Electricity doesn't "just happen."

Parts of Texas went dark.

We count on electricity for our food, water, heat, sewerages, communication. Things got miserable fast.

A closer look at electrical systems.

Early in my career as a Financial Advisor, utility stocks were safe, steady investments in a highly regulated "natural monopoly." Utility companies generated power and distributed it to consumers. A state Public Utilities Commission approved their plans and costs, then approved an amount that consumers--called ratepayers--were charged to cover the costs of the facilities, plus guarantee a respectable rate of return, typically seven or eight percent, plus a little growth to match inflation. Much of that profit got distributed as dividends to the stockholders.

By 2005 everything had changed. Utility companies were wheeling energy in the spot market and gaming the system when they could, going off-line for maintenance in order to drive up the price, then selling at high prices to desperate buyers. Utility companies were players. They were Wall Street hot shots, buying and selling one another. Some flew high, some went bankrupt. 

John Flenniken is a retired safety engineer at an Oregon utility. He had a close up view of the industry, and has a perspective on what happened in Texas. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Guest Post by John Flenniken

Crises seem to come out of nowhere. This one didn't. There is a history of events leading to this moment in Texas.

Over recent years electric utilities went through a “consolidation" by merger and acquisition. For example in Texas, Houston Lighting & Power became Reliant Energy, and is now GenOn (a holding company) serving Texas, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland, headquartered in Houston. The consolidation was a net positive for investors, giving economy of scale. 

All states maintain their own utility boards (Public Utility Commissions) for oversight. Bigger companies usually mean greater efficiency. PUC boards set and monitor service standards while allowing a utility to have a guaranteed service territory and return on investment to keep serving it. Companies centralized manpower, rolling stock, and stockpiled materials when they can. Service centers closed in towns that used to have a small local footprint. Call centers replaced local customer service personnel. Utilities used to be the reliable sponsor of Boy Scouts and local civic clubs. No longer. Now it is all about cost cutting.

Consolidation was well under way as early as the late 1980s. Texas is a special case, however. Texas has a Public Utility Commission of Texas, but it doesn’t coordinate with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). FERC came into existence when back-to-back blackouts affecting eastern Canada down to New York in the 1960's made it painfully clear that how the system was managed affected everyone connected to the transmission system. However, rather than linking their transmission to the rest of the U.S., Texas' electric utilities installed breakers at their state lines. These devices operate to isolate the state. This isn't an accident. It's a feature that allows Texas to avoid regulation by FERC.

Click: Texas Tribune

Texas is unique in being a state with its own system and regulator. To over-simplify a bit, Texas' handpicked board, the Energy Regulatory Council of Texas (ERCOT), operates and manages its deregulated market. FERC's regulations are just advisory to Texas. The benefit for Texas is from selling to the highest bidder the unregulated portion of electricity on the interstate transmission system. It creates a spot market where the price at the moment can go from almost nothing to whatever the market will pay. 

The rate any customer pays is set by the state PUCs, with utilities generating power to sell to their own customers. PUCs also allow a pass-through of more costly power from electricity generated by other utilities and purchased when needed. All utilities have some or all of their own generation to meet their customers' demand, and that was the tradition: Produce power for your own monopoly customers. Deregulation changed this arrangement turning local utilities into both producers and shoppers in the wholesale market, getting and selling energy where they can, through long-term energy delivery contracts and in that spot market. Electricity was turned into a commodity.

Electricity is different from every other commodity. Uniquely, the moment electricity is produced it is consumed. The job of scheduling the amount of energy required at any given time becomes extremely important in this new arrangement. The prices paid for a unit of electricity, the megawatt, vary by the generator that produced it and its price at the moment it is created and delivered.

Enter renewables--solar, wind, hydro pump storage--into the mix of thermal from fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) and nuclear. Costs associated with serving the utilities' customers are calculated mostly using thermal and nuclear generation figures. This is the number PUC boards use to set the amount you can be billed for their regulated return on investment. Now, by separating generation from delivery to customers, the risks and costs of providing the generation are shifted to the generating company. 

The deregulated spot market functions like any free and unregulated market. If there is high demand there is no limit on the price of a megawatt. But if the demand is low or cannot be sold, the megawatt is lost and the cost is absorbed by the company that produced it. There is strong incentive to get the amount just right, no more, no less. It is efficient but fragile.

Renewable sources of energy are recent additions to the pool of energy that companies sell into the wholesale market. They are a small part of Texas' winter electrical generation, but they were a handy target to criticize to divert attention from what was a policy and management problem. While wind turbines can be built to function in all kinds of weather, specific modifications must be built into the wind turbine to withstand extreme cold and icing conditions. Cold weather modifications add maintenance and labor costs. Operators of wind energy farms built with investor money in Texas did not add a cold weather package to each unit. As a result, some turbines iced up and quit generating.

What happened to the thermal generation? Here a cascade of events overtook their system. Texas uses more electricity in the summer for air-conditioning and petroleum production so they schedule plant maintenance in the winter. Knowing they can buy on the spot market made this smart in normal winters. In Texas, thermal units and pipelines are not built to run in extreme cold. As a result these units could not get back into operation. Had ERCOT followed FERC standards for their system Texas might have been in a better position to keep the lights on. They didn't.

The lessons in Texas are clear. We need a North American standard for interstate electric transmission. The “smart grid” that Obama proposed in his infrastructure plan to stimulate the economy would have supplied resiliency to the system. A smart grid would help balance out the system by linking the entire country, allowing power to be shifted instantly. Since commodification of energy created a more fragile system, we need to implement a better grid system to replace the reliability that the modern system lost.

The lack of electricity isn't just an inconvenience. People freeze in the dark.

Texas freeze mess was no accident

"Efficiency" is dangerous.

The Texas mess is not an Act of God. It was a choice.

After a week of false starts and finger-pointing, people are settling in on the reality of what went wrong in Texas. Simply put: Their system was designed to fail when it did. Texas policy-makers wanted their energy grid to be efficient and low-cost, and it was. It was market-based, with energy providers competing with each other. The system incentivized matching load with resources, to avoid waste. Utility companies made investments that pencilled out to bring value. 

Click: Texas Tribune

Texans were proud of their system, one that was independent of the rest of the federal system. They avoided the regulations that would have required redundancy and waste. The system was an example of no frills government and the genius of private enterprise and free markets.

The problem is that a system like that isn't robust against unusual events. It wasn't supposed to get to zero degrees Fahrenheit in Texas, and then stay there for a few days. It was something that could happen, of course, and they had earlier experience with something near it, but Texas did not respond by hardening its energy infrastructure. There was no incentive to do so. Market competition does not reward unproductive backup systems.

When the unusual happened, the system broke. Millions of people lost power. They got cold. The water system failed. Interior pipes froze, and then broke. As water begins flowing again, buildings are being flooded.

Risk transfer. Consumers were unaware of it, but they were paying a hidden price. The utility system transferred the risk of failure in a cold spell to consumers. Some of those risks--the discomfort, the inconvenience, the injury and deaths caused by carbon monoxide as people tried to keep warm--were borne directly. Some of the property damage costs were re-transferred to property-casualty insurers. 

If the property-casualty insurers priced the risk correctly, then some of the low cost of energy was regularly showing up in higher cost to insure against hazards like water damage. People blamed the insurer, not the energy companies. Someone always pays the price: the consumer, other consumers, stockholders, someone. Risk managers at insurance companies are re-calculating right now, re-pricing homeowners' and landlords' insurance. Texans will pay next year and thereafter, seen in higher rates. There is no free lunch. 

Improbable events have giant consequence precisely because they are unguarded against. Systems with a giant flaw can work perfectly well--until they don't. That was Texas. 

That lesson may be lost in the flurry of excuses and efforts to shift blame and costs. People who bought less-expensive homeowners' insurance policies will finally, to their dismay, read the fine print on exclusions.

Austin Newspaper

Politicians are pointing fingers. Texas Governor Greg Abbot and GOP rising-star U.S. Representative Dan Crenshaw both went onto Fox to say it was primarily the fault of the Green New Deal and windmills that iced up. Blame Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That explanation is falling apart--wind turbans work great in Antartica and Greenland--but they got the idea out there early and the villain is plausible to GOP voters. It is an easier target to understand than how natural gas pipelines can solidify and gages in nuclear power plants freeze and fail. 

Ted Cruz's trip to Cancun and back is another distraction. Cruz did not make the temperature cold, but he serves as an example of a politician leaving his presumed duty post, to go to a Ritz Carlton, no less. He is an easy target, and a more comfortable one than looking into the mirror.

The Texas event was not an accident. Failure was built into the system as an intentional tradeoff between efficiency and cost. It was a policy choice. 

"Insult to injury." The optics of elite privilege

     "The reports of Cruz’s alleged vacation spread quickly on social media, catapulted by Texans‘ frozen frustration. If true, the trip would add even more insult to injury for a battered state dealing with a historic disaster."

                 KSAT-TV, A San Antonio ABC affiliate

Bad mistake.

His trip to Cancun fits a narrative that is motivating American politics. The big shots play by their own rules. They live high while we suffer.

It is 7:40 a.m. on the West Coast as I type this.  America's media outlets erupted over the past forty minutes. They woke up to something passed around on social media last night, photos of Cruz and family on an airplane to Mexico. 

The lead sentences to each story, embed the notion of disapproval and resentment: 

"Barbs fly at Ted Cruz for heading to Cancun as millions in Texas freeze without power."

Tweet circulating

"Ted Cruz under fire as photos of him circulate. . . ."

"There's only one Texan warm right now as Ted Cruz bolted to Cancun. . . ."

"Ted Cruz accused of flying to Cancun amid Texas power outage. . . ."

"Why freeze in the dark with the rest of Texas when you can jet set to a beach resort. . . ."

"Ted Cruz flees with family. . . tries to get an upgrade. . . 'shameless' senator deserts millions of desperate Texans. . . ."

And more like these.

Today Ted Cruz is the target. The conservative media (NY Post, Washington Times, NewsMax, One America Network) have not yet added their voice to this story, although Fox's website was among the first. Conservative sources have their own handy targets:

Gavin Newsom eats at fancy Napa Restaurant!

Nancy Pelosi keeps fancy chocolate ice cream in Sub Zero freezer!

Newsom maskless at fancy restaurant

AOC modeled expensive dress for Vogue photo shoot!

The error for Gavin Newsom was not simply that he was  photographed after dinner, sitting and talking with table-mates when he should have been masked. Had he been at a Subway or McDonalds the image would not have the same sting. He was eating at an expensive--"exclusive" as the news stories reported it--Napa restaurant, The French Laundry. 

Nancy Pelosi was not merely eating ice cream. It was gourmet ice cream, not sold at the local Safeway. And it came out of a gleaming Sub Zero home refrigerator, a high end brand.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez advocates for people who don't own designer dresses. Neither does she, but she wore one for the photo.

Gavin Newsom is facing a recall election. The photo of him eating a meal at The French Laundry figures prominently in articles about him. It symbolizes something people don't like. Californians are inconvenienced and sometimes suffering under COVID restriction rules Newsom promulgates. Americans want to see him suffering alongside them, practicing what he preaches, experiencing the same miseries. 

Pelosi, too. She can afford fancy ice cream and a nice freezer--as can millions of fellow Californians--and can buy it with money she earned herself, but that doesn't mitigate. It exacerbates. She is a public servant. She gets a salary. We want to know about her sacrifices, not her pleasures.

Nancy Pelosi eats this ice cream. Do you?

Ted Cruz could tweet suggestions for Texans to stay safe and urge federal emergency money be sent to Texas as easily from Cancun as from Houston--more easily, since Houston currently lacks electricity. But the symbolism is huge: He isn't suffering with us. He took care of himself. He can afford to go to Cancun. He left his post, even if restoring power isn't his job. Ted Cruz has privilege.

I consider the criticism of Cruz--and Newsom, Pelosi, and AOC--to be unfair and petty.  Senior politicians have a right to live and have some personal space. Still, I recognize the criticism as inevitable and damaging, and the behavior of each of them to have been political error. People are looking for symbols of hypocrisy and privilege, and each offered them up. It was bad political tradecraft. 

The trip to Cancun is terrible optics for Cruz. This is body language people understand. It dwarfs the impact of his positions on issues. Who can keep track of who believes what policies, and whether Cruz is on the right side of it?  But everyone understands that Ted Cruz is warm and they are cold. When Cruz accuses others of wrongdoing, people will see a guy who took care of Number One and tried to sneak out of town. They don't like it. It will haunt him.

Cancun Cruz. 

Update at 10:00.  Ted Cruz returning home immediately.  Too late, but good plan.  He will say he realized he was needed at at home, and returning early was his plan all along. Critics will say that is bullshit. Lyin' Ted. Skip-town-Ted. Cancun Cruz.

Free? Since when is money free?

President Joe Biden proposed a COVID relief bill with a price of $1.9 trillion. 

He wants to "go big." It makes political sense, and he can do it.

I worry.

The Biden Administration entered office with three crises underway. There is the COVID crisis--3,000 people a day dying and a vaccine program noteworthy for its logjams. There is the economic crisis--businesses closing, people out of work, renters unable to pay rent. And there is a political credibility crisis--the public lost faith in our institutions of government.

Lucky for now

Biden lacks the charisma and excitement that Trump or Obama brought to the table, but he has decades of experience. He tackled the three crises.

He resisted the temptation to get involved with the impeachment. It is hard to notice things that aren't there, there were no headlines: Biden Blasts Traitor Trump. A lot of Democrats would have loved to see that fighting spirit, but it would have been a distraction from the agenda and exacerbated the political crisis. 

The second thing he did right was propose a big COVID spending plan: $1.9 trillion and then immediately invite a group of Republican leaders to the White House to urge bi-partisan support. It was a gesture that didn't work. Their response was to suggest a bill costing a third of that: $600 billion. Again, notice what Biden did not do. He did not blast it as a disgusting outrage, proof-positive that Republicans like it when young mothers starve and small businesses fail. He simply rejected it, saying it wasn't enough. He stayed polite.

The third thing Biden did right was learn from Obama's mistake. Obama was elected amid the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. Obama wanted bi-partisan support for an infrastructure spending bill to address economic slack. He also wanted bi-partisan support for universal access to health care. Obama got played. On both issues, the GOP slow- walked, suggesting compromises, burning through the presidential honeymoon period when the public is looking to see what their vote accomplished. 

Town Hall

Nothing much. It was the worst possible message for a Democrat elected to office with a promise of "hope and change." Recovery was frustrating and slow. People went from having equity in their home to being under water. Republicans--and the wider public-- attributed the failure to Obama. He was "feckless," as became the word used repeatedly by Fox and GOP officeholders considering a run for president. The 2010 midterm election was a disaster for Democrats.

Biden noticed and learned. Democrats like to spend money because they are the party of active, engaged government. Republicans were willing to vote for spending when Trump was president because it brought credit to Trump for a strong economy. There was no Congressional constituency for fiscal discipline. 

Now that a Democrat is in the White House Republicans are re-discovering fiscal discipline, but he is brushing them off. Biden has a tool Obama did not have: MMT--Modern Monetary Theory. Over the course of the past few years a delightful idea grew to dominate punditry and Congress. Spending doesn't "cost." Deficits don't matter. Debt doesn't matter. The United States can create new money without consequence so therefore there is no great need to show discipline or restraint in fiscal policy. The only real constraint is inflation, and we don't have it and don't see it coming any time soon, and a little inflation would be a good thing anyway, but we will deal with any problems if they come up, but they won't. It is a very happy, optimistic, and forgiving theory. 

Biden is pushing ahead with the $1.9 trillion stimulus. He just got help from an unexpected source: Trump. Trump grabbed the limelight, making news with spectacular insults directed at Mitch McConnell, saying he is an ugly, dour, corrupt, incompetent Senate leader who cost Trump the election for president and the senate for Republicans with his ridiculous concern over fiscal restraint:

In "Mitch's Senate" over the last two election cycles, I single-handedly saved at least 12 Senate seats, more than eight in the 2020 cycle alone—and then came the Georgia disaster, where we should have won both U.S. Senate seats, but McConnell matched the Democrat offer of $2,000 stimulus checks with $600. How does that work? It became the Democrats' principal advertisement, and a big winner for them it was. McConnell then put himself, one of the most unpopular politicians in the United States, into the advertisements. 

This is pure Trump. Some Republicans will love it, some hate it, but it has the effect of eroding any unified effort by the GOP to stop the Biden stimulus bill. 

President Joe Biden is in a sweet spot just now. It won't last. Presidential honeymoons don't. Problems come up and they get blamed on the president, but for now each of the three crises look positive for Biden. President Biden likely has the votes to spend a great deal of money; states and localities are improving vaccine distribution; and Biden is doing his job while Trump reminds a majority of Americans what they didn't like.

Warning and worry.  

I think Modern Monetary Theory is a crock of nonsense. Debts eventually get paid or written off. Debts are someone else's asset, and someone is counting on that money. In an environment of "free," people spend with abandon and it feels great. Free food at a buffet. Free stock trading at Robin Hood. Free credit.

Biden may get away with it. Luck and timing matter. But big deficit spending is dangerous. Biden may be planting seeds that will blow up on him, just as the "free money" era of mortgage security syndication blew up on George Bush. 

Eventually the piper gets paid.

     

Assassination risk ahead.

Keep the Capitol fence. Protect Senators. There are angry people out there.

They are motivated. They are armed. They think they are justified.

Thirty percent of Americans could not handle losing an election. Think how badly Americans would handle an assassination.

If any one of fifteen Democratic senators dies, we would have a constitutional crisis. 

We are hearing complaints that the Capitol fence and National Guard troops are an over-reaction. Fox News hosts complain Nancy Pelosi is trying to stigmatize Trump supporters by implying the country needs to protect itself from them.

Keep the fence. American democracy is sitting on a powder keg.  A targeted, strategic assassination would trigger a constitutional crisis. The country is too fragile for that right now.

 Long before January 6, Americans saw people plotting the kidnapping and murder of the Michigan governor. The plotters justified it as stopping tyranny in the form of her COVID restrictions. On January 6, we saw political leaders bring a crowd to the seat of government to stop Congress from proceeding with the transfer of power from Trump. People chanted "Hang Mike Pence." Did they mean it literally? Who knows? Some people carried deadly weapons. A policeman received fatal head wounds. A man texted that he wanted to put a bullet in the head of Nancy Pelosi and people hunted for her. There were dangerous people there with a political agenda. Mobs get out of control.

The people breaking barricades and pushing past guards were a small group compared to 74 million people who voted for Trump, but tens of millions of Republicans continue to believe the underlying premise justifying overthrowing the election. They believe Trump when he said he won by a landslide, that a massive fraud had stolen the election from him, and that the consequences of his losing power is a catastrophe for America. Biden and Democratic are gun-stealing, religion-hating, cancel-culture-loving socialists who hate America and God. With Trump out of office, taking back control of the senate is more critical than ever. Trump said so.

The death of any one of fifteen Democratic U.S. senators would flip partisan control of the senate back to Republicans. Nine states have a Republican governor and senators who caucus with Democrats—Arizona, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Hampshire, Georgia, Vermont, Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia. A governor traditionally appoints a replacement from the Governor's own party. An assassin has the power to switch control of the Senate.

(So that I am not accused of speculating that only Republicans benefit from targeted assassinations, eleven Republican senators serve in states with Democratic governors. The death of any one of those would be consequential as well, but it would not shift partisan control. Killing one of those fifteen Democrats would.)

I don’t personally have an up-close and direct contact with gun-carrying militia people on the right—the kind of people who planned the kidnapping/murder of the Michigan governor--but I get lots of communication from upper-middle-class church-going people with nice homes and cars and brokerage accounts, including people enthusiastic at having attended the Stop the Steal rally. These aren't people feeling economic anxiety. They are motivated by belief in what Trump tells them, what Fox tells them, what the InfoWars guy says, and what they get from alternative news sources--friends and email chains. 

Some of them believe crimes and conspiracies so hostile to Biden and Democrats that they justify extreme responses: the Flight 93 nothing-to-lose meme. These crimes include undetectable software vote switches, forged ballots from China, Republican officials being secret Democratic moles, thousands of "sleeper agents" of the left spending years pretending to be Trump supporters so they can run false-flag operations, Bill Gates creating COVID to profit from vaccinations, George Soros running child brothel rings for the benefit of Democratic leaders, Hillary Clinton killing multiple people to cover up crimes, now including skinning-alive children so she can wear their face skin to rejuvenate her own. Who believes this stuff? Millions of people believe some of it and are unsure about the rest.

The crazier stuff that circulates involves stranger-yet conspiracies, whose improbability and lack of confirmation from official sources is evidence implying greater likelihood of truth, since, of course, the real truth cannot be reported by the news media. In the context of conspiratorial rumors, political violence is normalized--even required.

Here is a sample of what circulates, shown below as I received it: 

Send to everyone you can as fast as you can!  Forward “IT'S HAPPENING! Military takedowns and arrests begin this weekend and will continue forward for the next 13 days/nights. Some international raids have already started. Italy has also been found complicit in our election fraud. Everyone will be getting emergency alerts on their phones, tv's, radios & internet. It will override all other broadcasts and could last for several hours at a time. Do not to be scared of what's coming as it is for the safety of our nation for this to unfold. DO NOT travel to any large cities (especially Philadelphia) for the rest of the month. Military operations will be taking place in many of the major corrupt cities. People will start rioting once this intel breaks thinking Trump is a military dictator. He only has 13 days to put this dog down. The implementation of the Insurrection Act began after the raid on the Capitol and was marked by Trump's broadcast to the people to disband and return home. This broadcast wound up being blocked, for the most part, by the media. Nevertheless, his address fulfilled the requirements to initiate the Act. Marines and National Guard troops are being moved as needed for the riots that will start after the national release of the intel. The intel will be dropped for everyone to see and hear in loops that will be several hours long. The system was just checked by the FCC a few days ago alerting ALL media that they cannot block the flow of intel under federal regs. Trump will be moved continuously like a chess piece from now until the 20th in order to avoid any retaliation against him and family. Trump had to exhaust ALL other means legally before this operation could commence. He gave everyone a fair chance to come clean and they refused. His press release of a "smooth transition" did not include the word, "concede" as he has no plans to do so. Rather, there will be a smooth transition of power to his new cabinet, staff and Vice President, General Flynn.

 

Give Peace a chance

America doesn't have a peace party. 

What will Biden do??

     "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

                 JFK Inaugural speech, 1961

In post-war America of the 1950's and 1960's both political parties sought to be the voice of anti-communist containment. It was conventional wisdom. People with an anti-war orientation were marginalized--"beatniks" became "peaceniks"--people defined by having unconventional ideas. Peace? How weird! What oddballs.

Envisioning Peace

After 1968 partisan alignment began falling into place. Vietnam became Nixon's war to defend--a Republican war. Since the 1970's Democrats had a "peace wing" in their coalition to go along with their environmentalist, women's-rights, and racial justice supporters.  Democrats were always under the threat of being called "soft on communism," and later "soft on Muslim extremism."  Democratic leaders worked to demonstrate the charge was unfounded, with the result that their language and overall messaging might be a notch or two less bellicose than their Republican opponents, but policies and practice were largely similar. Democratic officeholders supported military interventions and they grew the Pentagon budgets. 

Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton are arguably more hawkish than Trump.

Herb Rothschild is a retired professor of English. He lives in Southern Oregon. He introduced himself to me as a peace activist, and he has been involved in the politics of peace throughout his adulthood. One of his projects is Vision Quilt; an example of one is shown here. Like most politically engaged people, he has multiple concerns: The environment, women's rights, racial justice, poverty. Those issues make him at home with Democrats. A foreign policy that leads to peace, though, is complicated and lacks a clear partisan champion. He wonders about Biden.

Guest Post by Herb Rothschild

In a recent Zoom gathering I was asked if I could think of anything good to say about Trump’s presidency. I responded that he was the first U.S. president in my lifetime who didn’t take us into a war.  Undoubtably, that's because Trump saw no political benefit to himself of a war. Had he deemed that it would, I’m sure he wouldn’t have hesitated. Nonetheless, I’m grateful.

Herb Rothschild

Some former presidents initiated wars because they deemed them politically beneficial. In 1965, fearing he would be charged with allowing another Cuba on his watch, Johnson sent troops into the Dominican Republic after its people elected Juan Bosch, too liberal for our liking. In 1983, Reagan sent troops to overthrow the leftist government of Granada two days after he was hugely embarrassed by a suicide attack on a U.S. military installation in Lebanon that killed 241 soldiers. George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan because Americans wanted to make someone pay for 9/11. More tragically, Johnson and Nixon perpetuated the war in Vietnam because they didn’t want to be saddled politically with the defeat.

Mostly, however, the motives of our invasions—and the list of them is appallingly long—haven’t been so personal. They’ve been conducted for the benefit of large banks and corporations. This has been especially so in Central America and the Caribbean, where we can easily impose our will. The 2003 invasion of Iraq demonstrated the risks of operating so blatantly beyond our well-established sphere of control. Before and since that debacle, presidents haven’t invaded countries in Africa, Asia and South America (Vietnam being the exception that instructed every administration except the arrogant fools gathered around George W. Bush). Rather, they’ve conducted what is known as “low intensity warfare.”

Much of such warfare is so low profile that it doesn’t even come to public attention. When four Army special operations soldiers were killed in action in Niger in October 2017, even many members of Congress expressed surprise that we had military operations there. Other military engagements, such as our air operations in Libya and our air and ground operations in Syria during and after the Arab Spring, are higher profile—at least Congress and major news media know about them. But even in those our military commitments (and losses) are too small to cause administrations to worry that the American people will punish them for failure (and the death and destruction we leave in our wake means nothing to the voting public). The warfare I’ve just described was standard operating procedure under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She was to Obama what John Foster Dulles was to Eisenhower—a dedicated U.S. imperialist, and she didn’t even have the Cold War ideological cover of anti-Communism.

I dwell on this history because at this point we simply don’t know what President Biden’s foreign policy will be beyond his commitment to our former alliances, especially NATO.

But to what purposes will the alliances be put? In particular, will we resume the encirclement of Russia by admitting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO? The U.S., years before, broke George H. W. Bush’s pledge to Gorbachev and admitted the former Eastern bloc nations into NATO, thus bringing it to Russia’s Baltic border. Understandably alarmed by the possibility of hostile troops along a much longer southwestern border, Russia reclaimed Crimea, its access to the Black Sea, which Khrushchev had impulsively declared part of Ukraine when Ukraine was still part of the U.S.S.R. It suited Obama/Clinton’s purpose to depict that totally nonviolent action as shocking aggression.

Because Trump’s relations with Russia were motivated by personal, not geopolitical motives, he handled them terribly, refusing to acknowledge, much less push back against, Russia’s cyber-attacks. A sad consequence is that Democrats have discovered they can make political hay out of the “soft on Russia” accusation, which for decades had worked for Republicans and hampered the creation of a safer world.

Biden’s appointments have indicated some continuity with the Obama years. So far, however, he has responded to the needs of working people rather than the interests of Wall Street, a significant and welcome departure. Let’s hope that in the conduct of foreign policy as well he’ll not only distance himself from Trump but also from Hillary Clinton. If not, whatever progress toward justice he makes at home will be outbalanced by what he impedes abroad.

In praise of Mitch McConnell

A Republican friend asked me:

     "When are you going to move on? Let's stop talking about Trump and work to help people."

I responded:

     "I will move on when Trump no longer reflects the mindset of GOP leaders and voters."

Democrats are widely critical of Mitch McConnell. I am not. I am praising him today. 

Democrats write me to complain that McConnell is a day late and a dollar short. True. But better late than never. 

Mitch McConnell is part of the solution. I want more Republicans to act like McConnell, even if he is a crafty old partisan trying to thread the needle between the people who still adore Trump (which is why he voted to acquit) and the educated, moderate donor class of people who turned off the money spigot to the GOP (which is why he finally said aloud that Trump lied to everyone and attempted a coup d'état.) 

McConnell had motivation to change his tune. Donors don't trust populist revolution and mob rule. Donors are prosperous people. They own things. They run businesses. They are, as a group, practical, effective people. McConnell was getting signals from them. The Chamber of Commerce was starting to give money to Democrats; it was working closely with Biden and praising him; businesses PACs were refusing campaign help to legislators who tried to overthrow the election. That was body language McConnell understood. 

People with businesses and money to protect think Republicans were playing with fire by condoning lawlessness and political revolution. Trump is a right wing authoritarian, stirring up anger at immigrants and people of color. Donor elites liked the lower taxes and business-friendly judges, but they couldn't accept the process and precedent: Anarchy. Trump was normalizing populist mob violence. 

The next populist revolution could be in the opposite direction, from a charismatic leftist, stirring up crowds angry at corporate power and wealth. There is lots of history of that. The rich have gotten richer, and stirred-up people might turn their sights onto them. Those in-your-face people with American flags on their pickup trucks are angry and armed. They just might decide they are more angry with the landlords, businessmen, and billionaires than they are with the immigrant family living in a shoebox working two lousy jobs. 

Mitch McConnell is in play, seeking approval and validation where he can find it.

I consider this my Operant Conditioning approach. Imagine rats and pigeons in cages in laboratories of Harvard psychologist and theorist B. F. Skinner. Operant Conditioning is training them by rewarding certain behaviors and not others. You never really know about "mind," Skinner said, nor motivation, volition, rational choices nor gut feelings. But brains respond to incentives. You can get a pigeon to play ping pong if you feed it when it picks up a paddle and hits the ball, and don't feed it when it just sits there. It figures it out. 

(B. F. Skinner's critics said the image was insulting when applied to humans. Skinner said it is the way all of us learn anything and are motivated to do anything. It is the economic notion of the rational actor, responding to incentives.)

I want McConnell and Republicans generally to figure out that Trump was toxic to their brand and political careers. I don't expect to give many Republican candidates money, but I can praise them when they do the right things. It is fair to them. I want to be fair. 

I won't give an electrical shock for heading in the wrong direction in a maze, but I will be critical of people who support undermining our democracy, and I have been, perhaps tiresomely so. But when Republicans speak out to condemn Trump's lawlessness--as McConnell finally did, I will do my tiny part, and thank and praise them for it. If being a Trump-supporting conspiracy spreader gets rewarded within the circle of GOP precinct committee people--positive reinforcement short term--but then is led to a humiliating general election loss--negative reinforcement--candidates will figure it out.

Mitch McConnell would have saved the world a lot of heartache if he had said this louder and clearer and earlier, but he said it. It sounds about right to me.

Good for him.

Guest Comments from Mitch McConnell:

January 6th was a disgrace.

American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like.

Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the Vice President.

They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth — because he was angry he’d lost an election.

Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty.

The House accused the former President of, quote, ‘incitement.’ That is a specific term from the criminal law. There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.

The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their President. And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated President kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.