4.27.2008 | McCain speaks out for the poor

Taxes: Who's getting shafted?

And in the same breath he speaks out for the "100 million Americans" — less than one-third — who would be affected by a capital gains tax increase under Barack Obama's economic proposal. So as the Republican nominee McCain is carrying the mantle of supply-side conservatism (or, as Bush put it in 2000, calling the elites "his base"). That's understood.

But what caught my breath was seeing McCain refer to Obama's stance on the gas tax as being "defined by special interests." (For the record, McCain proposed a summer gas tax holiday, while Obama is against.) Now, it seems to me lower gas taxes might mean more gasoline sales for oil companies, which would mean more profits for them. What special interest could possibly stand to gain from lower gas sales figures?

Obviously Sen. Obama does not understand that this would be a nice thing for Americans, and the special interests should not be dictating this policy.

— Sen. John McCain on a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax, currently fixed at 18.4 cents a gallon

The only "special interest" I could find pushing for a higher gas tax was in Minnesota — home of last summer's I-35W bridge collapse — where the state's association of counties wanted more revenue. But with crumbling infrastructure around the country, tight state budgets and mounting national debt, if government itself has become a special interest in McCain's dictionary, we're in for a more topsy-turvy campaign season than I expected.

And if this is what the national debate looks like, God forbid what might happen if anyone were to suggest increasing the tax.

4.03.2008 | Has NATO lost its way?

Uneasy alliance? After today's meeting, NATO's path from West to East seems less certain. To those less in the know, NATO stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organization (you might be forgiven for not knowing it exists). The image above is based on the organization's flag, a white four-point compass on a blue field.

It's a question that's stayed in my mind — and indeed many others — since the end of the Cold War. With the threat of Soviet domination gone, why do we need a transatlantic military alliance? To many, the answer is obvious, and they are not necessarily wrong in thinking so: the new global, non-state threat of radical Islamic terrorism has replaced the old totalitarian Soviet bloc.

But as today's meeting of the 60-year-old alliance revealed, there is a larger question at stake in the future of NATO. Though its members are generally supportive of combating terrorism (France has committed new troops to Afghanistan, par exemple), they are less certain about expanding the membership of NATO eastward. In his attempt to bring the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine into the fold, President Bush ran into resistance from France and Germany, who wanted to avoid antagonizing Russia.

“Georgia's and Ukraine's membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.”

— Alexander Grushko, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister

While Albania and Croatia were extended formal invitations — the former of which should be eyebrow-raising as Serbia chafes over the recent independence declaration by majority-Albanian Kosovo — Georgia and Ukraine were put on hold for now, (though they have been promised closer relations of some kind). The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia was rejected outright after objections from Greece, who chafed at posters recently on display in Macedonia's capital depicting Greeks as Nazis.

Combined with U.S. plans to install a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe (which NATO backed at the meeting), Russia's skittishness about an American military alliance reaching into its sphere of influence should be understood. It may even be just a point of pride, as former Warsaw Pact members (NATO's old Soviet equivalent) fall away from the old Soviet influence and embrace the West (Bush has been particularly keen to reward Eastern European allies for their participation in Iraq). Perhaps not coincidentally, today's meeting was held in the capital of Romania, a former Warsaw Pact member.

“The Cold War is over and Russia is not our enemy.”

— U.S. President George W. Bush

But as NATO invites each new member into the fold, it invites new possibilities for military intervention in the future — each member of the alliance is pledged to defend the other in the event of an attack. I can't help but recall how the world wars showed us how entangled alliances can be troublesome — something that couldn't have been far from France's and Germany's national memories as they raised their objections.

While it is admirable to seek to bridge the gap that was carved between Europe's East and West during the Cold War, Macedonia, Georgia and Albania each have their own simmering disputes and political baggage to carry with them. As NATO seeks to expand, it should tread carefully, and watch out for the Russian bear in the woods.

11.15.2007 | Too easy to be green?

Ecstasy is all you need
Living in the big machine now …
Now your world is way too fast
Nothing's real and nothing lasts

These lyrics from the Goo Goo Dolls' 2002 release, Gutterflower, serve as pretext to a larger point about the state of the auto industry ahead of this week's Los Angeles Auto Show, not just in America but abroad as well. As German automakers struggle to increase fuel efficiency, America's largest, GM, is celebrating today's pronouncement of its 2007 Chevy Tahoe Hybrid — using a hybrid drive co-developed with its German counterparts — as Green Car of the Year.

Excuse me. Chevy Tahoe? Green? Car?

This effusive article from Reuters praises the Tahoe as "the first full-size hybrid SUV" that gets "21 miles per gallon in the city, the same as a Toyota Camry sedan." 21 miles per gallon? Break out the champagne! We can all go home now.

Even more galling is this gem from GM spokesman Dave Barthmuss:

When you think of a hybrid, you think of a small car that has been built from the ground up to eke out the most miles, but now you can have that kind of system in a large vehicle.

Yes, by all means! Let's throw away any mileage gains that could come from designing a new kind of SUV with efficiency in mind and just throw an electric motor on the existing one. That's progress! (To be fair, GM did make the doors out of aluminum, but most likely only to offset the added weight from the hybrid drive train.)

GM's mild Malibu and Aura hybrids, meanwhile, eke out only small mileage gains (perhaps why GM is advertising them as America's "most affordable" hybrids — they can't win on engineering).

Honda, for its part, is rolling out the first hydrogen fuel cell production car in the middle of next year to a "limited" number of customers in southern California for a bargain $600 per month ("affordable," according to MSNBC — we can only hope they took "relatively speaking" as granted). Good luck finding a filling station!

The Los Angeles Times' Dan Neil takes a longer view, saying that automakers cannot "throw a switch" and turn all their cars into hybrids at once — though that's exactly what GM seems to have done with its Tahoe. And, again according to Neil, automakers have more reason to appear green than just good PR:

Consider the context of this year's auto show. The price of oil is flirting with $100 a barrel. Recent studies suggest that, as the energy demands of emerging giants India and China increase, world oil consumption could rise 55% by 2030. Even oil executives concede we cannot drill or mine enough to satisfy that kind of energy appetite.

Two automakers seem to be headed in the right direction. Ford's CEO, Alan Mulally, talked about reducing vehicle weight as a means to increase fuel efficiency. Toyota, meanwhile, has a concept car with reduced weight instead of added batteries (though its larger image as a green company may be faltering).

On the plus side, automakers are finally waking up to the reality that oil is a finite resource. Their attempts at introducing greener technologies, if self-serving, are about as much as survival as social responsibility. But as they fight higher fuel economy standards at the same time, by and large their green effrontery remains a façade.

5.15.2007 | Frontline: Spying on the Home Front

How far is the government going in spying on its own citizens? That's the question posed by Frontline's latest insightful documentary on our government's inner workings. But the bigger question should be: how far is the government allowed to go, constitutionally speaking? The issue centers over two possible readings of the Fourth Amendment, which states rather simply:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Under one reading (mine included), the government cannot violate a person's privacy without getting a warrant first. But a new, more interpretive reading advanced by the Bush administration and its supporters says that any search can be conducted without a warrant as long as it's reasonable. Not only that, but a former Bush administration lawyer argued that the president's constitutional duties as commander-in-chief can override acts of Congress (i.e. the law).

This insidious shift in how our governing document is interpreted is not only risking our privacy. It seems a minor consideration compared to the even greater – and graver – risk to our fundamental system of checks and balances. Instead of going to Congress to authorize a new surveillance system after September 11 (and remember, this was when Congress and the president were of the same political party), the president decided he could change the status quo at will. If we were at war it would be one thing, but Congress only authorized the use of force when we went into Afghanistan after 9/11. Legally speaking, we are not in a state of war.

These are uncharted legal territories. Not only are we fighting a different kind of enemy, but we have unprecedented potential to use technology to pry into various aspects of people's lives. What is privacy, if it exists, and to what degree can the government violate it, how, and when? The answer to these questions will determine our future as a constitutional republic. Without appropriate safeguards against abuse, our rights are in danger.

Whatever is decided, precedent is already being written, and court decisions may end up defining the answers where Congress has remained silent. What's missing from all this is the voice of the people, a vigorous public debate about the balance between liberty and safety we will strike in a new age of terror. It's up to us to help change that by writing letters to newspapers and our members of Congress.

Benjamin Franklin said that those who would give up essential liberty for even a little temporary safety deserve neither. Let's hope that in the coming days, weeks and years that our country can live up to the better part of those words.

10.06.2006 | A more pragmatic apporach to immigration

Sure, I hate hearing "press 1 for English" as much as anyone else. And the quixotic mission of the Minutemen to guard what parts of the Mexican border they can is, in a word, adorable. But no matter how much we dislike it or how much we complain to our elected officials, the flow of migrants across the border is inexorable. This became clear to me as I was reading a feature article in this month's Mother Jones magazine about the struggles faced by illegal immigrants as they make their way north.

Before you make any assumptions – even I did because M. Jones is a liberal publication – the article I read was not a passionate defense of migrant rights. It was not full of rhetoric and propaganda. Far from it, it was a dispassionate analysis of both sides of the immigration struggle. The only purpose this article served was to awaken me to the reality on the ground. It put together bits and pieces of information I've heard over the years into one complete portrait.

Basically, the situation as it now stands is something like this: originally from Mexico, immigrants are increasingly coming from points further south in Central and South America. They hitch rides on so-called "death trains," clinging to the tops of freight trains and sometimes falling to certain injury – or death. After taking whatever transportation they can to the border, they face a miles-long journey through searing desert and punishing landscape. Getting caught by the border patrol is the least of their worries. It is a matter of sheer survival.

What went through my mind after seeing what these people have to go through to get here is this: if they can travel thousands of miles from home and risk their lives in a barren landscape, what difference will a wall on the border make? This is not to say that we shouldn't try to secure our border. I think that it is worth the effort to do so. But I think that even despite our best efforts, people will still find way to get through. In computer terminology, it is the ultimate firewall hack. You have a border thousands of miles long with millions of people trying to get through. It's like putting your finger in an open water spigot: some will still leak out on the sides.

So what do we do? We must face reality. Any immigration reform this nation undertakes must take this reality into account to be effective. While focusing on feel-good measures like walling off the border may be politically popular, we ignore the reality behind illegal immigration at our peril. One of the primary complaints of those who oppose illegal immigration (a complaint I share) is that they don't learn to speak English. Unlike previous immigrants to our country, they are not assimilating; they are maintaining their native culture.

Many people who criticize the migrants' insistence on their own culture, however, forget one key aspect about previous immigrants: they were forced to assimilate by "Americanization" classes, a predominant anti-immigrant atmosphere, and more recently under legal immigration the requirement to learn English and American history to become U.S. citizens. As a country that recognizes multiculturalism, I don't think we should "Americanize" immigrants necessarily, but it does seem that as long as we do nothing, these immigrants will continue to remain largely isolated and hold to themselves as a separate community.

In writing this, it seems to me that the "path to citizenship" argument makes the most sense in this regard. By providing the incentive of achieving U.S. citizenship status, we will provide a way for people to choose to assimilate without discriminating. They will learn English; they will learn about our history as a nation. Otherwise, I can see no way that the immigration problem will be solved. It is neither practical nor humane to round of 30 million plus migrants for deportation. It is not practical to rely on securing the border alone. It is practical, however, to provide migrants with an opportunity to participate in the American landscape as true Americans. This way we get to keep our country; English will continue to unify our nation; and migrants get the economic opportunity they've been looking for.

1.26.2006 | About time

California has decided that secondhand smoke is a pollutant, no different from diesel exhaust or Benzene, for example. I say it's about time. While the panel that made the unanimous decision cited a "seminal" study linking secondhand smoke to breast cancer, this New Scientist article from 2004 reported that cigarettes are more polluting than diesel exhaust. Considering, too, all the toxic chemicals found in cigarette smoke, as well as studies linking secondhand smoke to all sorts of other health problems, it should have taken more than just a breast cancer study for a decision like this to be made. Next will have to come all the public smoking bans that people will no doubt gripe about, saying it's their own right to kill themselves (euthanasia aside, of course). But what people don't think about it the smoke that isn't filtered that people around them have to breathe. Smoking isn't just unhealthy, it's downright dangerous – to yourself and to others.

12.18.2005 | Wake up! Global warming is real

 

The atmosphere now holds more than one-third more carbon dioxide than it did before the Industrial Revolution. In fact, European scientists reported last month that analysis of ice cores from Antarctica shows that today's level is 27 percent higher than any previous peak looking back 650,000 years.

As temperatures rise and global warming talks stall, it seems global warming is increasingly becoming an inescapble fact. Inescapable that is, for all but the U.S., who staunchly refuses to participate in any forced reduction of carbon emissions. China and India, rising giants whose economies still hover somewhere between developing and industrialized, sit on the sidelines as well.

The problem with modern environmental regulation is that countries that have already polluted to build up their economies (or in our case, still want to pollute) have to contend with developing economies that want to be able to waste their environment just as much as the industrialized nations have. Between these two factions we could find a balance if we had a leader willing to work out the compromises. But the U.S. under the Bush administration, as it does on other matters, continues to hold its head in the sand.

Bush once escaped the problem by saying "we need more study." But the facts are in, even in a report released by his own administration last year. Global warming is real, and between tons of emissions on a daily basis and rampant deforestation (trees, if you recall, convert carbon dioxide into oxygen), we are at least partially to blame.

12.13.2005 | No Christmas for Tookie

I don't usually have sympathy for gang co-founders, but Mr. Williams has dedicated his life to anti-gang activism, writing a number of books denouncing his former ways. Critics complain that he never apologized for the crimes he was convicted of, but I ask how it is possible to apologize for a crime you say you never committed. Some have said that admitting to the crime would have saved his life, but I wonder what that says about our justice system. Does a person deserve to die for maintaining his innocence?

I think Williams' attempts to make amends through his anti-gang activism were enough to grant the mercy of clemency – and even then only life without parole. Williams, now an old man, could have lived the rest of his days in confinement and continued his activism against gang violence.

I think our society has moved too far from a corrections and punishment mentaility toward a revenge mentality when it comes to the death penalty. In the Bible, Jesus saved the life of the adulterer, saying "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Granted, more of us have struggled with sexual sin than committing the high crime of murder, but I think Jesus' mercy and forgiveness are aspects sorely missing from our justice system today.

This is not to say that we should let criminals out on the streets. Crimes, like sins, have their consequences, and people have to live with them. But the key word is live: death provides an escape for some people while prematurely cutting off a chance of reform for others. In this case, I think we lost a powerful voice against gang violence. And all this after the 1,000th execution in the United States since the death penalty was resumed in 1977, while questions are surrounding the exoneration of many death row inmates after review of DNA evidence. A message to think about this Christmas, what is supposed to be a time of peace and reconciliation.

12.07.2005 | Air marshal shooting: bait and switch?

When the U.S. was first pressing for air marshals on international flights in 2003, the issue was painted as one needed to prevent the hijacking of airplanes, which would be an in-flight proposition. Why, then, did this latest shooting happen not in the plane, but in the gate leading to the airport? My understanding of the air marshal program was that it was supposed to prevent a plane in the air from being used in 9/11-style hijackings, or maybe even keep it from blowing up. But killing a person in an airport gate? This isn't what we signed up for. According to this BBC News article, 'Sky marhsals should be the last option', the last resort to protect people in the air. The article also mentions how Israel's air marshals use secret buttons to signal the pilot to dive and throw anyone standing off balance – certainly not a shoot-to-kill policy. We need to reconsider what we're using our air marshals for, and if people's rights aren't being violated in the process.

Déjà vu

After a similar shooting in London earlier this year, U.S. air marshals have opened fire on a bombing suspect at the Miami airport. Not only was the man they shot not on the plane, but he obeyed their order to leave the plane.

I don't want to jump to conclusions – the media was rife with speculation that if a Marshal had opened fire there "must have been a grave threat." I don't want to say that there wasn't. But this latest incident raises the question of whether a shoot-to-kill policy is the best to follow in protecting people from terrorist attacks

Why isn't it possible, for example, for non-lethal rubber bullets or tasers to be used? In fact I had assumed up until this point that marshals were armed with tasers. It's disturbing to me that these people can fire live rounds on an airplane.

While it can be argued that these measures are necessary for our safety, I wonder how much further we will be willing to tolerate the loss of innocent life at the hands of policies like these. In the London case the man was posthumously exonerated and found to be an innocent victim of misunderstanding – it was also later revealed that he didn't jump a subway turnstile as police had claimed. All signs seem to point that a similar misunderstanding may have taken place here.

I was especially disturbed by the appearance of a Florida Congressman on CNN (presumably a Republican) who said he didn't "really care" about the fact that the shooting victim might have been a victim of bipolar disorder. He called the death "unfortunate" and cited the billions of passengers who have flown with air marshals who hadn't been shot. As if that were some sort of comfort.

12.06.2005 | Global warming: U.S. snubs Canada, senators ask, mayors act

As global warming talks continue in Canada and the first Pacific islanders move to escape the effects of global warming, the United States has taken a specifically stubborn approach to the talks: no compromise. It's a wonder we're even there at all, considering we refuse to recognize the 1998 Kyoto agreement that led to the world's first measures to reduce carbon emissions. Canada tried to make a compromise and have talks with the U.S., China and India under a 1992 agreement, but no dice. We remain the world's number one source of carbon dioxide, providing a full 25 percent of the world's total emissions.

Meanwhile, a group of 24 U.S. Senators has asked Bush to participate in the discussions in a constructive way, arctic and tropical indigenous peoples are uniting in the fight against climate change, and 192 U.S. cities, along with a few states, are moving ahead with their own measures. It seems the only people being left behind in all of this is the Bush administration and their stubborn insistence that we do nothing to solve the problem.

Bush's complaint about Kyoto was a good point: exempting India, China and other developing nations from any final agreement on global warming is not an option. But Bush doesn't understand the patience and time needed to work out diplomatic agreements (hence our virtual silence at the global warming talks, and our overly single-minded attempts to bring in more allies in the Iraq invasion). Rather than put pressure on China, India and others to join the agreement and cut emissions, Bush has used the exemptions, along with his continued (and possibly feigned) doubt that global warming exists, to excuse the U.S. from any action entirely. It's like a child throwing up his hands when he doesn't get his way. I wish it weren't possible to make a comparison like that to our own president, but I don't know how else to describe it.