“We’ve laid out for the leadership of Iran what we’re willing to accept in order to get back into the JCPOA” US president Joe Biden said at a press conference in Jerusalem on July 14. “We’re waiting for their response. When that will come, I’m not certain, but we’re not going to wait forever.”

That’s an odd way of putting things, seeing as how it’s Joe Biden who’s spent the last year hemming, hawing, and finding new excuses to avoid “getting back into” the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka the “Iran nuclear deal,” while the Iranians have continually indicated that they’ll gladly “get back into” the deal any time the US does.

The history, briefly:

After a decade of the aforementioned US hemming, hawing, and finding new excuses to back out every time Iran said “yes,” the JCPOA was finally agreed to, signed, and ratified as a United Nations Security Council resolution in 2015.

It was an easy deal for the Iranians to accept, since all it did was forbid them to develop nuclear weapons, which they were already bound not to do under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and by a clerical fatwa declaring such development a sin against Islam, and which, according to both the US and Israeli intelligence communities, they hadn’t been doing.

The US, though, immediately started defaulting on its own obligations under the JCPOA, which involved lifting sanctions on Iran. And in 2018, US president Donald Trump announced that the US was henceforth going to just openly violate the deal. He characterized the violation policy as “withdrawal,” but the only way to “withdraw” from a UN Security Council resolution is to withdraw from the UN itself, which the US has not done.

Only since then, at a careful, slow pace, have the Iranians begun enriching uranium to higher levels than the deal allows for. Not to weapons or even NPT-violating level. Just enough to make the point that if the US won’t keep the deal, they won’t either.

Biden, meanwhile, pledged during his 2020 presidential campaign to return the US to meeting its obligations under the deal, but always with caveats and “what ifs.” And since actually becoming president, he’s worked overtime to avoid either a new deal or following through on the old one … all while blaming the Iranians.

The Iranians don’t seem to have, want, or be working on getting nukes. But for some reason, Biden seems bound and determined to poke and push at them until they decide heck, why not get nukes?

Why? Two reasons.

First, the US has effectively been at war with Iran for four decades, since the revolution that overthrew the US-puppet, CIA-installed Shah. Iran is an evergreen excuse for meddling in the Middle East and shoveling money at the US military-industrial complex.

Second, the Israeli lobby, which enjoys considerable influence in US politics, uses the fake “nuclear Iran” threat to keep US aid checks coming.

Biden should get off the dime and re-implement the original deal, or stop pretending he’s interested.

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 June, the European Union passed legislation requiring all mobile devices to use one specific port type (USB-C) for re-charging their batteries.

US Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) , Ed Markey (D-MA), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) think that’s a great idea, and that the US should adopt it as well. They’ve asked Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo to come up with a “comprehensive strategy” to take charge of how you charge your phones, tablets, etc.

“Consumers shouldn’t have to keep buying new chargers all the time for different devices,” Warren tweeted on July 7. “We can clear things up with uniform standards — for less expense, less hassle, and less waste.”

Looking to government for “less expense, less hassle, and less waste” is like looking to your favorite local buffet restaurant for fewer dishes and smaller portions. Expense, hassle, and waste is pretty much the dictionary definition of what government does. This case is no exception.

Let’s take this astoundingly stupid idea from the top on those three metrics.

Expense: At present, we’re all free to choose the devices we buy and, if we’re worried about the expense of chargers and cables, choose devices which are compatible with each other. If your phone with a micro-USB port dies, you can buy a new phone that’s compatible with the chargers and cables you already have instead of having to buy new USB-C cables.

Hassle: Right now, you can walk into pretty much any electronics, department, or even convenience store and find a cable to fit your needs. A government-imposed standard will, over time, result in older types of cables becoming “specialty” items that are harder to find.

Waste: Right now, you can re-use your existing cables with new devices. A uniformity requirement will eventually put those existing cables in landfills as you move on to new devices which are, by law, forbidden to use them.

And all that’s just on your end. How much cost, hassle, and waste will the proposed standard impose on manufacturers whose current devices come with now-illegal ports? Those devices will have to be re-designed. The factories that make them will have to be re-tooled, workers re-trained.

Let’s add a fourth item to the list of reasons legally required uniformity is a bad idea: It will slow down technological innovation.

Suppose the government requires all devices to come with USB-C ports. Who’s going to spend the money to develop USB-D or some other new port technology, even if that technology would likely prove much more efficient, reliable, etc.?

The regulatory delays and expenses in getting better charging devices to market would make innovation much less profitable … until and unless the government REQUIRED the new port, which would put you right back in the same expense/hassle/waste position as when the first requirement was imposed.

If 1880s legislators had imposed “uniform standards” on transportation, we’d all still be staring at the rear ends of horses from our wagons. And spending proportionally more of our time and money to get from hither to yon.

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

“Recent Supreme Court rulings have threatened the rights of New Yorkers to make decisions about their own bodies and our right to protect New Yorkers from gun violence,” proclaimed New York state governor Kathy Hochul in a statement released from Albany on the first of July.

That New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen struck down New York state restrictions on what items its citizens can carry on their bodies, and that supporters of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision see it as offering protection from violence, shows the inconsistencies in the very divisions entrenched by the Court.

Gerald Ford noted in a 1974 Presidential address that those realizing that “a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have” are nonspecialists who “are a lot better economists than most economists care to admit.” Giving the Supreme Court outsize power to override the legislative and executive branches of government has likewise been the sort of blunder in political strategy made by the most devoted political strategists.

For partisans aiming to scare their bases into line, nothing beats a Supreme Court balanced like Humpty Dumpty on the edge of the wall of polarization between the red and blue states. The toppling of that balance has cracked what protection they gave to civil liberties on one side or the other of the culture wars. The dissipation of what Clint Eastwood called the “liberal dither over Miranda rights” has been made clear by how ignored their overruling by Vega v. Tekoh has been compared to the overturn of Roe v. Wade. And all the efforts of the kingmakers will never unscramble it.

Eric Flint, a science fiction writer whose prognostications are informed by a history of hard-nosed activism, observed in 2018 that the notion that “the Supreme Court is the all-powerful institution in American politics” was disproved by its history.  “Slavery, segregation, slavish obedience to corporate welfare, grossly unconstitutional internment … are gone. Not thanks to the Supreme Court” — whose Justices consistently upheld them all — “but thanks to the struggles of the millions of men and women who fought against these injustices through the various means for mass action in a democratic society.”

The way out of the political disorder that was inevitably going to be unleashed by the Supreme Court’s essentially elitist nature lies in society routing around it, not just via more responsive and local sectors of governance but by expanding the realms of individual choice without waiting for its go-ahead.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “It’s coming from inside the courtroom” by Joel Schlosberg, Reno, Nevada Gazette Journal, July 10, 2022
2. “It’s coming from inside the courtroom” by Joel Schlosberg, USA Today, July 10, 2022
3. “It’s Coming From Inside The Courthouse” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, July 10, 2022
4. “It’s coming from inside the courthouse” by Joel Schlosberg, Sidney, Montana Herald, July 10, 2022
5. “It’s coming from inside the courthouse” by Joel Schlosberg, Elko, Nevada Daily Free Press, July 11, 2022
6. “It’s Coming From Inside the Courthouse” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, July 12, 2022