Monthly Archives: June 2018

Op-Eds

North Korea: Pelosi versus Peace

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Urban combat in Seoul, 1950, as US Marines fig...
Urban combat in Seoul, 1950, as US Marines fight North Koreans holding the city. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Which is worse: The specter of nuclear war, or giving US president Donald Trump credit for a significant diplomatic accomplishment?

In her official statement on Trump’s Singapore summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, US House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi makes it clear that a few million incinerated human beings are a small price to pay  to keep the 68-year-old Korean War going. Maybe not forever, but at least until there’s a Democrat in the White House.

“[T]he President handed Kim Jong-un concessions in exchange for vague promises that do not approach a clear and comprehensive pathway to denuclearization and non-proliferation,” Pelosi complains.

What were these dangerous “concessions?”

First, the US armed forces will, conditional upon progress toward North Korean denuclearization, stop conducting the threatening military exercises that they’ve conducted on North Korea’s border and off its coast since the 1953 ceasefire. Some “concession.” If  US and South Korean forces aren’t prepared for a new outbreak of hostilities after 65 years of training, they never will be.

Secondly, again conditional upon North Korea holding up its end of the developing bargain, the US will provide “security guarantees.” Which means, the US and South Korea won’t invade North Korea, just like they haven’t invaded North Korea since 1953. Again, some “concession.”

Would a Democratic president, at the kind of summit with North Korea’s ruler that Trump managed to swing — unlike any past president, Democrat or Republican — have refused those two obvious first-step “concessions?” Not a chance. They were the bare minimum, and if a Democrat had offered them, Pelosi would have publicly celebrated them as like unto the Second Coming.

“President Trump elevated North Korea to the level of the United States while preserving the regime’s status quo,” Pelosi continues, ignoring the fact that every president since Eisenhower has “preserved the regime’s status quo”  — until Trump, who recognized, diplomatically speaking and in relation to the issue at hand, that North Korea is already at “the level of the United States.”

If the Korean War is going to be sorted out, it will be the belligerents — North Korea, South Korea, China and the United States, likely with significant input from Russia — doing the sorting.

But Pelosi,  the Democratic Party, and the party’s allies in the media, would rather it NOT get sorted out.

That’s disgusting.

Posturing America as “the exceptional nation,” Kim as a supplicant in rags, and those other governments as mere hangers-on could have had only two possible outcomes. One was the status quo ante.  The other — a danger faced by then-president Barack Obama in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal — was those other parties negotiating their own deal, leaving a petulant, marginalized America to watch their parade from the sidelines.

A genuine and durable peace on the Korean peninsula may or may not be achievable, but Trump seems to be giving it the old college try. Pelosi and her party, having proven unable to  lead and unwilling to follow on the matter, should at least have the decency to get the hell out of the way.

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

Op-Eds

Let’s Call the Farm Bill What it is: Corporate Welfare

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Tractor, CC0 from MaxPixel

Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation,  doesn’t want the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 — the “Farm Bill” — used as a political bargaining chip. “Our nation’s farmers and ranchers are not pawns in a political game,” he writes. “They are the lifeblood of our nation.”

Duvall’s claims might be more convincing if he didn’t make them right after  touting the political power of the agriculture lobby in unseating members of Congress deemed insufficiently loyal to it, powering “rural America’s” election of Donald Trump to the presidency, etc. … and threatening to use that political power as needed to preserve the tens of billions of dollars in corporate welfare represented by the Farm Bill.

Yes, corporate welfare.

As of 1870, one of every two Americans worked in agriculture. As of 2012, that number was less than one in 50 and sinking fast toward one in 100. Advances in science and technology allow one fiftieth as many people to feed ten times as many mouths (not counting exports) now as then.

Those advances have come hand in hand with corporate consolidation of the same sort seen in other industries.  The day of the Depression-era family farm that my mother grew up on as one of 12 children, operating on human and animal power until they got their first truck right after World War Two and electricity shortly after that, is long gone. The kind of subsistence farm I lived on as a child, and the single-family operations my dad served as a dairy worker until his retirement in the 1990s, are fading away as well. Today, nearly all of the food you eat is produced either by, or under contract to, a few large companies.

The rawboned, overall-clad man driving a tractor 12 hours a day, calling the cows in for their evening milking, slopping the hogs, and sitting down for an evening pipe on the front porch before bed was once my grandfather. Now he’s a carefully cultivated image of the past, used by organizations like Duvall’s to propagandize for the transfer of billions dollars every year from your pockets to theirs via the political process, on top of what you spend in honest exchange for their livestock and crops.

The Farm Bill isn’t going to save a way of life that for practical purposes no longer exists, nor is it going to bring back that way of life. In fact,  a century of agricultural subsidies and welfare programs are at least partially responsible for killing off the family farm as we once knew it. Those subsidies and programs attracted people who were more interested in the subsidies and programs than in the farming. In this case, literally, the one percent.

Don’t reform the Farm Bill. Kill it.

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

Op-Eds

Election Omens: Blue Wave or 2018 Flushes?

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Coming out of the 2016 presidential election, Democrats had reason for optimism about their House and Senate prospects in 2018. In the last 21 midterm elections (starting with FDR’s first term), the president’s party has gained seats in both houses of Congress only twice (1934 and 2002) while gaining seats in one house but not both four times (1962,  1970,  1982, and 1998). On average, the president’s party loses 30 House seats and four Senate seats.

So, are we in for a “Blue Wave,” or for the electoral equivalent of a commercial for blue-toned  water swirling in the toilet?

As I write this, no combination of Republican/Democratic control of the houses is trading at more than 41 cents (of a possible dollar) on PredictIt, where people have real money riding on the outcome.  That’s a bad sign for the opposition.

Democrats are outpacing Republicans on the national “generic ballot,” but each House district is a separate contest, most of them gerrymandered as a “safe” seat for one party or the other. The CBS/YouGov Battleground Tracker, as of early June,  rates the House as a tossup: Democrats climbing from 194 seats to a one-seat majority of 219, but with a nine-seat margin of error.

The Blue Wave isn’t shaping up as a tsunami. Why?

One clue might be the gigantic collective yawn greeting rumors that former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz might run for president in 2020. His centrist “Democrats need to look more like Republicans to win” message — also pushed by the Democratic National Committee versus upstart progressive midterm  primary candidates around the country — just doesn’t excite anyone very much.

A second clue: In California’s June 5 primaries,  five independents, two Greens, and one Libertarian battled their way past the state’s “Top Two” primary barrier and onto November’s general election ballot, from which the “Top Two” scheme was expressly designed to exclude them in favor of Republicans and Democrats (mostly Democrats). Independents come in all flavors, but Greens and Libertarians reliably run from the Democratic establishment’s left on civil liberties issues.

The message: Putting a “D” next to your name,  not liking Donald Trump, and telling scary stories about the Russians is not enough this year.  Traditionally Democratic constituencies are up for grabs because their usual party of preference isn’t offering them anything of substance.

In the short term, Democrats are courting losses that could have been wins. In the long term, they may finally be creating an opening for the third party America desperately needs.

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