A COUP BY ANY OTHER NAME WOULD SMELL AS BAD!

When is a coup not a coup? Apparently it is when the President won't say the word. I know it's a complicated business. Israel is worried about its security if Egypt were to descend further into chaos, Our own military contractors are worried about future sales to Egypt should we declare it a coup and have to stop military aid. The Saudi Royal  Family and various other of our allied Kings, Sheiks and Dictators in the region are probably a little nervous too. Then there is that whole democracy thing, you remember, our supposed support of fairly elected governments but maybe that's only when they turn out the way we want them to. No Islamic fundamentalist need participate! Can you imagine the message this is sending to the Muslim  world? 

I think we should at least be honest about the situation and admit that the Egyptian Army has executed a "Coup D'etat", deposed Egypt's first democratically elected government which we were more than a little nervous about and we are standing by and letting them do it. Our President won't even say the word.

BP: DON'T GET MAD, DON'T GET EVEN, GET SMART!

This cartoon was inspired by one of those warm and fuzzy BP commercials that talks about how much British Petroleum is doing to cleanup of the Gulf of Mexico and take care of all the folks along the Gulf Coast. At the same time I was reading about the considerable efforts BP is making in court to shirk it's responsibility in the matter. It just made me mad! Hence the cartoon you see above but that got me thinking. 

There is an old political saying that goes: "Don't Get Mad, Get Even!" As dumb as getting mad and doing something rash is, plotting revenge is probably worse. So what are we to do when something like a BP or Walmart commercial or price gouging at the gas pump makes us really mad? You know you are being lied to or cheated or both but what to do? Most of us just get cynical, learn to live with the situation and develop high blood pressure but there is another path you can take. Get Smart! Use your brain and figure out how you can change the situation. For instance, I won't shop at Walmart because of their labor practices and by doing some research I found that CostCo and WinCo have just as low of prices and they treat their employees fairly. I'm as upset as anyone about the manipulation of gas prices so I've decided that our next car is going to be either a plug in hybrid or an electric car. I'm doing my research now and I'm finding that prices are finally coming down into my price range. I know that there aren't easy solutions for every injustice but there are probably more options out there than you are aware of. 

As Progressives, we need to find these new solutions not just nationally but on an individual and community level, that's going to take some serious creative thought! So, like I say if you don't like the way things are going "Don't Get Mad, Don't Get Even, Get Smart!" 

RECYCLING AND "THE END OF TIMES!"

It's the old "Garbage In, Garbage Out" principle we've used for years with computer data but as it turns out it's kind of a natural law too. If you put millions of tons of non biodegradable trash, poisonous chemicals, heavy metals and greenhouse gasses into the environment a day you're going to get unbreathable air and undrinkable water back. If you take this pattern of behavior out it's logical conclusion you get an uninhabitable planet, game over, the end of time for mankind! 

Interestingly enough, one of the biggest and easiest things we can do to reverse this self-destructive trend is to recycle, repurpose  and repair our stuff instead of just throwing it away. We did it during World War II we can do it again. Some cities, like San Francisco California and Portland Oregon, are already trying to get to the point of recycling/composting 100% of their trash. Recycling needs to become an integral part of our society, something we teach our children, practice in our homes and support in our communities. People look at all our overwhelming environmental problems and wonder what they can do to change things. Well, recycling is an important first step that everyone can take to returning our environment to good health!

THE GREAT GUN DEBATE: THE NRA AND MY PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH GUNS.

I have conflicting feelings about guns. I was raised in a family of hunters. In the 1950s my Father was a logger and we were financially struggling. The deer that my Father and my Uncles killed during hunting season each year were an important part of our diet. The family would often spend a weekend or two at my Uncle's little tree farm just outside of Grants Pass Oregon where the whole hunting experience became kind of a family gathering. They were good times in my life but this warm fuzzy memory covered a darker reality that I would not be told about until I was fourteen. 

This dark side of my family came out when my parents finally explained why my uncle had only one arm. We had been told for years that he had lost it in a hunting accident but the reality was far more disturbing. As it turns out, back in 1930 my Grand Father, who suffered from mental illness and alcoholism, had gotten hold of a shotgun and tried to kill the entire family. He killed my Grand Mother and my Uncle fought with him but was nearly killed. He ended up losing his right arm and struggling for many years with bad health from infections caused by the buckshot and fragments of his coat that were embedded in his side. As my Grand Father reloaded my Father, who was five years old, escaped from the room. Even as an adult he could still remember the sound of buckshot hitting the wall of their screened in porch when he ran into the yard. My Grand Father then killed himself. It was quite a shock to learn all this. We were one of those family tragedies that you see on the TV news and we hadn't even known it but my journey with guns wasn't over.

Around this same time other events conspired to change my feelings about guns and blood sports generally. First was the death of my Sixth Grade teacher in a hunting accident. A member of his own hunting party shot him. Then a few blocks from our house a young boy accidentally shot and killed his brother while playing with loaded gun. Another boy in my math class committed suicide with a hand gun. All of these events and more were weighing on my mind but it was a relatively small thing that revealed to me how much my feelings about guns were changing.  I shot a robin one day with pellet gun. I knocked it right out of a tree and as I picked it up to inspect my prize the poor little thing pumped it's life's blood out into my hand. That day I stopped wanting to kill things. It's impact on my life was profound, perhaps because the bird was so small  and helpless, I'm not sure why exactly.

The warm fuzzy memories of my childhood had met the cold hard reality of how very dangerous guns are and I found that my interest in guns and blood sports was over. So I can understand the appeal of hunting and even collecting guns. I have a cousin who collects antique guns but I feel guns should be much more carefully regulated in the interest of public safety, like cars. Our current laws have so many loopholes in them that we have developed a very large prosperous black market for illegal gun traffickers right here in the United States and these guns are flowing through our gun shops and gun shows. Why do you think the NRA fights so hard to protect the sale of assault rifles with 30 round clips and a dysfunctional background check system? It's not for hunters or home protection or even to protect our civil liberties, it's to make sure that U.S. gun manufactures can continue to sell into this black market. How do you think the Mexican drug gangs get most of their arms? Estimates are as high as 90 percent of their weapons come from the U.S. I suspect they aren't the only ones buying their guns on our black market. We need to stop this!  

EARTH DAY: HOW FAR CAN A POLAR BEAR SWIM?

On this Earth Day, I can't help but wonder how many species we will have to lose before the Earth can no longer support mankind? Right now there are a host of species on the edge, from polar bears to honey bees but in thirty, forty, fifty, or perhaps a hundred years it may well be mankind that is on the endangered species list. If we continue to abuse nature now we will pay a very high price later.

UPDATE: Checkout what Louise Leakey thinks about the possibility of human extinction:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/louise-leakey/human-extinction_b_3543036.html

THE GHOST OF AYN RAND STRIKES BACK!

I think our nation is being haunted by a malevolent spirit. Not a spirit in the religious sense but more metaphysical in nature. We are talking here about the world of ideas. There are many ghosts in that world, ideas left over from dead people. There is a dark and a light side to the world of ideas sort of like in Star Wars. Some are good and enrich our lives, think Jesus, while others have staying power like Shakespeare, still others lurk in libraries barely noticed waiting for their opportunity to reinfect the minds of men. It is one of this last group that I fear has reemerged to vex mankind and our nation specifically. 

Ayn Rand was the person that spawned this powerful new ghost who walks among us. It lives in the pages of "Atlas Shrugged," her most important work. It has infected the minds of many powerful people including Alan Greenspan the former Fed Chairman, Congressman Paul Ryan Chairman of the powerful House Committee on the Budget, and Senator Rand Paul a potential Republican Presidential Candidate just to mention a few. Objectivism is the name that Ayn Rand wrapped around her ideas but you can see parts of her thinking spreading to the libertarian right, mainstream conservatism, and even the Tea Party to some degree. If unchecked it will soon form the intellectual foundation for the Republican Party and much of our economic elite on Wall Street if it hasn't already.

When you look closely at the core values of her philosophy the number one thing that jumps out at you is that she believes that selfishness is right and altruism is evil. So greed really is good and compassion is more than misguided in her book. At the top of the food chain in Rand's world are the economic elites which are in a life or death struggle with corrupt governmental elites for dominance. Everyday working people, the middle class, working class and poor are pretty much parasites wanting benefits that they have not earned. It reminds me a lot of the 47% Speech given by Mitt Romney in the 2012 Presidential Campaign and the fact that he was using her basic arguments to induce the  rich to give him their money tells me that the wealthy elites of our nation have already bought into her ideas whether they realize it or not. This type of thinking leads directly the situation we are now in, where the public is crying out for the government to invest in infrastructure, education and job creation but a Republican controlled Congress is forcing austerity measures, threatening to default on our national debt and trying to hack away at our social safety net programs.

I believe one of the reasons for the successful resurgence of Rand's ideas is that they are invisible to the public at large. Like a ghost they are moving among us undetected. We must change that! Many who are being baited in by parts of Objectivism do not understand the whole package they are buying into. For instance, many in the Tea Party love Rand's anti government rants about the virtues of unrestrained capitalism yet what many of these fine Christian people don't realize is that Rand hated Christianity specifically and religion in general. So they are being sucked into following a philosophy which is anti religious and anti Christian. It's hard to imagine that they would continue following her ideas if they understood the whole picture. This is just a small part of this malevolent philosophy and all of it needs to be dug up and exposed.

We on the left of the political spectrum can no longer afford to ignore Rand and her followers. If we want to have a society which is here to help all of it's citizens not just the elites and is not ripped apart by class warfare then Ayn Rand's Objectivist ideas must be challenged and debated openly so all can see where they will take us.

XL PIPELINE, IF YOU BUILD IT, IT WILL LEAK!

It's just "Murphy's Law," you build a massive pipeline for Canadian tar sands oil that must be diluted with toxic corrosive chemicals and pumped across the country under high pressure and at high temperatures, and things are going to go wrong. The part of the Keystone pipeline that has already been built has had 14 spills and two shutdowns. The problem is that tar sands oil is almost impossible to cleanup. Why are we taking this risk? So some very rich multinational corporations can sell the world's most polluting oil to the world's most polluting country, China. The other reason is jobs (3500 construction jobs for two years and 35 permanent pipeline jobs) unless you count all the temporary cleanup laborers that are going to be needed.  These are desperate times and I know that states and communities really need the jobs but at what cost? How much of the environment will you sell in exchange for these temporary jobs?

Here's Robert Redford's take on the XL Pipeline:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-redford/senate-keystone-pipeline_b_2931109.html

UPDATE: Here's what you can look forward to from the XL pipeline.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-radford/the-arkansas-oil-spill-ph_b_2998988.html?ref=topbar

UPDATE: Here's a video you've got to see on the XL pipeline.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-mckibben/the-video-president-obama_b_3360973.html?utm_hp_ref=green

RAND PAUL AND THE DRONE WARS!

I'm not a big fan of Senator Rand Paul, his father the Texas Congressman Ron Paul, or most of their ideas but I do believe Senator Paul did our country a great service by using his filibuster, of the Brennan nomination, to bring the issues surrounding the use of drones to the fore. Drone and cyber attacks are clearly the wave of the future in warfare and they are already being used by a number of nations in a semi clandestine fashion. The United States is leading the way in both of these categories with the Stuxnet Worm attack on the Iranian Nuclear program  and the prolific use of drones in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Mali and who knows where else. This brings several problems immediately to mind:

SECRECY AND DUE PROCESS - We've already used drones to kill three Americans, that we know of. U.S.-born Anwar al-Awlaki, accused of plotting the so-called underwear bombing of a plane in 2009 and two others who were apparently accidents. Watch Christiane Amanpour's video on the subject:

http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/03/12/americans-killed-by-american-drones/ 

The trouble is that the whole process is so secret that we have no oversight of it or understanding of how these decisions are made. Perhaps the most important question of all is, "when mistakes are made and innocent lives are lost, who is held accountable?" I think more transparency, accountability and a stronger legal framework needs to be built into this program.

AGGRESSIVE DRONE/CYBER WAR AND VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW - So when we are talking legal framework another important consideration is International Law. We started both our cyber and drone programs basically as intelligence gathering operations but both have now been weaponized and used in and on foreign countries, think Pakistan and Iran.  When you are violating a nation's airspace using drones to hunt some of their citizens down and assassinate them, then your actions could logically be seen as an act of war. The same could be said of cyber attacks that destroy large amounts of critical data or do real damage like destroying the Iranian centrifuges or shutting down electrical grids. As more nations follow our example by developing and aggressively deploying these type of weapons it is likely that real war will result. 

COLLATERAL DAMAGE AND BLOW BACK - If real war resulting from a nation violating another's sovereignty with cyber or drone weapons isn't enough, there are other types of collateral damage. Right now whole sections of Pakistan are being terrorized and traumatized by our drones. Contrary to the administration's claims drone attacks do kill innocent noncombatants. For each innocent mother, father or child killed how many new terrorists will be be born? When you project out ten or twenty years the blow back from our use of drones could be substantial.

NON STATE ACTORS - Drone technology is not rocket science. In it's most basic form, think radio controlled model airplanes or helicopters. If memory serves, the prototype for one our most successful drones was built by an engineer in his garage using predominately off the shelf parts. The take away, is that non state actors, like terrorists, could soon be using forms of drone technology. The same is obviously true of cyber war. As drones and robots become a bigger part of modern society new opportunities for terrorists will  present themselves. Think of the potential of Google's self driving cars, imagine self driving car bombs.

Don't get me wrong drone and cyber weapons are the future. The drones weapons of today are going to look like Model Ts in just a few years. We desperately need to start discussing the appropriate use of these weapons within our own country and throughout the world before something dreadful happens. This is why I believe that Rand Paul  and Ron Wyden, the only Democrat to join the filibuster, have done us a great service. They have begun an important dialogue on this most secret subject but it is only the start.

Update: I've just read the most interesting article on this subject. Have a look.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/when-the-whole-world-has-drones-20130321?page=1?mrefid=skybox

Update: Attorney General Eric Holder has admitted, in a letter to Congress, that the U.S. has killed four Americans with drone strikes.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57585776/attorney-general-holder-drones-killed-4-americans-since-2009/

JOIN THE GREEN REVOLUTION!

When you think of the "Green Revolution" I'll bet that something like this cartoon comes to mind, sort of barbarians at the gate. Or perhaps you picture groups of old hippies coming out of the Cascadian wilderness to protest pipelines and stand in front of coal trains. A "Green Rebellion" in a nonviolent, obstructionist, pain in the rear kind of way. Even if you are sympathetic to our cause you most likely think it's pretty much a waste of time and if you aren't sympathetic then it just looks like another left wing special interest group trying to kill jobs and slow progress. These views are quite understandable considering who owns the media in this country but allow me to share with you an alternative vision of the "Green Revolution."

THE GREAT DISRUPTION - The engine that is driving the "Green Revolution" isn't a group of old hippies, or Greenpeace, or the Sierra Club, it is Mother Nature in the form of climate change. Oh sure, there are old Baby Boomers aplenty and literally  hundreds of organizations that are fighting to protect the environment but they aren't toppling governments, or causing hundreds of billions of dollars in storm and drought damage, or melting the polar ice caps, climate change is.  It's hard to believe that climate change may have caused the "Arab Spring." It didn't, by its self but it was a powerful contributing factor in the destabilizing of the Middle East. Check this article out:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/03/climate-change-secret-inflamer-arab-spring/4896/
As global warming continues to alter our climate we are going to experience economic and political disruption on a massive scale for the foreseeable future. The "Green Revolution" isn't causing this, it is in reaction to it. In my view, it is an effort to try come to terms with reality of global warming and the climate change it is causing.

THE GREEN REBELLION - When you turn on your TV or log on to your favorite news site this is the part of the "Green Revolution" you will see first, "the Rebellion," and for most folks this is all they will see. It is the war being fought to slow the damage we are doing to the planet and hasten our conversion to a green economy. The battles are fought locally but the struggle is global and it is being led by organizations like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace just to mention two. It may seem, to the casual observer, that the "Green Rebellion" is anti growth but it is not an effort to stop progress, it is an attempt to redirect it into a green and more sustainable path. For instance, the idea is to stop the development of more fossil fuels like tar sands and lobby for more investment in renewable energy like wind and solar. This "Green Rebellion" is being fought in every corner of the globe and at times it seems impossible to stop the power of unrestrained capitalism and it's unquenchable need for cheap resources but as climate change progresses the strength of the "Rebellion" will grow.

BACK TO THE GREEN FUTURE - This is the part of the "Green Revolution" that I find most fascinating. It is the efforts of many everyday people to adjust to the difficult realities we are facing by taking old practices and technologies and updating them for use in modern times. For instance, the Farmer's Market, which completely disappeared from America after World War II, has been brought back to life in communities across our country. We can expect to see these markets expand as our globalized food distribution network gradually breaks down under the pressures of climate change and imported food stuffs become more expensive.  Many people are also becoming farmers, urban farmers, with sizable garden plots, fruit trees, honey bees, chickens, goats and community gardens. Wind mills and high speed trains would be high tech examples of old technology being updated to serve the "Green Revolution." I think you will see more of this kind of innovation as time passes.

THE AGE OF GREEN INNOVATION - We already can see that we are living an age of great creativity and innovation but the results of our inventions and ideas aren't always green or sustainable. This will continue to be true as climate change progresses but I believe, the power of the climate disruptions we will experience eventually will give us focus and more and more effort/dollars will be poured into green research. It's already starting to happen in the military which is becoming one of our leaders in green technology. Another reason for calling this the "Age of Green Innovation" is the law of unintended consequences which means that technologies, that weren't invented to be green can end up inadvertently helping to move the revolution forward. Telecommuting is taking million of cars off the roads worldwide but the invention of the personal computer and the internet wasn't intended to reduce air pollution. Hydraulic Fracking for natural gas is not very environmentally friendly yet the cheap gas it produces is putting the coal industry (the most polluting fossil fuel source) in the United States out of business. How's that for unintended consequences? I think that "Green Innovation is perhaps the most invisible part of the "Green Revolution" but the part that may be progressing the quickest.

GREEN ECONOMICS - This maybe the last part of the "Green Revolution" to emerge but when it does it will be the turning point in our battle with climate change. At the heart of our problem is that raw unrestrained capitalism does not pay for the damage it does to the environment, just take a look at China. To turn the corner in our struggle with climate change we must support new ways of doing business like using "Feed in Tariffs" to democratize the electrical grid, a "Carbon Tax" or a "Cap and Trade" system to help slow down  air pollution, "Impact Investing," "Socially Responsible Investing" and most of all we must nurture the emergence of a new sustainable capitalist model of economics. This is going to be hard! The rich, who control our present day carbon based economy are not going to give up what has worked so well for them in the past but climate change isn't going away either. The outcome of this struggle will determine our future. I believe that this change has already begun as corporations are finding that going green is sound economically and that consumers a very interested in buying green products from ecologically responsible companies.

THE LEFT BEHIND - This is the sad part of the "Green Revolution," those that it leaves behind. There are billions of people on the planet who have little choice in how they will deal with climate change, it will just be about survival. There is no telling how things are all going to work out but there is the potential for massive loss of life and many countries becoming essentially ungovernable. There are other communities and individuals that can do a lot to fight global warming and climate change, of those some will join the "Green Revolution" while others will oppose it. Just like in the Industrial Revolution those who embrace the "Green Revolution" will be more likely to prosper in our new  climate change driven world. Those who can't or won't adjust to the new realities that we are facing will be left behind trying to compete with increasingly inefficient technologies and out dated ideas. 

JOIN US - So join us! It is the defining struggle of our age and it's just beginning. It is the 800 pound guerrilla in the room that we just want to close our eyes and have go away, "The Inconvenient Truth" Al Gore keeps talking about. Here's the bottom line, climate change is the force behind the "Green Revolution" and it will not stop until we create a green and sustainable economy, fundamentally altering the way we do business and live our lives. You can join us in our struggle to create a greener more livable and sustainable world or you can watch it pass you by. There are many ways you can help but the choice is yours!

Greenpeace

Sierra Club

350.org

GLOBAL WARMING: LAKE EFFECTS!

This cartoon is about an effect of global warming that never occurred to me, the record low levels of water in  Lakes Huron and Michigan. The other Great Lakes and the Mississippi River are also suffering from extremely low levels of water. It's already started to curtail barge traffic on the Mississippi and shipping on the Great Lakes. 

Prepare yourselves, I think we will see many things, in the coming years because of climate change, that we would never have expected in our life times. Global Climate Change isn't just an inconvenient theory, it's here, now and we will suffer the consequences. The only question that remains is "Will we learn from the experience and change our behavior, our economy and our relationship with nature?" On that question the jury is still out.

Take a look at this post on CNN about the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, it's an eye opener.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/13/us/great-lakes-low-water/

So what do you think? Will we learn and if so what and when?

PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH?

Aristotle said that "We make war that we may live in peace." This concept is as familiar to modern men as it was to the ancients and I believe that it has been driving much of our foreign policy and military spending since World War II. It's sort of the "Peace Through Strength Doctrine" and it just seems to make sense but the questions I'd like to ask are "Does it work and if not, Why doesn't it work?" Are powerful nations at peace more of the time than weaker less militaristic ones? Is our "Peace Through Strength Doctrine" really just another form of winning through intimidation, call it "Peace Through Intimidation?"

To explore the first question I think we should begin by examining Israel, the Mighty Mouse of modern nation states. Don't let it's small size fool you, man for man it may have the most capable army and air force in the world. It also has nuclear weapons and an intelligence service that is second to none. It has, on more than one occasion, defeated the armies of all of it's neighbors at the same time. No country in their right mind would pick a fight with Israel, yet for all it's power it has no peace. You might, rightly respond that Israel's situation and history are much too complicated to be reduced to such a simplistic discussion and that would be my point exactly. How nations live with their neighbors is complicated and can change over time. Simply building a big military may in one situation help a nation to establish a stable peaceful relationship with it's neighboring countries but in another situation or at another time the same military build up could provoke war. 

Having brought the basic concept of "Peace Through Strength" into question I'd like to propose a four reasons why I think it does not work:

Provocation - Nations like people have personalities. Some are secure, some are not. If your country is close to a nation that is worried or perhaps a little paranoid about it's survival then a military build up on your part may provoke attack. Think of how the Israelis have moved so aggressively to destroy the nuclear programs of both Iraq and Syria. They are now threatening to do the same thing to Iran. 

Temptation - The leaders of a nation are human and can succumb to the temptation to use military power when a wiser course of action is available.  Lets say that a difficult confrontation occurs between two nations. When one nation knows that it is so strong that it can easily win a military conflict with the other then there is a big temptation for the stronger nation to through it's weight around, and there is no finer example of this than the United States of America. I'm 61 years old and I can't remember all of the coups, policing actions, invasions, interventions and air strikes that we've carried out worldwide over the years, not to mention our full blown wars. It's my personal belief that our second Iraq War fits into this category. It's kind of a case of excessive strength leading to a form of bullying.

Human Resistance - War is won in the will. Since our "Peace through Strength Doctrine" often boils down to a game of intimidation then it is wise to remember that attempts to intimidate people or nations can backfire.  The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was clearly an attempt to cower the United States that didn't work out so well. We've all seen the kid who stands up to the schoolyard bully even though he knows he's going to take a beating and there are leaders who are so determined that they can not be be intimidated, think of Hitler or Bin Laden.

Financial Exhaustion - Waging war and preparing for war are expensive, very expensive! It is possible to create military forces of such a large size and to use them with such regularity that you bankrupt your own country. Perhaps the best example of this, in recent history, is the former Soviet Union. It built one of the world's  most formidable armies during World War II and then entered into an arms race with the United States, called the "Cold War", that lasted for over forty years. In 1989 it began to collapse, by 1991 it was all over and much of the reason for the fall of the Soviet Union was due to trying to maintain a military that their economy couldn't support. Since 9/11/2001 I think we've been on a similar path.

Teddy Roosevelt said "Walk softly but carry a big stick." Well our stick is the size of a giant redwood tree and we've exhausted ourselves trying to use it to beat Afghanistan and Iraq into ant hills. We were provoked by Bin Laden into starting the war in Afghanistan and tempted by our own strength into starting the war in Iraq. In the last twelve years we've suffered two recessions, one of which was nearly a depression and the world economy is still in trouble, yet our Defense Budget is by far and away the world's largest, dwarfing China's. Since World War II we've seen our concept of "Peace Through Strength" degenerate into a doctrine of "Winning Through Intimidation"  and now we're approaching the point of financial exhaustion. Isn't it time to reexamine this old "Cold War Era" idea that we must be so strong that we can police every conflict and intimidate the entire world? 

UPDATE: Here's the top ten list of big military spenders:
http://247wallst.com/2013/06/27/countries-spending-the-most-on-the-military/

SEQUESTRATION: THE CARPET BOMBING OF OUR ECONOMY!

Do you remember the term "Carpet Bombing"? It comes from World War Two and the Vietnam War when the planes would fly over the battlefield and just lay down a blanket of bombs. There was no precise targeting, they destroyed pretty much everything. Well we are about to experience the economic equivalent of carpet bombing, it's called "Sequestration." I don't know where they came up with that name but it boils down to  1.2 trillion dollars in across the board cuts to all agencies of the Federal Government except for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, food stamps and federal retirement programs. 

Now, if you are of the Tea Party persuasion then this probably sounds pretty sensible but here's the problem, it will cost us about 2.14 million jobs at a time when we have record high unemployment and an economy that is just starting to get it's head above water. Sequestration is also like "carpet bombing" in that it does not make targeted cuts. Every program gets an equal percent cut, good, bad or indifferent, they all will get whacked.

If we are going to fix our long term debt problems we need to do three things and we need to do them in a certain order and a precise way.

Step 1  "Restore Robust Growth" and bring down unemployment drastically. This can be done by spending money on updating and rebuilding our infrastructure, expanding educational opportunities and converting as much of our power grid as we can to renewable energy. If restoring growth is not done first, then we will be taking the path of Greece, Spain and England who all made massive cuts to government spending and promptly slid into recession or in the case of Greece and Spain, depression. Oh, and by the way had their debt problems increased at the same time.

Step 2 "Reform the Programs That Are Really Causing Our Debt Problems." Of all the programs that are at the heart of our debt problems only Defense is included in the Sequestration cuts. I'm no fan of the Defense budget but if we are going to fix the problem we need to work on all programs that are  causing it.

Step 3  "Cuts Must Be Precise And Well Thought Out." All these cuts and reforms effect peoples lives, the stability of our economy and the security of our country we should really think about what we're doing not just use automatic, indiscriminate cuts to slash and burn our way to a balanced budget.

So that brings me back to how the Sequestration cuts are like "Carpet Bombing?" Simply put, they are both automatic, indiscriminate, frighteningly destructive and create a lot of collateral damage. Did I hear someone yell "INCOMING"?

So what do you think? Will Congress act before we carpet bomb our economy back into recession or could that be precisely what the Tea Party Republicans want to do?

THE WINTER OF THE KILLER TORNADOES!

The idea for this cartoon actually came to me in the Winter of 2012 when the Midwest was hit by a large number of powerful winter tornadoes. Like everyone else I was stunned by the power and timing of the out breaks. As amazing as that was, it has been just one manifestation of the wild and crazy weather we've been having in the last decade or so. 

You've seen and felt the impact, the floods, the droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes and all manner of abnormal weather. Yet, no one wants to call it by it's real name "Global Warming" or "Climate Change." Is it too scary for our country to face or as Al Gore said just too "inconvenient?" Instead many of us are desperately trying to find someone who can prove the scientists wrong. In fact, many of our computerized climate change models do appear to have been wrong, they may have been too conservative. The data coming in now seems to indicate that climate change maybe occurring faster than scientist originally thought.

There is no comforting scenario that I can give you on this one but it is worth remembering, as we collectively stick our heads in the sand, that there is no place you can hide from the effects of climate change.

So what do you think? Is climate change a hoax or just an "engineering problem" as the CEO of Exxon seems to think? Is it too late to stop climate change?

BEIJING ON THE GREAT SALT LAKE!

Did you see the pictures of smog in Salt Lake City last week on the NBC Nightly News? They had one of those winter temperature inversions that traps all the air pollution that the city creates in the Salt Lake valley and the smog got really bad. It looked Beijing bad! Because I lived in the greater Salt Lake area for almost ten years back in the 70s and 80s my first reaction was to question, "how they could let things get so out of hand?" But the more I thought about it, I remembered that even back in the late 70s Salt Lake City had this same problem, just not as bad and I didn't do or say a word about it. I just drove my cars and went to work and ignored it like everyone else. I didn't write a letter to the editor or try to organize or donate money to organizations trying to cleanup the environment. Why was I so complacent?

That is real question at the heart of this problem, "why do we take the health of our environment for granted?" I know many people in Salt Lake and they are very involved in their community and care deeply about their families. They volunteer, donate to charities and get involved in their local government. These are good people, so why the blind spot on the environment? It is a blind spot that almost all of us seem to share but what is causing it? 

Is it the old quasi-religious belief that God gave the planet and all nature to man to have dominion over so we can do whatever we want with it? Or could it be an Industrial Revolution era faith in unrestrained capitalism? Sort of an economic Darwinist point of view where the markets will sort out what species survive, which ones don't and technology will pull us through the bad spots. Perhaps, it is just a form of following the path of least resistance until the situation gets so bad that we can't ignore it anymore. From the look of the pictures on TV Salt Lake City maybe at that point.

What do you think will shake us out of our complacency on global warming?

THE BOEING 787 DREAMLINER, MADE IN AMERICA OR JUST ASSEMBLED HERE?

Have you ever noticed that when a new product comes out, whether it's a new type of car or a new computer operating system, there always seems to be a bunch of bugs in it for a year or so. This seems to hold especially true for very complex products, like aircraft. In fact, you could probably make a generalization that "the more complex the design or product the greater the likelihood of problems with it." So when the Boeing 787 Dreamliners began to have problems, even before they got off the assembly line, I wasn't entirely surprised to hear that as much as 30% of the production of parts for the plane had been outsourced to companies offshore, although the final assembly was kept in the US. Here Boeing is building a radical new design, with new composite materials and cutting edge technologies and it scatters it's parts production across the globe, in many time zones , companies and countries with a variety of languages. Common sense would seem to dictate that such a highly experimental and complex project should have been  kept closer to home, with more reliable suppliers that could have been more easily supervised. 

The folks at Boeing are very bright and have been building jetliners for years, so what gives? Is it the corporate herd mentality that seemed to prompt Boeing to move it's headquarters from Seattle to Chicago so they could rub elbows with the big boys? Is that same lemming like thinking driving Boeing's management to push off shoring because everyone else is? Is this some sort of strategy to break into the Chinese aircraft market to try to secure future growth prospects there? Or, is it just about money, cutting overhead, cheaper labor and the like? Unions are tough to deal with and skilled American workers demand good wages and benefits unlike those in many other countries. 

So, I wonder, how is this new offshore strategy working out? Boeing, now  has a new jetliner that's three years behind schedule and all 50 planes it had in service have been grounded by the FAA. I'm sure that in time the engineers at Boeing will get the bugs worked out of this plane but I'll bet that things are pretty intense back in Chicago right now. In the mean time we are all getting a very public demonstration of the difference between "Made in America" and "Assembled in America." 

Here's an interesting article I ran across on this subject:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/18/is-outsourcing-to-blame-for-boeings-787-woes/

Is this just about working out the bugs in a complex design or is it really about corporate greed? What do you think? 

GOOD-BYE 112th CONGRESS AND GOOD RIDDANCE!

As I watched the 113th Congress being sworn in on TV I couldn't help but think of how bad the 112th congress has been. The Republican hatred for all things Obama, combined with the Tea Party's simplistic economic theories have just about brought the Federal Government to a halt but that's really what they want, isn't it? You've heard their cute little lines about how "government isn't the solution, it's the problem" or that they want to "shrink government down to a size where they could drown it in a bathtub." It's the sort of political philosophy  that claims government doesn't work and then goes about crippling it to make sure it can't function. Trouble is that the 112th Congress had a large number of members who seemed to really believe this sort of stuff and unfortunately for the people of the United States the 113th Congress does too. I think the next couple of years will be a painful repeat of the last two, like a bad B movie sequel, let's call it Congzilla II or Congzilla 113. Their behavior is so bad as to almost be funny but they have been doing real harm to our economic recovery and they seem to be planning to do even more damage.  I sincerely hope I'm wrong on this for all our sake's.

BEWARE OF BANKERS BEARING GIFTS!

"What's in your wallet?" is the slogan of one of the big banks but the proper question should be who's in your wallet and how much can you trust them? No, I'm not talking about your ex-wife or your teenage kids I'm referring to the organizations who are lending you money, the financial services industry, in short the banks. You wouldn't buy a new plasma flat screen TV on credit if you had to borrow the money from some guy named Vinny down at your local neighborhood bar. Yet we don't think twice about whipping out the credit cards and taking out instant loans with banks who's business model has become the equivalent of legalized loan sharking. How many ex-home owners were ripped off by their banks using tricks like "Robo Signing" of fraudulent documents during their foreclosure process? How many hundreds of millions of dollars were lost by investors and pension funds who were sold AAA grade mortgage backed derivatives by their investment banks who knew the derivatives were worthless and then bet against them using credit default swaps? I know, banks, credit cards and mortgages are all facts of modern life but I guess what I'm saying is when dealing with bankers one should be very cautious. No matter how warm and fuzzy their commercials are they are not loaning you money to help you out, or build a lasting business relationship, or help the community, or help your business grow or any of the other lines of BS they spout. It's all about the money, the fees, the commissions, the interest payments, your well being never figures into their calculations. So Borrower Beware!