an example. In 2000, Japan’s economy was about eight times larger than Southeast Asia’s. In about three years, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is projected to be the same size economically as Japan. The largest trade relationship in the world is between China and ASEAN — almost $1 trillion. And ASEAN countries cannot grow without open and vibrant trade, especially with China." So the world is changing. The US is not changing with it, but instead is trying to maintain its grip on being the world's leading superpower. Criticizing other nations based on their forms of government is leaving the US open to the criticism that its foreign policy is subject to change with respect to other nations based on the election cycle and an administration coming into power every four years that has diametrically opposed views on the subject. China by contrast maintains a consistent approach over much longer periods so that once a successful policy has been implemented, it will probably remain in effect indefinitely and not be subject to an election cycle which can swerve back and forth and even spin out of control as it did on January 6, 2020.

The US also could be exposed to the criticism that any fool can become President as was the case in the election of 2016, not to mention any Congress person, while in China the best and brightest are usually promoted to the highest positions in government.

Off the Top of My Head

Why Didn't Democrats Raise the Debt Ceiling When They Controlled Both Houses of Congress?

by John Lawrence

What is clear is that Democrats can only get new legislation passed when they control all three branches of government. This legislation usually increases spending on social programs. Likewise, Republicans can only get their legislation composed - usually of tax cuts - when they control all three branches of government. Both cases usually require the government to deficit spend, the former because of increased government spending, the latter because of decreased government revenues from taxes. So whichever party controls Congress and the Presidency and passes a budget requiring increassed deficit spending should also at the same time raise the debt limit. Make sense? So now we're in this dystopian dilemma that, after Democrats passed Biden's budget requiring a huge amount of government spending, Republicans, who now control the House, effectively want to repeal Biden's budget or else they won't agree to raise the debt ceiling. What a conundrum! These problems would never come up if the party that deficit spent also raised the debt ceiling to accommodate the deficit spending.

Congress has raised the debt ceiling twice under Biden, by about $3 trillion. Republicans voted three times to raise the debt ceiling under President Donald Trump, who added nearly $8 trillion to the national debt. "Republicans in Congress raised the debt three times when Donald Trump was president and each time with Democrat support, but now they won’t raise it, even though they're responsible for more than $8 trillion in bills incurred in four years under the previous administration," Biden said. The 115th Congress (2017–2019) featured unified Republican control of the government with GOP majorities in the House and Senate, and Republican President Donald J. Trump in the White House. So Republicans had no problem with raising the debt ceiling during the Trump administration which added $7 trillion to the national debt. Please note that Democrats could have filibustered the debt ceiling increases during the Trump administration because Republicans did not have a filibuster proof Senate, but they didn't

Raising the debt limit is not about new spending; it is about paying for previous choices policymakers legislated. However, if the previous choice were made by a government controlled by the Democratic party in a two party system, there is every reason to get those choices reversed when the Republican party comes into power and vice versa although Democrats have never tried to bring the country to the brink of default, a game of chicken which Republicans have been all to eager to engage in. They were successful in doing this when Obama was President. Having seen that chaos and mess as vice Preesident, Biden is not willing to engage in negotiations this time around hoping that more sensible heads will prevail. It didn't used to be this way. Sometimes called the Gephardt Rule in honor of Representative Dick Gephardt who introduced its first version, the rule used to provide that when the House agrees to a budget resolution, the Clerk shall prepare a joint resolution suspending the debt limit for the fiscal year covered by the budget resolution. In other words the debt ceiling was automatically effectively raised to accommodate the budget. This all changed when Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House. When Newt Gingrich took over the House in 1995, he nullified the ingenious “Gephardt rule” that deemed the debt limit to be increased whenever a budget passed. This eventually led to the 1995 and 1996 government shutdowns, when Republicans refused to increase the limit because the president was a Democrat. In 2011, a showdown over the debt ceiling during Barack Obama’s presidency led to the Budget Control Act and ten subsequent years of austerity budgets.

So the simple answer to the question posed by the title of this piece is that, although Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress during the first two years of the Biden administration, they did not have a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. Therefore, they could get a budget passed under the budget reconciliation rule which prevents a filibuster, but they could not raise the debt ceiling because that is subject to the filibuster. Oh what tangled webs these politicians weave! Nothing makes clearer the need to end the filibuster than another round of hostage-taking of the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. Add this to the mounting problems of American democracy. Congress has created an arcane jumble of chaotic rules which threatens government of the people, for the people, and by the people. Go figure.

Off the Top of My Head

"Spare me the bullshit about mental illness"

by John Lawrence

In sane countries abortions are legal and assault rifles are illegal just the opposite of the US. Italian women are eligible to request an abortion for health, economic or social reasons, including the circumstances under which conception occurred. Abortions are performed free of charge in public hospitals or in private structures authorized by the regional health authorities. Assault weapons are not legal in Italy, nor are any fully automatic rifles or handguns. Noise suppressors, or silencers, are also illegal, along with any kind of military or police-grade weapons. Abortion in the United Kingdom is de facto available through the Abortion Act 1967 in Great Britain, and the Abortion (Northern Ireland) (No. 2) Regulations 2020.The following are generally prohibited: Fully automatic or burst-fire weapons, which may include some air guns. Semi-automatic or pump-action rifles that fire centre-fire ammunition (e.g. Ruger Mini-14, L1A1). The Swedish Abortion Act came into force in 1974, giving women the right to decide for themselves whether they wanted to end a pregnancy in the first eighteen weeks. Since then, abortion procedures have become more effective, safe, accepted and accessible. Current Norwegian legislation and public health policy provides for abortion on request in the first 12 weeks of gestation, by application up to the 18th week, and thereafter only under special circumstances until the fetus is viable, which is usually presumed at 21 weeks and 6 days. In Norway there is a total ban on automatic firearms for civilians, unless they fall into the collector category. Modification of semi-automatic guns into fully automatic without the consent of the police is a felony crime. The EU already bans all automatic weapons, plus some semi-automatic guns widely available in the United States.

Apart from the very few European nations that retain highly restrictive laws on abortion — Andorra, Lichtenstein, Malta, Monaco and Poland — no other European country “bans” abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Instead, almost all European countries allow abortion throughout pregnancy on a range of grounds, including where there are risks to a patient’s physical or mental health, and in situations involving severe or fatal fetal impairment. According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, 95% of European women of reproductive age live in a country where abortion services are available on demand.

NBC reported:

[Connecticut Senator] Murphy said the shooting deaths of 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday was a uniquely American problem.

"This only happens in this country and nowhere else. Nowhere else do little kids go to school thinking that they might be shot that day. Nowhere else do parents have to talk to their kids as I have had to do about why they got locked into a bathroom and told to be quiet for five minutes just in case a bad man entered that building. Nowhere else does that happen except here in the United States of America. And it is a choice. It is our choice to let it continue," Murphy said.

In comments to reporters afterward, Murphy took aim at the Republican talking point that mass shootings are a problem of mental illness, not easy access to guns.

"Spare me the bullshit about mental illness. We don’t have any more mental illness than any other country in the world. You cannot explain this through a prism of mental illness, because we don’t — we’re not an outlier on mental illness. We’re an outlier when it comes to access to firearms and the ability of criminals and very sick people to get their hands on firearms. That’s what makes America different,” he said.

There are only three countries that have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms: Mexico, Guatemala, and the United States. The US quibbles while the earth burns and floods due to global warming. Nations are immersed in conflict while they need to be cooperating if the human species, despite all its vaunted high technology, is to survive. Earth itself will survive. The survival of the human species is doubtful unless every nation goes all out to prevent global warming which is not happening. What is happening is that nations are trying to prevent the release of greenhouse gasses on the margins without interfering with economic growth. It's a recipe for disaster.

Off the Top of My Head

The US has a "Version" of Democracy

by John Lawrence

Nowhere in the world does a pure democracy exist not even in the US. Witness one judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, who was not even democratically elected to that position, is the would be dictator over one issue - abortion medicine. How can this be democracy? None of the Supreme Court Justices who will make the final decision on this matter were democratically elected. They were all appointed by Donald Trump as was Kacsmaryk. Not only that, but this or some other appointed judge could decide unilaterally to take other drugs off the market. What else could they decide? The rule of law in the US is in shambles. Mini dictators in the form of appointed judges can hold sway over a whole host of issues. In fact the US does not even make the top ten list of the most democratic countries in the world according to the Economist Intelligence Unit which compiles an annual list in its Democracy Index. Stanford University political scientist Larry Diamond has a similar list, maintaining that any democracy must include four key elements:

1. A political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections
2. The active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life
3. Protection of the human rights of all citizens
4. A rule of law in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens

The US ranks 36th on a list Ranking Countries by Quality of Democracy behind such countries as Costa Rica, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Uruguay, Slovakia and the Czech Republic!

One can see why when one appointed judge can dictate an issue for the whole country! The Washington Post reported:

As a lawyer for a conservative legal group, Matthew Kacsmaryk in early 2017 submitted an article to a Texas law review criticizing Obama-era protections for transgender people and those seeking abortions.

The Obama administration, the draft article argued, had discounted religious physicians who “cannot use their scalpels to make female what God created male” and “cannot use their pens to prescribe or dispense abortifacient drugs designed to kill unborn children.”

But a few months after the piece arrived, an editor at the law journal who had been working with Kacsmaryk received an unusual email: Citing “reasons I may discuss at a later date,” Kacsmaryk, who had originally been listed as the article’s sole author, said he would be removing his name and replacing it with those of two colleagues at his legal group, First Liberty Institute, according to emails and early drafts obtained by The Washington Post.

Yet to hear American politicians talk about it, you would think that the American Constitution is sacrosanct, paramount and equivalent to Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on two tablets of stone. You would think that it is so perfect that it is unthinkable that anyone would want to try to improve it in any way. People take a sacred oath to defend it. It is inconceivable to want to try and replace it like many other countries have done with their constitutions over the years. It is like the Bible, something that cannot be transcended without being accused of heresy, treason or worse.The American Constitution has not been updated in 234 years! On the other hand the current Constitution of France, for instance, was adopted on 4 October 1958. It is typically called the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, and it replaced the Constitution of the Fourth Republic of 1946 ... .

Meanwhile as Republicans exploit every conceivable loophole in the American Constitution, and the Second Amendment is literally tearing the nation apart, the US seems to be making it clear that it is a Republic rather than a Democracy. As Benjamin Franklin said when asked what the US government represented, "It's a republic, my dear, if you can keep it." He didn't even pretend that it was a democracy. While we criticize foreign dictators, we have a homegrown dictator by the name of Matthew Kacsmaryk right here.

From Iraq into the Abyss?

From Iraq into the Abyss?

Iraq Plus 20 Part II

Dennis Kucinich

5 hr ago

 

Iraq Plus 20 Part II

Dennis Kucinich

5 hr ago

 

When the hijacked planes hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center, pierced the Pentagon and buried into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, most of our thoughts were about the cruel, horrific shattering of family bonds, the forever severing of deep friendships, the senseless destruction of human life.  More than that America was under threat and fear prevailed.

The never-ending heartache of loss was on display in photos with messages that ringed the fence of a church near ground zero in New York:  “Have you seen him?”  “Please, any information, call…”  “Please help us find our wife and mother.”   

Hundreds of messages. No responses.

I was in New York a few days after 9/11 and witnessed the devastation.  I traveled to the site where Flight 93 impacted.  And I had heard the plane hit the Pentagon, as I joined hundreds evacuating the Congressional House Office Buildings in Washington, D.C.    

The personalization of immense loss compounded our anger and despair.  We identified with the victims.  We identified with the families.  We mourned with them.  We united in our grief.

The day after 9/11, with the nation frozen in fear and trauma, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld speculated to the Bush inner circle that the attacks presented an “opportunity” to strike Iraq, according to Bob Woodward, author of ‘Plan of Attack’. 

Except Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

In my previous Substack post I detailed the carefully practiced lies, that were disseminated to ignite the war on Iraq.  What enabled the execution of such a plan was the skillful manipulation of the fears of Americans.

The US military attack on Iraq commenced on March 20, 2003, after a highly structured domestic and international media campaign of misinformation and disinformation, by the Bush Administration, which succeeded in getting major media and Congressional support. 

We were introduced to “Shock and Awe,” a military sword of Damocles flashing again and again in the starlight, against the bright yellow-orange glow of U.S. missiles hitting targets in Baghdad, all streamed live into our homes via network television.  This is when an extraordinary disconnect occurred.

We were attacking Iraq!

No, wait.  We were attacking the Iraqi people.    

We were blowing up innocent people’s homes, businesses, places of worship, marketplaces, schools, nurseries. We killed Iraqis en masse.  And neither the Bush Administration nor Congress, nor the embedded media showed the remotest interest in the casualties which the US attack on Iraq inflicted on its people. 

This was, by all definitions an illegal war of aggression against a country that had little or no ability to defend itself against the mighty U.S. war machine.  The media coverage was state-sponsored war porn.  The words of the poet Yeats well described the U.S. presence in Iraq:  “Everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

After 9/11, I lamented the people on the hijacked flights, those victims who worked in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and their families.  When the U.S. unleashed “Shock and Awe” upon the people of Iraq, my thoughts turned to Iraqi families shattered, to social structures lovingly knit together over generations, destroyed. 

Wiped from the earth were ceremonies of birth and marriage, music, dance, literature, the stories handed down through word of mouth, the exchanges among friends and even strangers, woven into a beautiful fabric of life that informed an ancient, rich culture, in some places pulverized, vaporized, as if it never existed. 

In October of 2006, an article in Lancet stated that 654,965 had already died as a result of the war.  In January 2008, Reuters reported that one of Britain’s leading polling groups set the total of Iraqi deaths attributable to the war at slightly over a million people. 

Numbers do not adequately communicate the depth of human suffering, but scale is instructive.  Iraq, then a nation of 27 million people, suffered a million dead, millions injured and at least one million children orphaned and 4 million people  displaced. 

The war against the Iraqis was a criminal act of immense proportions. U.S. political leaders, and their complicit media counterparts, have been shielded from domestic and international courts for their actions that resulted in the mass deaths of innocent people.

In a just world, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and a long list of US government officials and their propagandists would be held accountable to both national and international law.

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Think about this: If a comparable disaster had been visited upon the United States, then a nation of 290 million, we would have proportionally recorded 11 million dead, tens of millions injured, at least 11 million orphans, 44 million displaced. Would we have demanded justice? 

The Bush Administration, their ideological retainers and supporters in the media, sent nearly 5,000 America soldiers to their deaths, and left tens of thousands permanently injured.  Their service was honorable, but those who sent them were not. We owe their families continued appreciation and full support.  We also owe them the truth.

The war’s dark legacy continues.  The Iraq High Commission for Human Rights reported in December 2021 that there were 5 million orphaned children in Iraq and 4.5 million children in families living below the poverty line, with a million child laborers.

Consider the extraordinary level of deprivation experienced by the Iraqi people, without clean water, access to food, health care, their homes and places of work destroyed, schools laid waste, the wholesale destruction of infrastructure.  Iraqis were, in a turn of a phrase from Winston Churchill, ‘stripped bare, with the curse of nothingness.’  This was no natural disaster. This was made by the American government and paid for by American taxpayers. 

I ran for Congress so that I could represent the social and economic interests of working men and women.  I intended to spend my service championing education, health care, pension protections and to save America’s manufacturing base.

I soon found myself trying to forestall one military adventure after another, which inevitably drained trillions of dollars away from domestic needs. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, America was losing its way by attempting to force “democracy” upon distant countries, while undermining democracy and the rule of domestic and international law.

The shameful lack of empathy in the White House, and in the U.S. Congress, for the people of Iraq was alarming. Those of us who raised questions about the legality of the war, and who pointed out that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and who reminded media and government officials alike that there was no proof  Iraq’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction actually existed, were roundly chastised and ridiculed.  

In a concerted effort to beat down the opposition, mainstream media, peddling the least intelligent positions that the U.S. government had to offer, brainwashed the American people with anti-Iraq propaganda.   Those of us who dared object were condemned.  

I answered this deadly war drumbeat as best I could through parliamentary procedures, 341 speeches on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in opposition to the war.  I made two runs for president to attempt to rally the American people behind a fundamental transition in American foreign policy doctrine  from militarism’s ‘Peace Through Strength’ to diplomacy’s, ‘Strength Through Peace’.

As a result of the War upon Iraq, America shifted its priorities ever more firmly to conquest. The constitutional doctrine of separation of powers has been shredded, establishing an imperial executive. The government has shifted the resources of our country away from a domestic agenda to a war-fighting mode. It has ever more firmly entrenched the military-industrial complex in the affairs of the nation.

The war against Iraq legitimized conquest for resources such as oil.  It has set the very finances of our nation upon the precipice of unsustainable debt.  It established the assassination of foreign leaders as a U.S. government policy.  It normalized the use of depleted uranium munitions creating multi-generational birth defects.  It has further energized a culture of violence and polarization.

The U.S. government broke Iraq, beginning on March 20, 2003 and committed wholesale aggravated, premeditated murder against Iraqis.  Our leaders, their propagandists and war profiteers manipulated our deeply held feelings about freedom, fairness, and justice and our fears, and misled us in an unholy endeavor around which they sacrilegiously wrapped the American flag.

Imagine Iraq as a trial run for the next war; for ever-expanding military budgets, impunity from international trial; for media manipulation that makes the public fearful enough to accept their own economic demise in exchange for a false sense of security through militarism.

These individuals were members of the bi-partisan consensus that promoted the Iraq War: Then-Senator Joe Biden, Democratic Staff Director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Antony Blinken, and U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO, Victoria Nuland, were themselves promoted politically, to positions of greater influence where they could wreak even greater havoc upon the world.

These same individuals, Vice-President Biden, Deputy National Security Advisor, Blinken and assistant Secretary of State, Nuland, were joined by Hillary Clinton acolyte Jake Sullivan  (Vice President Biden’s National Security Adviser in 2013), to engineer the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014, and the subsequent sacrificing of Ukrainians in the U.S. proxy war with Russia.

It is critical to remember that in 2013, then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a NATO-inspired military agreement, in the guise of economic reform and EU association, that was aimed at severing Ukraine’s connections with Russia, and advancing a western geo-political agenda. 

The West exploited the desperation of Ukrainians whose average monthly minimum wage was then about  $150, violently propelled protests with the help of Right Sector and Svoboda parties, and ousted Yanukovych in a pro-western coup. Ukrainians thus became pawns in an international power struggle catalyzed with the help of Biden, Blinken, Nuland and Sullivan.    

Now, in the White House and suspected of colluding to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines, President Biden, National Security Adviser Sullivan, Secretary of State Blinken and Undersecretary of State Nuland are positioning the U.S. to pivot from the proxy war with Russia. 

Ukraine will be abandoned so the U.S. can prepare for war with China by 2025.  This dangerous brinkmanship is supported by both parties in Congress, the media and so-called think tanks cashing in from military build-ups and unnecessarily created conflict.

How do we, as a nation, recover from the heinous deeds committed in our name against the people of Iraq?  How do we stop government leaders from lying to us and the media, to stoke and to incite wider and wider wars?

The people who led us into the Iraq War must be held accountable. We must teach the real history of the Iraq war, the deceptions and propaganda a complicit media communicated unquestioningly to the American people. 

The media must question the government’s current policies and not swallow sensational stories that government officials peddle for their own narrow, venal concerns.  We need a return to investigative journalism, where the media properly holds government to account, instead of being compliant spear-carriers. 

We must insist upon the constitutional safeguards which exist to insure such foreign adventures never happen again.  Congress must return to its mandated role as a co-equal branch of government.  It must guard against executive usurpation of the war power, as directed in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.  

Congress must continually challenge the executive branch’s cause for military action by (1) insisting that intelligence be shared with all members of Congress and (2) bringing intelligence agencies forward to authenticate information attributed to them, either by anonymous news reports or the statements of top-ranking administration officials. There must be severe sanctions for presenting fake intelligence.

We must insist on strict accountability for those who have or will mislead us into aggressive wars, masked as “defending America and its values.” We, as a nation, cannot continue to act as if the U.S. can do whatever we wish to any other nation we please, without incurring the enmity of the world and endangering the future of the United States of America.

Unless we change course, the Pentagon budget and military contractors will soon command over 50% of U.S. discretionary spending.  Congress has recently given the Administration an historic $858 billion for defense, an astounding $45 billion more than requested,  to help sustain at least 750 military bases in 80 countries.  This is a classic definition of a national death march.

Today, amidst rising the interest rates, bank failures, layoffs in tech, and with food prices rising sharply, the U.S. is drastically cutting food stamp benefits!  We can’t feed our own people, but we have unlimited money for contrived wars everywhere.

It is time to ask, what the hell is the end game?  Is there anyone who does not understand that a U.S.-initiated war with China and Russia means assured annihilation?  It is time to demand that those who had have led us in this direction be voted out or removed from public office.

We must learn and then teach that it is not patriotic for a nation to wage aggressive war. Aggressive war, as the U.S. practiced in Iraq,  does not extend prowess, but instead shows the absence of a moral code and the weakness of our craven, fearful leaders’ minds and the spirits.   True strength extends from moral, not military authority.  True patriotic leadership focuses on the needs of the American people and on taking care of things here, at home, in the United States.

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Off the Top of My Head

US Would Like to Forget It Invaded a Sovereign Country Recently

by John Lawrence

The hypocrisy is appalling. The US invaded Iraq, a sovereign country, in 2003. Joe Biden voted for that war. Many children and civilians were killed as a result. The rationale for the invasion was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He didn't and George W Bush knew it. The invasion and consequent death and destruction in Iraq was based on a lie. The Guardian reported:

"Two decades ago, the United States invaded Iraq, sending 130,000 US troops into a sovereign country to overthrow its government. Joe Biden, then chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, voted to authorize the war, a decision he came to regret.

"Today another large, world-shaking invasion is under way. Biden, now the US president, recently traveled to Warsaw to rally international support for Ukraine’s fight to repel Russian aggression. After delivering his remarks, Biden declared: “The idea that over 100,000 forces would invade another country – since world war II, nothing like that has happened.”

"The president spoke these words on 22 February, within a month of the 20th anniversary of the US military’s opening strike on Baghdad. The White House did not attempt to correct Biden’s statement. Reporters do not appear to have asked about it. The country’s leading newspapers, the New York Times and Washington Post, ran stories that quoted Biden’s line. Neither of them questioned its veracity or noted its hypocrisy."

The Iraq war and the war in Ukraine are similar in that a sovereign country was invaded on false pretenses. The difference is that Iraq was no threat to the US. Ukraine is within what Russia would consider its "sphere of influence," much like Cuba is within the US' sphere of influence. The invasion of Cuba by the US turned out not to be too successful. However, Cuba has been punished by the US for going on 70 years because it had the impertinence to ally itself with the Soviet Union. By the same token Russia considered it a threat if Ukraine allied itself with NATO. The war could have been prevented if NATO had given any credence to Russia's concerns in pre-war negotiations.

The Guardian article continues:

"While Washington forgets, much more of the world remembers. The flagrant illegality of bypassing the United Nations: this happened. The attempt to legitimize “pre-emption” (really prevention, a warrant to invade countries that have no plans to attack anyone): this mattered, including by handing the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, a pretext he has used. Worst of all was the destruction of the Iraqi state, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,600 US service members, and radiating instability and terrorism across the region.

"The Iraq war wasn’t the only law- or country-breaking military intervention launched by the US and its allies in recent decades. Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya form a tragic pattern. But the Iraq war was the largest, loudest and proudest of America’s violent debacles, the most unwarranted, and the least possible to ignore. Or so it would seem. Biden’s statement is only the latest in a string of attempts by US leaders to forget the war and move on."

Today Fareed Zakaria said, "America's unipolar status has corrupted the country's foreign policy elites." American foreign policy too often consists of making demands and issuing threats and condemnations. There is very little effort to try to understand the other side, never giving any credence or credibility to it. Fareed's column in the Washington Post is "America’s foreign policy has lost all flexibility." America's foreign policy is sclerotic, the policy of an aging empire. Meanwhile the rest of the world has moved on.

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 War in Ukraine is More About Winning Than About Creating a Peaceful Solution

by John Lawrence

Biden talks about winning. Zelensky talks about winning. Putin talks about winning. Both sides are more interested in winning than in creating a peaceful solution that both sides can live with. That's their mindsets and orientations, unfortunately. It doesn't help for either side to demonize the other or characterize them as war criminals. So far there have been a total of approximately 8000 civilian deaths since the February 2022 Russian invasion. In contrast are the Vietnam war results: "Around 2 million civilians were killed in the territories of North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It is suspected that over 1.2 million of these deaths were murders." The war in Iraq, the invasion of which was based on a lie, resulted in the following: "No one knows with certainty how many people have been killed and wounded in Iraq since the 2003 United States invasion. However, we know that between 275,000 and 306,000 civilians have died from direct war related violence caused by the U.S., its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces from the time of the invasion through October 2019."

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was considered the architect of the Vietnam War, said in an interview: "[General Curtis} LeMay said, if we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals." McNamara characterized himself as a war criminal, but of course was never prosecuted as such. Only the losers of wars are prosecuted as war criminals. McNamara's son, Craig McNamara was a critic of his father's role in promoting the Vietnam war.

"[Craig} McNamara enrolled at Stanford University in 1969. McNamara took part in antiwar demonstrations at Stanford. Often joining him on the podium to denounce the war were two other students at Stanford, namely Susan Haldeman and Peter Ehrlichman, who were respectively the daughter of H.R Haldeman and son of John Ehrlichman. H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were respectively the presidential chief of staff and domestic affairs adviser under Richard Nixon, being known as Nixon's "Berlin Wall", owing to their German surnames and ability to grant or deny access to the president. [Craig] McNamara recalled: "Pretty much all the time at Stanford was occupied with anti-Vietnam and Cambodia demonstrations...I remember the rage settling in on me, and the frustration that we all felt because we couldn't stop the war""

After the war, Robert McNamara was fired as Defense Secretary and became President of the World bank which resulted in another family clash with his son. "In 1971, [Craig McNamara] moved to Chile whose President, Salvador Allende, was a Marxist in order to see Marxism in action. In 1984, McNamara stated that he moved to Chile because: "I felt an enormous sense of frustration with my family, with my country. I felt there was nothing I could do to change my father, so I left the country"."

"In 1973, [Craig] McNamara visited the United States where over the course of a dinner, he became caught up in an argument with Katharine Graham, the owner of The Washington Post newspaper and his father over Chile. The younger McNamara insisted that the Nixon administration was trying to overthrow Allende because he was a Marxist while both the elder McNamara and Graham insisted that there was no such policy on the part of the United States. Later on in 1975, the "destabilization campaign" waged by the Nixon administration came to public light. [Craig] McNamara stated: "That's why I'm still cautious about my father to this very day-that's the flip side. If they [Graham and Robert McNamara] didn't know what was going on in Chile factually, they must have known it intuitively. But they wouldn't say so".

"Shortly before he was due to return to Chile, the Allende government was overthrown in a military coup d'etat led by General Augusto Pinochet on 11 September 1973. The Pinochet government vowed to "exterminate Marxism" in Chile, earning a reputation as one of the worst human rights abusers in Latin America."

Putting all this in perspective purported war criminal Putin's civilian death total in Ukraine pales in comparison with (self-characterized) war criminal Robert McNamara's civilian death total in Vietnam or even the civilian death total in the Iraq war perpetrated by President George W Bush. Not to mention the approximately 200,000 civilian deaths as a result of atomic bombs dropped on Japan or the 25,000 civilians killed in the fire bombing of Dresden.

The war in Ukraine is a tragedy regardless of the number of civilian deaths. One civilian death is one too many. However, the longer the war goes on with both sides determined to win rather than determined to find a just peace that both sides can live with, the longer will be the destruction of civilian lives and real estate.The concept of winning in and of itself is the problem.

Off the Top of My Head

Where's the Off Ramp for the War in Ukraine?

by John Lawrence

I repeat: where's the off ramp for peace in Ukraine. Each side seems more interested in winning than in finding a resolution to the conflict that both sides can live with. Meanwhile, Ukraine is having billions of dollars in real estate destroyed not to mention having thousands of its citizens killed. Russia is having no real estate destroyed and won't unless the war is escalated. What would a negotiated settlement look like? It would have to be acceptable to both sides obviously. Otherwise, Russia could attack again at will. Unless they made Ukraine a member of NATO in which case any Russian attack on NATO would result in World War III. However, there may be another way. That would involve recognizing that Russia has a legitimate interest in a negotiated settlement. Right now the West seems more interested in demonizing Russia than in finding a negotiated settlement. They even pooh pooh the very reasonable negotiated settlement proposal which China has put forward. This does not bode well for peace in Ukraine. A war of attrition in which one side, namely Ukraine, is the side attrited while the homeland of the other side, namely, Russia, remains relatively unscathed is a disaster for the people of Ukraine. When all is said and done, these two countries will still be neighbors. The only thing that remains is whether they will be hostile neighbors in perpetuity or can a solution be found for which they could possibly be friendly ones.

Let's go back to the root of the problem: the dissolution of the Warsaw pact in 1991. As one of the victorious countries in WW II, Russia had certain rights insofar as the divided Germany was concerned. If Germany was to be reunited and become a member of NATO, then President Gorbachev was given assurances that NATO would not try to incorporate other previous Warsaw pact countries into NATO. But Gorbachev should have taken Reagan's advice: "Trust but verify." There was no formal agreement about NATO expansion - only a trusted verbal agreement. I reported in a previous post:

"NATO expanded during the 1990s largely due to the imprecations of President Bill Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright even though President Gorbachev had been promised that NATO would not expand "one inch eastward" as part of a deal to reunify Germany after the Cold War.

Politifact reported:

After explaining why the U.S. wanted the reunited Germany to stay within the framework of NATO, Baker told Gorbachev that "if we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO 1 inch to the east."

"I put the following question to (Gorbachev)," Baker recounted in a letter to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. "‘Would you prefer to see a united Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces, or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift 1 inch eastward from its present position?’"

Those comments, along with similar remarks from Baker’s European allies, like Genscher and Kohl, were part of what researchers at George Washington University’s National Security Archive called a "cascade of assurances" offered to the Soviets.

But Baker and other officials involved in the events have denied that the conversation ever turned on expanding NATO to other countries. 

So basically Gorbachev was sold a bill of goods that, if he consented to the reunification of Germany and with Germany as a NATO member, that NATO would not expand eastwards. However, "given assurances" is not the same as "legal and binding". Therefore, in July 1997, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic (where Albright was born) were formally invited to join NATO."

Interestingly enough, Biden did not give any credence to Putin's concerns before the invasion of Ukraine regarding future membership of Ukraine in NATO. If he had, it might have been possible to work out a security arrangement prior to the war that would have addressed both Russia's and Ukraine's concerns. Instead the Biden administration has continued to heap imprecations on Putin. As I said in the previous post, "All along the road of NATO expansion Russia's security concerns were ignored or belittled or disrespected." Now instead of a settlement acceptable to both sides before the war, essentially the same thing must happen to end the war after much destruction of Ukraine and loss of lives on both sides. If Russia and Ukraine cannot find an agreement that is acceptable to both sides, there is really no way that Russia can be persuaded not to attack again some time in the future. In order to have reconciliation and peace both sides have to be satisfied with the solution and both sides, of course, have to compromise. However, Biden, NATO and the west have to face up to their mistake in not acknowledging that Russia has legitimate security concerns in the Black Sea region just as the US has legitimate security concerns in the Americas.

Off the Top of My Head

Problem of American Democracy: Will It Devolve to Tribalism?

by John Lawrence

The US was settled by western Europeans - white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. All the Founding Fathers and writers of the Constitution consisted of these folks. When the Europeans came here there were 100 million Native Americans. A few years later, due to war and disease, there were only 10 million. 90% of Native Americans were wiped out. African Americans were brought here as slaves and completely subjugated, first due to slavery and secondly due to Jim Crow laws up to 1965. So western Europeans predominated in the US right up to late in the 20th century. From the 1880s to the 1920s many of the immigrants were Eastern and Southern Europeans fleeing poverty. They were preceded by the Irish in the 1850s due to the potato famine. This was the era when the motto, "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore" really held true. Then in 1920 or thereabouts the door to immigration was slammed shut. The western Europeans who ran America were afraid that these new immigrants would outnumber them and take over. Tribalism had reared its ugly head. About the same time eugenics was elevated to the point that the Supreme Court allowed the states to sterilize people that they considered undesirable. In Virginia Carrie Beck was sterilized.

Now that African Americans have escaped the bounds of Jim Crow and other Persons of Color have come to predominate in many positions of power, the remnants of the western Europeans who controlled the US up until the last 30 years or so are feeling like they're losing their grip on power. Democracy, as it was set up by the WASP Founding Fathers, only worked when the citizenry were also predominantly WASPs.Although its ideals were lofty, it was never meant to include African Americans, Native Americans, Latin Americans or other Persons of Color from around the world. The point could be made that democracy only works when it is enacted completely within one tribe, and, when other tribes are incorporated into the community, it doesn't work so well. What is happening today is that the WASP tribe is losing its grip on power, and so is attempting to put democracy aside and just revert to a society in which WASPs hold the reins on power. That is what the Republican party and especially the election deniers are all about.

Election deniers and conspiracy theorists are simply using a dog whistle because they just can't come out and say that what thy are really about is reverting to a tribal state in which they maintain the power that WASPs have always been accustomed to. Donald Trump is just the symbol of this.Election denying is just a euphemism for white western European power. The harsh reality is that the remnant WASPS would rather have an autocracy that they control rather than a true democracy consisting of African Americans and other Persons of Color. They don't want the true history of the US which includes other harsh realities taught in class rooms. The history they want taught is circumscribed to include only Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln and other WASPs but certainly not the realities of African and Native Americans and what happened to them at the hands of the WASPs.

So now what is at stake is the creation either of a true democracy which includes as full citizens and people allowed to enter positions of power those of African descent and other Persons of Color. What is at stake is a true Rainbow Coalition. The alternative is what the election deniers are trying to bring about which is an antidemocratic autocracy in which the descendants of WASPs prevail. That is basically what the Republican party represents - the descendants of WASPs. This is predominantly what the US has always been controlled by up till recently, and they want to continue in that mold. That's why the culture wars are heating up and what is taught in school is so important. If history is taught in such a way that it includes the realities of all Americans and not simply WASP Americans, it is taught in such a way that it does not reflect so favorably on WASP Americans. If non WASPS are given full citizenship or even if they are compensated for some of the inequities they have experienced in the past, this is threatening to the WASPs who would like to maintain the facade that they are good people and have always been good people. What is at stake is which version of reality will predominate in American society and who will be allowed into the Sanctum Sanctorum of American political power. Either the US becomes a true democracy or it reverts to a tribe controlled by the descendants of WASPs only.

Off the Top of My Head

Is There an Off Ramp to Peace in Ukraine?

by John Lawrence

In a hypothetical handshake between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin, the agreement was that the war would be fought entirely within Ukraine's borders, and that the US and the west would provide no boots on the ground in Ukraine. Until recently that unacknowledged agreement has been honored by both sides. The US has sought to contain the war also by not providing Ukraine with any long range missiles with which it could attack Russian territory. The idea was that the two sides would slug it out on the conventional military battlefield although Russia clearly has the means by which it could attack anywhere in Ukraine with missiles. The recent attack on the Kerch bridge followed by missile strikes on Kyiv represents an escalation of the war. In the "conventional" war Russia has evidently been losing. From Russia's perspective they have other modes of attack than just a conventional battlefield war. In the words of one Russian general, Russia should bomb Ukraine back to the 18th century. At this point Ukraine has little or no air defense capabilities, and Russia could do just that. So will Russia violate the unwritten agreement that the war will be won or lost on the battlefield? Probably "yes" if they are losing on the battlefield. Russia has long range missiles; Ukraine doesn't. Russia has an air force; Ukraine doesn't. Ukraine has no air defense system. The US and the west will not use their air force resources within Ukraine. This, as Joe Biden rightly observes, would start World War 3.

So why is the West deluding itself by thinking Ukraine could win this war and things could peacefully continue from there? Why is Russia trying to win a conventional war that it clearly is losing. Why are there no negotiations to try and settle this conflict in order to prevent further human suffering and devastation of Ukraine? Why is there no peace process underway? The US air force is not going to come to the aid of Ukraine. The US is not going to give Ukraine long range missiles so that it could attack inside Russia's borders. As atrocious as the Russian side has been made to seem by western media, Russia has exercised at least some restraint by not wiping Kiev off the map with missile strikes. Now that dynamic seems to have changed. Russia can inflict much damage on Kyiv and western Ukraine that it has recently refrained from doing. But now the gloves may be off. So my prognosis is that the war will get even more destructive because Kyiv and western Ukraine are essentially sitting ducks for Russian missile strikes. So why should Russia continue to fight a war on the ground that it is losing? The US and the west is concerned that Russia could use a battlefield nuclear weapon. Russia does not need to do that in order to devastate Kyiv and western Ukraine.

Unless there is some attempt at a peace process or a negotiated settlement, the destruction of Ukraine and the suffering of its people will only get worse. Modern wars are not constrained to military troops on the battlefield as they were in Napoleanic times. Increasingly in modern warfare, more civilian than military lives have been lost. Demonizing Putin will not win the day for Ukraine. Ukraine has belonged to Russia more often than not for hundreds of years. It was essentially peacefully "given" to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954. Nina Khrushcheva, the political scientist and great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, the then First Secretary of the Communist Party, said of Khrushchev's motivation "it was somewhat symbolic, somewhat trying to reshuffle the centralized system and also, full disclosure, Nikita Khrushchev was very fond of Ukraine, so I think to some degree it was also a personal gesture toward his favorite republic. He was ethnically Russian, but he really felt great affinity with Ukraine." Russia clearly has a historical interest in Ukraine, not to mention the fact that the Russian Black Sea fleet is based in Sevastopol which is in Crimea.

The US and the west continues to ignore Russian history at it's and Ukraine's peril. Russia will obviously not let the country that harbors its Russian military fleet become a part of NATO. That would almost be a contradiction in terms. The negotiated solution to this war, an off ramp to peace, seems unthinkable at this point, but decent human beings on both sides better start thinking about it. Unless they do, there will be even more destruction of Ukrainian civilians and of the Ukrainian civilization.

Off the Top of My Head

The Immigration Debacle - Part 2

by John Lawrence

By international and American law, any foreign national has the right to present themselves at a port of entry and apply for asylum. To be given asylum one must prove that they have a fear of persecution in their home country. One also has a right to request asylum if they enter the US illegally ^i.e. swim across the Rio Grande or getting into the US by means of a weak link in the border fence. Title 42, implemented under the Trump administration allowed persons who entered illegally to be deported because of COVID restrictions. Also in a deal worked out with the Mexican government asylum seekers were required to remain in Mexico while applying for asylum. Title 8 which preceded Title 42 allowed asylum seekers to remain in the US until their court date at which time they were either granted asylum or deported. The Trump administration with Title 42 had a makeshift, half way solution to the border crisis: they discouraged people from coming to the southern border. However, they did nothing to address the root causes and conditions that incentivized this problem. It's true that the southern states shouldn't have to bear the brunt of immigrants legal or illegal coming across the border any more than Italy or Greece should have to bear the brunt of immigrants seeking entry to Europe from Africa and the Middle East. The current UNHCR law regarding refugees was implemented after WW II and is need of revision since the current situation is far different than the one prevailing then.

Applying for asylum status at a port of entry or entering illegally requires a lengthy and dangerous journey from a home country and possibly paying a coyote thousands of dollars. However, the US southern border is a magnet for asylum seekers because of the current law. That law should change in order to encourage migrants to apply for asylum in their home country. Unfortunately, their home country is the one they're fleeing from presumably because of a threat to their lives. One solution is for the US, hopefully with the cooperation of central American and south American countries which are providing most of the asylum seekers, to go into those countries and do whatever is necessary to root out the gangs which are threatening the violence from which the asylum seekers are escaping. The US could provide safe zones in those or neighboring countries to which asylum seekers could flee and apply for asylum or refugee status there. The US should give cash and/or other incentives to keep asylum seekers in or relatively close to their home country until their cases can be heard in court. Courts should also be located in these safe zones so they would not have to travel to the US.

At the same time that asylum seekers are incentivized to apply in or near their home countries, they should be disincentivized from coming to the US southern border. This could be done by denying a court hearing for asylum status to those presenting themselves at a port of entry or entering illegally. This relieves the pressure on the southern border. This would be in violation of the international law regarding asylum seekers, but would not foreclose the possibility of seeking asylum. To the extent that the US improved the conditions which created the need for asylum in the first place, the number of asylum seekers would diminish. In the present era many seeking to immigrate to the US or Europe are doing so to escape economic conditions in their home countries. Economic immigrants are already ineligible for asylum under international law. However, if developed and advanced countries like the US and European Union would devote major resources to improving economic conditions in poorer countries, this would decrease the need for immigration. At the present time and going forward immigration will also be driven by climate change as people lose the means to support themselves due to floods, fires and drought. The US, as the major cause of greenhouse gas emissions, has a responsibility to ameliorate conditions in countries which are suffering most from global warming.

UNHCR most recently estimated that, by mid-2021, for the first time in recorded history, the number of forcibly displaced persons is now 89.3 million with over 27.1 million refugees. The advanced countries - that means Europe and the US -  need to coordinate their policies and increase their quotas for the admission of refugees. The number worldwide will only increase due to climate change. Refugees are not the same as asylum seekers. They are mostly in refugee camps around the world while asylum seekers present themselves at the borders of a country they wish to immigrate to. Those seeking asylum in the US are not entitled to government benefits such as TANF or Medicare until they have actually been granted asylum. It is only then that they can get a green card and other benefits. However, the court system is so backlogged that this might take years. The system as it exists now needs to be thrown out and revised, and that should start by changing the law at the UN so that both a humane and a realistic system can be implemented based on current and projected conditions.

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

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

The Pope Suggests NATO Partially to Blame for Russian Invasion

by John Lawrence

In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, Pope Francis said that “NATO barking at Russia” caused the Kremlin “to react badly and unleash the conflict” with Ukraine. The Pope has requested a meeting with Russian President Putin but so far to no avail. What is clear is that the West did not take Russia's objections to NATO expansion seriously and acted unilaterally to march NATO up to Russia's door. Besides that the US abrogated or just dismissed arms control treaties with Russia without further consultation. President George W Bush and Putin both came to power in the year 2000. Bush announced America’s intent to withdraw from the 1974 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that had been central to the U.S.-USSR strategic relationship. Abrogating the treaty did not go down well in Moscow, especially given the the huge military technological lead the Kremlin believed Washington had after the 1991 Gulf War. Then in 2019 during the Trump administration the US abruptly abrogated the INF treaty which was the centerpiece of the post Cold War negotiations between Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. There was no attempt by the US or NATO to renegotiate these treaties which was a slap in the face to Russia.

The Hill reported:

When America intervened in Afghanistan in late 2001, Putin was irritated because the Bush team rejected Russian advice based on its decade-long failure in that country. In 2003, Putin strongly counseled Bush against invading Iraq, as the Russian leader feared the region would be thrown into turmoil. And the continuing expansion of NATO was neuralgic for Russia. A series of U.S. administrations downplayed or ignored how serious this issue was for Russia.

At the Munich Security Conference, Putin unleashed an angry broadside against the U.S. as a “uni-power” and against NATO expansion. Participants were shocked by the intensity of Putin’s attacks but otherwise largely dismissed them. That was a mistake. It was clear that Putin believed he was being disrespected and marginalized by the U.S. and NATO, adding to his growing resentment about the patronizing treatment he believed Russia was receiving.

NATO expanded during the 1990s largely due to the imprecations of President Bill Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright even though President Gorbachev had been promised that NATO would not expand "one inch eastward" as part of a deal to reunify Germany after the Cold War.

Politifact reported:

After explaining why the U.S. wanted the reunited Germany to stay within the framework of NATO, Baker told Gorbachev that "if we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO 1 inch to the east."

"I put the following question to (Gorbachev)," Baker recounted in a letter to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. "‘Would you prefer to see a united Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces, or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift 1 inch eastward from its present position?’"

Those comments, along with similar remarks from Baker’s European allies, like Genscher and Kohl, were part of what researchers at George Washington University’s National Security Archive called a "cascade of assurances" offered to the Soviets.

But Baker and other officials involved in the events have denied that the conversation ever turned on expanding NATO to other countries. 

So basically Gorbachev was sold a bill of goods that, if he consented to the reunification of Germany and with Germany as a NATO member, that NATO would not expand eastwards. However, "given assurances" is not the same as "legal and binding". Therefore, in July 1997, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic (where Albright was born) were formally invited to join NATO.

The Conversation reported

"In hindsight, Albright’s curt dismissal of Russia’s security concerns might seem to have been ill-judged. This is especially true in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which some analysts blame in part upon the speed and perceived recklessness of NATO expansion during the 1990s."

One of Albright’s most consequential acts – both as Ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 to 1997 and as Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton – was to support NATO expansion.

NATO had been a cornerstone of the Cold War security order in Europe, binding the United States to the defense of Western Europe. Albright’s approach was to cast NATO not just as a military alliance but as a pillar of international stability and an engine of democratic progress. She saw the alliance as a conduit through which the United States could impart peace, order and good governance upon a fragile European continent.

At the time, critics cautioned that NATO enlargement would antagonize a post-Soviet Russia and could end up worsening the European security order.

Albright’s answer was uncompromising.

“We do not need Russia to agree to enlargement,” she assured senators in 1997, stressing the word “need.”

The strategic and moral case for enlargement was overwhelming, explained Albright. If the newly democratized states of Central and Eastern Europe craved the protection of the United States, she concluded, then no other nation should be allowed to stand in the way.

In short there might have been no NATO expansion or at least Russia's security concerns might have bee addressed if it were not for Madeleine Albright and later for Bush era neocons who pressed for NATO admittance for Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia much to Russia's chagrin. All along the road of NATO expansion Russia's security concerns were ignored or belittled or disrespected. Russia was dismissed as a weak and powerless nation with no skin in the game, powerless to do anything or have any say as NATO was quick to identify Russia as a potential enemy which justified the arms buildup by the US. Notably the European nations did not commit anywhere as much of their financial resources to an arms buildup, a fact lamented by President Donald Trump who suggested that the European nations were letting the US carry the load.

During the Cold War, US forces had been deployed around the world for the explicit purpose of deterring Soviet aggression. When the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so did the primary justification for America’s enormous troop presence abroad and globe-spanning web of military alliances. However, defense spending was given a new justification by Madeleina Albright in order to increase the US militarized global role in the post-Cold War era. She supplied a new rationale for spending on the military industrial complex and the development of ever more destructive weapons systems. NATO expansion and the abrogation of important nuclear arms treaties with Russia were a thumb in the eye of the Russian bear.

Off the Top of My Head

Don't say Gay, CRT or That Founding Fathers Were Less Than Perfect

by John Lawrence

As Ken Burns pointed out in his excellent documentary on Benjamin Franklin, not only was Franklin a slave owner, but also he fathered an illegitimate son, William. Geez, a slave owner and a philanderer! Do we want this taught to our kids in school? I say why not. It's better than filling their heads with nonsense, bullshit and fairy tales. The truth is that European settlers stole land from the Indians, and then brought in African slaves to work it while they sat on their asses and got rich. Benjamin Franklin is held up as a paragon of American achievement which he was in many ways. As a scientist he made a contribution to the theory of electricity and saved many church spires with his invention of the lightning rod. He also almost single-handedly saved the American revolution as a diplomat who got France to support it financially and militarily. Without France's support the fledgling United States of America would have assuredly remained British colonies. By the way Franklin's son William became the British Governor of the colony of New Jersey. Franklin himself was a loyal British subject until the Declaration of Independence at which time he decided to be an American.

So Republican reactionaries don't want unsavory facts about our Founding Fathers taught in school in addition to unsavory facts about sex. They don't want anything taught,especially the truth, if it makes their children feel uncomfortable. The fact is that not all people are heterosexuals, the Founding Fathers owned slaves, Indian's land was stolen from them and the Founding Fathers, some of them anyway, were philanderers who fathered illegitimate children. William, by the way, also fathered an illegitimate son, whom Franklin, to his credit, accepted into his household. After the Declaration, Franklin and his son William, who remained a loyal Brit, became estranged. William was captured and imprisoned by the American patriots.

Time reported:

"Opponents of CRT now invoke it as a catchall term for any discussion of systemic racism. All of a sudden, this once obscure bit of pedagogy is the hottest topic in conservative politics. In recent weeks, Republican governors in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas have signed bills designed to restrict the way history is taught or ban the use of CRT. In a legally binding opinion, Montana’s attorney general called critical race theory and antiracism training “discriminatory” and illegal “in many instances.” On June 10, the Florida board of education approved a rule that instruction “may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” At least 25 states have proposed or taken actions designed to restrict how teachers discuss racism and sexism, according to Education Week. One group in Nevada is calling for teachers to wear body cameras; under a bill that was proposed in Arizona, teachers could have been fined $5,000 for teaching students to feel “guilt” over their race."

So American history can't be portrayed in school as anything "other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence." Glory, glory. What noble people these slave owners, Indian land stealers and philanderers were! Not to mention the Mexican American war.

History.com reported:

"The invasion of Mexico was one of the first U.S. conflicts to spawn a widespread anti-war movement. Political opponents labeled “Mr. Polk’s War” a shameless land grab, while abolitionists viewed it was a scheme to add more slave states to the Union. Among the more notable critics was freshman Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln, who took to the House floor in 1847 and introduced a series of resolutions demanding to know the location of the “spot of soil” where the war’s first skirmish took place."

Well, in fact American history is full of lies and bullshit about war including the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Perhaps grade school children shouldn't have to be faced with the facts of life unsavory as they may be, but at some point, say high school, American citizens should be required to read "The Untold History of the United States," by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick or "A People's History of the United States," by Howard Zinn or both.

Off the Top of My Head

Joe Biden's Policy: Speak Loudly but Carry a Small Stick

by John Lawrence

As opposed to Theodore Roosevelt's policy: speak softly but carry a big stick. I think Biden's policy is correct. By all means we don't want World War III. As Ellen Brown makes clear on Web of Debt blog, sanctions will not do much except hasten the day when the US dollar is not the only world's reserve currency. There are so many workarounds to sanctions, and billionaires can always replace their super yachts. Russia has a fiat currency just like the US dollar. Modern Monetary Theory has shown that a country with a fiat currency can have its central bank print as much of that currency as it wishes. The only constraining factor is inflation. Right now the US is more constrained by inflation than Russia is. There is no need for Russia's domestic economy to suffer because of inflation. Businesses can continue to receive investment loans from the central bank. International trade will continue with friendly countries like India, China, Venezuela and Turkey. Turkey is a member of NATO by the way, and India is the world's largest democracy.

Daily Sabah reported on March 11, 2022 in Turkish businesses expect progress on using rubles in trade with Russia :

"Since the currency dispute with shipping companies is causing problems in the delivery of goods passing through customs, Turkey should actively work to develop a mechanism to facilitate trade with Russia in rubles, Istanbul Chamber of Commerce (ITO) head Şekib Avdagiç said Friday. Avdagiç stated that the companies working with Russia see the withdrawal of Western countries from Moscow as a new opportunity and emphasized that it is important to enable the use of the national currency of Russia. The issue was also brought up during President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s phone call with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, he reiterated. Erdoğan told Putin that, apart from the euro and dollar, trade between the two countries can be carried out using the Russian ruble and Chinese yuan."

Aljazeera reported:

Mumbai, India–Indian authorities are actively considering dedicated payment mechanisms for trade with Russia to enable existing trade obligations in the wake of sanctions imposed on the Kremlin, a move that will also pave the way for cheaper oil imports to meet the country’s energy demands. In the past month, as sanctions have been imposed on Russia, the scope of a payment mechanism in local currencies has expanded from being a means to sustain ongoing trade to possibilities of deeper engagement, including increasing bilateral trade.

Of course, US authorities are managing the news here just as they are in Russia. They don't want you to know that our erstwhile ally, India, the world's largest democracy is doing workarounds to avoid US sanctions. As Ellen's article points out, we in the US may be better off once the US dollar is not the only world's reserve currency. At that point we may have to rely more on our domestic economy and infrastructure just as Russia is being forced to do now. So we won't have to be at the mercy of supply chains from other parts of the world. More stuff will be manufactured here in the good old USA, and that's a good thing.

Off the Top of My Head

Two Truths About War and One About Planet Earth

by John Lawrence

1) Truth is the first casualty of war. 2) War is hell. 3) Planet earth can't survive without the cooperation of all nations. Despite the outcome of the war in Ukraine, the whole planet will go up in flames unless all nations can cooperate to solve the problem of global warming. If peace among all nations on earth is not possible, then we can kiss planet earth good-bye as a habitable refuge for humans and other forms of life. The cockroaches may survive, but there is no guarantee even for them. While we humans are busy fighting wars, the planet is warming, and there is not a lot of time to fix this problem before it gets to the point of being unfixable. Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose by 6% in 2021 to 36.3 billion tons, their highest ever, as the world economy rebounded strongly from the Covid-19 crisis and relied heavily on coal to power that growth, according to a new IEA analysis released this March 2022. So we're going in the wrong direction heading for a cliff full steam ahead. Not only are we not turning around this catastrophe, we're accelerating it.

"The increase in global CO2 emissions of over 2 billion tons was the largest in history in absolute terms, more than offsetting the previous year’s pandemic-induced decline, the IEA analysis shows. The recovery of energy demand in 2021 was compounded by adverse weather and energy market conditions – notably the spikes in natural gas prices – which led to more coal being burned despite renewable power generation registering its largest ever growth"

So now with the sanctions on Russian gas, there is a likelihood that even more coal will be burned as gas prices soar around the world. We are shooting ourselves in the foot! More natural gas usage, even Russian natural gas, should be encouraged because it produces less greenhouse gas emissions than does the burning of coal. So whoever loses the war in Ukraine, the biggest loser of all will be planet earth. Combined with the methane emissions estimates that the IEA published last month and estimates of nitrous oxide and flaring-related CO² emissions, the new analysis shows that overall greenhouse gas emissions from energy rose to their highest ever level in 2021.

The IEA report emphasized:

"The use of coal for electricity generation in 2021 was intensified by record high natural gas prices. The costs of operating existing coal power plants across the United States and many European power systems were considerably lower than those of gas power plants for the majority of 2021. Gas-to-coal switching pushed up global CO² emissions from electricity generation by well over 100 million tonnes, notably in the United States and Europe where competition between gas and coal power plants is tightest."

So now because of sanctions on Russian natural gas, even more power plants across the US and Europe will be switching to coal! We should be closing all coal powered plants and even those powered by natural gas replacing them all with renewables, geothermal and nuclear. There are alternatives available, but the human race would rather be all concerned about war fighting and not at all concerned about the fate of the planet and the fate of the human race. When it comes to war, there is an unlimited budget. When it comes to peace, there is hardly any money available. Why? Because war is profitable. Defense contractors will be making record profits in the United States and Europe and their stock prices will soar. Meanwhile, there is a paltry budget for switching to renewable energy.

Cold War II or World War III? (Or Climate Change Hell)

An Ukrainian Territorial Defence fighter examines a destroyed Russian infantry mobility vehicle GAZ Tigr after the fight in Kharkiv on February 27, 2022. (Photo: Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty Images)

 

"Such consequences that you have never encountered in your history."

 

Tom Engelhardt

March 18, 2022 by TomDispatch

He's our very own emperor from hell, an updated version of Nero who, in legend, burned down Rome on a whim, though ours prefers drowning Washington.  Why, just the other day, Donald Trump—and you knew perfectly well who I meant—bent the ears of 250 top Republican donors for 84 minutes. Among other things, he assured those all-American (not Russian) oligarchs—and let me quote him in the Washington Post on this—that "'the global warming hoax, it just never ends…' He mocked the concept of sea levels rising, disputing widely held science. 'To which I say, great, we have more waterfront property.'"

Here we are heading into Cold War II, while facing the possibility of World War III on a planet that, thanks to the way we live and produce energy, is heading for hell.

Admittedly, he's talking about flooded property, including possibly whole cities going underwater in the decades to come, but what the hell! Yes, indeed, he was the president of the United States not so long ago and, if all goes well (for him, not us), he or some doppelganger, could win the Oval Office again in 2024, ensuring the arrival of that new, all-too-wet waterfront property.  And yes, he offered up that little gem—about the 9,000th time he's called climate change a "hoax" (sometimes blaming it on China)—just as a new scientific report came out suggesting that, if things don't improve in fossil-fuel-burning terms, up to half of the Amazon rain forest, one of the great carbon sinks on Earth, could be transformed into savanna. To quote the Washington Post again:

"The warming consequences of suddenly losing half the rainforest would be felt thousands of miles away and for centuries into the future, scientists warn. It would mean escalating storms and worsening wildfires, chronic food shortages and nearly a foot of sea level rise inundating coastal communities. It could trigger other tipping points, such as the melting of ice sheets or the disruption of the South American monsoon."

Hey, Donald, what could possibly go wrong on this all-too-embattled planet of ours?

Of course, at this moment, three of the four largest greenhouse gas emitters, Russia, the U.S. (which is now allowing more drilling for oil and gas than even during Trump's presidency), and China, are locked in what could only be thought of as a deadly embrace over Vladimir Putin's disastrous invasion of Ukraine. And the grim war the Russian president launched seems likely to guarantee yet more fossil-fuel use on a planet that needs so much less of it, even as he also put the issue of nuclear war back on the table for the first time since the Cold War ended.  How appropriate, if you're heading into Cold War II to once again raise the possibility—forget about the next Chernobyl—of turning World War III into a nuclear one.

At this point, if you don't mind a genuine understatement, what a strange planet we now live on.

World's End, Property of…?

Once upon a time, whatever your religion, Armageddon was the property of the gods; until August 6, 1945, that is, when a lone B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay (named after its pilot's mother), dropped the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, essentially obliterating it.

Thought of another way, however, we humans took the power to end the world (at least as we've known it) out of the hands of the gods in the nineteenth century when the fossil-fuel based industrialization of Planet Earth began in earnest in Great Britain. In other words, credit our cleverness. In the space of a mere 200 or so years, we've developed two different ways of devastating or even ending our life on this planet. Consider that a genuine accomplishment for humanity.

As it happens, recent nuclear and climate-change news should have brought that reality to mind again.  But before I even get to Vladimir Putin, the invasion of Ukraine, and the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), let me mention that, more or less any week, there's a new study (or two or three) of our climate future suggesting ever more extreme peril for us in the decades (or even months) to come: ever fiercer droughts, intensifying heat, more extreme wildfires, more melting ice, and ever rising sea levels.

Of course, like the rest of us, you already know that story, right? And of one thing you can be sure, the next scientific study, whatever it is, will only offer yet more extreme climate news (with the rarest of exceptions).  In fact, I had barely begun writing notes for this piece when that IPCC study arrived on the scene with, of course, the latest round of dreadful news about where we're heading—to a potentially "irreversible" hell in a handbasket, natch. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called it a "code red for humanity," lamenting that the evidence it details was unlike anything he had ever seen on the subject and describing it as an "atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership."

Damning indeed on a planet where, even before the Ukrainian nightmare, it was obvious that key leaders were doing anything but greening this world fast enough for the health of humanity.  And that, of course, is just the background against which all of us now operate, whether we think about it or not—and in the midst of events in Ukraine, it's not being given much thought at all—on a planet going to… well, why insult "the dogs"?

Which brings me back to Vladimir Putin.  The strange thing about that other form of planetary suicide, atomic weaponry, is that, since at least the end of the Cold War, it's generally not been on the table (so to speak) or much in the news.  Yes, in the Trump years, the president did implicitly threaten to rain nuclear hell on North Korea—he called it "fire and fury"—and, at one point, spoke of ending the Afghan War with just such a strike, but most of the time from 1990 to late last night, nuclear weapons (Iran, which didn't have them, aside) simply weren't part of the conversation.

Now, don't get me wrong.  In those same decades, nuclear arsenals only spread and grew.  Nine countries now possess such weaponry and the three great powers on the planet—the U.S., China, and Russia—have all been hard at work. Russia has been "modernizing" its vast arsenal and China moving rapidly to build up its own.

Since Barack Obama's presidency, the U.S. military-industrial complex has also been—and, yes, this is indeed the term often used—"modernizing" its already mind-boggling arsenal to the tune of $1.7 trillion to $2 trillion dollars over three decades.  That includes, for instance, a new intercontinental ballistic missile known as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent that, it's already estimated, will take at least 264 billion of our tax dollars over its lifetime (and that's before the cost overruns even begin!).  Keep in mind that this country already had an unmodernized arsenal all too capable of destroying this planet many times over into the distant future. With our 1,357 deployed nuclear weapons (3,750, if you count the "inactive" ones), including land-based nuclear missiles, those transported by strategic bombers, and our nuclear subs wandering the world's waters with their own devastating nukes on board, global destruction would be a given.

With all that activity long underway to remarkably little attention, nuclear weapons—and apocalyptic possibilities—have once again hit the headlines thanks to Vladimir Putin. After all, as his troops headed into Ukraine, he suddenly and all too publicly issued a directive putting his nuclear forces on "high alert" and offered this gem to the world:

"Whoever tries to hinder us, and even more so, to create threats to our country, to our people, should know that Russia's response will be immediate. And it will lead you to such consequences that you have never encountered in your history."

To make his point even clearer, he promptly oversaw the test launching of four nuclear-capable ballistic missiles. Since the U.S. still has plenty of tactical nuclear weapons based in Europe, consider us once again, as in the original Cold War, on edge and in a nuclear stand-off. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the Russians threaten to repeat, of all things, the Chernobyl disaster by taking the nuclear plants they once set up and serviced there in a wartime blaze of horror.  One has already been captured under hair-raising circumstances.

Looking back, maybe the strangest thing of all is that most Americans, maybe most people on the planet, essentially forgot about nukes.  In retrospect, you have to wonder how that was ever possible, especially if you're my age and remember ducking and covering at school in repeated nuclear test drills, while the media of that time focused on whether people should share their personal nuclear shelters with their friends and neighbors. And mind you, that was in the years when, in reality, Russian nuclear weapons couldn't yet reach this country (though the U.S. already had the ability to devastate the communist world).

Here, then, is a strange irony: in the years when we were most truly paying attention, they couldn't have done anything to us. Once they truly could, we essentially began forgetting those weapons. Now, however, the potential destruction of humanity is back on the table—and this time around, brilliantly enough, in two different ways.

Green What?

Believe me, when you've been on this planet for 77 years, you feel like you've seen everything.  And then, of course, it turns out that you haven't. Not by a long shot. Not faintly. At 14, my grandfather, a Jew, ran away from his home in the city of Lemberg when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.  Between World Wars I and II, it was called Lvov and belonged to Poland.  During that second great war, the Jewish population there was slaughtered by the Nazis.  Since the end of that nightmarish war, it's been known as Lviv and it's been part of Ukraine, or rather, if Vladimir Putin has his way, the place that until recently was known as Ukraine. As a result, Lviv is again in the news, big time.

I mean, invading Ukraine at this moment?  How truly mad.  It's still hard to take in what's happening, including the million-plus children who have already fled that country. Of course, ever more people are in motion on this planet today thanks both to war and climate change. Yet, in a sense, there's really nowhere left to go, is there?

As it turns out, our leaders have done all too good a job of providing options for ending the world.  I mean, in a century when it should be hard not to know that, if the burning of fossil fuels isn't brought under control, life as we've known it will cease to exist, two great powers with preening, overweening leaders thought it made far more sense to order their militaries to invade other countries based on lies.  Because of that, cities were destroyed and deaths made all too plentiful.  Vladimir Putin's ongoing invasion and destruction of Ukraine has been denounced by much of the world led by Joe Biden's America.  Russia is now experiencing potentially devastating sanctions, while from sports to entertainment to fast food, much of the planet has been turning its back on Russia.

But here's the odd thing: Russia invaded its neighbor, which once indeed had been part of the Soviet Union. The other great and invasive power I had in mind struck two countries thousands of miles away—Iraq (based on the lie that its autocratic ruler was developing nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction) and Afghanistan.  And yes, as the present conflict will undoubtedly prove a catastrophe for Russia and the people of Ukraine, so those wars proved disasters for the United States but even more so for Afghans and Iraqis.  Strangely enough, however, the world didn't condemn the U.S. for its acts. No sanctions were put in place.  No weaponry was sent to Afghans or Iraqis to help them defend themselves against the occupying imperial power.  And stranger yet, in retrospect, the present president of the United States, then a senator, voted to invade Iraq and subsequently even developed a plan to divide that U.S.-occupied country into three different states.

And so it goes on this endangered planet of ours, while the greenhouse gasses from unending fossil-fuel burning invade our atmosphere with devastating effect, yet create next to no headlines at all.

Armageddon-Makers

Today, 76 years after World War II ended (I was 1 at the time), the heartland of Europe is again embroiled in war, death, and destruction. And more than three decades after the Cold War ended, the new tsar of Russia, now a rickety petro-state with an economy smaller than Italy's, is responsible.

Confused yet?  Well, you should be on this god-forsaken planet of ours.

If you look at the American experience, whether in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan (or the Russian experience in that same country), the one thing you know is that this can't end well, not for Vladimir Putin or Joe Biden or Donald Trump or the rest of us, not on a planet that humanity insists on taking down. A tip of my hat goes to the outraged Russians who have hit the streets to protest the war in Ukraine, as Americans did (myself included), however briefly, in that spring of 2003 when the invasion of Iraq loomed.

Given our world, we should all probably be in the streets now. I mean, here we are heading into Cold War II, while facing the possibility of World War III on a planet that, thanks to the way we live and produce energy, is heading for hell. Think of climate change in its own way as perhaps the equivalent of World War IV, though somehow, while Ukraine is endlessly in the headlines, the climate emergency, no matter how horrifying the news, remains in the shadows, even as the Republicans call for yet more fossil-fuel drilling.

The peacing of Earth? Not likely. The greening of Earth? Not likely either, it seems. In our own fashion, we have indeed taken the place of ancient gods of every sort.  We are now the Armageddon-makers and, sadly enough, it seems that we're just gearing up.

---

© 2021 TomDispatch.com

 

Tom Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Type Media Center's TomDispatch.com. His books include: "A Nation Unmade by War" (2018, Dispatch Books), "Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World" (2014, with an introduction by Glenn Greenwald), "Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050"(co-authored with Nick Turse), "The United States of Fear" (2011), "The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's" (2010), and  "The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond" (2007).

Off the Top of My Head

We're Taking Our Eyes Off the Ball Regarding Climate Change

by John Lawrence

It's all about war and oil. Climate change is taking a back seat to the peril of human existence on planet earth. It won't matter who wins the war in Ukraine if we forget about the constant dumping of carbon dioxide greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. When we should be getting rid of oil consumption, all most Americans seem to care about is the price of gas. 2, 4, 6, 8 we don't want to mitigate. Mitigating climate change will take the cooperation of every nation on earth. Instead nations of earth are dividing into two dissenting camps. If the production and consumption of oil is to be mitigated, the world needs the cooperation of the world's largest oil producers. Let me see who that might be. Could it be Russia and the United States? And let me see who could be the largest greenhouse gas emitters? Could it be China, India and the US? India, by the way, the world's largest democracy, hasn't condemned Russia over the war. The BBC reported:

"India has had to walk a diplomatic tightrope over Ukraine in the past few days as it tried to balance its ties with Moscow and the West. ... Delhi continued with its strategy as it chose to abstain when the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to demand an immediate end to the invasion of Ukraine. ... India's strategy has raised questions, particularly in the West, over whether the world's largest democracy should have taken a clearer stand. ...There are several reasons for India's quest to find a diplomatic balance over Ukraine. The most important are India's time-tested defence and diplomatic ties with Moscow."

So kiss planet earth good-bye insofar as human habitation is concerned. The cockroaches are willing and able to take over. It's almost a foregone conclusion as homo sapiens marches inexorably toward its own extinction. Right now is the time to convert to renewable energy post haste ... with all possible speed. Instead we're squabbling over the price of gas and involved in a war which is destroying what fragile good will existed a few weeks ago. We're all concerned about where our oil production is going to come from instead of using this opportunity to get off oil consumption. But all good American middle-of-the-roaders consider it too radical to take the emergency measures necessary to avoid the complete destruction of the planet for future generations. Instead they want to continue business as usual as if gradual measures will be enough. The time window for doing anything of consequence keeps getting smaller and smaller while greenhouse gas emissions keep bigger and bigger.

Off the Top of My Head

That's Not Who We Are

by John Lawrence

Obama declared: "That's not who we are" when opining about the more hateful aspects of American society. But the reality is that's who we veritably is, at least some of us Americans. It's impossible to generalize about the American character. We are not a monolithic society. Take Charlottesville for instance. Latter day confederates and ku klux klaners. That's not who we are? That's who some of us are. That's the problem. There is no common set of values. Trump said there were good people on both sides. What is the definition of a "good person"? Is it one who fights to maintain his own way of life or is it one who tries to reach accommodation with others and understand their point of view. For America as a nation in general, it is more the former than the latter. Historically at least since WW II, the US has always taken the path of using force and power to maintain its standing in the world and to maintain its right to exploit the resources of weaker nations while ignoring the welfare of their people. The US has supported right wing, authoritarian dictatorships in South America and elsewhere so that the "supply chain" of natural resources could be extracted and shipped back to the homeland while keeping the cheap native labor cheap. There was no effort to improve the lifestyles of the natives. Those locals who sought to do so were overthrown and right wing dictatorships were installed in Chile, Nicaragua, Argentina, Iran and many other countries too numerous to mention. For many years it was all about the oil. Now we realize that that oil transformed into greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere is what's killing us.

When Gorbachev sought detente and the elimination of nuclear weapons in the world, Reagan hung on to his Star Wars fantasy. Neoconservatives in the Reagan administration considered Gorbachev's stated desire to bring peace to the world a sign of weakness to be exploited rather than a signal that a new era of peace could be at hand. This neoconservative foreign policy has been the policy of US Presidents both Democrat and Republican. Jimmy Carter had his Zbigniew Brzezhinski. Nixon had his Henry Kissenger. Reagan and the Bushes had a whole host of neocons fashioning their foreign policy. Reagan himself had no idea about what to do other than that he was against communism. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick wrote in "The Untold History of the United States":

"But what is Reagan's real legacy? One of the most poorly informed and least engaged chief executives in U.S. history, he empowered a right wing resurgence of hard-line anti-communists who militarized U.S. foreign policy and rekindled the Cold War. He paid lip service to democracy while arming and supporting repressive dictators. He turned local and regional conflicts in the Middle East and Latin America into Cold War battlegrounds, unleashing a reig of terror to suppres popular movements. He spent enormous sums on the military while cutting social programs for the poor. He sharply reduced taxes on the wealthy, tripling the national debt and transforming the U.S. from the world's leading creditor in 1981 into its biggest debtor by 1985. In October 1987, he oversaw the worst stock market collapse since the Great Depression. He let the chance to rid to rid the world of offensive nuclear weapons [proposed by Gorbachev] slip through his fingers because he wouldn't let go of a childish fantasy [Star Wars]. And as for his much-vaunted role in ending the Cold War, as we shall see, the lion's share of credit goes instead to his Soviet counterpart,. Mikhail Gorbachev."

Is it any wonder then, that a chauvinistic and self-serving foreign policy has been internalized by so many "patriots" like the ones who attacked Capitol police on January 6, 2021? They just want what we already have: access to the natural resources of the world for Americans at the expense of indigenous peoples, the continuation of a way of life that favors the fortunes of white, European immigrants at the expense of African American forced immigrants, Latin American immigrants as well as Native Americans. When Obama says over and over, "That's not who we are," it's wishful, thinking because that's exactly who many of us are.

Off the Top of My Head

Problems of American Democracy - Part 2

by John Lawrence

How is Roe vs Wade like the Iran nuclear deal? They both can be overturned by a new President, Supreme Court or Congress. There is no such thing as "settled law." Another example: the Paris climate change agreement which Obama signed on to and Trump pulled out of. A nation that can't keep its agreements either internally or externally is a nation with no direction, a nation not so much making progress as going over and over again the same ground. We go back and forth and round and round while other countries go forward in the same direction.This whole process is more crucial due to the fact that 1) other countries are losing trust in us if they can't count on us to keep our word and 2) if we're not all on the same page regarding climate change, the earth will be a goner in just a few years. Some countries are already experiencing disasters that they are ill prepared to deal with.

Some of the issues are pretty straightforward. Instead of the US getting its panties all in a wad over Ukraine, the situation there is mainly of concern to Russia since Ukraine is right on Russia's border, and, by the way, used to be part of Russia. Would the US tolerate a hostile government in Mexico? Let Russia deal with it. It should be none of our business. Reagan promised Gorbachev that NATO would not start absorbing countries further to the east. Now that's just what NATO is doing with its cultivation of Ukraine for admission to NATO. The National Interest reports:

"Indeed, Russian Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin have complained bitterly about the expansion of NATO towards their borders despite what they had believed were assurances to the contrary. “What happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today?” Putin said at the Munich Conference on Security Policy in 2007.“No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr. Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: ‘the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.’ Where are these guarantees?”

"As the newly declassified documents show, the Russians might have had a point. While it was previously understood that Secretary of State James Baker’s assurance to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “not one inch eastward” during a February 9, 1990, meeting was only in the context of German reunification, the new documents show that this was not the case.

"Gorbachev only accepted German reunification—over which the Soviet Union had a legal right to veto under treaty—because he received assurances that NATO would not expand after he withdrew his forces from Eastern Europe from James Baker, President George H.W. Bush, West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the CIA Director Robert Gates, French President Francois Mitterrand, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, British foreign minister Douglas Hurd, British Prime Minister John Major, and NATO secretary-general Manfred Woerner."

Obviously, Russia is very concerned about Ukraine becoming part of NATO with the prospects of advanced weapons being placed on its border. So why make a big deal over whether or not Ukraine or part of Ukraine is taken over by Russia? The US has long considered itself to have hegemony over North and South America and has overthrown governments in South and Central America. Let Russia have some degree of hegemony in its corner of the world. There are more important issues which require the cooperation of the whole world - climate change and pandemics to name two.

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

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

Snake in the Grass Kyrsten Sinema Sells Out to Corporate Lobbyists

by John Lawrence

Corporations, especially the pharmaceutical, can thank Kyrsten Sinema for selling out to them. The least objectionable parts of Biden's Build Back Better plan are the ones Sinema vetoed. Biden's plan would have been much better if corporate lobbyists hadn't gotten to her. But not to worry. She's set for life with probable promises of corporate board positions paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few hours "work." With Democrats like her, we don't need Republicans. She's a Republican wolf in Democratic sheep's clothing. But never fear. Biden's Build Back Better Bill will eventually pass within the next couple of weeks, and it's still truly transformational. Too bad that every Democratic Senator had effectively a veto over any provision of it. Joe Mancin was at least up front with the public about his concerns, some of which were at least plausible. Sinema sprung her demands on Biden at the seeming last minute forcing him to renegotiate the whole deal and delaying the whole process. While pundits quibble over Biden's ratings, I don't think he's too concerned about that. He knows he has a BIG DEAL or a BIG FUCKING DEAL as he once whispered to Obama. He'll go down in history as a transformational President.

So what do the Republicans have to offer? Election denialism and insurrection denialism. It wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that they could spring back to life in two or maybe four years. Too bad for the rest of the world's confidence in America. Although the US decries Soviet and Chinese authoritarianism in which one leader can remain in power for a number of years, while the whole US relationship with the rest of the world could change every four, what about Angela Merkel, who remained in power for 16 years, in a putative democracy. Longevity of intent is not a function necessarily of type of government. The US is back? Biden would like to convince others it's so. But Trump has a different perspective which is that Biden's version of the US is back until he, Trump, takes over again in 2024. The US could veer wildly back and forth without any continuity whatsoever. While Democrats are doing their best to help families and bring the US into the modern world, Republicans offer warmed over conspiracy theories aided and abetted by social media. The US needs to get serious about denying Trump a chance of ever running again. In fact he should be in jail for attempting to overthrow a legitimately elected US government which is treason. Yes, the T word applies to him. The S word, sedition, as well. Yet as of now he can run again and possibly win in 2024.

I think that, after the twin Build Back Better bills finally pass, Democrats will turn their attention to voting rights. Will Sinema and Mancin go along with holding the filibuster in abeyance to get voting rights passed? That's the big question. If not, Democrats are sunk in 2022 and 2024. And so is the US as a world leader. The US will become a backwater and a latter day banana republic with an outsize military, corporate lobbyists run amuck and a fast fading US dollar as the world's reserve currency. Runaway global warming will be a given if Trump is elected again in 2024. The US will become a billionaire's paradise with unrestricted limits in economic inequality and a burgeoning homeless population that neither Republicans or Democrats seem to be able to do anything about. Rents will soar out of sight as more people live in their vehicles and on the streets without adequate sanitation. The rest of the developed world will leave the US in its dust, but they alone will not be able to solve the problem of climate change which will eventually make parts, if not all, of the earth uninhabitable. So there is a lot riding on a Federal voting rights bill overriding the Republican state efforts to gerrymander and restrict access to the ballot in order to favor the electability of Republicans.

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.

Off the Top of My Head

One Million French Sign Up For Vaccinations After Macron Demands Passes for Restaurants, Cafes

by John Lawrence

French vaccination rates were lagging in France as they are here. Then French President Emmanuel Macron got on TV and told Frenchmen they would not be able to go to cafes and restaurants unless they had a vax pass. Qelle horreur! A Frenchmen not allowed to enter a French cafe or even bicycle home with a batard? It is, je ne sais quoi, impensable. So why couldn't Joe Biden do the same thing here? Just get on TV and inform the American people that they won't be able to go to bars and restaurants or baseball games or theme parks unless they are fully vaccinated and show their card proving this at the entry gate? Because in America you have to tread lightly around what Americans think are their rights. In this case they think they have a right to infect not only themselves but those around them and to demand service from overworked doctors and nurses when they get sick.

I think France is a democracy, but Macron seems to have a lot more power than a US President who evidently cannot mandate that the American people do anything. This is definitely not the roll up your sleeves and get to work World War II generation. This is not Gen X or Gen Y. This is Gen Selfish. Gen not give a damn about anyone but themselves. No wonder they like Trump so much. He exemplifies their values. Even in France young people think they should be able to do what they want. “I’m getting vaccinated because I want to have a social life and go on holidays,” law student Marius Chavenon, 22, said, adding: “I don’t think vaccination should be compulsory. We live in France, we should be able to do what we want.” Man the barricades, the ancien regime is about to fall. Instead of Marie Antoinette saying "Let them eat cake," Macron is saying "Let them get vaccinated."

The US central government is weak because of states' rights. States have the prerogative of overruling Federal mandates. Oh excuse me, has Joe Biden overstepped his bounds when he demands that people get vaccinated? Not in my state says the governor of Florida and the other southern states. We will not be told what to do by the central government. This does not happen in most democracies. The provinces are subordinate to the central government, but not in the US. This is one of the flaws in the American version of democracy. It doesn't have to be this way for a nation to qualify as a democracy. America is a nation of spoiled brats. They are a bunch of selfish misinformed, stupid A holes. They figure that that's their right as an American.

The virus has its own methodology. It has no respect for American sensitivities. While Joe Biden has to walk on eggshells, COVID does not. It doesn't care about the fact that Americans want to get back to their normal life of going to bars and restaurants, baseball games and theme parks. It doesn't care about Americans' right of self-indulgence. Facebook should be mandated to take down any misinformation about getting vaccinated, but that's how they make their money and the central government would be overstepping its bounds if they mandated Facetime to do so. So what to do? Local governments and businesses can mandate that their employees get vaccinated. They have more power than does the US government in this circumstance evidently.

Off the Top of My Head

The Militarization of the American Mind

by John Lawrence

From seemingly rational thought processes that would make it impossible to end the war in Afghanistan to the insurrection at the Capitol to the "American movie" chock full of violence to the "well regulated militia" justification of gun proliferation, there is no end of rationalizations for the American military-industrial complex and gun culture on every level. Why does it come as a surprise to some journalists that many participants in the January 6 insurrection were current or ex military or police officers? They are exactly the ones with the mind set that believes Trump won the election, and that it was OK to do what their leader commanded them to do - invade the Capitol. The Generals who say that Biden shouldn't end the Afghanistan war on the grounds that the Kabul government will collapse are exactly the ones that argued we shouldn't end the Vietnam war because the South Vietnam government would collapse. Sure when the US sets up a puppet government and then props it up with money and a military presence, it probably will collapse when the US leaves that country which it never should have invaded in the first place. Afghanistan is Vietnam all over again or as Yogi Berra would say deja vu all over again.

The division among Americans into two tribes can be understood in terms of the two paths Americans take after high school graduation. There are those who go to college and there are those who go into the military. Those are basically the two choices high school graduates have. Those who go to college are taught to think critically to some extent, while those who go into the military are taught to obey orders. Unfortunately, Trump, as their Commander-in-Chief gave them the order to invade the Capitol, and they felt justified in following it because that is what their training led them to do. The choice to go into the Peace Corps or AmeriCorp is not really viable for most high school graduates because the perks of going into the military greatly exceed the perks of going into more peaceful pursuits, and they are less glorious. This is also a characteristic of the militarization of the American civilian mind. The military-industrial complex including, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, profits greatly from ongoing militarization and military thought processes, employs most of the college graduates and provides debate ending rationalizations for American military preparedness despite the fact that their extremely expensive hardware doesn't work half the time, and the threats to America are primarily cyber in nature as well as domestic terrorism.

The divide and contrast between high school graduates who go into the military and are taught to follow orders and those who go to college is reflected in the political divide between those on the right and those on the left.The military is all about symbolism including snappy uniforms, medals for valor in combat, saluting the flag and honoring themselves for their patriotism. On the left results in the improvement of the lives of the American people - and not just the elite civilian Officer's Corps - are more important than symbols of glory. They are more likely to question authority rather than unquestionably following orders. The January 6 insurrectionists were following Trump's orders at least that's what they were thinking in their own minds and by their own admission. I would like to see the FBI release to the public the number of insurrectionists who were military or former military. I bet that would be most of them, especially the males. A lot of ex military go into police work because of the familiarity with weaponry which they gained in the military. Since guns are a familiar way of life for them, naturally they become arch supporters of the Second Amendment, "well regulated" or not. They are used to classifying groups of people as either friendly or the enemy, and this mind set lends itself to police work.

In the final analysis, America is so used to being the world's policeman and profiting in various ways therefrom, that it is unthinkable that we should cooperate with our supposed adversaries to forestall global warming or to thwart future pandemics let alone the current one. We must always have an enemy or at least an adversary to justify our existence. A peaceful world in which everyone gets along and cooperates to solve the problems we earthlings face and have to deal with is unthinkable. Even though the US has a glut of vaccines while the rest of the world is begging for them, Americans feel free not to have their arms jabbed because after all they are free - free to be stupid, free to ignore the safety of other Americans and free to get infected with the virus and die taking others with them.. They just want to get back to normal entertaining themselves to death and ignoring totally any responsibility to their fellow citizens not to mention fellow citizens of the world, many of which they would like to maintain in their necessary roles as the enemy.

Dr. Fauci wondered why we couldn't all unite to fight the common enemy  - COVID - instead of fighting among ourselves about taking the vaccine. Uniting to fight a common enemy like COVID or climate change just isn't the way Americans and maybe humanity in general do things. We need to disagree even about things that are crucial for our continued existence as a species. As a nation we need an enemy whether it be Russia or China seemingly to justify our existence.

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

Republicans Represent a Diasporized Ku Klu Klan

by John Lawrence

America First was also a credo of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan organization. This assertion rated true by Snopes. Now Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz are embarking on an "America First" tour of the USA. It seems that the US can not get over its racist past. Republicans are basing their party on lies like that Trump won the election. Maybe the biggest lie was the one Thomas Jefferson wrote when he penned the preamble to the Constitution: All men are created equal. That was patently a lie because Jefferson himself was a slave owner as was George Washington and many of the other Founding Fathers.Obviously, Native Americans were not created equal. Neither were African Americans. So why did Jefferson create the first BIG LIE which Trump and the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene are only perpetuating. On the other hand the sentiments embodied in Jefferson's preamble can be seen as aspirational and that is the tack the Democratic party is taking at the present time. Let's make this a country where all men, women and children are in fact created equal.

The Ku Klux Klan has become normalized in the Republican party which pretends to exemplify our Anglo Saxon heritage. So let's just go back to the era of King George, why don't we? Republicans could change their name to the Tory party. The term Tory or "Loyalist" was used in the American Revolution for those who remained loyal to the British Crown. Since early in the 18th century, Tory had described those upholding the right of the King over Parliament. During the war of independence, particularly after the Declaration of Independence in 1776, this use was extended to cover anyone who remained loyal to the British Crown. The US has already become a neo-feudal society with great wealth concentrated in the upper one percent, and great poverty concentrated among black and brown people. "America First" is just a slogan for perpetuating the idea that those who are superior by dint of their having acquired great wealth should be the nobiity and the lesser among us should just be content with their lot of a few crumbs from the table. They surely shouldn't be given de facto equal rights despite the fact that the Constitution says that they were created equal.

A diaspora is a spreading out of a people or a philosophy. The Ku Klux Klan used to be concentrated mainly in the South. The Republican party is still based there, but the philosophy has metastasized to include white supremacists in the heartland as well. "Republican" is a more respectable name for a philosophy that bears an eerie resemblance to that of the Ku Klux Klan. "America First: really means "white people first." Let's just keep the example that white people were the ones that first officiated over the construction of a so-called democracy, one that denied women, African Americans and Native Americans the vote. The only reason they let in eastern and southern  Europeans was that they needed their labor power. Asians were discriminated against and even put in concentration camps during the Second World War. What has been consistent about America is the fact that white people have held the reins of power ever since the country began. African Americans, who have been here as long as white people have, were first enslaved and then subjected to Jim Crow laws. Native Americans were herded onto reservations.

At the beginning of the 1830s, nearly 125,000 Native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida–land their ancestors had occupied and cultivated for generations. By the end of the decade, very few natives remained anywhere in the southeastern United States. Working on behalf of white settlers who wanted to grow cotton on the Indians’ land using black slaves as labor power, the federal government forced them to leave their homelands and walk hundreds of miles to a specially designated “Indian territory” across the Mississippi River. This difficult and sometimes deadly journey is known as the Trail of Tears.

So get the picture? All men, let alone women, were not created equal in fact despite Jefferson's words which he didn't really believe himself. At best they were aspirational. Well how long do some people have to wait for aspirations to become realized? Joe Biden's administration is trying to correct some of these historical wrongs which go back to the BIG LIE that was embodied in the US Constitution with the flowery words of Thomas Jefferson. Today Trump supporters like Marjorrie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz with their America First tour are only trying to perpetuate the BIG LIES that go back to the beginning of the country. They didn't start with Trump. He only exemplified them, and now Republicans are doing their best to carry on that American tradition.