Commentary on the rule of law; Global warming update: Propaganda for power & profit

The Financial Times editorial board writes:

America’s gathering legal storm

Donald Trump promises the mother of all stress tests for the US rule of law

The former attorney-general Bill Barr alleged that in his first term Trump suggested that rivals be “executed”. Barr said that he did not worry about Trump’s impulses because he knew they would be thwarted. 

Such complacency is no longer merited. The Supreme Court last July significantly boosted Trump’s powers by granting near sweeping immunity to the “official acts” of the US president. In theory this could include assassinating political adversaries. In practice, it will almost certainly include legal witch hunts against Trump’s detractors in politics, the media and civil society. Some of them, such as Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman, and Mark Milley, the former chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, he has repeatedly singled out.

The FT editorial goes on to point out DJT's low quality cabinet appointees and his outright contempt for international law as evidence of pressure on the rule of law generally. His public track record of criminality, treason, felony convictions, outrageous courtroom shenanigans, and open contempt for the rule of law all speak loud and clear. The intent of DJT and MAGA elites to subvert the rule of law cannot be much clearer. How our democracy responds, or fails to respond, is the open question. 

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The fossil fuel industry has been running a large propaganda campaign for decades to promote pollution for power and profit. Industry tactics are well-known in propaganda campaigns, e.g., lying, delaying, slandering opposition and inconvenient science and scientists, distracting society and confusing the situation. Global warming is denied, distorted or downplayed.

CleanTechnica writes about a gigantic lie about solar energy the polluters and sympathetic news sources like the Wall Street Journal are spreading:

Fossil Fuel Interests Ramp Up Their “Solar Makes 

Electricity More Expensive” Falsehood

In the run-up to Trump 2.0, the fossil fuel industry is trotting out its biggest guns to attack renewable energy and electric cars, which should come as no surprise. They paid to get him elected and now they want to make sure they get the maximum return on their investment. This morning there were two emails in my “solar power” news alert that caught my eye. One was a headline from the Wall Street Journal that screamed, “Green Electricity Costs a Bundle. The data make clear — The notion that solar and wind power save money is an environmentalist lie.” The second was from a Koch Industries mouthpiece in Canada called the Fraser Institute that proclaimed, “Solar and wind power make electricity more expensive — that’s a fact.”

When faced with such outrageous and downright scary news from the likes of the Wall Street Journal and the Fraser Institute .... I reached out to Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and the director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford University.

Mark responded with an information-packed email but also with a link to a study published December 22, 2024, by the journal Renewable Energy authored by himself and his colleagues that addresses precisely the questions raised by the WSJ and the Fraser Institute. Here’s what he had to say in response to my SOS for information.

“Table 1 of the paper shows that 10 of the 11 U.S. states with higher fractions of their demand powered by renewables are among the 20 states with the lowest U.S. electricity prices. Six of the states are among the 10 states with the lowest prices. For example, from October 1, 2023 until September 30, 2024, South Dakota (ranked #1 in terms of its penetration of WWS [wind, water (hydropower), solar] renewables relative to demand) provided 110% of the electricity it consumed from just wind (77.5%), hydro (30.1%), and solar (2.2%) yet had the 9th-lowest electricity price in the U.S. in March, 2024. South Dakota also produced another 16% of its electricity from fossil gas and 11.2% from coal so produced a total of 137% of the electricity it consumed but exported the additional 37%. Similarly, Montana (ranked #2) and Iowa (#3) supplied 86.5% and 79.4% of their demand with WWS but had the 8th and 12th-lowest prices.

“California (#12) also had high prices (ranked #49). However, it is easy to show California’s high prices have nothing to do with increasing renewables. For example, the same paper in Figure 8 shows that the spot (instantaneous) price of electricity in California dropped by over 50% during the period of interest covered by the paper (March 7 to June 30) 2024 versus 2023 despite a big growth in solar, wind, and batteries in 2024 versus 2023. A lower spot price means it is easier to match demand with supply. Spot prices dropped over 50% despite far more WWS on the grid in 2024 indicating renewables reduce the risk of blackout and make it easier to match demand.

“So why are California’s electricity prices so high? They are high for several reasons that have nothing to do with renewables. These include high fossil gas prices (3rd highest in U.S.), utilities passing on to customers the cost of wildfires due to transmission-line sparks, the cost of undergrounding transmission lines to reduce such fires, the costs of the San Bruno and Aliso Canyon fossil gas disasters, the cost of retrofitting gas pipes following San Bruno, the cost of upgrading aging transmission and distribution lines, and the cost of keeping the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant open. In sum, available data indicate that increasing the share of WWS reduces electricity price throughout the US. When high prices occur, they are not due to WWS.”

The error that both the Wall Street Journal and the Fraser Institute make in their articles is an example of the sort of trick apologists for the fossil fuel industry pull all the time. Because the price of electricity in Texas spiked after a winter storm, it must be because of those damned solar and wind farms (in fact, solar came through for ERCOT big time when the thermal generating stations failed). If the cost of electricity in Germany has gone up, it must be because of solar, not because Germany decided to take its nuclear power plants off line with little prior planning. (emphases added)

The war against democracy, the rule of law and the public interest that DJT and MAGA are currently engaged in is heavily funded, broad, deep, sophisticated and powerful. Attacks are coming simultaneously from hundreds of sources, including supportive, deceived and/or subverted mainstream media like the WSJ, the US supreme court, the Republican Party, many big corporations, including ones that own mainstream media conglomerates, and the Christian nationalist theocracy movement. Low information members of society are significantly deceived and mostly defenseless against the onslaught. They have been conned and betrayed. 

Mandatory service or no?

 

Should the United States Enact Mandatory National Service?

Should any country? 

Mandatory national service (also called compulsory service) is a requirement, generally issued by the federal government, that people serve in the military or complete other works of service, most often as young people, but age requirements vary. Modern propositions for compulsory service in the United States include young Americans serving in the military or working on civilian projects such as teaching in low-income areas, helping care for the elderly, or maintaining infrastructure, among other ideas.

https://www.britannica.com/procon/mandatory-national-service-debate

More snippets from the link:

More recently, between 2003 and 2013, former U.S. Representative Charles Rangel (D-NY) made five unsuccessful attempts to pass the Universal National Service Act, which would have required all people in the United States between ages 18 and 42 to either serve in the military or perform civilian service specifically related to national defense.

Many countries require national military service of some or all citizens, including Brazil, Greece, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Requirements for each country vary; in Israel, for example, military service is mandatory for women, too.

Globally, a few countries have nonmilitary national service. Nigeria (as example) has a social mandatory service requirement for college graduates: the National Youth Service Corps

U.S. public opinion on mandatory national service is split but changing, moving in favor of mandatory service. In a 2013 poll, 59% of younger voters ages 18 to 39 strongly opposed such a system. In a 2017 Gallop Poll, 57% of 18- to 29-year-olds opposed mandatory service.  But in 2023 survey, 75% of young people aged 18–24—those most affected by the proposal—supported an 18-month mandatory national service program (if they received compensation for their service, free room and board during their service, and could choose from either civilian or military service options)

More to consider:

As Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine reminds European countries about the importance of manpower, many are once again weighing the promise and perils of compulsory military service.

While most European militaries suspended mandatory military service after the end of the Cold War, some retained it. And several countries, such as Latvia, Lithuania, and Sweden, have in recent years reinstated conscription in response to a changing security environment. In the last several months, Western European politicians, including in Germany and the United Kingdom, have publicly pondered the benefits of returning to mandatory military service. 

In Denmark, Latvia, and Lithuania, the selection of recruits is lottery-driven. Lithuania reintroduced conscription in 2015 after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine and illegal purported annexation of Crimea the year before. Lithuania requires somewhere around 3,500 to 4,000 male citizens between ages eighteen and twenty-three to enlist for either six or nine months of military service each year. After their service, the conscripted soldiers then become reserves for the Lithuanian Armed Forces. According to the Lithuanian Armed Forces, since conscription was reinstated, the majority of eligible males has enrolled voluntarily in military service. 

https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/07/europes-conscription-challenge-lessons-from-nordic-and-baltic-states?lang=en

I suspect the reaction in the U.S (and likely Canada) would be HELL NO! That aside, should some form of mandatory service be instituted? Would YOU be in favor of such a program? 

Kleptocracy in the law; Stupidity in regulations

Last August I posted about the radical right authoritarian USSC decision in a case called Loper Bright. In July, I posted about the likely horrific impacts Loper Bright. In that lawsuit, Republicans on the USSC gutted a long-standing (1984) USSC legal decision called the Chevron defense. The Cheveron defense required courts to give deference to federal agency regulations that implement the usually incoherent laws that congress writes and passes. Last August, the US Air Force was relying on the Loper Bright decision to blow off environmental regulations the EPA was trying to impose. 

Today, the NYT writes (not paywalled) about a major repercussion from the incredibly damaging, hyper-radical Loper Bright decision: 

Net Neutrality Rules Struck Down by Appeals Court

After nearly two decades of fighting, the battle over regulations that treat broadband providers as utilities came to an end on Thursday

A federal appeals court struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s landmark net neutrality rules on Thursday, ending a nearly two-decade effort to regulate broadband internet providers as utilities.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, said the F.C.C. lacked the authority to reinstate rules that prevented broadband providers from slowing or blocking access to internet content. In its opinion, a three-judge panel pointed to a Supreme Court decision in June, known as Loper Bright, that overturned a 1984 legal precedent that gave deference to government agencies on regulations.

“Applying Loper Bright means we can end the F.C.C.’s vacillations,” the court ruled.

The court’s decision put an end to the Biden administration’s hallmark tech policy, which had drawn impassioned support from consumer groups and tech giants like Google and fierce protests from telecommunications giants like Comcast and AT&T.

The F.C.C. had voted in April to restore net neutrality regulations, which expand government oversight of broadband providers and aim to protect consumer access to the internet.  

The regulations were first put in place nearly a decade ago under the Obama administration and were aimed at preventing internet service providers like Verizon or Comcast from blocking or degrading the delivery of services from competitors like Netflix and YouTube.

As is usual in law and politics these days, wealthy special interests and their money talk and the public interest walks. This is a great example of that truth. The radicalized Republican USSC, DJT and MAGA have been on the side of killing the Chevron defense. That is an effective way to get rid of dozens or hundreds of all kinds of regulations that protect the environment, consumers and workers. In this case, ISPs like Verizon can now jack up prices and profits without regulatory hindrance. Consumers will pay more. Verizon and other corporate winners here might feel compelled provide a “gratuity” (formerly called a bribe) to the appeals court and the USSC for a fine job well done.

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This NYT article describes some of the basis for hostility to federal regulations. The problem is that some regulations are worse than merely stupid. Some cause harm. By smearing all regulations as the basically the same, MAGA has finally managed to kill off essentially the entire federal regulatory infrastructure by killing the Chevron defense. The main targets of MAGA are regulations that protect the environment, consumers and workers. The NYT writes about a stupid regulation and an equally stupid fix:

The Most Reliable Scapegoat in Politics? Red Tape.

Less regulation is an easy rhetorical pitch. Better regulation is harder to stump for

Just before the November election, Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat from Washington’s Third Congressional District, posted a video explaining why she was running to keep her seat. Unlike many other Democrats, she didn’t talk about Donald Trump or the state of democracy. She talked about fruit. She dressed casually and spoke directly, like one parent sharing a grievance with another at the playground. It all started, she said, when a constituent who worked at a day-care facility complained to her that she was not “legally allowed to peel bananas or oranges for the kids.” Why not? “She said peeling fruit is considered food prep.” (Here Gluesenkamp Perez tightened her eyebrows, as in: Can you believe it?) Even worse, while peeling a healthful banana was against the rules, opening a bag of potato chips was apparently fine.

The congresswoman looked into it. At first, she said, the regulators she talked to gave her the runaround, insisting that this wasn’t what the rules said. [hence public hostility toward regulators and regulations] But eventually she concluded that it was true: This day care would need to install “like six more sinks” to meet the legal requirements to serve fresh fruit. To Gluesenkamp Perez, this was an absurd example of how regulations that made “good reading on paper” [how could that reg ever look good on paper?] easily went awry in “the real world,” a policy emblematic of “an ingrained disregard for working people by policymakers in D.C.”

This video is part of a long tradition of bashing American bureaucracy and a perfect example of how easy it can be. Candidates perennially tell us that they’re the ones who understand the pain of being constrained by thickets of red tape — the warriors of common sense who will pick up a machete and hack away at the meddling of clueless elites who gaze down on real life from up high.

Trump often goes further, casting the entire administrative state as useless at best and a malevolent, corrupt, anti-American fifth column at worst and pledging to empower business-world titans like Elon Musk to hew through it in search of inefficiency. In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, politicians of both parties clearly feel some pressure to communicate that they understand this zeitgeist; Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, quickly declared himself ready to work with the proposed Department of Government Efficiency to “slash waste.”

When I read the bill, though — officially titled the Cutting Red Tape on Child Providers Act of 2024 — it turned out to be, well, not particularly concrete, even as an exercise in messaging. It proposes just one change: the addition of a single sentence to the federal law governing block grants to states to support child-care programs. Any state that takes these grants, the new sentence says, must “not create any barriers on the simple preparation” — defined as “washing, peeling, cutting and serving” — “of fresh fruits and vegetables.”

To which I could only think: Hold on. No barriers? I’ve never worked in a day care, but I drop my kids off at one most weekdays, bearing partial witness to the endless flows of snot and other bodily fluids that turn such places into potent germ-distribution centers. It seems uncontroversial to say that some barriers on fruit preparation might be welcome — say, not washing it in the same sink where children are cleaning up after using the bathroom, or at least washing your hands before serving it. These things are “common sense,” but codifying “common sense” is a great deal of what rules do. To borrow Gluesenkamp Perez’s own phrasing: “No barriers” sounds nice on paper, but what about the real world?

The two topics in this blog post are deeply entwined with each other. Both are essential tools in the rise of kleptocratic American radical right authoritarianism. MAGA elites desperately want to get rid of regulations so they can profit from fun activities like political payoffs, plunder, pollution and persecution of consumers, workers and the environment. MAGA elites demagogue the hell out of the deep state with its allegedly tyrannical and sometimes actually stupid regulations.

Getting rid of regulations is one of the key requirements to the rise of kleptocracy. The other two keys are (1) getting rid of anti-fraud oversight, e.g., by replacing independent inspector generals with corrupt DJT loyalists as Project 2025 proposes, and (2) neutering law enforcement for elites who tow the MAGA line, and properly tip their federal judges, congresspersons and of course DJT himself.

America's consumers, workers and environment need smart regulations that work reasonably well with the lowest practical adverse impact for regulated interests. That is smart, reasonable regulation. What authoritarian MAGA kleptocrats want is little to no regulation for elites and lots of control over the people, i.e., by gutting civil liberties and protective regulations. 

An analysis of America's Afghanistan failure: The role of kleptocracy

A NYT opinion by John Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan dissects the disaster. The bottom line is that we were lied to and our own system was rigged to hide catastrophic failure from the American people and most of the US government. Vast corruption shot through the whole doomed enterprise. Sopko writes:

The collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2021, revealed what little American lives and money had purchased over 20 years there. It also laid bare a gaping disconnect between reality and what senior U.S. officials had been telling Americans for decades: that success was just around the corner.

As the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012, my staff and I have audited and investigated U.S. programs and spending to rebuild Afghanistan ....

In hundreds of reports over the last 12 years, we have detailed a long list of systemic problems: The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects and did not understand the country or its people. American agencies measured success not by what they accomplished, but by dollars spent or checklists of completed tasks.

Why did so many senior officials tell Congress and the public, year after year, that success was on the horizon when they knew otherwise?

A perverse incentive drove our system. To win promotions and bigger salaries, military and civilian leaders felt they had to sell their tours of duty, deployments, programs and projects as successes — even when they were not. Leaders tended to report and highlight favorable information while obscuring that which pointed to failure. After all, failures do not lead to an ambassadorship or an elevation to general.

The sudden collapse of the Afghan government and rise of the Taliban showed that the United States could not buy favorable Afghan perceptions of the country’s corrupt leaders and government, or of America’s intentions.

Yet over two decades — and even as Afghan provinces fell like dominoes in the summer of 2021 — I do not recall any senior official telling Congress or the American people that failure was a real possibility.

Official statements across successive U.S. presidential administrations were, in my view, often simply untrue. Just six days before the Afghan government collapsed, the Pentagon press secretary declared that Afghanistan had more than 300,000 soldiers and police officers, even though the special inspector general’s office had been warning for years that no one really knew how many soldiers and policemen were available, nor what their operational capabilities were. As early as 2015, I informed Congress that corrupt Afghan officials were listing “ghost” soldiers and police officers on rosters, and pocketing the salaries. (emphases added)

One of the problems the US could not fix was the fact that Afghanistan was and still is a true kleptocracy. Feeding into that intractable problem was all US money flowing through the various NGO and US agencies. Everybody wanted to keep the cash flowing. What happened in Vietnam also happened in Afghanistan.

 In 2015, anti-corruption expert Sarah Chayes published her book, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security [1]. Chayes made it obvious obvious that the US was doomed to fail. It took years before she understood what Afghanistan was really like, i.e., Vietnam before the US got kicked out:

Chayes co-founded a charity “of unclear mission,” that was run by President Hamid Karzai's brother, Qayum. “At first I believed Qayum’s description of himself as constituting a ‘loyal opposition’ to his younger brother the president. . . . . Not for years would I begin systematically comparing his seductively incisive words with his deeds. .... I had, in other words, been an accessory to fraud.”

One big point here is that kleptocracy is real and it really does threaten global security. Chayes warned us again about corruption in 2024 a few weeks before the election[1]. People other than Chayes have been warning about growing corruption in the US. All the warnings have been ignored. 

The US is on the verge of becoming a true kleptocracy run by various morally rotted, radical right authoritarian kleptocrats, e.g., Christian nationalists, the brazenly autocratic DJT, his autocratic Republican Party, the authoritarian US supreme court, and various oligarch billionaires and multi-, multi-millionaires.

Too bad we do not learn from our mistakes. This time it will very likely cost us dearly. Trillions in theft per year is a scenario that is now truly on the horizon. We are powerless to stop it because both parties want the cash.

One last point: Was the US government really ignorant about how bad the situation in Afghanistan was? I rather doubt it. But if it really was mostly ignorant, that points to gross incompetence, deep corruption and/or complicity in the charade, knowing or not.

Footnote:

1. In Oct. 2024, Chayes urgently warned about corruption among Democrats and the Democratic Party. By then, she knew that the Republicans already were truly kleptocratic. The GOP had become completely impervious to warnings about deepening corruption: 

For a party that wraps itself in the mantle of truth and integrity, pointing across the aisle and saying “they’re worse” is not good enough. For the sake of their electoral fortunes, not to mention the country they purport to serve, Democrats must show voters a serious plan to curb corruption and corporate crime — including within their own ranks.

Since 1987, U.S. Supreme Court justices appointed by Democrats have largely concurred in a series of decisions narrowing what legally qualifies as corruption.

Although liberal justices dissented in the most recent such ruling — which legalized what amounts to bribes, so long as the money is paid after the official renders the service — almost all the previous votes in these cases were unanimous.  

With this kind of track record, Democrats’ effort to contrast themselves with the lawlessness of Mr. Trump’s Republicans can be taken only so seriously.