Picking Apart the Bill of Rights

16 May
by John, posted in Liberty, Life, Pursuit of Happiness   |  No Comments

The irony of the AP wiretapping scandal is listening to the Press cry apoplectic about the threat to the First Amendment after the Press lead the largest potential restriction of the Second Amendment in a generation.  There are certainly on a micro level very different issues.  But they fit the pattern of constant government assault on the Bill of Rights since 1980.

A forgotten part of the conservative agenda in 1980 was legal reform.  It is forgotten because it was so hugely successful it is now the mainstream thought of both the Left and the Right.  Conservatives believed the liberal Warren Supreme Court of the 1960s had expanded the Fourth and Fifth Amendment’s guarantees to the accused (Nixonian translation “criminals”) over society and victims.  As the War on Drugs accelerated the pendulum swung to law and order.

These Liberal/Conservative Supreme Court cutbacks, particularly in drug and national security cases, fit a pattern of an over grasping Federal Government diluting fundamental rights.  You do not have to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist to have concern.  It is precisely the concern the Founders had in writing the Bill of Rights.

So the Federal Government marches on in its collection of power.  Intimidating reporters, restricting gun rights, tolerating warrantless stop and frisk searches, listening to domestic phone and Internet conversations to overseas without a warrant, entering homes without a warrant, searching cars without a warrant …

We all have parts of the Constitution that we find more interesting, more relevant, more inspiring.  But in the end it is a unitary document.  We either all as voters band together to insist on preserving all of it or call a Constitutional Convention to change it.  Perhaps it is time after 225+ years.

But we as voters should express clearly and often that the Federal Government’s job is to protect the Bill of Rights and expand its relevance in the modern world, not cut it back under the guise of national security, “common sense” regulation,  or judicial “exceptional circumstances”.  If we as citizens want any changes, we will call that Constitutional Convention, then let our public servants know what changes we have wrought to the foundations of the Republic.

Republican Foreign Policy Melt-Down

13 May
by John, posted in leadership, Liberty, Middle East, Policy, President   |  No Comments

For me George Schultz summed up Ronald Reagan. I have seen Schultz repeat it in various formulations many times.  Some people run for President to be President.  Ronald Reagan ran for President to do things.

It was a time of big ideas – 1980.  Reagan had decided that containment of the Soviet Union had reached its limits and that detente was just as limited a doctrine.  The time had come to call evil, evil.  To rearm and assert that the binding glue of civilization was not collective dehumanization, but liberty.

Today we have the Republican Party, the party that gave us 4,000+ dead in Iraq based on ideological misjudgment, determined to prove that President Obama conspired in Benghazi to do …  I have no idea what it is the President’s administration is covering up.  But this blog has associated itself for a long time with the view that President Obama is a smart and intelligent fellow with a wonderful family who is by  temperament and skills incompetent as President.

What we know about Benghazi is that the President’s administration through incompetence and bureaucratic in-fighting got four guys killed.  Then through incompetence it bungled every non-political aspect of reporting on the facts.  Given the President’s inability to pass any material legislation since 2010 that he is incompetent is hardly news.

When I was in Budapest in 2004, I was amazed at how many Hungarian business people, waiters, artists, and people across the capital stopped to thank me as an American for freeing them from communism.  When I took a cab ride out to the airport, the driver refused to charge me and drove me around the city to see memorials, tank shell holes, and the other visible signs of the Hungarian struggle for liberty.   In Warsaw that year it was the same experience.

There was a long bipartisan effort to contain communism.  But it was Reagan’s decisive abandonment of Carter’s bumbling “human rights” agenda, in favor of a foreign policy based on liberty that changed the game.  Reagan’s aides were concerned he was a neophyte unable to carry his own weight in foreign policy.

Instead he, almost alone,  had the central analysis correct.  The CIA’s estimates that the Soviets were outgrowing the US were wrong.  The US could simply out muscle the Soviet economy in any arms race.  It was a dangerous theory for a nuclear war strategy, but it forced the Soviets  to the table.  And for all the foreign policy elites scoffing, let me state the following unequivocally.

This blog values the opinion of that Hungarian cab driver more than the views of any “expert”.   Under the policies of those elites I crawled in fear under my school desk.  Because of Ronald Reagan my children never have.

This is what I know about Republican foreign policy today.  There are two wings.  One believes we should intervene militarily in every Arab or Persian crisis, while not advocating intervention in any black African, Asian, or Latin American country suffering war induced famine, rape, and genocide.  It does not care that every US kinetic intervention in the Middle East with the exception of the Gulf War in 1992 has cost more lives than anticipated.  Every such intervention has yielded unintended results worse than the initial problem.

The other wing believes the United Nations is a global conspiracy.

We are witnessing the passing of the baton on foreign policy competency to the Democrats.  Since 1968 the Republican Party has owned national defense and foreign policy.  It was the party of limited decisive intervention.  This began to collapse with the 2003 Iraq invasion and the rise of Neo-Con “invade every culture we do not really understand” policies.

Now, rather than articulating a vision for how to engage in Asia on a broad economic, cultural, humanitarian, and lastly military basis, we have the Benghazi investigation.   Even as a Democrat I would venture to guess that would not be President Reagan’s foreign policy agenda for 2013.

The Known Natural Gas Problem

06 May
by John, posted in environment, leadership, Policy, President   |  No Comments

Right before I departed on my spring time tour of rural Nebraska and Colorado, I attended FrackingSense’s “Atmospheric Perspective on Oil & Gas Operations” from CU’s Jana Milford, a professor with expertise in airborne pollutants, and NOAA’s Gabrielle Petron, who is busily measuring field levels of airborne pollutants in oil & gas fields. It was very hard to get either of them to use the word fracking. They just do not accept it as scientifically relevant to the pollution issue.

It reminds me frankly of listening to someone who is an expert on firearms pointing out why “assault weapons” is an irrelevant term in gun violence.

For two years while at CU Law I interned for the National Wildlife Federation, the Environmental Defense Fund, and a coalition of water groups in Summit County, Colorado.  It was hardly a pro-extraction group.  But whether it was whooping cranes on the Platte, pronghorn antelope in Wyoming, or air pollution from uranium mining it was all about science.  In those days and in heavily rural Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska the emotion was all on the side of the farmers and ranchers.

After several months of attending the FrackingSense forum at the Center for the American West I have had everyone of my preconceived views confirmed, but one.  Water pollution, traffic, noise, pipeline construction and maintenance are all solvable problems under assault from people who act as if hydrocarbon production is a new untested industrial process.  These problems deserve much more study and innovation, but they are not the problems to focus upon. The air pollution impact is much worse than I thought.

Off the record some of the top regulators in Colorado had warned me that this was the main issue.  There are two grave distortions fostered by the environmental community diverting our attention from the methane, and more importantly, volatile organics currently flooding our new hydrocarbon fields.  First, is that the unscientific video in Gasland and elsewhere points to a water table crisis.  Second, is that the Clean Air Act does not apply to oil & gas production through the so called “Halliburton loophole”.

Both of these are false.

There are water use issues in some watersheds in Colorado, but in no watershed does oil and gas production require the kind of permanent substantial use that agriculture (80% of CO water useage mostly for cattle production) and municipal usage require.   There is a ready and functioning water market with increasing use of industry recycling.  You have a 100% recycling of the fracking fluid and a reasonable near term chance of 100% recycling of produced (ancient underground) water.

The issue is that there is substantial leakage of methane, and worse, volatile organics at the surface in the oil & gas fields.  The leaks can come from drilling, particularly completion of the well processes.  The leaks come from tanks, pipelines, dryers/evaporators, and other equipment.  All of those leaks are regulated at the federal level under the Clean Air Act.

It is the exact opposite of Gasland.

We need the EPA to act within its existing authority to tighten the amount of leakage through the use of technology, enhanced monitoring, and inspections.  The Clean Air Act is one of the most successful US regulatory efforts in history.  Go back and watch video from the 1960s of any major US city before the Clean Air Act .  You will cough in sympathy.

So much of the FrackingSense presentations have been about what we do not know. But it was clear already from Ms. Petron’s previous work and published measurements in Utah and Colorado that a field can be a “sea of methane” from leaks. More importantly accompanying that methane are volatile organics that in the presence of sunlight convert into ozone (O3), one of the original air pollutants regulated under the Clean Air Act.

Regardless of your view of the science on methane and climate change, nobody debates that ground based ozone kills people.

Instead of wasting all this effort on unknown water pollution and temporary disruptions to the surface, the environmental community should be focused like a laser on what we already know.  We have a bad ozone pollution problem, regulated under the Clean Air Act, which we can abate right now.  All it requires is the President to stop campaigning and start acting under existing law.

How Little We Understand the Cultures We Bomb

23 Apr
by John, posted in City Club, Middle East   |  No Comments

The Boulder City Club hosted as part of our International Affairs luncheon series a talk with Q&A on the Arab Spring with Dr. Nader Hashemi, the Director for the Center of Middle East Studies within the Korbel School at the University of Denver.  Another great topic – “The Arab Spring Two Years Later and The Catastrophe in Syria”.  I have some Israeli friends who might retitle it “The Catastrophe of the Arab Spring and Syria Two Years Later.”

I recently wrote about Ambassador Hill’s presentation to the City Club rethinking the power of diplomacy. Ambassador Hill heads the Korbel School, but the institution appears to have a deep bench. Dr. Hashemi delivered a nuanced talk across the vastly complex cultures of North Africa and the Middle East. Once again I was struck how little we understand the cultures we bomb.

Dr. Hashemi had a tough topic. There really is not much good to say about the Arab Spring at the moment. Perhaps, objectively it is an omelete in the whisking stage. Whether it results in a fluffy and airy creation or a hardened oily mass is in the future. And the results will surely not be uniform across the region.

Dr. Hashemi described the promise of democratic revolution under threat from authoritarian counter-revolution in country after country. But the Arab Spring resists region wide description. In Tunisia the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderating force. In Egypt it is largely incompetent, but the alternative is as likely Salafist (a more extreme version of political Islam) as Jeffersonian. Libya is perhaps closer to Somalia in the early 1990s.

That Syria is a catastrophe is the easy judgment. What policy for the United States and the West in Syria, is the tougher decision. We have a reasonable track record of liberating occupied countries of foreign forces. We have a terrible record intervening in civil wars or even in identifying a side connected to our national interests.

Syria brings all of the worst temptations of US policy since Vietnam.  The willingness to see secular democrats where there are none.  An exaggeration of the American military’s ability to improve the situation on the ground.   Finally, the tendency to fool ourselves that policymakers truly understand the complexity of factions, religions, and grievances tracing back through the mists of 5,000 years.

If I have a criticism of Dr. Hashemi, it would be my typical one in this area of US policy.  What is the vital US national interest in Syria?  He vaguely assumed it without naming it. Afterwards I asked several fellow City Club members what was the US vital interest in Syria.

“General stability”

“Economic interests”

I am an admirer of Churchill, Ghandi, Washington, Eisenhower, the actors of conviction.  They did not commit the lives of their young men and women to a battle for general stability.  When has this part of the world had stability?

And let us remember that as in Iraq and Vietnam we would act in Syria without United Nations authorization.

And rather than hurl an insult about combat airmen dying for GDP, let me say I see no vital US economic interest in Syria or the surrounding area that is made better through US intervention.  Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan have been a mess of violence and misguided socialist lingo masking authoritarianism or tribalism since 1945.  Before sanctions Syrian/US trade was 200 to 400 hundred million dollars per year – a minuscule drop in our river of international trade.

At least nobody at the City Club is as dumb as tv pundits – nobody brought up weapons of mass destruction as the basis for intervention.

The real story is not hope or despair, but muddling through ancient and tangential quarrels.  We are lucky to have the Korbel School nearby to push our cultural thinking.  Even if I must say Dr. Hashemi’s talk reinforced my view that there is no US interest in Syria worth one American life.

The Coming of the Second Jimmy Carter

17 Apr
by John, posted in Euro, Falklands/Malvinas, Middle East, President, UK   |  No Comments

For those of us in 2008 who voted enthusiastically for Senator Obama from the center of the Democratic Party it has been quite a ride.  Through TARP, the auto-bailouts, and the killing of Osama Bin Laden we saw a steady moderate hand at the tiller of crisis.  Then the diversion into healthcare resulted in the loss of a governing majority.

Having sacrificed his political capital on healthcare, the President has been unable to follow a traditional Keynesian path to stimulate the economy.  His vaunted stimulus was both more effective than his critics admit, too structurally dependent on temporary tax cuts,  and too short lived to have any real long term effect.  His efforts on “too big to fail” banks who are bigger than ever ended in another regulatory flop. The most capitalists in the US can hope for is that the supposedly “Keynesian” President ceases raising taxes, imposing higher healthcare costs, raising the minimum wage, and pursuing short term austerity in a shrinking discretionary budget.

But while the President remains tactically more reliable than his predecessor overseas, he remains blunderingly opaque on strategy.  Surely a pivot to Asia involves more than sending a detachment of Marines to Australia. Would not a transformative economic proposal linking China further into the international trading system be a stronger strategic initiative?

But there is another immediate foreign policy strategic tipping point coming in our most important ally – Great Britain. In 2014 Scotland may secede from Britain. Sometime after 2015 Great Britain will probably vote on whether to leave the European Union.

What is President Obama’s policy on revolutionary change within our strongest ally?

If Scotland leaves, the Labor Party in Britain is finished.  England is a Tory bastion.  And in a rump Britain England will dominate even more. The Tories will chart a more conservative course.  And since the desire to leave the EU is even stronger with Tories than in Britain as a whole, a follow-on referendum could leave a smaller and militarily weakened Great Britain outside the EU.

Mr. President, what is our plan for that?

Scotland has played an outsized role in Anglo-American defense strategy since World War I.  Most of the secure naval harbors in Britain, including its only harbor for nuclear weapons capable ships, are in Scotland.  The Scots have sacrificed the most per capita in causalities within the UK from World War I onward.  Scotland has always been at the heart of British defense capabilities.

Now this is not all bad news.  Change is inevitable and Britain has not yet faced all of its past in Scotland, Ireland, the Falklands, and Gibraltar.  The US could much more easily reach trade agreements with an independent Britain than with the EU.  The debate over Scotland’s readmission into NATO after it leaves Britain could force a needed conversation. Why are the United States, Britain, Canada, and France undertaking to defend small countries who cannot or in the case of the Scottish Nationalist Party will not contribute to our nuclear deterrent?

The point is a major strategic moment is coming within this President’s term.  What is the plan?  Surely it is not merely to send a mid-level official to London to lecture the British government on why it is in the United States’ interest for Britain to stay in the EU. I am confident FDR or Reagan would have sent a high level official to explain why it is in Britain’s interest to stay in the EU.

But as with all the strategic things in his Presidency – the economy and foreign policy – President Obama is incapable of acting. It is if he exists in an ether world of soft focused rallies calling for dinners to discuss budgets.  As with President Carter’s last years the President just cannot get anything strategic done.  Perhaps at this point that is a comfort.  And on and on we go riding the 13 year merry-go-round of limp leadership.

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