“Unity begins with the truth,” US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) tweeted on January 13, arguing in favor of the impeachment of then-President Donald Trump,  “and the truth demands accountability.”

Senator Warren just loves her some “accountability.” In 2018, she proposed the “Accountable Capitalism Act.” In 2019, the “Corporate Executive Accountability Act.” In 2020, according to Forbes, she demanded “Accountability From 181 CEOs.” A Google search on her name and the word “accountability” returns 668,000 results.

The relevant question when Senator Warren brings up “accountability” is, of course, “accountability to whom?”

And the feeling one gets, regardless of her claims to be acting on behalf of workers, consumers, or corporate shareholders, is that it’s really all about accountability to … drum roll please … US Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Warren’s not the only politician with such an attitude, of course. She’s just more loudly transparent about it than most, which is why I picked her to pick on here.

Her mask (no, not the COVID-19 mask, the other one) briefly came off on March 25 when she told Amazon that she’s “fight[ing] to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets.”

She means to rule. She thinks she’s ENTITLED to rule. And the peasants (a group she places even Jeff Bezos, at the moment the second wealthiest man in the world, in!)? Our job is to keep our smart-aleck mouths shut and do as we’re told.

So, to whom is Senator Warren  herself accountable?

The easy answer is “the voters of Massachusetts.” But the US has a de facto “Senator for Life” system under which incumbents get re-elected more than 90% of the time. Not so much because their voters love them, as because incumbents rake in a lot of money to hold onto their seats for as long as they like, while challengers tend to struggle.

Perhaps she’s accountable to her campaign contributors? But owners or employees of the “Big Tech” firms she says she wants to “break up” rank high on that list (Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, and, yes, Amazon are all in the top 20). Are they trying to buy her off, or maybe change her mind? Either way, it doesn’t seem to be working.

As best I can tell, the only person US Senator Elizabeth Warren considers herself accountable to is US Senator Elizabeth Warren.

And on that count, US Senator Elizabeth Warren is par for the course as American politicians go.

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

In 2018, telling us that “trade wars are good, and easy to win,” then-US-president Donald Trump imposed 15-25% tariffs (versus the previous rate of 10% and the average US tariff of 1.6%) on various Chinese goods, ranging from “dental cements and other dental fillings” to “Trout, fresh or chilled, excluding fillets, other meat portions, livers and roes.”

China wasn’t the only target.  Trump also imposed a 20% tariff on Canadian lumber.

Turns out (as if we didn’t already know from previous experiences) that trade wars are bad and nearly impossible to “win,” if “winning” means making the citizens of the country imposing tariffs more prosperous.

Sure, SOME people — the owners of, and some of the workers in, the industries Trump claimed to be “protecting” — came out ahead. But everyone else lost.

Trump’s tariffs aren’t the only reasons that the stuff you buy (especially stuff made of steel or wood) is more expensive now than in 2018. But they’re among those reasons.

Four months into his presidency, Joe Biden seems disinclined to roll Trump’s tariffs back and bring these ruinous trade wars to an end.

Why? Because in one key area, Trump and Biden were competing for the same “voter base.” That area is the Rust Belt, and the base is industrial labor. Trump won the 2016 election on the back of what we used to call “Reagan Democrats.” Like Reagan, Trump carried those states by promising to bring jobs “back” from abroad. And this has always been part of Biden’s pitch as well, a pitch he’s used to bring organized labor in on his side in every campaign for office he’s ever run.

Yes, Trump and Biden both pretend that it’s  “China,” not you, paying those tariffs.

But according to Moody’s Investors Service, more than 90% of the tariffs on “China” are actually absorbed by US importers of Chinese goods in the form of higher prices. And guess who those importers are passing the price increases onto?

You, that’s who.

Every extra penny you shell out for every good you buy in which tariffs are involved is essentially a campaign contribution to whichever politician keeps (or promises to keep) those tariffs in place. That includes domestically produced goods whose makers can jack up their prices because tariffs raised their foreign competitors’ costs.

Tariffs are the domestic equivalent of foreign economic sanctions, which in turn are the economic equivalent of war. No, not war on “China.” War on you.

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

On May 23, a fighter jet intercepted Ryanair Flight 4978 as it was about to exit Belarus’s airspace en route from Athens, Greece to Vilnius, Lithuania. Citing a supposed bomb threat (apparently contrived by regime agents on board the plane), Belarus air traffic control ordered the Boeing 737 to turn around and land in Minsk.

On the ground, regime police entered the plane and abducted opposition journalist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega. Belarus’s state media reports that the hijacking/abduction was carried out on the personal orders of President Alexander Lukashenko.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken (rightly) called the operation a “shocking act.”

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU Commission, tweeted (correctly) that it was “outrageous and illegal” and that Protasevich “must be released immediately.” That’s hard to disagree with.

Unfortunately, neither the US, nor several EU regimes, have any business grandstanding on the matter. They’ve pulled the same kind of stunt before, at least as recently as eight years ago.

In July 2013, Bolivian President Evo Morales’s plane left Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport en route back to La Paz.  The Dassault Falcon 900 FAB-001 was forced to land in Austria after being refused entry into French, Italian, Portuguese, and Italian airspace.

Why? Because while in Russia, Morales had indicated (in an interview with Russian state media) his willingness to offer asylum to American whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The US government, in the words of Jen Psaki (currently White House Press Secretary, but back then a State Department spokesperson) had  “been in contact with a range of countries across the world who had any chance of having Mr. Snowden land or even transit through their countries.”

Austrian authorities claim they searched the plane for Snowden. Bolivian authorities say that Morales refused to allow a search. But either way there’s little doubt that several EU regimes, at the request (implicit or explicit) of the US regime, colluded to force a plane — and not just any old regular plane, but a diplomatically protected plane — to land in an effort to help abduct a political refugee.

No, I’m not defending Lukashenko. He’s not very defensible. I hope that he can be pressured into freeing Protasevich and Sapega alive and unharmed.

But if the “leaders of the free world” didn’t act exactly like Lukashenko whenever it suits them or serves their interests, they’d be in a much better position to mobilize global action to achieve that outcome.

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