Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

The case for vaccinating everybody.

Leave a comment

Here we go again. Cases are rising, as are hospitalizations and deaths. This COVID-19 catastrophe – the Trump Plague, as I like to call it – is not going away anytime soon.

Why the hell is this happening? I think we all know the answer to that. From the beginning, Trump and his allies played down the seriousness of this illness. The Republican Party and the right more generally have made a political football out of vaccination and wearing PPE. As a result, only a little more than half of Americans are fully vaccinated.

The miracle that wasn’t

Cast your mind back to fourteen months ago. Everything shut down, people were panic-buying toilet paper, etc. – you remember the drill. If someone had told you then that there would be not one, not two, but three highly effective vaccines available within a year, would you have believed it? Perhaps. But what if they had told you that many millions of Americans would refuse to take it? I, myself, would have thought that was nuts.

Well, here we are. We literally have the means to end this pandemic, and we’re choosing not to do it. And mind you, this criticism goes beyond the reluctance of my fellow Americans to take the jab. There’s a whole world out there begging for these shots. It is well within our means to manufacture and distribute enough shots to save millions of lives in Asia, Africa, South America, etc. It is also well within the scope of what can reasonably be defined as our “national interest” to do so. But we’re not. What. The. Fuck.

The hard problem

Our COVID vaccine standoff reminds me of the politics around climate change. The right keeps working to force the issue into a cultural context. In their view, your position on the salient question becomes a marker for the type of American you are. So if you encourage people to get the COVID shot – literally, to save the nation from this plague – you’re a “woke” liberal forcing your views on others and squelching their freedom of speech/expression/choice.

The same dynamic is at work with climate change. It doesn’t matter how much evidence there may be of already-occurring global warming. Right-wingers despise the idea of doing anything about it because that’s what the other side wants. Even if the policy would help people on the right, it’s more important to them to “own the libs” than to flourish or even survive.

One way out

I tend to be an optimist. My feeling, generally, is that losing hope is basically surrendering to hopelessness. The only thing we have in our favor is that there are more of us than there are of them. Our only chance is to act boldly, take the initiative, and move forward, even if we have to drag them along with us, kicking and screaming.

With respect to COVID, that means requiring vaccines (or a legitimate exemption) to gain access to a wide range of services (short of essentials like nutrition, housing, etc.). It also means making the necessary investments to quickly implement a robust global vaccination program, so that we can not only save millions of lives but head off these variants.

If people are truly tired of masks and social distancing, that’s what we have to do – get at least 85% fully vaccinated. You can have the thing you want, but you need to do this first. Pretty simple, right? DO IT!

Cuba revisited

Just a brief call back to last week’s column. After posting that piece and its Strange Sound podcast companion episode, I commented on some vaguely related Tweet by Code Pink and incurred the dubious wrath of what I call the Mas Canosa chorus. A crowd of right-wingers from the Cuban exile community basically called me a hater of freedom, etc., because I dared criticize some of their number for yelling “Fuck You” at Code Pink.

I typically don’t engage in pissing wars on Twitter, but I looked into this a bit and it seems that the Cuban exile community has invested in some Twitter bots. Were my digital accusers non-human? Hard to say, though their grade-school level virtue signalling could well have been the product of automation. “If you side with the brutal Cuban dictatorship over the people of Cuba, yearning only for the right to speak freely, then you cannot claim to stand against the powerful,” I was told by someone who supports strangling the Cuban people to death with sanctions. Sure sounds like a bot to me.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Pirates (or landlords) of the Caribbean .

Leave a comment

Did I mention that the Biden Administration’s foreign policy is abysmal? I thought so. It’s always worth repeating, and the last couple of weeks have borne it out entirely.

On July 12, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken made a statement to the press regarding recent demonstrations in Cuba. Among some other boilerplate nonsense about our supposed commitment to human rights, Blinken told the press that the protesters “criticized Cuba’s authoritarian regime for failing to meet people’s most basic needs, including food and medicine,” chiding Cuba’s leaders that “peaceful protesters are not criminals”.

Okay, a couple of things. First, Cuba has been under sanction by the United States my entire life – sixty years – with the most punishing restrictions having been added during the Trump years. I’m not sure how well most Americans understand what these sanctions mean for a poor country like Cuba. They can’t do business with us, the regional hegemon, and other countries are threatened with retaliation if they trade with Cuba.

What this means, of course, is that food, medicine, and other goods are scarce. Now, I’m not claiming that the Cuban government is a model of efficiency, but I would say that any government that can maintain a standard of living exceeding that of its regional neighbors while under siege is doing something right.

Comparing like with like

I hate to keep bringing up Morning Joe, but when the protests began in Havana, the very next morning Joe Scarborough was sniping at the Cubans’ socialist “workers paradise”. “How’s that going?” snarked the former Florida congress member. Meanwhile in Colombia, massive protests against this capitalist banker’s paradise propped up by billions in U.S. aid were in their seventieth (and now eighty-fifth) day. That story didn’t make it onto the Morning Joe couch.

I know hypocrisy is kind of an impotent charge in this day and age, but honestly, the record of capitalist failure in Latin America is broad and deep. There is no lack of examples, no paucity of dumpster fires. I believe the Morning Joe crew commented on the “chaos” in Haiti the same day they cat-called Cuba, but of course when capitalist experiments fail abysmally, it’s always the fault of the populace.

Where’s the change?

What angers me most about this policy is that it doesn’t even reach the low standard of the Obama administration. Biden is literally leaving Trump’s extremist Cuba sanctions in place. He was in the government that decided at the eleventh hour to lessen tensions with Havana, and yet now he’s content with observing the new/old status quo.

Let’s face it – we have no standing to criticize Cuba on human rights, none at all. We support plenty of governments that abuse human rights on a far more horrific scale, including Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt … the list goes on and freaking on. Did I expect better from them? No, of course not. But that’s no reason not to be pissed off.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

That’s one small step for money.

Leave a comment

The increasingly crusty-looking billionaire owner of Virgin Galactic Richard Branson took a sub-orbital flight aboard a rocket plane last week. News outlets like MSNBC spent nearly an entire day’s worth of air time covering this monumental achievement and the presser/victory rally that followed. So, just to be clear – a self-obsessed billionaire essentially did what Yuri Gagarin did sixty years ago, and somehow it’s news.

Of course, there’s more to this than space flight. On one level, it’s a childish pissing match between three billionaires – Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk – all of whom want to CONQUER SPACE. More than that even, it’s a marketing effort, helped along by drooling press coverage by everyone from CNBC to the New York Times.

Ticket to nowhere

The Times article made note of the fact that the cost of a ticket on one of Branson’s rocket-planes rose from $200K to $250K since they first went on sale, perhaps dampened somewhat by a crash in 2014. “For the vast majority of Americans,” the Times correspondent observes, “the cost of such a trip is out of reach.” Can’t get anything past these people.

Not that the vast majority of Americans will be missing anything. After all, Virgin is offering a trip to space, not a trip from one place to another. It’s basically a carnival ride for the uber wealthy. And believe me, those people have no shortage of carnival rides as it is.

A modest proposal

Now, people might justly accuse me of being hostile, even abusive with respect to the uber rich. Fair enough. Mea culpa! But at the risk of providing even more fuel for this accusation, I have a modest suggestion to make. Now that Branson has banked all this free advertising from MSNBC, CNBC, and various print media outlets, there are ways that his little space enterprise might actually do humanity some good.

If this media carnival around the flight of the VSS Unity has its desired effect, billionaires might buy tickets like hotcakes. Hopefully, that will prompt Branson and his various competitors to start offering excursions to the Moon, Mars, and other reachable planets. With Earth currently on fire as a product of their collective greed, our Billionaires may be tempted to spend longer and longer periods of time on other planets. If that happens, all we need to do is bar re-entry. That would take care of our billionaire problem, full stop.

Or, we could do the more practical thing and just tax the living piss out of them. That solution doesn’t make for great television, but it has the virtue of eliminating unaccountable power in a very practical and do-able way. All it takes is the will to do it.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

When labor remembers how to say no

Leave a comment

What keeps a worker going to the job, day after day, even if s/he hates it like fire? The need for money, mostly. During the pandemic, however, that need was outweighed by something more basic – namely, the desire to stay alive.

When going to work began to entail risking your life for a broad swath of workers, those who had a choice in the matter chose to remain at home. The government made some effort to facilitate this, at least in some segments of the economy. There were those deemed essential workers who were compelled to risk their lives. This included many undocumented immigrants who picked our food and cared for our elderly while we hid from COVID.

Now that Americans are being strongly encouraged to return to their desks, their machines, their stations, etc., many are reluctant to do so. No doubt some folks have decided that this was an opportune time to drop out of the workforce entirely. Others are not convinced it’s safe. But I suspect many are holding back from returning to their crappy jobs because, frankly, they’ve had it with that shit, and who can blame them?

King Tut-Tut

Enter Donny Deutsch, some second-generation ad man who shows up on MSNBC every five minutes to share some rhetorical pearls of dubious provenance. Deutsch squeezed out this gem on Twitter the other day, then expanded on it when he appeared on Morning Joe:

Has the American work ethic softened? Maybe a little too much coddling of employees going on… just saying

So apparently this trust fund baby feels like capital isn’t disciplining labor sufficiently in the wake of the COVID shutdown. He feels like employers are being too flexible and are letting their workers work from home, etc. That’s undermining the “work ethic”. (I know he doesn’t own his dad’s business anymore, but if he did, I could tell you exactly why HIS employees wouldn’t be returning to the office. )

Green Solutions

It likely wouldn’t occur to someone like Deutsch that there is an obvious capitalist solution to the problem he’s describing. It’s called pay people more. It’s called treat them better.

Most of the jobs he’s talking about are ones that can easily be done remotely. If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that all this driving back and forth to office complexes is a tremendous waste of energy and resources. Even with many people choosing to stay out for a variety of reasons, I imagine a large percentage of those who’ve returned to the office work for an employer who is doing what Deutsch so admires – demanding that they sit at their workstation and look busy.

Times like these, I truly think that capitalism only survives by virtue of worker complacency, hopelessness, and cynicism. When some outside factor, like COVID, shakes things up, for a hot moment they can see the stupidity of this owner-wage slave relationship and start demanding more. There’s your silver lining.

luv u.

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Wearing out our welcome in iraq

Leave a comment

Biden dropped bombs on Iraq and Syria again this week, this time using F-15s and F-16s. This is the president’s second large action against what the administration describes as Iranian-backed groups. They claim this action is in self-defense, invoking the U.N. Charter (presumably article 51). Nancy Pelosi piped up with her own cry of support for the attack, stating that “protecting the military heroes who defend our freedoms is a sacred priority.”

Now, what the fuck freedoms are these heroes defending? And how is it self-defense to hit back against local forces that are resisting our presence in their own country? A country, mind you, that didn’t ask us to invade in the first place and that has explicitly asked us to leave. Like all empires, we have an expansive sense of our own sovereignty. We feel put upon when the locals rise against us.

What’s different is lesser than what’s the same

I know, we were all happy when Donald Trump had the nuclear launch codes taken away from him. And his assassination of Soleimani was an obvious and reckless provocation coming from an administration that put Iran on notice in its first week and tore up the JCPOA. That said, they still stride around the Middle East like they own the place, and that should be just as unacceptable to us as when Trump did it.

Even worse, the Biden foreign policy team is leaving bad policies in place from the previous regime. They are essentially in agreement with much of it, and because they are generally more competent than the last crew, they in some ways may pose an even greater threat to the cause of peace.

And again, what the hell are we doing in Iraq, anyway? Our troops should leave now. In fact, they should never have been there in the first place.

Death of a Salesman

Of course, there was a reason why they went there in the first place. The Bush administration sold the war in Iraq to the American people – or at least to enough of them for the tanks to start rolling. An important part of that sales effort was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who died this week.

I’ve never made a habit of dancing on people’s graves, and I’m not about to start now. Suffice to say that this man did a lot of damage in his life. He helped to push two disastrous wars that resulted in the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of people. Simply put, he was a horrible man in many respects.

Of course, he had a lot of help in this sales job. The mainstream press was a tremendous help. At the height of Rumsfeld and Bush’s popularity, before the Iraq war went predictably down the drain, the press was even painting Rumsfeld as some kind of warped sex symbol. I remember having a hard time with that as I waited in supermarket checkout lines, looking at People magazine or Us or whoever was blowing Rumsfeld that week. Jesus, how nauseating can you get?

Anyway, one of the main architects is now gone. Time to stop this stupid ass war, once and for all.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Voting the bums in for the last time.

Leave a comment

Okay, so the “For the People” act did not overcome the filibuster this past week. That was no surprise, of course. Neither was the fact that Republican senators made no effort to specify exactly why they thought the provisions of the act would negatively affect Republicans. They speak in billboards, these people – short, snappy phrases like “power grab” and “stop the steal,” with no key as to what the hell they’re talking about.

But let’s be clear: in statehouses across the country, GOP legislatures and governors are putting the mechanisms in place to commandeer the next election, regardless of who gets the most votes. The “For the People” act would have rolled much of those back. Without some restraint from the Federal level, it’s going to be very difficult for poorer and disenfranchised people to access the ballot in coming elections.

Nothing new under the gun

Republicans have been working on this stuff for a long time. They’ve been pushing voter i.d. laws, rolling back early voting, and resisting policies like automatic voter registration for decades. During the Bush II administration, they even fired a bunch of U.S. Attorneys for not aggressively prosecuting voter fraud cases (which, frankly, were practically non-existent even then). The reason is simple: the more people vote, the more they tend to lose because their stated policies are so deeply unpopular.

Also, they have long tended to appeal to their constituents’ baser instincts – namely, fear of immigrants, fear and hatred of dark people more generally, fear of crime, etc. Democrats have resorted to this as well, but less so over time as white people have become a proportionately smaller part of the electorate. (Many of them do accommodate the views of their Republican colleagues, of course.)

GOP election strategy: one and done

There is, however, a difference in kind, not degree, about the current “conservative” movement. Now they truly seem determined not only to steal elections via legal and extralegal means, but to set themselves up so that they permanently remain in power. Trump is not what I would call a “thought leader” on the right, but he does have utter contempt for rules, restrictions, and institutions, and I think he deployed this to supercharge the autocratic tendencies in the Republican party, which now seems enamored with his erratic, dictatorial behavior.

Readers of this blog will know that I had my doubts last year over whether Trump would leave office if he lost the election. Based on what we know he and his cohorts attempted to do, I think that sentiment was justified. In all honesty, if Trump or some Trump clone runs for president in 2024, I think there’s a better than good chance that, with the support of these GOP legislators and governors, that candidate will be named the winner. And once they pull that off, staying permanently becomes that much easier.

Keith was kinda right

At the beginning of Trump’s term, Keith Olbermann put out a series of videos attacking him as a usurper, a criminal, and an autocrat. While I think the Russia, Russia, Russia stuff was way overblown, he was kind of right about Trump’s congeniality towards the idea of ruling like a freaking King Rat. I, for one, will not underestimate the danger of autocracy again, and I strongly suggest that you take the same precaution.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.

Leave a comment

This week the airwaves were filled with more breathless speculation than we’ve seen since the last major award show. Biden meeting with Vladimir Putin! The newly repopulated set of Morning Joe was all a-twitter with neo-Kremlinology. They even invited John Bolton on board to share his valuable perspective (though his only use might be as a reverse barometer).

The talking heads, I kid you not, were hoisting charts that compared the wait times of various heads of state who met with American presidents over the past fifteen years. If Biden comes a half hour late, what does that mean? Is Tony Blinken frowning too much? Jesus Christ, I wish I were joking. You would think, with all the air time, they would talk about the IMF treaty, or Open Skies …. something substantive. Not a chance.

The only mildly interesting piece of this whole sordid drama was the competition for the moral high ground underway between Biden and Putin, each playing to his own domestic audience.

Sympathy for the Devil

In the lead-up to the summit, Putin was interviewed by an NBC reporter, who asked him about Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident (and ultra nationalist, btw). Now, there are plenty of counter examples Putin could have invoked in response if he wanted to demonstrate American hypocrisy. He instead chose the January 6 insurrectionists as examples of people being arrested for expressing political views.

That’s just plain adorable. Putin sees a gang of white supremacists trying to overthrow elective government as dissidents and freedom fighters, even though they had the backing of the President of the United States and more than a few members of the institution they were attacking that day. Hardly outsiders, and treated with relative kid gloves by the police. Of course, they wanted Putin’s favored candidate to remain in power – not because Putin loves Trump, but because Trump is a burning disaster.

Suggestion Box

If Vlad wanted to perform some genuine what-about-ism, he could have chosen much better subjects. Now, I’m sure he has no sympathy for Reality Winner – who was recently released from prison – because she exposed some intelligence on Russia’s influence campaign in the 2016 Presidential election. But he might have gone with Edward Snowden, who after all, is relatively close at hand (in exile in Russia).

Probably a better pick would have been Julian Assange, who is now serving hard time in London and under indictment by the U.S. Justice Department and whose health is rapidly deteriorating. Assange’s “crime” was the release of the Iraq war documents, diplomatic cables, and collateral murder video, for which they’ve been hounding him non-stop for over a decade, through administrations of both parties (see my older posts on this). They are slowly killing Assange, in essence. That’s roughly equivalent to the Navalny accusation.

Of course, Putin could also point to, I don’t know, millions of other incarcerated Americans. Or perhaps the text of our 13th Amendment. The man just has no imagination!

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Meeting the enemy (and it is still us).

Leave a comment

President Biden headed off to Europe this week to meet with the leaders of rich, white-dominated countries on that side of the pond. His meeting with Putin is drawing as much interest as you might expect. Some of the recent hacking attacks and ransomware incidents have been blamed on operatives connected at least tangentially with Russia. And, of course, a goodly number of people within the broader Democratic coalition see Russia as responsible for having delivered Trump into the White House in 2016. They see all this, and more, as pieces of the same puzzle, and they want Biden to read Putin the riot act.

To the extent that the ransomware stuff can be attributed to the Kremlin, it can be seen as part of the same effort that drives their illicit involvement in our political campaigns. They want to sow confusion and internal conflict in the world’s sole remaining superpower as a means of keeping us from confronting them – that only makes sense from their point of view.

But the idea that they are having an out-sized effect on our politics is vastly overblown. We Americans are fond of conspiracy theories, especially ones that involve nefarious foreign actors. Yes, we have serious problems, but they are self-inflicted, not imposed from without.

Clinton v. Clinton

I’ve said it on this blog many times before, and I’ll say it again – I never liked Putin, even back in the early 2000s when that was kind of a minority view. But the impact of their agitation in support of the Trump campaign in 2016 was marginal at best. The biggest reason for the failure of the Clinton campaign was – wait for it! – Hillary Clinton. The biggest non-Hillary factor in her loss was the FBI probe and James Comey, but even that issue was rooted in her own flat-footedness.

Let’s face it – she was a terrible candidate from the beginning, and in spite of that, was almost elected. Regarding Trump’s win, she has no one to blame but herself.

Putin’s Favorite POTUS

Did Putin want Trump to be president? Probably, as likely any Russian leader would. It was obvious that Trump was going to make a mess out of everything from the very beginning. That comports with Russia’s long-term strategic goals viz the U.S. And yes, Trump was nice to Putin as part of his constant self-dealing (he wanted that Trump Tower Moscow), but U.S. policy towards Russia was basically the same as in recent administrations.

As Americans, we have no idea of what it’s like to be a nation in the world that has to deal with the United States. The U.S. is the most powerful military, economic, and political player on Earth, and we don’t exactly walk around on tiptoe. Basically every other nation is dwarfed by our power and influence, so they reach for whatever they can to throw us off.

In the case of Russia, the most cost-effective methods of doing that include exacerbating existing divisions between political factions and, perhaps, making commodity prices – gas and beef – go up. That’s espionage 101. We do similar things in other countries, only from a position of power.

What will Biden say to Putin? God only knows. It would be nice if he did some serious work toward de-escalation of differences, maybe reinstating the IMF treaty, etc., but only time will tell. When you have most of the power, you are inevitably tempted to wield it in increasingly arbitrary ways. That would be hard for Biden to overcome, and he shows no sign of doing so.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Doing the wrong thing. Again.

Leave a comment

We live in a violent society. I think that’s as close to a truism as anything can be. Mass shootings are a fact of life in America, and they happen with a sickening regularity. Gun violence takes a very heavy toll, and violent crime has spiked since the pandemic – specifically, homicides over the course of 2020. It was, of course, a year of exceptions, though many pundits and prognosticators have claimed that the increase is largely the result of police going into a kind of defensive crouch in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent uprising.

I’ve no doubt that police departments have pulled back. Some made a point of doing so after previous high-profile deaths of people of color in police custody. On the podcast Why Is This Happening?, Patrick Sharkey talks about the various factors behind this rise in violent crime. Less aggressive policing is one, but he makes the point that a lot of community-based services that contribute significantly to reducing crime were shut down during the pandemic.

This, in some ways, reflects the divide between right and left perspectives on how best to address crime. Not surprisingly to anyone who follows this blog, I come down on the left side of this question, and I do so with what I consider to be really good reasons.

Fighting Crime With Crime

The idea that, as a society, we should reduce crime by over-policing disadvantaged communities is cynical beyond belief. Yes, you can marginally depress crime by mass arresting people, throwing them in jail for long terms, harassing people of color, etc., but in so doing you do irreparable violence to entire communities. That in itself is criminal far beyond the level of anything you might hope to prevent.

Other approaches work better, frankly – mutual aid, community-based counseling and mentorship services, nutrition programs, housing support, direct aid to families and individuals, etc. They also build communities, not destroy them.

Dirty Harry Syndrome

The advocates for hyper-aggressive policing work to create the impression that cases like the murder of George Floyd are necessary by-products of the service police provide. Sure, goes the argument, occasionally someone gets killed who probably shouldn’t have died, but that’s the price you pay for having safe streets. Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few skulls … I mean, eggs, right?

There’s a visceral appeal to this argument – a kind of cathartic, give-them-what-they-deserve attitude that makes a lot of white people feel right with the world. There’s a reason why movies like Dirty Harry were big hits – it’s a very attractive narrative for people who don’t do a lot of thinking.

The Political Economy of Policing

Of course, we know that political careers are made on hyper-aggressive anti-crime politics. That’s true of everyone from your local DA to the President of the United States. It’s a lot easier to get taxpayers to pay for MRAPs and sophisticated weapons for the cops than it is to get them to fund after-school programs and free breakfast for kids of color. And even though aggressive policing is a bad solution to the problem of crime, it’s an easier sell for politicians than the much more effective and less destructive approach that involves supportive community services.

Let’s face it, there’s a lot of money in expanding the police/prison state, just like there was a lot of money in slavery. That’s why defund causes so much consternation – it hits them where it hurts. Very insightful on the part of BLM to work that out. We need to carry that knowledge with us as we seek real solutions to this dysfunctional system.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

Making the bombs more drop-able.

Leave a comment

I don’t know if you noticed this in an otherwise busy week of news, but at some point renowned Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released an a previously redacted classified U.S. government report from the late 1950s.

The document included discussion of the possibility of using nuclear weapons on mainland China at a moment of heightened conflict between China and Taiwan, which China regards (not incoherently) as a breakaway province. This was over the island chain called Quemoy and Matsu in the Straits of Taiwan – disputed real estate that came up in one of John Kennedy’s televised debates with Richard Nixon. (The report, prepared by the Rand Corporation, was among a cache of secret documents Ellsberg had taken along with the Pentagon Papers.)

I would like to be able to say that this was the only instance of the United States threatening to use nuclear weapons in conflicts following the Second World War. Sadly, I cannot. We considered using them in Korea and in Vietnam, then fortunately thought better of it. (I seem to remember Nixon exhorting Kissinger to “think big” when he suggested it.) We also came close to triggering a nuclear exchange by accident, through recklessness, more than once. (See my posts on nuclear weapons for some discussion of this.)

A New Generation of Threat

Another thing I would like to think is that we have gained some wisdom with regard to these weapons over the years. I have yet to see evidence of this. The fact is, we are in the process of investing many, many billions of dollars into “upgrading” our nuclear arsenal. This was a process brought along considerably by President Obama, and of course signed on to by Trump and now Biden.

Part of the rationale for this upgrade is safety. But what the hell is safe about an H-bomb? The thing is just inherently dangerous, is it not?

Good Things Do Not Come in Small Packages

What’s particularly frightening about the next generation of nuclear bombs is the advent of low-yield “bunker buster” weapons. These bombs are extremely destabilizing, as they blur the line between nuclear and conventional weapons. They make it simpler for commanders and political leaders to transition to a nuclear conflict in the midst of some overseas dust-up that they get themselves (and the rest of us) into.

Of course, nuclear components have been used in our conventional munitions for decades. The depleted uranium shell casings employed by our military nominally as a means of penetrating armor have been the source of radioactive hot spots in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. These weapons are effectively dirty bombs we deploy pretty liberally.

We’ve Got Shit To Do

One thing we can do to stop this craziness is to tell our congressional representatives to support legislation restricting spending on the ongoing nuclear “upgrade” and expansion. One piece of legislation in the works is Senator Markey’s SANE Act, which was reintroduced just this past week. This bill would cut $73 billion from the planned $1.7 trillion spending on nukes over the next thirty years. Of course, we need to do more than that, but bills like this one represent a good start on starving the beast. Worth a call to your Rep and your Senators. And your President.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.