Diatribes of Jay

This blog has essays on public policy. It shuns ideology and applies facts, logic and math to social problems. It has a subject-matter index, a list of recent posts, and permalinks at the ends of posts. Comments are moderated and may take time to appear.

27 May 2019

Why Pelosi is Right


For an explanation how abortion has ruined our national politics and how we could recover, click here. For an essay on why we must compete peacefully with China and what we must do to win, click here. For an essay on Elizabeth Warren’s qualifications for the presidency, click here. For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Great Minds Think Alike?

I published the following post early Monday Morning. Tuesday morning’s print New York Times continued the theme at a factual level, in a story also released Monday online. It followed one laid-off worker at GM’s now-closed Lordstown, Ohio, plant, showing how his political struggle never was and never will be about impeachment. It’s about dignified, good-paying jobs for people who work mostly with their hands.

If you like the kind of news stories that focus on individuals at the personal level, this one will melt your heart. The headline in Tuesday’s print edition is more evocative: it reads, “Where Jobs Vanished, ‘Nobody Had Our Backs.’”

    “To impeach, or not to impeach, that is the question.
    Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
    The slings and arrows of outrageous misdeeds,
    Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
    And by opposing end them. To wait—to sleep,
        . . .
    To wait, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
    For what dreams may come when our 40%
    Might join the Devil and push us into Hell?”
    —with apologies to William Shakespeare
For months I’ve been relatively silent on the issue of impeachment. I’ve gone back and forth, again and again. But Friday I made up my mind. Trump’s temper tantrum over infrastructure pushed me over the edge. I now have a firm conviction that Nancy Pelosi is right.

The investigations must go forward, but in the background, sotto voce. They should produce no leaks or headlines except for “smoking guns” or Trump’s own tax returns, with secrets so stark as to tar him instantly as a monumental sleazebag.

But for the Dems to devote all their efforts to impeaching Trump now would be a big mistake. Rehashing the Mueller Report endlessly will do nothing but waste precious time. Here’s why.

Nancy Pelosi is one of the most underestimated pols of our age. Not only does she have the spurs from over forty-one years in politics—a record that, among Dems, only Biden can match. She also learned politics at her father’s knee, in a big Italian family. So she knows how to raise children and grandchildren, and she knows what to do when kids rebel.

Isn’t that pretty much what’s happening with our Trumpets? When teens rebel, there is only one way to reach them. It’s hard to do it with Reason, because they’ve waxed cynical and think they know better. To reach them, you have to convince them that you love them and have their best interests at heart.

Telling them is not enough. You have to show them. Once that realization dawns, then Reason can win.

And so it is with the Trumpets—the 40% of our electorate who love Trump. They will follow him literally into Hell: the Hell of an unfocused trade war with China, the Hell of an isolated and fractured economy, the Hell, perhaps, of a real war with Iran, and God knows what other unnecessary suffering.

Why is this so? Because know one else seems to care about them.

The rich just keep getting richer and more indifferent while the Trumpets’ jobs evaporate, their pay and benefits wilt, their factories and towns dry up and blow away, their retirements wither in bankruptcies of firms and cities, their families dissolve under economic stress, and their kids migrate to the coasts (or to Texas) where the jobs are and forsake them. So they turn to opioids (which the oligarchs make easily available) or to drink, and they kill themselves, quickly or slowly, as is their wont.

What do most Dems do? They lecture them, directly or indirectly. They justify themselves with abstractions, just as Republicans do. “Globalization and trade make everyone better off. Things will improve soon.” Stop clinging to guns and religion. Get more education or training. Get a new and better job. Stop complaining.

Hillary was the paradigm. She famously called Trumpets “a basket of deplorables.” Even Mitt Romney couldn’t match that in 2012. He only called them the “47%” and accused them of being “takers.”

Hillary and Romney weren’t alone. Nearly all pols, like our economic elite, ignored or dissed the Trumpets’ real suffering. It conflicted with their own personal comfort and their nice, neat, abstract economic and social theories why their own comfort was so right.

“Takers?” If you asked the Trumpets, they would say that everything that once made their lives joyful has been taken from them. Some takers!

Along comes Donald Trump. He’s profane, vulgar, crude, senile and erratic. But he says he cares about them. He says he’s going to fix their plight, and he’s the only one who can do it. In his own erratic, narcissistic way, he seems to love them. No one else does.

So suppose you are one of the ones who’ve lost almost everything. Are you going to go with the pol who has the better abstract idea to fix the economy? Are you going to follow the nuances of trade policy or of the Fed’s playing with interest rates and inflation? Are you going to worry about checks and balances and separation of powers? Or are you going to go with the only one who seems to love you and your kind?

These questions answer themselves, don’t they? That’s why the bond between Trump and his Trumpets is so hard to break. They think he loves them, and they think no one else does. Their hard lot this last generation makes convincing proof.

And what about the Trumpets’ other pols? They ought to care about checks and balances, the separation of powers, and Congress’ proper role. After all, many of them are lawyers. But they don’t. Most of them never had to fight for this country, never put on a uniform. So you’re going to tell them that they ought to care more for a bunch of abstractions they studied in law school than for their perks, their power, and the people who secure them? Good luck with that.

Dems are long past advising that suffering is good for you or “my plan will hurt you in the short run but help you in the long run.” It’s way beyond that already. All Dems can do is show their own love and refute the bad Dad’s. Trying to impeach the bad Dad will just put them in the Trumpets’ enemies’ camp, along with Hillary and Romney.

With his infrastructure tantrum, Trump gave the Dems an opening. His female pit bulls can spin it all they want. But Trump’s words and the angry look on his face show how much more he was concerned with himself and his reputation than any Trumpet’s livelihood. The Dems should show the clip of his angry grimace, in an endless loop, while explaining, over and over again, how many good jobs for skilled workers a big infrastructure push would create how soon.

But that’s only half the battle. The other half is Dems showing they love the Trumpets and want to improve their lives. That requires working on their health care, child care, college debt relief, free and reduced-cost higher education, opiate-addiction relief, strengthening the retirement safety net, and most of all, providing good new jobs for people who work mostly with their hands.

Nothing will show this love better than the Democratic House passing bill after bill while McConnell stalls or diverts his Republican Senate and, if a bill ever passes both houses, Trump vetoes it. Dems must show their love with practical measures and careful, empathetic explanation of benefits.

Then Dems can break the wall of fear and loathing and start to peel the Trumpets off from the Dark Side and back to America. If it ever comes to that, a Bill of Impeachment will enjoy so much more credence and power once the Dems do so.

The practical Democratic House bills should be real and valid, not tokens or poison pills. They should reflect the kind of good, bipartisan legislation that any pol of either party would have been proud to author forty years ago. If possible, each should garner a few stray Republican votes.

If nothing else, the Dems could enact revived copies of these bills instantly, early in 2021, if they win big in 2020. Then they might actually get a few things done for the people.

The very first bill out of the House’s hopper should be a gigantic infrastructure bill. It should provide at least two trillion dollars to fund millions of high-skilled jobs. It should deal with nothing else, just infrastructure. And it should be as simple as funds appropriated and a list of projects and places.

The Dems should promote this bill widely, with specifics about all the jobs it would fund and the many places where it would fund them—especially in red states! And in every ad and news clip where they tout it, the Dems should show the clip of Trump’s face, twisted in anger and refusing to deal, in an endless loop.

We’ve had enough of Armageddon. In October 1962, we almost extinguished our species in Armageddon with the Soviets. Now we’ve got Armageddon in our own land. Bannon, Miller, Bolton, and Trump want some kind of Armageddon with the Chinese, global Muslims, Iran, Hispanic refugees and God knows whom else. Trump seems to be daring Dems to start political Armageddon with the only one who, as erratic and self-centered as he is, has ever shown the Trumpets anything like love.

Under present circumstances, impeachment is just a political form of Armageddon. It will be so as long as 40% of our people think only Trump cares about them. Break that bond, and impeachment will be possible. Break that bond and it may not be necessary.

Trump’s own several Armageddons are the answer to nothing. They let him win only because they helped him convince his “base” that he loves them. But he doesn’t love them. He loves only himself. Show them that and Dems can win with empathy.

The Trumpets, too, are us. They are just as American as the rest of us. They grow our crops. They keep our outback alive and populated. Their small-town values create the kind of nurturing, wholesome, human-sized communities that many of us in huge cities wish we had. Show them all a little love and caring and we can wean them off of Trump’s testosterone-shriveled teats. We can do so without a climactic battle, political or otherwise.

Sure, we need to restore checks and balances and the balance of powers. Sure, we need to elect pols who will do that. Sure, we need to fill Congress with members who understand its institutional role and how it keeps us from the Dark Side of a runaway Executive.

But we also need to elect pols who will think for themselves, and for the common good. We desperately need ones who will relegate Rove, Luntz, Bannon, Miller, Bolton and their Democratic clones to the dustbin of history, where they so surely belong.

There are plenty of bad pols in both parties who’ve delegated their jobs and their thinking to shills, scoundrels, propagandists and fourth-rate operatives. They all need to go. But Dems can clean their own House and change the Senate quicker and better working with the Trumpets (or at least some of them) than fighting all of them at once.

To win with kind, thoughtful pols and weed the bad ones out, we need to love our neighbors once again, as Jesus advised. We don’t need a climactic battle, in Congress or otherwise. We need the kind of empathy, understanding and love that, of all the pols in our current twisted system, a 79-year-old woman who’s practiced politics and family all her life knows best.

Armageddon is overrated. We nearly tried it in 1962, with the Soviets. It nearly extinguished our species. Love and empathy work better. Nelson Mandela tried them, and they let him negotiate his people’s freedom from inside his prison cell. As old as she is—maybe because of her age and gender—Nancy Pelosi seems to understand.

Links to Popular Recent Posts

For an explanation how demagoguing the issue of abortion has ruined our national politics and brought us our two worst presidents, and how we could recover, click here.
For analysis of the Huawei Tech Block and its necessity for maintaining our innovative infrastructure, click here.
For ten reasons, besides global warming, to dump oil as a fuel for ground transportation, click here.
For discussion why we must cooperate with China and how we can compete successfully with China, click here.
For reasons why Trump’s haphazard trade war will not win the competition with China, click here.
For a deeper discussion of how badly we Americans have failed to plan our future, click here.
For an essay on Elizabeth Warren’s qualifications for the presidency, click here.
For comment on how not doing our jobs has brought us Americans low, click here.
To see how modern politics has come to resemble the Game of Thrones, click here.
For a discussion of the waste of energy and fossil fuels caused by unneeded long-range batteries in electric cars, click here.
For a discussion why Democrats should embrace the long campaign season and make no premature moves, click here.
For a discussion how Trump and Brexit have put the tree world into free fall, click here.
For a review of how our own American acts help create our president’s claimed “invasion” of Central American migrants, click here.
For a review of basic facts that must inform any type of universal health insurance, click here.
For a discussion of how the West’s fall and China’s rise affect the chances of our species’ survival, click here.
For a discussion of what the Mueller Report is and how its release could affect American politics, click here.
For a note on the Mueller Report as the beginning of a process, click here.
For comment on the special candidacies of Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg, click here.
For reasons why the twin 737 Max 8 disasters should inspire skepticism and caution with regard to potentially lethal uses of software and AI, click here.
For my message to Southwest Airlines on grounding the 737 Maxes, click here.
For an example of even the New York Times spewing propaganda, click here.
For means by which high-school teachers could help save American democracy, click here.
For a modern team of rivals that might comprise a dream Cabinet in 2021, click here.
For an analysis of the global decline of rules-based civilization, click here. For a brief note on avoiding health lobbying Armageddon, click here.
For analysis of how to save real news and America’s ability to see straight, click here.
For an update on how Zuckerberg scams advertisers, click here.
For analysis of how Facebook scams voters and society, click here.
For the consequences of Trump’s manufactured border emergency, click here.
For a brief note on Colin Kaepernick’s good work and settlement with the NFL, click here.
For an outline of universal health insurance without coercion, disruption of satisfactory private insurance, or a trace of “socialism,” click here.
For analysis of the Virginia blackface debacle, click here. For an update on how Twitter subverts politics, click here.
For analysis of women’s chances to take the presidency in 2020, click here.
For brief comment on Trump’s State of the Union Speech and Stacey Abrams’ response for the Dems, click here.
For reasons why the Huawei affair requires diplomacy, not criminal prosecution, click here. For how Speaker Pelosi has become a new sheriff in town, click here.
For how Trump’s misrule could kill your kids, click here.
For comment on MLK Day 2019 and the structural legacies of slavery, click here.
For reasons why the partial government shutdown helps Dems the longer it lasts, click here.
For a discussion of how our national openness hurts us and what we really need from China, click here.
For a brief explanation of how badly both Trump and his opposition are failing at “the art of the deal,” click here.
For a deep dive into how Apple tries to thwart Google’s capture of the web-browser market, click here.
For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here.
For reasons why natural-gas and electric cars are essential to national security, click here.
For additional reasons, click here.
For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here.
For Democrats’ core values, click here.
The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights?
For how our two parties lost their souls, click here.
For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here.
For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here.
For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here.

Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

permalink to this post

24 May 2019

Roe, Roe, Roe your Boat . . .


For an essay on why we must compete peacefully with China and what we must do to win, click here. For an essay on Elizabeth Warren’s qualifications for the presidency, click here. For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Once upon a time, there was a nation called the United States of America. Its people were doers and problem solvers. They explored and settled a continent. They tamed the Mississippi. They discovered how mosquitos carried yellow fever and wiped out the mosquitos. They used vaccines to eradicate smallpox and measles.

They built the Erie Canal, the Transcontinental Railroad, and the Interstate Highways. They invented air travel and propagated it worldwide. They invented nuclear weapons but used them only to end humanity’s most terrible war. They put men on the Moon. They invented the Internet and saw it spread worldwide. They gave humanity personal computers and smartphones.

When disputes among their people arose, they settled them. When disputes became acute, they compromised or went to court. When the top court ruled, the losers sighed and accepted its decision. The government was far from perfect, but it worked. It did things.

No more. Some time during the reign of a grade-B actor named Ronald Reagan, pols began privatizing their sacred duties. They delegated them, and their own thinking, to “political operatives”—a motley crew of grifters, PR people, salesmen, advisors, propagandists and third-rate “thinkers.”

These worthies convinced pols that all that mattered was staying in office, not what they did while there. Pols’ lives became self-reinforcing exercises in deceiving themselves and their constituents. They spent most of their time and energy raising money for their next campaigns and the media propaganda required to maintain their deceptions.

Solving problems, their operatives told them, is not the thing to do. The thing to do is to stay in power. And the way to do that, the operatives said, is to keep issues alive, not resolve them. Maybe that’s why Trump just canceled negotiations with Democrats over rebuilding our infrastructure—the best way to give millions of skilled workers good, non-outsourceable jobs.

If you keep issues alive and refuse to resolve them, you will attract—and often enrage—a phalanx of committed voters. You will have a steady stream of support from single-issue extremists. You will have their money, too, so you won’t have to spend so much time on the phone making cold calls for cold cash.

Just kick the can continuously down the road, and you will have an inexhaustible reserve of intransigent support. That’s how you stay in power; never mind how you govern.

The epitome of this perversion of democracy is, of course, abortion. That’s not surprising: the issue is tailor-made for indefinite discussion and non-resolution. It’s also an issue that doesn’t belong in national politics at all: the criminal law that anti-abortion zealots use to try to stamp out abortion is primarily state law. In the absence of consensus on the issue in Congress, the only effect national elections have on abortion is the rare chance for a president to appoint a Supreme Court Justice based on this single issue.

Imagine a professor of philosophy posing the question to college freshmen in a final exam. Which should prevail, the desires and life of the pregnant woman, or the nascent life of the fetus? A good professor would have no fixed answer in mind. Instead, he or she would grade students on their nuance and subtlety, their understanding how myriad additional facts can change the analysis, and their clever citation of great philosophers discussed in the course.

The operatives, of course, did no such thing. They propounded a single answer for all cases, regardless of facts and nuances. Their goal was not to resolve the issue or deal with it practically in all its complexity, but to provoke an ideological war. They wanted “clickbait” before there were clicks.

Abortion best motivates voters when it’s a constant irritant, like a burr in one’s shoe. Republicans treat abortion as “killing babies.” Democrats say forbidding it denies women autonomy and control over their own bodies. Both sides leave all the crucial nuances—things like, rape, incest, the mother’s age, health and circumstances, the fetus’ condition and viability, the father’s presence, condition and wishes—out of the discussion.

Back in 1973, before Reagan and the onslaught of Karl Rove and his clones, our Supreme Court had done what Americans used to do. In the case of Roe v. Wade, it had tried to craft a practical solution. The pregnant woman’s wishes, it said, prevail until the fetus is viable outside the womb. Thereafter, the fetus has rights because it could survive on its own if given the chance.

It was a simple, practical solution, but it didn’t last long. The rapid advance of medical science and technology made fetal viability a moving target. With today’s technology, we can grow a fetus in a test tube, from the very moment of fertilization. So isn’t a fetus now “viable,” with some help from modern medicine, from the moment of fertilization, too?

The issue is ripe for “keeping,” not resolving, for yet another reason. There is no scientific or medical consensus on when a human life begins. In science and in reality, both life and death are complex processes. Recall the recent experiments provoking some activity in “dead” neurons from the severed heads of slaughtered pigs.

Religion stepped into the breach, taking the matter out of secular hands. But our First Amendment precludes establishing an “official” religion and gives everyone the right to practice his own. Anyway, if we let priests, pastors, rabbis and imams decide, we would have no general rule. And that approach, too, would deprive pregnant women and their doctors of the power to decide.

Finally, there’s the notion of “liberty,” which our Constitution guarantees us in its preamble and its Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Isn’t the right of a pregnant woman to decide whether to bear a child, in consultation with the child’s father, her family, her doctor, and her moral and religious advisers, the essence of “liberty”? But isn’t also the fetus’ right to live, at least if and when human? Does the concept of “liberty” shed any light on what’s right in a particular case?

The Roe v. Wade Court tried to draw a line. Perhaps it should have refrained. Perhaps wisdom, then and now, lay and lies in restraint. Perhaps there’s no one-size-fits-all “solution” to this most personal and delicate of issues, dependent as it is on every detail of the actual facts and circumstances.

But that’s how the Roe Court did rule. It declared a limited, constitutional “right” to abortion. In so doing, it not only made abortion a political issue for keeping, not resolving, for the foreseeable future, and perhaps forever. It also gave pols an easy reason to forsake their duties, jump into bed with their sly operatives, and goad voters into manning the barricades rather than improving their day-to-day lives.

We can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Already Rove-like operatives have become a pack of hyenas. They have sunk their teeth into our political system as if it were a downed calf. Among the consequences are: a do-nothing Congress, a system dead in the water, an imperial presidency with the least qualified leader in our history, a divided and hateful public, and the indefinite prospect of more of the same.

Cui bono? Who benefits? Rove and his fellow operatives certainly did (See this post and this one.) They have proliferated like locusts, creating a new, well-paid and powerful profession, from nothing, in less than two generations. Many of them switch candidates and even parties like bettors picking horses at the racetrack. Perhaps vultures are better metaphors than hyenas.

Of the two major parties, probably the GOP has gained more. Blanket opposition to abortion plays well in the outback where Trump won unexpectedly. It undoubtedly helped George W. Bush enough in his race against Al Gore to drop the race into the Supreme Court’s lap, where Bush won. My own anecdotal experience suggests as much, for a colleague of mine (a professor, no less!) confessed to voting for Bush primarily on the issue of abortion.

But our nation as a whole has lost egregiously. We don’t need two huge phalanxes of single-issue voters, let alone on an issue on which national elections have little or no direct effect. By oversimplifying an incredibly complex and nuanced issue, abortion has taught our electorate to shoot from the hip. It has also encouraged name-calling (“baby killers,” “misogynists”) and discouraged civil and rational discourse. If there is any single thing, prior to Trump’s presidency and the revival of white supremacy, that has wantonly cheapened and coarsened our national politics, it’s the elevation of abortion to a perennial national issue.

So what comes next? Here’s my fervent hope.

Let the new “conservative” Court deliver the coup de grace. Let it overrule Roe v. Wade as soon and as decisively as possible.

Let our electorate awaken from its nightmare of distracting and fruitless abstract ideological combat. Let voters see how the oligarchs have stolen the people’s jobs and patrimony, are blocking their future, are pillaging our land, air, water and wilderness, and are risking yet another unnecessary and potentially catastrophic war, this time with Iran. Let them see how their elected representatives have morphed from independent thinkers into lackeys groveling for money and controlled by third-rate, quasi-criminal minds. Let them see how they’ve been led around by the nose, with an issue of state law that presidents and members of Congress have little power to resolve. Let them understand, with full force, how deeply they’ve been duped.

However much the operatives on both sides want their single-issue voters to believe it, sustaining or overruling Roe is not ideological Armageddon. All overruling it would mean is that abortion would become illegal in some red states.

Clean and safe abortions will undoubtedly still be lawful on the West and East Coasts, in some Mountain states, in Canada, and in Mexico (which is not far from many of the reddest, most anti-abortions states). If supporters of women’s autonomy are concerned that poorer women in red states won’t have access to safe and legal abortions, they could form an organization to transport them to places where abortions are legal and see them through the procedures. The Constitution’s guarantees of state sovereignty and full faith and credit to all states’ laws, not to mention citizens’ privileges and immunities to travel freely among states, would keep them from being prosecuted on their return. That’s what our ancestors—who once were problem-solvers, not issue-hoarders—would have done.

According to the Washington Post, 638,169 abortions were reported in 2015, the latest year for which good data are available. Relative to our national population of 328,830,848 (estimated as of May 22, 2019), the political issue of abortion directly affected 0.2% of our population. (The issue may have indirectly affected more people than the aborting women, for example, their men and parents. But an unknown number of aborting women, probably a majority, lived in or traveled to states with liberal laws and had no practical problems. In the absence of more detailed data, it’s safe to assume that the number of reported abortions is an upper limit to the number of pregnant women who had trouble with abortions derived from legal prohibitions.)

Let’s suppose (contrary to common sense) that every one of those 638,169 women had to travel to a get a clean, safe and legal abortion. According to Planned Parenthood, an abortion in the first trimester costs from $350 to $950. That’s in the first trimester—the precise time frame in which Roe originally protected abortion as a constitutional right. But let’s make our estimate “conservative” and, by taking the top first-trimester cost as the average, include some later abortions. Then let’s add $1,500 for the cost of round-trip air travel to and from a blue state (or Canada or Mexico) and a couple of a days in a reasonable but not shabby hotel. That sums to $2,450 per procedure, or 638,169 x $2,450 = $1.56 billion dollars.

In a $20 trillion economy, with a “t,” that’s a 0.008% problem. To put it in perspective, 10 million ardent pro-choice advocates could fund the whole thing with donations of $156 dollars apiece. Some of our leading multi-billionaires, such as Jeff Bezos, could fund it out of pocket change

Instead, we the people let the GOP operatives trick us into treating abortion as an issue of ideological Armageddon, rather than a practical problem to be solved practically. The best thing anyone who wants to see America great again could do is to put this issue behind us, once and for all. Having the private sector fund abortions (and any necessary travel) for women who who can’t afford them would do that, quietly and effectively.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that will happen. Over the last two generations, the GOP has become adept not just at “applied philology,” the science of name calling and word-twisting. It has also become a master of distraction.

Except for pregnant women who consider and/or have them, the issue of abortion is the mother of all distractions. It seems so simple yet really is so complex. It has reduced many voters from thinking citizens to shouters at barricades. It has helped the oligarchs steal the nation’s substance and governance right out from under voters’ noses. It’s as important to the oligarchs’ plan for supremacy as are the many kinds of vote suppression and voter discouragement that Stacey Abrams describes in her recent piece in the New York Times.

The key to understanding the real role of abortion in our national politics is the extreme anti-abortion laws just passed in states like Alabama and Missouri. No Supreme Court Justice—not even Gorsuch or Kavanaugh—is going to let states criminalize ending a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, or to save the life of the woman. That would be like encouraging Solomon to split the baby with his sword, right there in his audience chamber.

These extreme laws are dead on arrival in our courts. So why pass them? The purpose is not to “test” Roe. Anyone who’s gone to law school knows how that “test” will come out.

The purpose of these impossibly harsh laws is distraction, pure and simple. If women and other voters focus on these obvious threats to women’s health care, autonomy and justice, they might not notice the vote suppression, tax theft, environmental degradation, effects of global warming, or wanton destruction of our safety net going on all around them. They might not notice how our war machine is gearing up yet again to make money for arms makers and to put immigrants who want to earn their spurs as citizens through yet another meat grinder.

So I don’t think Roe will die by a single stroke. The oligarchs want the issue, not the result. They want the distraction to continue.

Roe will die by a thousand cuts. The process will take years, keeping the issue and its distraction alive. The distraction will continue to energize rural and small-town voters, which form much of the GOP’s “base,” not to mention Dems who have trouble keeping their eyes on the ball. It’ll be the gift that keeps on giving, with nothing ever finally resolved.

One thing should be glaringly obvious. Trump, the oligarchs and the GOP operatives don’t really give a damn about abortion one way or the other. If they or their own women have an unwanted pregnancy, they can fly to England, Germany, Switzerland or Singapore and have a safe, clean and legal abortion, in luxury, at will. They can even have it in privacy and secrecy. They care about the issue of abortion for one reason only: it distracts voters’ attention from their stealing the substance of this nation and tilting the playing field further against ordinary workers and citizens each and every day.

By the time Roe falls, if ever, the oligarchs may have taken over completely, and the United States may be an empire, like ancient Rome in its latter days. Women may be much like the maids from The Handmaid's Tale now used as protest icons. Or a second civil war may have started, with the aim of restoring real democracy to what remains of the United States.

Roe, Roe, Roe your boat, gently down the stream,
Merrily, airily, carelessly, mindlessly, voting’s just a dream.

Footnote: Perhaps the sole benefit of this appalling political trend is that the vulture class now offers equal opportunities for women. Don’t we all just love ladies like Hope Hicks, Kellyanne Conway, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, with all their manifest intelligence, veracity and moral sensitivity? Who elected them?

Links to Popular Recent Posts

For analysis of the Huawei Tech Block and its necessity for maintaining our innovative infrastructure, click here.
For ten reasons, besides global warming, to dump oil as a fuel for ground transportation, click here.
For discussion why we must cooperate with China and how we can compete successfully with China, click here.
For reasons why Trump’s haphazard trade war will not win the competition with China, click here.
For a deeper discussion of how badly we Americans have failed to plan our future, click here.
For an essay on Elizabeth Warren’s qualifications for the presidency, click here.
For comment on how not doing our jobs has brought us Americans low, click here.
To see how modern politics has come to resemble the Game of Thrones, click here.
For a discussion of the waste of energy and fossil fuels caused by unneeded long-range batteries in electric cars, click here.
For a discussion why Democrats should embrace the long campaign season and make no premature moves, click here.
For a discussion how Trump and Brexit have put the tree world into free fall, click here.
For a review of how our own American acts help create our president’s claimed “invasion” of Central American migrants, click here.
For a review of basic facts that must inform any type of universal health insurance, click here.
For a discussion of how the West’s fall and China’s rise affect the chances of our species’ survival, click here.
For a discussion of what the Mueller Report is and how its release could affect American politics, click here.
For a note on the Mueller Report as the beginning of a process, click here.
For comment on the special candidacies of Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg, click here.
For reasons why the twin 737 Max 8 disasters should inspire skepticism and caution with regard to potentially lethal uses of software and AI, click here.
For my message to Southwest Airlines on grounding the 737 Maxes, click here.
For an example of even the New York Times spewing propaganda, click here.
For means by which high-school teachers could help save American democracy, click here.
For a modern team of rivals that might comprise a dream Cabinet in 2021, click here.
For an analysis of the global decline of rules-based civilization, click here. For a brief note on avoiding health lobbying Armageddon, click here.
For analysis of how to save real news and America’s ability to see straight, click here.
For an update on how Zuckerberg scams advertisers, click here.
For analysis of how Facebook scams voters and society, click here.
For the consequences of Trump’s manufactured border emergency, click here.
For a brief note on Colin Kaepernick’s good work and settlement with the NFL, click here.
For an outline of universal health insurance without coercion, disruption of satisfactory private insurance, or a trace of “socialism,” click here.
For analysis of the Virginia blackface debacle, click here. For an update on how Twitter subverts politics, click here.
For analysis of women’s chances to take the presidency in 2020, click here.
For brief comment on Trump’s State of the Union Speech and Stacey Abrams’ response for the Dems, click here.
For reasons why the Huawei affair requires diplomacy, not criminal prosecution, click here. For how Speaker Pelosi has become a new sheriff in town, click here.
For how Trump’s misrule could kill your kids, click here.
For comment on MLK Day 2019 and the structural legacies of slavery, click here.
For reasons why the partial government shutdown helps Dems the longer it lasts, click here.
For a discussion of how our national openness hurts us and what we really need from China, click here.
For a brief explanation of how badly both Trump and his opposition are failing at “the art of the deal,” click here.
For a deep dive into how Apple tries to thwart Google’s capture of the web-browser market, click here.
For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here.
For reasons why natural-gas and electric cars are essential to national security, click here.
For additional reasons, click here.
For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here.
For Democrats’ core values, click here.
The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights?
For how our two parties lost their souls, click here.
For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here.
For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here.
For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here.

Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

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20 May 2019

Ten Practical Reasons to Dump Oil as an Energy Source for Ground Transportation


For an essay on why we must compete peacefully with China and what we must do to win, click here. For an essay on Elizabeth Warren’s qualifications for the presidency, click here. For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

For this principle post on oil, click here.

The Huawei Tech Block: the NYT and the Trump Administration Get it Wrong

In a front-page print-edition story (Tuesday, May 21, 2019 at A1), the New York Times today reported the Trump Administration’s executive order blocking the transfer of certain American technology to the Chinese blockbuster 5G telecomm firm Huawei. But in a missed opportunity to inform the public and China what’s really going on, the story never hits the nail on the head.

The story reviews China’s separate, censored Internet and its growing success in exporting low-priced high-tech products like smart phones to Europe and the world. The story name-calls what is going on now an “Iron Curtain” in trade, being built for the first time from both sides. But it fails to put its finger on the essential reason to build the wall from the US side.

The Trump Administration might be making the same mistake. Its pretext for the Huawei Tech Block is “national security.” It cites the fear that Huawei, in supplying hardware and software for the free world’s 5G networks, might insert hardware or software “back doors” into its systems, allowing China to use them to spy and steal information. Even if Huawei isn’t doing so now, the reasoning goes, Chinese law lets the Chinese government force it to do so on command.

These fears face the future. There is no evidence that Huawei is doing any of this now, or that the Chinese government has ordered it. The fear is rational, but it addresses only possible future danger.

In contrast, the destruction of the free world’s middle class is well under way. It’s responsible for the Trump presidency and the rise of like-minded right-wing (so-called “populist”) leaders worldwide. Among many other things, it has driven the opioid epidemic, pushing formerly normal middle class workers to kill themselves with drugs to drown the pain of job loss, a dismal future, and cultural stagnation.

What’s destroying the West’s middle class? The forced migration of jobs, factories, technology and manufacturing prowess to China. China has become a turbine-charged drain not just of brains, but of manufacturing brawn and technology. It’s draining the West dry, especially the US.

Contrary to popular belief and the Trump Administration’s combative rhetoric, this is not all China’s fault. Western capitalists have willingly—even enthusiastically—built and manned the drains. China’s low-cost labor and huge market gave them a chance to get rich quickly, to grow their corporate empires, and to penetrate vast new markets, including ones outside the US and China. The price they paid was not theirs to pay: selling out the West’s technological infrastructure in a way certain to deprive our middle class of good jobs and bright futures for as far forward as anyone can see.

No one in government or our elite wants to talk about this. Certainly no oligarch does. They all want to pretend this gigantic drain never happened. But if Ross Perot was right about the “giant sucking sound” of jobs going to Canada and Mexico, the sound of jobs and technology draining to China was the sound of 1.3 billion turbines.

Like the oligarchs, Trump wants us to believe that this was all his predecessors’ fault—the fault of weak government. Isn’t that just like blaming the Crash of 2008 entirely on government regulators, and not the bankers who actually pulled the triggers?

Regardless how much our leaders try to conceal its real justification, this technology-transfer blockage is long overdue. Neither the US nor any other Western country can sustain a high-tech infrastructure or economy if all its best ideas migrate to China in search of low labor costs and China’s big market. The drain had to stop somewhere, somehow, and the Huawei Tech Block is as good a time and place as any.

Up to now Trump has been running our trade fight with China like an ill-trained drunk throwing random roundhouse punches. Tariffs on steel, aluminum, and consumer stuff don’t even aim at the real target: the draining of our technological infrastructure. Like any random roundhouse punch, they can just as easily dislocate a shoulder or harm innocent bystanders as cause the target real and instructive harm. The Huawei Tech Block is our first well-placed uppercut in what promises to be a long and difficult fight.

It’s right because it addresses directly the primary cause of our national malaise: the steady sale of our technology and technological infrastructure to China. It’s right also because, unlike general tariffs, it doesn’t entirely destroy the intricate international web of trade and supply chains already built up, on which the world’s economy depends.

What the Huawei Tech Block does do is give China notice that the days of a one-way drain of technology and infrastructure to China are numbered. Henceforth the US must and will maintain a separate technological infrastructure in order to preserve its ability to innovate and the middle class that is the bulwark of its democracy.

A lot of hard work lies ahead. We must spread the tech block to other strategic sectors and industries. But we must do so carefully, methodically and strategically, with detailed expert judgment on which sectors we can dominate and which have already fallen to China.

This will be a long, difficult and minutely strategic economic struggle, to be managed only by leaders who know what they are doing and have expert advice and counsel every step of the way. It will involve both competition and cooperation, lest the world slide into an economic recession or depression, or (worse yet) an unthinkable real war with China.

This struggle will be hard for us as a traditionally open society. But we Americans will have to learn the ways of secrecy if we are to remain at the forefront of human innovation, let alone to preserve our middle class and our democracy.


The Principal post on oil follows:

Yes, global warming is an existential threat to our species. Yes, burning oil accelerates global warming, which, by virtue of all the “artificial” CO2 in our atmosphere now, is already baked in (pardon the pun). So yes, our youth are right to urge us to dump oil for that reason alone.

But that is only one of many practical reasons to stop using oil as a primary fuel for ground transportation as soon as humanity can practically manage to do so. Here, in brief summary, are ten other good reasons, in rough order of importance:

1. Oil is running out, probably within the lifetimes of children born this year. This table shows several estimates of the remaining life of all known global oil reserves, made back in 2013—six years ago—under varying assumptions about the accuracy of reserve figures. The estimates range from 18 to 43 years from then, or 12 to 37 years from now.

2. Oil is already an insecure resource. By far the largest known reserves of oil lie in the most geopolitically insecure and unstable regions, including the Middle East and Venezuela. (The only region arguably more unstable today is the Korean Peninsula.)

There is nothing anyone can do about this; that’s where the world’s biggest reserves are. This fact makes the lifeline of energy for much of the world (outside of Russia) insecure and unstable. Europe’s and China’s abject dependence on oil for vital energy supplies increases the risk of another world war, which could go nuclear.

3. Fracking makes the United States more independent, but its sustainability is uncertain. The common refrain that “technology will always find more oil” is a hope and a prayer, not a strategy. In the century or so since oil became a global energy mainstay, mankind has not discovered any new oil field with anything like the reserves of Saudi Arabia’s or Venezuela’s.

Our species’ hunt for more big oil strikes has failed despite astronomical investment and a century of increasingly sophisticated exploration techniques. Those techniques include seismic exploration, undersea searches, superconducting magnetometers, exquisitely sensitive gravitometers, and ground-penetrating radar. In replicating the strikes in Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, those technological wells came up dry.

The notion that advances in technology will lead to the discovery of gigantic new fields, when they have failed to do so in over a century, is nothing more than blind faith. In the past, competent governments and wise industrialists didn’t bank on blind faith. They shouldn’t do so now.

4. “Fracking” is only a temporary expedient, a stopgap. The reason is simple: it’s almost impossible to estimate the capacity of fracked reservers with anything like the accuracy of estimates for big underground pools like the Saudis’ and Venezuela’s. Fracking works—and is needed—only where the oil is distributed among shale in innumerable little deposits or “veins” of vastly varying size, shape and depth. Not only does this fact make it hard to estimate the total recoverable volume; it’s harder still to estimate the cost of recovering the oil, even from the layers that appear subject to practical recovery.

Fracking has worked well to wean the United States off the Saudi oil tit. But only blind faith suggests it’s a medium-term, let alone a long-term, solution.

5. When oil runs out—and it will—as a primary global source of energy, it will leave behind the largest and most useless collection of stranded assets in human history. All the things used to find, extract, refine and transport oil, as well as all the machines that burn it and the factories to make them, will become useless. The list includes exploration equipment (all the stuff noted in point 3), drilling equipment (on land and offshore), derricks, tanks, tankers, tank cars, pumps, pipelines, the internal combustion engines in cars, trucks, railroad locomotives, ships, and planes, and all the factories that make these things.

Some of these assets might be repurposed for natural gas, but it, too, is running out, albeit more slowly. The expense of converting the parts of this enormous infrastructure that can be converted is unknown and likely to be enormous.

Only one thing is certain. The nation(s) or region(s) left holding the bag of stranded infrastructure as oil runs out will be the ones whose economies tank first and worst.

6. Oil is vulnerable to natural disasters, sabotage and war in a way that solar and wind energy are not. Oil’s vulnerable at three centralized places: the oil fields, the refineries, and the means of distribution: pipelines, tankers, trains and truck depots.

Fracked oil is less vulnerable than conventional oil because it requires many distributed wells. But the difference in vulnerability isn’t great, and there is no difference in oil’s vulnerability while being refined, or while in transport to distant markets, for example, through long pipelines or on ships. How easy those pipes and ships would be for drones to bomb!

The recent confrontation with Iran and the recent Houti drone attacks on Saudi oil assets have focused attention on how vulnerable are the world’s chief transportation energy sources. It’s relatively easy for a minor power like Iran, or for terrorists, to maim the free world’s and China’s supplies. This point applies even more strongly to Venezuela’s huge reserves (if they ever again start producing at capacity), for they are far less hardened by major-power planning and attention than the Saudis’.

The only major global oil reserves that are presently hardened from attack by a major power and located in areas not prone to natural disasters are Russia’s. That fact should give scant comfort to China, Japan, Europe, South Korea, and the United States.

Solar and wind power have none of these disadvantages. They are intrinsically distributed resources because the sun shines and the wind blows almost everywhere. Their technology and economics also permit them to be actually distributed close to their points of use, where they are spread out and less vulnerable to disasters or attack. Every house and business could have a solar array like mine and could use it to power an electric car like mine, or a small truck.

7. Oil prices are unstable and are likely to rise and fluctuate unpredictably as oil comes closer to running out. Oil prices are vulnerable to spikes in times of uncertainty, whether due to geopolitics (as now) or extreme weather affecting oil fields, refineries or oil transport. In contrast, the costs of solar and wind power depend primarily on the cost of making and installing the solar arrays and windmills, because they use no fuel.

In general, that cost is known, predictable, stable and declining. Once it is fixed for a particular solar array or wind farm, it is invulnerable to change.

Advances in the technology of solar arrays and windmills and their manufacturing and installation are likely to drive the price of solar and wind power down further as time goes on. In contrast, the price of oil is likely to rise—in general, if not always in temporary market fluctuations—as supply gets shorter near runout. As for wind power, it may actually benefit from global warming, as more unstable weather and bigger storms produce more powerful winds.

8. For road transportation—our species’ principal use of oil—that fuel is already nearly twice as expensive per mile as alternatives. As of this writing, the average US retail cost of regular gasoline (all grades and formulations, for May 13, 2019) was $2.942 per gallon. A small car that gets 40 miles to the gallon would thus require about seven cents per mile (7.36 cents, to be exact). The average US residential retail cost of a kilowatt-hour of electricity (from all sources in February 2019) was 12.7 cents. At 3 miles per kilowatt-hour (the general parameter for electric cars, including Teslas, Leafs and Volts), the energy cost per mile is 4.23 cents.

As distinguished from the cost of driving on electricity from all current sources, the energy cost of driving on solar photovoltaic power, with presently available technology used in large, commercial-scale solar arrays, can be as low as 0.9 or even 0.6 cents per mile. (These figures come from first-principle calculations, excluding the cost of any batteries, smart grids, or other means of smoothing the natural variability of solar power. For driving, it makes sense to exclude those considerations because an electric car’s own batteries smooth those fluctuations as they charge.)

9. Solar arrays and windmills produce no pollution, except in manufacturing them. Oil produces air pollution in its process of refining, transport and use, and air, ground and water pollution in its process of extraction. Even with undesirable means of generating electricity like coal and natural gas, running cars and trucks on electricity from countryside power stations can pull air pollution out of crowded cities, reduce asthma attacks, and improve public health.

10. Solar and wind power are much safer for the workers who provide it, and for the environment, than oil. Solar and wind power involve nothing like oil spills, earthquakes, blowouts, pollution of drinking water with drilling compounds, inadvertent methane releases, explosions, or burnoffs. There will never be a Deepwater Horizon disaster in installing solar arrays or windmills, even offshore, because there’s no volatile fossil fuel or gas to explode.

As for maintenance, solar arrays and windmills require nothing like the risk to workers of maintaining producing oil wells, refining crude oil or transporting crude or gasoline. Six years of maintaining my own home solar array required only replacing a couple of dozen cable ties and using a broom to clear snow off the solar panels after a few storms.

* * *


Oil is a doomed resource. It’s doomed in so many ways, besides the fact that it, like coal and natural gas, is changing our planet’s climate radically from the one in which we evolved.

It’s running out, most likely in the lifetimes of children born today. It will certainly run out that soon if we don’t cut down on burning it so profligately. When it runs out, the cities and nations that are ready will leap ahead of those that are not, economically, militarily and in every other way. Those that are not ready will be less secure, poorer and unhappier. Some nations and cities may suffer sustained hardship and suffering, as their transportation systems and even their agriculture grind to a halt.

In the meantime, societies higher up the learning curve will have cheaper, more secure energy for their transportation, with far less vulnerability to attack and disruption, less air, water and ground pollution, and lower energy prices that don’t jump or rise. If we are to maintain our citizens’ trust and their standard of living, we must be among those leading societies.

Footnote: At present, we have no viable substitutes for oil in air and sea transportation. We might use wind for sea transportation, with much more sophisticated technology than our ancestors used. There is also a chance of using hydrogen from water electrolyzed with renewable power for both sea and air transportation.

But those approaches require additional research and development. We have the technology right now to convert our cars and small trucks to run on electricity from renewable sources. All we require is the will to convert and some investment.

Among the many reasons to convert is preserving remaining reserves of oil for sea and air transportation and for use as feedstocks for chemicals and medicines. It took millions of years for Nature to give us those convenient chemical starting points. Synthesizing them from scratch would be expensive in dollars, time and energy. We shouldn’t burn them up to do what the wind and sun can do for us almost for free.

Links to Popular Recent Posts

For discussion why we must cooperate with China and how we can compete successfully with China, click here.
For reasons why Trump’s haphazard trade war will not win the competition with China, click here.
For a deeper discussion of how badly we Americans have failed to plan our future, click here.
For an essay on Elizabeth Warren’s qualifications for the presidency, click here.
For comment on how not doing our jobs has brought us Americans low, click here.
To see how modern politics has come to resemble the Game of Thrones, click here.
For a discussion of the waste of energy and fossil fuels caused by unneeded long-range batteries in electric cars, click here.
For a discussion why Democrats should embrace the long campaign season and make no premature moves, click here.
For a discussion how Trump and Brexit have put the tree world into free fall, click here.
For a review of how our own American acts help create our president’s claimed “invasion” of Central American migrants, click here.
For a review of basic facts that must inform any type of universal health insurance, click here.
For a discussion of how the West’s fall and China’s rise affect the chances of our species’ survival, click here.
For a discussion of what the Mueller Report is and how its release could affect American politics, click here.
For a note on the Mueller Report as the beginning of a process, click here.
For comment on the special candidacies of Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg, click here.
For reasons why the twin 737 Max 8 disasters should inspire skepticism and caution with regard to potentially lethal uses of software and AI, click here.
For my message to Southwest Airlines on grounding the 737 Maxes, click here.
For an example of even the New York Times spewing propaganda, click here.
For means by which high-school teachers could help save American democracy, click here.
For a modern team of rivals that might comprise a dream Cabinet in 2021, click here.
For an analysis of the global decline of rules-based civilization, click here. For a brief note on avoiding health lobbying Armageddon, click here.
For analysis of how to save real news and America’s ability to see straight, click here.
For an update on how Zuckerberg scams advertisers, click here.
For analysis of how Facebook scams voters and society, click here.
For the consequences of Trump’s manufactured border emergency, click here.
For a brief note on Colin Kaepernick’s good work and settlement with the NFL, click here.
For an outline of universal health insurance without coercion, disruption of satisfactory private insurance, or a trace of “socialism,” click here.
For analysis of the Virginia blackface debacle, click here. For an update on how Twitter subverts politics, click here.
For analysis of women’s chances to take the presidency in 2020, click here.
For brief comment on Trump’s State of the Union Speech and Stacey Abrams’ response for the Dems, click here.
For reasons why the Huawei affair requires diplomacy, not criminal prosecution, click here. For how Speaker Pelosi has become a new sheriff in town, click here.
For how Trump’s misrule could kill your kids, click here.
For comment on MLK Day 2019 and the structural legacies of slavery, click here.
For reasons why the partial government shutdown helps Dems the longer it lasts, click here.
For a discussion of how our national openness hurts us and what we really need from China, click here.
For a brief explanation of how badly both Trump and his opposition are failing at “the art of the deal,” click here.
For a deep dive into how Apple tries to thwart Google’s capture of the web-browser market, click here.
For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here.
For reasons why natural-gas and electric cars are essential to national security, click here.
For additional reasons, click here.
For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here.
For Democrats’ core values, click here.
The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights?
For how our two parties lost their souls, click here.
For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here.
For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here.
For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here.

Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

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