Then There Were Two

Elizabeth Warren has dropped her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Yesterday the rumour mill circulated the story that Warren had decided to endorse Bernie Sanders. If so, she hasn't announced it yet.

"Hamsterkauf" - Trust the Germans to Have a Word For It.

The common hamster is known for its ability to stuff extra food into its cheek pouches.

In Germany this has inspired a word for panic buying when there's some sort of public scare such as the coronavirus. Hamsterkauf.

Panic buying is perhaps part of the German angst that crops up once in a while. The question is: If angst made it into the English language long ago, isn't it time for hamsterkauf to follow suit and join the likes of dachshund, blitzkrieg, kindergarten, realpolitik and hinterland? Probably not, as compound words stand a far lower chance of ever being incorporated, but never say die in this crazy lexiconic world. 

Be that as it may, there's no denying the fact that a number of English-language publications have explicitly mentioned and explained the German expression for hoarding as they seem to like it quite a bit.

In a daily email newsletter called Morning Brew, which says it covers the latest news from Wall Street to Silicon Valley and beyond, hamsterkauf made into the "beyond" section this week.

"They say there's a German word for everything, so obviously, there's one for hoarding during times of widespread panic," the newsletter points out. "Hamsterkauf has a connection to hamsters, which store food in their cheeks," it continues. It even suggests using the German word in sentences such as "German grocery stores have been experiencing a wave of hamsterkauf during the coronavirus scare."

Monbiot Declares "Open Lawfare" on the British State

Guardian eco-scribe, George Monbiot, is in a mood to litigate an end to fossil energy power generation in the UK.

Far from building new fossil power plants, the survival of a habitable planet means retiring the damaging projects that have already been built. Electricity plants burning coal and gas and oil will not secure our prosperity. They will destroy it. 

But everywhere special interests dominate. Construction projects are driven, above all, by the lobbying of the construction industry, consultancies and financiers. Gigantic and destructive schemes, such as the Oxford-Cambridge Expressway, are invented by lobbyists for the purpose of generating contracts. Political support is drummed up, and the project achieves its own momentum; then, belatedly, a feeble attempt is made to demonstrate that it can somehow become compatible with environmental promises. This is what destroys civilisations: a mismatch between the greed of economic elites and the needs of society.

Monbiot et al are energized by last week's decision of the Court of Appeal to nix the long-awaited third runway at Heathrow airport.

The Heathrow decision stands as a massive and crucial precedent. Now we must use it to insist that governments everywhere put our survival first, and the demands of corporate lobbyists last. To this end, with the Good Law Project and Dale Vince, the founder of Ecotricity, I’m pursuing a similar claim. In this case, we are challenging the UK government’s policy for approving new energy projects. 

On Tuesday, we delivered a “letter before action” to the Treasury solicitor. We’ve given the government 21 days to accept our case and change its policy to reflect the climate commitments agreed by parliament. If it fails to do so, we shall issue proceedings in the high court to have the policy declared unlawful. We’ll need money, so we’ve launched a crowdfunding appeal to finance the action.

It sounds far fetched, almost wild-eyed, but it's really not. Eventually, albeit perhaps too late, we will have what Schellnhuber called an "induced implosion" of the fossil energy industry. Government will at some point begin shutting down the carbon economy and pushing the transition to alternative, non-carbon energy.  It'll be a "we can't go on like this" divorce and it could be protracted and ugly.

Bloomberg is Out

They're falling like flies. What's left - Biden, Sanders and Warren? Mayor Mike has withdrawn. Bloomberg just kissed goodbye the half-billion dollars he wasted on his presidential bid but not before giving his Billionaire Boys Club endorsement to - Joe Biden.

A  lot of Bernie supporters will be licking their wounds this morning but, seriously, does anyone imagine that Sanders could set a policy agenda for America's deeply "bought and paid for" Congress? There are still many primaries to go between now and the beginning of June but it's now a come from behind race for Sanders.

As for Elizabeth Warren, the future is not looking rosy either. She came in third in her home state of Massachusetts last night. Biden came in first.

Ms. Warren lost after liberal voters split sharply between her and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who flew into the state last weekend to campaign in hopes of dealing her a powerful setback. But instead it was former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. who came in first place in Massachusetts, winning voters over 50, moderates, black voters and even some liberals. 

The result represented her worst-case scenario. Ms. Warren had already finished in third place or worse in the early nominating states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. That left her on the sidelines after Mr. Sanders and Mr. Biden picked up momentum and dominated the 16 Super Tuesday contests, which included delegate-rich states like California, Texas and North Carolina, as well as Democratic strongholds like Massachusetts.

Covid 19 an "Act of God"?

It's not just the health care system fretting about the Covid-19 virus. Commerce is also affected especially in the modern-era of global supply chains.

A lot of western concerns are dependent on products and components sourced from China or elsewhere in Asia. Many other industries, especially in the resource sector, get a lot of their revenue selling to China. China may sell more than it buys but it still buys. Just look at how we target China as a prospective major market for bitumen and LNG.

Commercial contracts often have a "force majeure" clause that exempts the parties from liability (i.e. claims for damages) for non-performance caused by unforeseeable consequences beyond the party's control. Let's say that ISIS overruns your refinery, for example, or a flood of Bibilical proportions swamps your mines, something rising to the standard of an "Act of God."

Where problems can arise is that different countries can have different interpretations of these terms. Not surprisingly, Chinese authorities are a little more cooperative with Chinese industries in issuing force majeure certificates.  Your country, however, may have a more narrow interpretation, a tougher standard established in your nation's courts. You might not have an enforceable claim against your supplier for failure to perform but that might not take you off the hook for claims from your customer arising out of the very same failure to supply.

It's a complex area of law that rarely offers ideal solutions.

Bloomberg offers a look at a related problem, the "price majeure."

Illness is a very unusual reason for declaring force majeure, but coronavirus isn’t a common ailment. It has quarantined entire cities in China, overwhelming hospitals while leaving streets and workplaces empty. Some commodity contracts won’t include epidemics, Perrott said, although a case could still be argued. “The more the measures to contain the virus prove to be unsuccessful,” he said, the stronger the case. However, it’s a brave trader who turns to the legal system to take on China. In practice, those doing business with the world’s fastest-growing economy may find it easier to negotiate a solution that works for both sides.

Traders often talk about “price majeure,” which isn’t a legal term but a joke about Chinese buyers using any excuse available to walk away from a contract when prices have moved against them. Take LNG: long-term cargoes are often priced as a percentage of the oil price, meaning that they cost about $6 per million per British thermal units. In the meantime, the LNG cargoes can be bought in the spot market for as little as $3 per million British thermal units. The trick for a buyer is to declare force majeure in the long-term supply contract, and turn around and buy cheaper cargoes in the spot market. If that happens, that’s when the sellers call their lawyers.

Well, This Is Not Auspicious

When I checked the news this morning there were six reported deaths due to Covid-19 in Washington State.

At 11:11 I received an email bulletin from the Seattle Times of another Covid-19 fatality, seven in all.

Then, at 12:27 the next Seattle Times bulletin pegged it at two more, up to nine so far.

How an Irishman Views the Coronavirus

From the Irish Times:

A wise teacher once told me that humans have two basic responses to threat: panic and complacency. Neither response is helpful and both are in evidence today, albeit about two different kinds of threat: panic about coronavirus and complacency about other, apparently less dramatic problems, including, most notably, climate change. 

In fact, there are plenty of people who are responding calmly and efficiently to coronavirus, and plenty who are appropriately exercised about climate change. But my teacher had a point. If even 10 per cent of the panic about coronavirus was shifted to climate change, the world would be a substantially better place and our fight against coronavirus would be none the weaker.

- Brendan Kelly

The Ghosts of Auschwitz

In January a group of politicians and dignitaries gathered to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Auschwitz death camp. They joined 200 of the last survivors of the Nazi hellhole. Henry Giroux writes that several of the survivors openly asked if we're not witnessing a return to that darkness.

Calls to never let such crimes happen again were mixed with impassioned indignation and a “warning against the complicity, apathy and demagoguery that paved the way to the mass slaughter of about 11 million people.” Several survivors spoke not only to the terrifying criminal nightmare and systemic ethnic cleansing undertaken at Auschwitz, but also to the conditions that made it possible, warning that the lessons there have not been learned by existing generations.

A number of the survivors expressed alarm at our current moment in history when authoritarianism is on the rise once again. They argued that indifference and the failure to hold power accountable provide the moral abyss and political foundation that makes mass murder possible. Many, such as 91-year-old Elza Baker, warned that, “There are signs to look out for, if you don’t watch out one day you wake up and it’s too late.” The toxic shadow of Auschwitz and the collective repulsion against bigotry, discrimination, racism and racial purity appear to have been forgotten as fascist forces long kept at bay in the margins of society have moved to the center of power. For instance, in Poland almost a 100 municipalities have adopted resolutions declaring themselves as “LGBT-Free Zones.” This anti-LGBT rhetoric echoes a sordid genocidal moment in Poland’s history. It makes the familiar claim of passing homophobic resolutions which exclude those considered disposable from public space in the name of defending Christian values and “children, youth, families and Polish schools from sexual depravity and indoctrination.”

Under demagogues such as Donald Trump in the U.S., Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Recep Erdoğan in Turkey, Narendra Modi in India and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, a moral abyss has emerged in which state violence, widespread repression and a surge of lawlessness against those considered disposable have become the hallmark of an updated fascist politics.

...
Repressive apparatuses associated with fascist politics are further normalized through a culture of fear and a language of demonization, depravity and racism long associated with fascist ideas and culture. For example, in the United States, the Trump administration appeals to the racist sentiments of neo-Nazis, ultra-nationalists, white Christian fundamentalists and white supremacists. This is evident not only in his relentless racist taunts, policies and discourse, but also in his various appointments of white supremacists such as Stephen Miller, an avowed white nationalist who serves as Trump’s senior aide and is the architect of Trump’s immigration policy. As Rebecca Gordon observes, Trump’s racism and embrace of white supremacy has emboldened individuals, groups and authoritarian politicians such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who share Trump’s views.

We are witnessing the rise of evil men elevated to high office. So far it seems that our policy has been to ignore their vile ministrations in the blind hope they're a passing contagion that will run its course and go away. History has shown that's a terrible bet.

Gallows Humour

 I saw this on the weekend:

In the United States, conservatives use the word "socialist"

to describe everything to the left of hunting the homeless for sport.

Yikes!

Somebody's Hurting

I've never taken a cruise. Never wanted to go on one. Not my thing. For almost 20 years when I did want to travel it was astride my motorcycle. Flying has become something reserved for close relatives' funerals and they're pretty much gone now.

I don't understand why, in recent days,  I'm receiving emails from cruise line brokers. I have to say there seem to be some real good bargains out there. There are plenty of 14-day Trans-Atlantic cruises on offer at $350 to $400. Now I assume that's sub-steerage or bilge class accommodation but still, 14-days for 400 bucks. That's crazy.

Same same for those all-inclusive resorts. It's like they miss me and I don't even know those guys.

I expect what I'm experiencing are the telltale signs of a tourism industry being hammered by the Covid-19 virus. Now, granted, cruise ships have lost a bit of their lustre as the public has come to see them as viral incubators. It's probably not everyone's idea of a dream holiday to wind up moored at some remote dock, confined to your cubicle room, getting your meals left at your cabin door by - who knows? No party there.

Will this be the end of cruise lines? Who knows? This contagion is still playing out.

If we wind up in a pandemic it's hard to imagine that society won't be re-ordered in many ways, some of them very unexpected.

We are indeed living in interesting times.

What "American Dream"?

In Canada, Conservatives extol the United States as a land of virtually limitless opportunity and prosperity. Not so much. Business Insider shows how deeply America's middle class is being hollowed out.

The American economy may be booming, but its middle class is struggling. 

The median male US worker now has to earn more than a year's salary to afford the annual expenses for a family of four, according to "The Cost of Thriving Index" published by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and previously reported by The Washington Post.

In 1985, the typical male worker needed 30 weeks' pay to cover the $13,227 required for a family of four's major living costs: housing, healthcare, transportation, and education. As of 2018, those expenditures had risen to $54,441, and the typical male worker has to work 53 weeks to get there. "This is a problem, as there are only 52 weeks in a year," Oren Cass, the report's lead author, wrote.

The "Cost of Thriving Index" points to tensions underlying the American economy, from the gender pay gap to skyrocketing living costs that have outpaced wage increases, particularly for younger generations.

Those between ages 25 and 34 have seen only a $29 income increase since 1974, when adjusted for inflation, according to a new SuperMoney report that analyzed US Census Bureau data. Adults ages 35 to 44 made nearly $2,900 more in 2017 than their 1974 counterparts did, while those ages 45 to 54 saw an income growth of nearly $5,400 over that same time period, adjusted for inflation. 

Meanwhile, college tuition has more than doubled since the 1970s, bringing the national student-loan debt to an all-time high of $1.5 trillion. According to Student Loan Hero, the average student-loan debt for a student who took out loans and graduated in 2018 was a whopping $29,800.

The price of home sales has increased by 39% since the 1970s, and national healthcare costs per person have increased by $9,000 in the same time frame, according to the SuperMoney report.

The increase in so many disparate costs shows that middle-class Americans carry several financial burdens — they're behind on homeownership, lagging in retirement savings, and have debt to pay off, according to a previous Insider and Morning Consult survey. 

When all the paychecks from one year don't pay off a family's living costs, our typical male worker will feel he's living paycheck to paycheck, but it's actually worse than that.

America has become a nation in which the master class flourishes at the expense of the working classes, blue and white collar alike.

Trump has been inordinately successful at convincing middle class America that their plight is all the Democrat's doing and Trump's recent numbers suggest a lot of them are buying his lies. He has them believing he's improved their lives even as they flounder while Trump delivers tax cuts for corporations and the rich as he simultaneously swells the US government deficit.

These Americans will also bear the brunt of pain if the Covid-19 virus morphs into a global economic recession.

Covid-19. It's the Economy, Stupid.

There's more to this virus than health problems. As the New York Times explains, Covid-19 could easily become a global economy wrecker.

The globalism spawned by the neoliberal order has inflicted some grave economic vulnerabilities on most countries. We become dependent on long supply chains and "just in time" delivery. That requires a high level of stability in every country in the chain. One country goes down and the chain can be broken and, if that happens, it can take a long time to fix. A Dell computer is said to be dependent on the timely supply of components from upwards of 30 countries. One of them goes down and the whole thing stops.   In May of 2018, Ford was forced to stop production of its best-selling F-150 pickup truck when a fire gutted a supplier's plant.

The May 2 explosion and fire at the Chinese-owned Meridian Magnesium Products plant in Eaton Rapids, Mich., disrupted output for Ford and several other automakers, including General Motors Co., Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV and Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz. 

The pain has been felt most acutely at Ford, since F-Series generates most of the company’s profit. The company had shut down F-150 assembly at the plants in Dearborn and near Kansas City and also stopped building bigger Super Duty pickups at a factory in Louisville. 

F-Series is the top-selling vehicle line in America, hauling in about $40 billion in annual revenue. Morgan Stanley values the franchise as worth more than the entire company.

The NYT article reveals there's not a lot Washington can do to avert a recession.

Interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve — which appeared more likely Friday after a late-afternoon statement by its chairman, Jerome Powell — can lower borrowing costs and raise stock prices. But they can’t replace the goods made by factories closed to keep their workers from getting sick with Covid-19, the serious respiratory illness the virus causes. The government can try to pump more money into people’s pockets directly, such as with tax rebates, but money alone won’t put goods on empty store shelves.

If a potential coronavirus downturn were a fire, the recession-fighters would be like a fire brigade low on supplies, fighting among themselves, and probably lacking the right chemicals to quench the flames anyway.

“I’m looking at the combination of fiscal and monetary policy as potential triage,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at the accounting firm RSM. “All they can do is really mitigate the shock of supply chains and reduce the second-order effects.”

The core of the economic problem emerging from coronavirus is a “supply shock,” meaning a reduction in the economy’s capacity to make things. Companies in China that have shut down because their workers are quarantined are not making goods. That could eventually mean shortages of certain items for which there are few sources of elsewhere in the world.

Multinational companies typically operate complex supply chains, with lean inventories and essential merchandise that often arrives just in the nick of time. That means American companies that rely heavily on Chinese suppliers might begin facing shortages of key goods in the weeks ahead, said Nada Sanders, professor of supply chain management at Northeastern Univ“I believe we’re going to have a massive shortage of goods,” she said. “Two weeks ago I told people this was coming. The big problem was economists don’t understand how global supply chains work, how intertwined and interconnected they are.” It is an issue she said would particularly affect pharmaceuticals and electronics. 

But supply problems can bleed into demand problems, and vice versa. 

“If first the store is empty of products, and then people don’t go to the store anymore and they lose their jobs, they can’t buy anything,” Ms. Sinclair said. “That’s what we’re risking here.” 

In parts of Italy, for example, where outbreaks of the virus have disrupted daily life, tourism is slowing and restaurants and stores are reportedly empty as people seek to avoid exposure. That could result in waiters and store clerks who endure a drop in income, which could in turn feed back into less demand for all sorts of products, and a weaker economy. 

Similarly, businesses might go bankrupt if the financial markets freeze up and they cannot get access to credit, meaning otherwise sound businesses end up laying off employees or closing down. 

The role for economic policy, in that sense, wouldn’t be to solve the supply shock, but to try to prevent that initial supply shock from triggering a demand shock.

...“There are a lot of reasons to think we don’t have a lot of tools for this,” Ms. Sinclair said. “It’s more of a supply-side issue, and we can’t do a whole lot to stimulate supply. And if it does trickle over into demand, it will be a real test of whether the Fed has any firepower left and whether we have appetite for the kind of fiscal stimulus that’s actually impactful.” 

In other words, it would be best if the public health efforts to contain the spread of the virus are effective enough that we don’t have to ask very much of the economic firefighters.

For those who think this is a hoax, the image above shows satellite images of greenhouse gas emissions over China. The first is pre-Covid 19. The second is recent. China's industrial triangle has ground to a halt. The skies are clear. That reflects production that has been disrupted which means knock-on disruption through the supply chain.

Covid-19, Best and Worst Case

I have no medical education. I'll bet you don't either. That leaves both of us ill-equipped to reach informed opinions about this corona virus, Covid-19. Is it just a passing thing, a seasonal flu sort of virus?

A guy in the know is Jonathan Quick, former chair of the Global Health Council who wrote a book, "The End of Epidemics: the Looming Threat to Humanity and How to Stop It."

Here, in one concise paragraph, he explains the best and worst case scenarios.

The best case is that the Chinese conflagration is brought under control, the smaller “flames” we’ve seen flare up in other countries are extinguished, there’s little or no spread to new countries or continents, and the epidemic dies out. The worst case is that the outbreak goes global and the disease eventually becomes endemic, meaning it circulates permanently in the human population.

Permanently? I don't like the sound of that. But really, what are the odds?

The worst-case scenario is looking increasingly likely. We’ve now seen cases on six continents, apparently “silent” – that is, at least partly asymptomatic – chains of human-to-human transmission both inside and outside China, with additional countries reporting cases within the last week – bringing the total to 47 – and new, accelerating outbreaks in Iran, Italy and South Korea. If it becomes a pandemic, the questions are, how bad will it get and how long will it last? The case fatality rate – the proportion of cases that are fatal – has been just over 2%, much less than it was for Sars, but 20 times that of seasonal flu. There are still many unknowns – we may have underestimated the period during which a person is contagious, for instance, and the variety of ways in which the virus spreads.

But surely "they'll think of something" right? That's what we always say - they'll think of something.

Evidence suggests that vaccine hesitancy* diminishes when lots of people are dying. Once an outbreak is over, however, levels of vaccine uptake may depend on how fresh that outbreak is in people’s minds – even though the risk of another one is real. I’ve written about a hypothetical situation in which a new and dangerous pathogen emerges, a vaccine is developed, and you still get a pandemic, because large numbers of millennials refuse the vaccine. In the US, 20% of millennials believe that vaccines cause autism. The problem is bad information. As my students often remind me, news tends to be behind paywalls, while fake news is free.

* Vaccine hesitancy, also known as anti-vaccination or anti-vax, is a reluctance or refusal to be vaccinated or to have one's children vaccinated against contagious diseases. It is identified by the World Health Organization as one of the top ten global health threats of 2019. Wikipedia

"Canada is Broken"

69 per cent of Canadians polled say that Canada is broken. 

In a time of widespread disagreement and ever-increasing polarization, there remains a bitter solidarity among Canadians in the belief that the government doesn’t know what it’s doing. 

In the wake of regional discontent from the western provinces and blockades jamming up the country’s rail network, a towering majority of Canadians agree with the statement, “Right now, Canada is broken.” 

Sixty-nine per cent of Canadians agree with the statement, rising to 83% in Alberta, found a DART & Maru/Blue poll conducted for the National Post.

The poll spells bad news for Justin Trudeau with a majority of people believing that the country is not headed in the right direction and that the prime minister is not governing well. The Liberals also get most of the blame for the rail blockades. 

And on Trudeau’s signature promise to help Indigenous people, two-thirds of Canadians don’t believe he has delivered on that pledge. 

“A lot of the blame has been centred on the prime minister and the Liberal government,” said Daniel Béland, the director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

...Asked to rank how various people have handled the Wet’suwet’en protests, 67 per cent of people think the rail companies have handled it well. The provincial police get a 57 per cent approval rating and the RCMP get 55 per cent approval. 

Politicians, though, get much worse reviews. Provincial premiers get a 45 per cent approval rating, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer gets 36 per cent approval, and only 27 per cent of Canadians think Trudeau has handled the situation well.

...More than 80 per cent of Canadians believe their politicians care more about their own partisan interests than working on behalf of all Canadians. The highest level of agreement on this came from Alberta, at 90 per cent, and Atlantic Canada, at 86 per cent. 

[Dart pollster John] Wright said the issue of increasing partisanship and polarization is one that worries him. 

“People are truly frustrated with the inability of their leadership to come together and recognize that human beings are being affected by their decisions and that they’re not simply voters,” said Wright.

The problem with this poll is that it almost guarantees the outcome, the piling-on of the prime minister. Yes, we've become a deeply divided society. Isn't that an occurrence common to former liberal democracies beset by the corrosive nature of neoliberalism? Is Britain not a divided society? Is Germany not divided? Is Bolsonaro universally loved across Brazil? What are we to make of the United States whose people are more angrily divided and distrustful than at any time since the Civil War?

Have the Tories been a force for nurturing social cohesion in Canada? Absolutely not. Stoking division and rancor is their stock in trade. Movement conservatism is fueled by this sort of division. But you will never hear that in the pages of PostMedia because they're in league with the Conservatives and openly supportive of the petro-state.  They're right in claiming that Canada is broken. They wouldn't have it any other way.

Before we leave the subject of our ailing democracy, how about a First Nations take on the same subject? Matthew Norris is a member of the Lac La Ronge band and currently a PhD candidate at UBC. He too sees a crumbling legitimacy of Canadian democracy only his take is different. It's a worthwhile read, deserving of ten minutes of your time.

Once Upon a Time, Chapters 9 (Viet Nam) and 14 (Afghanistan)

I was listening to the BBC World Service podcast this morning. They had a brief interview with some anodyne retired US Army general, one of many now forgotten names who had done a stint commanding American and ISAF forces in Afghanistan. He was questioned about the new peace deal struck between Washington and the Taliban.

The official White House line is that this marks an American victory over the Talibs. Even Pompeo says that with a straight face, not a trace of hilarity on his visage.  The BBC's talking head general was a bit more restrained. He said it was a victory for Afghan women. Apparently they now have rights that will persist into the future in some form, maybe.

The interviewer struck a raw nerve when he mentioned the Taliban were also declaring victory whereupon the cookie cutter general said they had better not because America wouldn't tolerate that. Really. America stood ready to return and restart the war if the Talibs got out of line. Yeah, sure.

Like all fairy tales this war begins with 'once upon a time' - 1973 - in a distant land, Paris. Two dudes met there - Henry Kissinger, on behalf of the United States, and Le Duc Tho on behalf of the Peoples Republic of Viet Nam, a.k.a. North Vietnam.

For more than a decade American forces had been fighting a fairly bloody war to check the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia by propping up a series of puppet governments in South Viet Nam. They had tried and tried but never got very far.  The Communist's supply of soldiers seemed inexhaustible even as America dropped more bombs than in World War II. That's 7,662,000 tons of bombs and that's a lot. Laos wasn't even a combatant yet it received, on average, 8 bombs per minute from 1964 to 1973. But I digress.

After dropping all these bombs wherever they could find a place to drop bombs and still not getting anywhere with Hanoi, the Americans started to think they were neck deep in a shit show so they convened a sit down that resulted in a peace deal called the Paris Peace Accord.  A curious aspect of the accord is that it was negotiated and agreed by just the United States and the government of North Viet Nam. The other government, the Saigon regime of South Viet Nam, wasn't at the table. It was there in spirit only, I suppose. The Nobel Prize committee only handed out two Peace Prizes for that - to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho (Comrade Tho declined).

Then, deal in hand, the US delegation went back to Saigon to present them the accord as a fait accompli. For appearances sake the US pretended the South was in on it, but they weren't. Washington tried to pretend it secured peace for the South, but it didn't. The truth came out via the White House tapes Nixon was forced to cough up to the Special Prosecutor during Watergate.

The president of South Vietnam, in whose defense more than 50,000 Americans gave their lives, wept upon hearing President Richard Nixon's proposed settlement terms. ...Nixon would leave North Vietnamese troops occupying and controlling much of the South, while withdrawing all remaining American ground forces. "It is only an agonizing solution," said President Nguyen Van Thieu, "and sooner or later the government will crumble." National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger reported Thieu's response to Nixon on October 6, 1972, adding, "I also think that Thieu is right, that our terms will eventually destroy him."

As schoolchildren are taught, Nixon promised America "peace with honor" via a strategy of "Vietnamization" and negotiation. Vietnamization, he said, would train and equip the South Vietnamese to defend themselves without American troops. He realized it wouldn't. "South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway," the president said on tape. 

This was no mere passing doubt. On his first full day in office, he'd asked military, diplomatic and intelligence officials how soon the South would be able to handle the Communists on its own. The answer was unanimous: never. The Joint Chiefs, CIA, Pentagon, State Department, and the U.S. military commander in Vietnam, General Creighton W. Abrams, all agreed that Saigon, "even when fully modernized," would not survive "without U.S. combat support in the form of air, helicopters, artillery, logistics and major ground forces."

Okay, with that background in mind, let's flash forward to 2020, yesterday when the United States and the Taliban signed another 'peace with honor' agreement for US forces to di di mau out of Afghanistan.

Another deal where America negotiates with a rag tag adversary it has not, in almost 20 years of combat, with every conceivable advantage in its favour, managed to defeat. Another deal that America negotiates in the absence of its client government that will eventually destroy the Kabul government. Another deal that leaves the adversary in occupation and control of most of the countryside. Another deal presented under the illusion of 'peace with honor.' The parallels are crushing.

You know the adage that 'victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan'? Yeah, that one. See?

What's the lesson here? There are so many. One is that America can win battles but unless the US can force its enemy to fight on American terms, to fight in the American style, the US can be defeated every time. This invokes another adage - we have all the watches but they have all the time. There's no need to defeat American forces in battle. You just have to bleed them a bit and wait for America's clock to run out.

Some have called it "The War of the Flea." Long before he became a household name, David Petraeus, told a journalist that all an enemy like the Taliban had to do was to be left still holding the field when the last American troops boarded the final transport out of Afghanistan. He was right then. He's right now.

Oregon Jury Refuses to Convict Climate Protesters

A group of Extinction Rebellion activists were put on trial for trespass. It was pretty open and shut, they did it. Except that they pleaded "justification" in their defence. It worked.

The defendants were not convicted of trespassing in the first degree—charges that resulted from their role in an April 28, 2019 action intended to halt Zenith Energy’s, a Texas corporation, (“Zenith’s”) essential role in the global facilitation and transport of fossil fuels, specifically, tar sands oil—one of the world’s most egregious source of carbon emissions and climate change. 

For the first time in U.S. history, to our knowledge, a jury was given the “choice of evils” climate necessity instruction and deliberated after a full jury trial. Jurors ended their deliberation with a hung jury after hearing testimony from expert witnesses and defendants. CLDC and its clients are grateful to the jury—fellow Multnomah County residents—who are imminently affected by Zenith’s environmental destruction and recognized that the climate defenders’ actions in defense of the public interest may have been justified under the law. 

“The jury’s inability to convict the activists reflects the prevailing community consciousness, which is unlikely to punish climate defenders for acts of nonviolent resistance,” [Civil Liberties Defense lawyer Lauren] Regan said.

Oregon has a "choice of evils" law under which a jury may refuse to convict where a defendant shows the conduct was necessary to avoid an imminent injury and that the need to avoid the injury was greater than the injury created by the defendant.

And Now, Just a Few Words, "In God We Trust"

In 1776, America's founding fathers proclaimed that the official motto of their freshly minted United States would be "E Pluribus Unum" or 'out of many, one.' Let's not clutter this up with awkward issues such as slavery or the 'white trash' syndrome. It was a noble thought. We're all in this together. We are as of one.

E Pluribus Unum lasted for 180 years, a good run in any country. Then, in 1956, it was retired to make way for "In God We Trust." Gotta get the Great Father in there - white, respectable, mom's apple pie sort of thing. It was all Dwight Eisenhower's idea. He wanted America yoked to religion although it didn't much matter to Dwight which religion that turned out to be. Eisenhower thought that embedding a little more religion in the public consciousness would make for a better, more loyal, less unruly populace.  Boom, the pews were full on Sunday morning as they had never been before. And the radical religion of the far right was inducted into the inner circle of power.

Post-war America has been no E Pluribus Unum country. That "all for one, one for all" business didn't fit capitalism on steroids. And in a society so deeply divided across so many fault lines - political, economic, ethnic and cultural -  that "unum" business is pure crap. Besides, In God We Trust is at once benign and yet so enduringly flexible. It has that Wehrmacht belt buckle "Gott Mit Uns" quality to it. God is with us, we are God's chosen. Hence, God delivers endless bounty in good times and in bad times there's the "Jesus, take the wheel" flip side.

Will America ever emerge from the current 'Jesus take the wheel' mode? Not as that nation is currently constituted and at some point we'll have to figure out how to live with that.

Full Dither Ahead

There are rarely political solutions to scientific perils.

That point is lost on our federal government that insists that action on climate change must be politically tailored to economic priorities.

The Liberals seemingly endorsed a motion to recognize that Canada - like every other country - is in the grip of a climate emergency. The government's sincerity was called into question when, less than 24 hours later, it greenlighted the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

Our government struggles in its efforts to reconcile two blatantly irreconcilable priorities.  Fortunately it has mastered cognitive dissonance, elevating it to an art. It results in a government of pretence. It says it sees the red light just ahead but its response is to floor the gas pedal.

Deputy prime minister, Christia Freeland, erased any doubt that it will be "Full Dither Ahead" for the Liberal government.

For starters, the Liberals cling to the dodgy pledge to make Canada a "net zero" emitter by 2050. How likely is that when, under the current government, we're falling further and further behind meeting Stephen Harper's emissions cut targets?

A number they don't seem to like is 2030. The scientific consensus is that if we're to avert truly catastrophic climate change all nations will need to cut by half their emissions by 2030. That leaves just a further 20 years to deal with the hardest part, the final 50 per cent. If you can't manage the first half by 2030 you've essentially given up on decarbonizing your economy by 2050.

What is the government's plan to cut Canadian greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030? How do we reconcile that responsibility with building pipelines for high-carbon fossil fuels? I guess that's where cognitive dissonance comes to the rescue once again.

There's also the Great Canadian Pacifier, the vaunted carbon tax. Suck on that and be quiet.

There is one thing the government could do right now that could put Canada on the right path. It could cancel fossil fuel subsidies. No more subsidized electricity. Charge world prices for water consumed/contaminated. No more grants and deferrals. Start collecting the funds for environmental remediation, the old 'polluter pays' principle.

Why won't they do that? It's because the petro-economy is a Ponzi scheme, that buries costs as 'externalities' that are often then transformed into a future public burden. It's a racket and we're the marks.

The IMF contends that Canada, like most petro-states, hides the true costs of public support for the most profitable corporations on the planet. That's socialism for the rich. While Canadian governments admit to over $2 billion in annual subsidies, the IMF adds in all these hidden costs and freebies and comes up with $46 billion each and every year. I have never seen any government, federal or provincial, ever refute those IMF numbers, have you?

Why do our leaders perpetuate this farce? I think I know. I suspect it's because they know what happens if they stop. They know we're sitting atop a Carbon Bubble that's ready to burst and they don't want to be that guy. They don't want to take the blame. They're afraid to lead.

And so we'll dither along, assuring the public that we can have it both ways. It's an emergency but, ya know, not really. Not so much.

Which brings us to Churchill, a guy steeped in emergency, who said, "It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required."

A Court Rules Against a Government Over Climate Change

The UK government has committed itself to some impressive climate change targets and, to
 the country's High Court, that means there'll be no third runway for Heathrow Airport.

[The court][ ruled that ministers’ failure to take the UK’s climate change commitments into account rendered the Airports National Policy Statement (ANPS) – which effectively gave the green light to a third runway – unlawful. In order to be lawful, the ANPS would have to be rewritten to include a credible plan for squaring expansion with our commitment under the Paris Agreement to seek to limit global temperature rise to no more than 1.5C. The court was careful to clarify that it has no opinion on whether or not this is possible.

Gee, holding a government to its word, there's a novel idea.

Today’s judgment marks a turning point in the climate struggle. It looks like the beginning of the British state taking the implications of the climate emergency as seriously as its citizens have now begun to. For UK air travel, this means there is turbulence ahead. We can no longer muddle on with the pretence that ever-increasing demand for flights can be met while also reducing emissions down to zero. The uniquely generous tax breaks that have kept air travel artificially cheap must end, but if the climate movement wants to maintain the support of the wider public, we must do this in the fairest way possible. That means bringing in a frequent flyer levy, which would protect access to some air travel for all, regardless of income, while still keeping aviation emissions within safe limits for the climate. Whether Boris Johnson’s government has the stomach for this kind of medicine remains to be seen.

I suppose Boris could appeal the decision on the grounds that the Paris Climate promises were merely aspirational, greenwash, little more than eco-bullshit. Of course that would mean admitting that its promises are meaningless, not to be relied on, never to be believed. Sort of like Justin telling Canadians that achieving a green future for Canada depends on expanding the production of high-carbon, climate wrecking bitumen.

The National Dilemma or Trudeau's (Sophie's) Choice

An Angus Reid poll finds that Canadians are split, almost half and half, on the Wet'suet'en/Coastal Gaslink demonstrations and blockades. 47 per cent support 'patience and dialogue' while 53 per cent want the blockades brought down using 'whatever force is necessary.' It's Ipperwash by a nose.

I suppose it's a safe bet that the company's polling base was under-represented among First Nations populations and so this may be weighted toward the non-FN majority.

A lot (78%) are worried that the protests have damaged Canada's reputation as a place for investment. There you go.

On a party basis, Tory respondents are far more on the economy/law and order side (89%).  Justin's Liberals, however, give the edge to indigenous rights/environment by 55%. Only 24% of New Dems chose the economy/law and order option. I wonder what Horgan is going to make of that, especially if this turns ugly.

Team "Use of Force" or, as I call them, the Tories, support the force option by a bloodthirsty 89 per cent.  The Libs and New Dems favour the talking option by 60 and 79 per cent respectively.

Respondents were asked whether they thought the protesters were 'troublemakers' or 'committed people taking a stand on something they feel strongly about.' BC was evenly split. Alberta and Saskatchewan, however, were heavily on the troublemaker option. Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada give a solid nod to the protesters.

It looks like the media slant has scored a hit with the population. Canadians have bought into 'elected chiefs' as the proper voice of First Nations. And, by wildly huge numbers, they're ready to put the blame on Trudeau for the whole mess. Only Liberals support the prime minister and, even then, by a 50/41 per cent margin.

For the other players it's also dismal. Horgan is polling at 18 per cent. Kenney's numbers mirror Trudeau's - 50 yea to 40 nay. Ford comes in even lower than Horgan at a dreary 15 per cent. Legault's numbers are favourable but not by that much, 41 to 37 per cent.

No one is looking good on this. That, I expect, will make Horgan and Trudeau hesitant to use muscle lest something goes horribly wrong and they get their very own Ipperwash and hand the First Nations another Dudley George.

Added into their political calculus has to be the Coastal Gaslink venture and whether the gas line to Kitimat is any more economically valid than Teck's Frontier mine proposal.  Nobody in Asia is paying $9/million BTU for methane. They're barely paying half that. And with massive new gas fields reportedly being discovered in the Russian sector of the Arctic Ocean, Canada's break even price may be a distant memory. Is that worth fighting over?