On April 22, more than 300 American lawmakers publicly pledged their unconditional loyalty to a foreign power.

In a letter to the chair and ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, the members of Congress cautioned against “reducing funding or adding conditions on” US welfare checks (totaling $3.8 billion annually) to Israel.

The letter name-checks US President Joe Biden, who, nearly a year ago tried to have it both ways — decrying Israeli annexation of Palestinian land and the eviction of Palestinian residents to make room for Israeli squatters (“settlers”), while likewise volubly assuring Jewish campaign donors,  “I’m not going to place conditions on security assistance.”

Now Biden and members of Congress from both sides of the partisan aisle feign surprise and dismay as the Israeli regime once again makes war on the populations of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip.

What the heck did they expect?

I’m not going to litigate the Israeli-Arab conflict in Palestine here. If that’s what you’re after, there are enough books by apologists for both sides to fill a sizable library. My point is far more narrow: Incentives matter.

Even leaving aside the question of what fate might befall a member of Congress who publicly pledged fealty to Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping instead of to Benjamin Netanyahu, actions have consequences.

The math isn’t that difficult: If I hand my kid a wad of cash and say “please don’t spend this on booze and brass knuckles, but if you do, well, that’s okay, and there’s more where that came from,” I shouldn’t be shocked when I get a midnight phone call concerning bail.

There are many good reasons why US aid to Israel shouldn’t be premised on conditions, but rather cut off entirely. Among them is that US it’s illegal under the 1976 Symington Amendment, which forbids aid to rogue nuclear regimes.

Unfortunately, there are also many political reasons (among them votes, campaign donations, and a brutally effective public relations apparatus) why cutting off aid to Israel is a third rail that few politicians dare touch.

It’s probably expecting too much of American politicians to suggest that they grow spines and stand up to the Israel lobby, or that voters send those who decline to do so back to the private sector. And that means Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews alike will continue to pay in blood for a conflict that American aid subsidizes and rewards.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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On May 8, my wife and I pulled into a local gas station and filled the family car’s tank. It wasn’t intended as a smart move, nor did it result from a premonition. It was just dumb luck. Within 24 hours, we were driving past gas stations with yellow plastic bags over the pump handles and “no gas” signs at the lot entrances.

On May 7 — although they didn’t bother to tell us until a day later —  Colonial Pipeline shut down 5,500 miles of pipeline, which normally carries almost half the gas sold on the US east coast,  due to a cyberattack. On the evening of May 9, to take the edge off, the Biden administration declared an emergency covering 17 states, lifting restrictions on delivering gasoline by truck. No word on when the pipeline will resume operation.

For the last few years, as the price of electricity produced by sunlight and wind power has continued to drop, fossil fuel flacks have insistently informed us that the problem with solar and wind power are that they’re “intermittent and incapable of meeting our needs” (as Ron Stein puts it in Natural Gas Now, an online publication put out by, surprise, the natural gas lobby).

Well, they’re right to a degree: The sun only shines so many hours a day, and we can have cloudy days; the wind isn’t always blowing at sufficient speeds to turn turbines.

What we really need, they say, is reliable old coal, oil, and natural gas.

The fossil fuel advocates either ignore or minimize the progress of  a third technology: Large battery storage capacity.  We’re getting better and better at generating the electricity when conditions are good, then delivering that electricity to your home (or from a home battery rig) when it’s needed.

Another thing the fossil fuel advocates ignore is just how vulnerable fossil fuels are to intermittency due to long and not always reliable supply chains. Pipeline or drilling rig accidents or attacks. Labor conflicts. Derailed trains or wrecked trucks. Suez Canal blockages. Wars, or warlike political embargoes or blockades.

“Intermittency” isn’t the only complaint we hear from the fossil fuel lobby, of course. They also like to complain about government subsidies to renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

I’m with them on that. But  the thing is, they’re not with themselves on that.

Fossil fuels are by far the most government-subsidized energy form on Earth — everything from “steal that land via eminent domain so we can run a pipeline over it,” to “hey, could you pretty please send the US Navy out to secure our tanker routes, take out a competitor, or scare a stubborn supplier?”

Then they throw a hissy if a renewable energy competitor gets special tax treatment on a new solar panel factory.

Coal, oil,  maybe even natural gas are on their way out, even with the massive subsidies they’ve enjoyed for more than a century. Withdraw the subsidies — all of them, to everyone — and the market will likely make even shorter work of fossil fuels.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Move on from ‘old’ fossil fuel, embrace renewable energy,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Trinidad & Tobago Daily Express, 05/10/21

The Biden administration has taken to frequently asserting its intention to return — versus the Trump administration’s departure therefrom — to something called a “rules-based international order.”

What is this supposed “order?” What obligations does it impose, and upon whom? Which governments meet those obligations. Which don’t?

Google returns about 197,000 results on the phrase “rules-based international order.” The top result leads to a paper from the United Nations Association of Australia, which defines it as “a shared commitment by all countries to conduct their activities in accordance with agreed rules that evolve over time, such as international law, regional security arrangements, trade agreements, immigration protocols, and cultural arrangements.”

The US government, on the other hand, usually invokes the term when making unilateral demands of, or militarily intervening against, other governments. Washington defines it as “the US makes the rules; the rest of the world must do as it is ordered.”

On the rare occasion that it takes an even slightly broader view, that view — as voiced by an anonymous US State Department official in a recent press briefing — is that a handful of governments (in this case the G7 group) “has a global perspective, which is not true of every country in the world.” The (US-dominated) G7 makes the rules; the rest of the world must do as it is ordered.

A major problem with the “rules” in question, in addition to the US government wanting to enforce them pursuant to its own agenda while violating them whenever it pleases, is that the US government can’t be trusted to follow the rules even when it makes, and explicitly agrees to, them. Two recent examples:

The Trump administration, in violation of US and international law (“the rules”), began shirking its obligations under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka “the Iran nuclear deal,” in 2018. Instead of bringing the US back into compliance as promised during the 2020 presidential campaign, the Biden administration continues to attempt to negotiate new conditions for holding up its end of a binding international deal.

After two decades of war, the Trump administration negotiated an Afghanistan peace deal with the Taliban, under which US troops were required to exit the country by May 1 of this year. The Biden administration hemmed, hawed, and reneged on that obligation, pushing the withdrawal back by more than three months.

Absent a powerful referee  (the US regime loves to style itself the world’s “only remaining superpower,” immune to pressure from lesser regimes or even the United Nations), the only possible basis for a “rules-based international order” is trust. And the US regime continually proves itself untrustworthy.

If the Biden administration really wants a “rules-based international order,” the first step is to start following the rules.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY