Chris Powell: Too late to stop the bad Iran deal
Connecticut isn't convulsed as Washington is over President Obama's nuclear inspections agreement with Iran. All members of the state's congressional delegation, all Democrats, have endorsed the agreement except Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who hasn't decided yet, and they wouldn't be supporting it if their constituents were furious about it. Nevertheless, last week U.S. Rep. John B. Larson (D-1st District), held a forum in his district with a State Department official who helped negotiate the agreement, Chris Backemeyer, the department's deputy coordinator for sanctions policy. Backemeyer answered critical questions from a well-informed crowd of about 80 people who, if not entirely convinced, hurled no tomatoes and appreciated that their concerns were taken seriously. Ready to keep taking punches, Backemeyer and Larson met afterward with several journalists.
While Iran may delay by a few weeks the access of international inspectors to any new suspected nuclear development sites, Backemeyer and Larson said radiation leaves enough traces that any cheating at such sites will be caught quickly.
They added that the release of $150 billion in frozen Iranian assets won't be as big a bonanza to Iran's international terrorism and subversion as many fear, since Iran will need to reserve much of the money to manage its international trade.
But Iran already is said to be within a few months of capability to build nuclear bombs, and if the country is determined to get them, the agreement and inspections won't delay it much. If Iran is found to be cheating, presumably the nations that were enforcing economic sanctions against Iran will reimpose them, but Iran will have regained its frozen assets and put them to use for terror and subversion, particularly against the United States and its ally Israel.
This seems to be what most distresses Americans about the agreement with Iran -- that it is not a peace treaty but actually will help Iran continue its de-facto wars against fellow members of the United Nations. Thus it is silly to believe that Iran really wants to comply with the agreement or that it will comply with it for long.
The world should have continued blockading Iran economically without exchanging sanctions for an agreement about nuclear weapons, as the blockade was causing great political discontent among Iranians and weakening their government, a fascist theocracy led by a fuhrer who claims to be implementing the will of God. Continuing the economic blockade would have been more likely to change Iran's behavior and perhaps even its regime than the agreement is likely to prevent Iran from making nuclear weapons.
But it's too late now and nothing would be gained by Congress's rejection of the agreement. President Obama induced this country's allies to put great effort into negotiating the agreement and they will not humiliate themselves in front of their own people and the world by reversing their position now because the president did not first build a consensus in Congress for his policy.
Without proof of Iran's violating the agreement, any attempt by the United States to reimpose sanctions on Iran would not have enough international support to be effective. Instead of isolating Iran, the United States would be isolating itself and breaking up the alliance against Iran, such as it is. There would be neither an economic blockade nor nuclear inspections.
The agreement with Iran is largely appeasement. But appeasement is increasingly the attitude in Europe, and while polls say Americans oppose the agreement, they are not likely to support another military adventure in the Middle East, the adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq having turned out so badly.
There's not much left for the United States to do here but regroup its allies to contain Iran, starting by giving Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia what they need to defend themselves.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Robert Whitcomb: Land of the all-too free
The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling authorizing gay marriage across America has helped to cement homosexual citizens’ sense of civic acceptance. However, in part because homosexuality usually involves behavior as well as orientation, they’ll continue to suffer some angry bias that will be impossible to prevent. There are limits to social engineering and even of litigation, however noble the intentions.
Meanwhile, the erosion of traditional, heterosexual marriage continues. That has helped lead to poverty, child abuse, addiction and other social pathologies as an increasing number of families are led by overwhelmed, low-income unwed mothers, and all too often fathers don’t help support the children they’ve helped create. Indeed, many fathers just disappear.
Thus, we have increasing social dysfunction, exacerbated by the continuing loss of jobs to globalization and technology. Still, some social legislation, such as the Affordable Care Act, may alleviate the effects, especially poverty, of traditional marriage’s decay.
None of this is to say that marriage is a panacea for anything or that no-fault divorce doesn’t have merits. Whatever, it’s good to know that all American gay adults can now experience, if they really want to, the joys, anxieties, sorrows, fun and boredom of marriage and the privilege of paying divorce lawyers to help them terminate their unions. (Since a much higher percentage of married gay couples will presumably be childless than of married straight couples, most of their divorces will usually be fairly easy. But who will look after them when they’re old?)
But I suspect that, as with many heterosexuals, many gay couples will assiduously avoid the duties of marriage. Why get tangled in the red tape of marriage – the smallest unit of government? Isn’t this “The Land of the Free’’?
xxx
Northerners should know that to many Southerners the Confederate battle flag is a symbol not of slavery per se but of regional pride, including in the friendliness, courtesy and sense of community more common in the South than in much of America.
That isn’t to say that the centrality of slavery in “The Lost Cause’’ doesn’t evoke enthusiasm among many of the region’s racists, who hate the melanin-rich President Obama. And I agree with the general sense of Ulysses S. Grant’s opinion that the Confederacy was “the worst cause for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
In any case, America is now more than ever a land of tolerance. Indeed, for all the rhetoric about bigotry here, by world standards America is a very welcoming place for virtually all minorities, rivaled only by a few northwestern European nations (that we militarily protect). Many Americans would be surprised to learn how lucky they are in this regard. Vicious bigotry reigns on much of the planet.
Dictatorships and discrimination are on the march, and America and the West in general must be ready for a renewal of what John F. Kennedy called the “long twilight battle’’ of the First Cold War. Computers may be the biggest weapons on this war; just ask the Chinese, who are winning it so far and who aren’t about to permit gay marriage.
xxx
“You go to my head
With a smile that makes my temperature rise Like a summer with a thousand Julys’’
-- From “You Go to My Head’’ (1938), music by J. Fred Coots, lyrics by Haven Gillespie
July Fourth marks the start of high summer, which goes so fast in New England.
Perhaps oddly, considering that he was a World War II combat veteran, my father loved loud fireworks. In those days (the ‘50s) it was nearly impossible to buy them in New England so he’d purchase boxes of them at stores in the Carolinas and fill much of a station wagon with them, often with a lit cigarette in his mouth.
The blasts would happen every few minutes on the Fourth – mostly large firecrackers, such as M-80s, but we also fired a small cannon. The finale was around sunset at a beach, where whatever was left was exploded. This violated town laws, but few local ordinances were enforced on the Fourth.
Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) is a Providence-based writer and editor and the overseer of New England Diary. He's also a partner at Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com), a healthcare-sector consultancy, and a Fellow of the Pell Center.
A photo-op that would have mattered greatly
It seems obvious to me that even if it had required 10,000 troops and police officers to surround him with security that President Obama, as the paramount leader of the Free World, should have flown to Paris and marched with the other leaders as a side of solidarity against Islamic terrorism. It would have been a photo-op with great resonance. --- Robert Whitcomb
Llewellyn King: Bad news for climate: U.S. nuclear plants closing
This will be a bleak Christmas for the small Vermont community of Vernon. It is losing its economic mainstay. Entergy, the owner of the midsize nuclear plant there, which has sustained the community for 42 years, is closing the plant. Next year the only people working at the plant will be those shuttering it, taking out its fuel, securing it and beginning the process of turning it into a kind of tomb, a burial place for the hopes of a small town.
What may be a tragedy for Vernon may also be a harbinger of a larger, multilayered tragedy for the United States.
Nuclear – Big Green – is one of the most potent tools we have in our battle to clean the air and arrest or slow climate change over time. I've named it Big Green because that is what it is: Nuclear-power plants produce huge quantities of absolutely carbon-free electricity.
But many nuclear plants are in danger of being closed. Next year, for the first time in decades, there will be fewer than 100 making electricity. The principal culprit: cheap natural gas.
In today’s market, nuclear is not always the lowest-cost producer. Electricity was deregulated in much of the country in the 1990s, and today electricity is sold at the lowest cost, unless it is designated as “renewable” -- effectively wind and solar, whose use is often mandated by a “renewable portfolio standard,” which varies from state to state.
Nuclear falls into the crevasse, which bedevils so much planning in markets, that favors the short term over the long term.
Today’s nuclear-power plants operate with extraordinary efficiency, day in day out for decades, for 60 or more years with license extensions and with outages only for refueling. They were built for a market where long-lived, fixed-cost supplies were rolled in with those of variable cost. Social utility was a factor.
For 20 years nuclear might be the cheapest electricity. Then for another 20 years, coal or some other fuel might win the price war. But that old paradigm is shattered and nuclear, in some markets, is no longer the cheapest fuel -- and it may be quite few years before it is again.
Markets are great equalizers, but they're also cruel exterminators. Nuclear- power plants need to run full-out all the time. They can’t be revved up for peak load in the afternoon and idled in the night. Nuclear plants make power 24/7.
Nowadays, solar makes power at given times of day and wind, by its very nature, varies in its ability to make power. Natural gas is cheap and for now abundant, and its turbines can follow electric demand. It will probably have a price edge for 20 years until supply tightens. The American Petroleum Institute won't give a calculation of future supply, saying that the supply depends on future technology and government regulation.
Natural gas burns cleaner than coal, and is favored over coal for that reason. But it still pumps greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, though just about half of the assault on the atmosphere of coal.
The fate of nuclear depends on whether the supporters of Big Green can convince politicians that it has enough social value to mitigate its temporary price disadvantage against gas.
China and India are very mindful of the environmental superiority of nuclear. China has 22 power plants operating, 26 under construction, and more where construction is about to start. If there is validity to the recent agreement between Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Obama, it is because China is worried about its own choking pollution and a fear of climate change on its long coastline, as well as its ever-increasing need for electricity.
Five nuclear-power plants, if you count Vermont Yankee, will have closed this year, and five more are under construction in Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia. After that the new plant pipeline is empty, but the number of plants in danger is growing. Even the mighty Exelon, the largest nuclear operator, is talking about closing three plants, and pessimists say as many as 15 plants could go in the next few years.
I'd note that the decisions now being made on nuclear closures are being made on economic grounds, not on any of the controversies that have attended nuclear over the years.
Current and temporary market conditions are dictating environmental and energy policy. Money is more important than climate, for now.
Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com) is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS.
Don Pesci: Conn. GOP losses will lead to more corruption
Don Pesci: Do political endorsements matter?
VERNON, Conn.
Chris Powell: In Conn., the real family problem
VERNON, Conn.
Contriving their daily dose of campaign hysteria, leading Connecticut Democrats gathered at the state Capitol the other day to denounce the Republican nominee for governor, Tom Foley, for accepting the endorsement of the Connecticut Family Institute. "Candidate Foley gives few details but now we know the company he's keeping," state Sen. Beth Bye, D-West Hartford, said. State Comptroller Kevin Lembo added, "The endorsement of the Family Institute is or should be the kiss of political death in this state. It is outside of who we are as a people." Bye and Lembo are liberals and a few decades ago liberals denounced such attacks as "guilt by association." But that was when liberals were the ones guilty of associating. Foley is hardly a conservative -- Bye condemned him not just for accepting the Family Institute's endorsement but also for having few positions at all -- but his election would change the locks on the candy store Democrats have made of state government. So Foley must be demonized. The Democrats' problem with the Family Institute is that it opposes same-sex marriage. That is, they argue that the Family Institute should be disqualified from politics and decent society forever for taking today the same position that the country's two leading Democrats, President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, themselves took until a few years ago. But somehow Obama and Clinton have been forgiven. They were never going to change the locks on the candy store. The Family Institute says it endorsed Foley not because of his position on homosexuality and same-sex marriage -- those things don't seem to have ever bothered him and he is striving not to give offense even to those who deserve it. Rather, the institute got Foley to say he opposes legalizing assisted suicide, which the institute believes could lead to the euthanasia or murder of the disabled. Assisted suicide is not among Connecticut's big political issues, though if the Democratic state administration is re-elected those who work in the private sector will have less reason to go on living, or at least to go on living here. But then homosexuality isn't a big issue for Connecticut either. The state decriminalized it decades ago, hadn'tprosecuted it for decades before that, and was among the first states to authorize same-sex "civil unions" and then same-sex marriage itself. The state long has been and remains overwhelmingly indifferent to such entirely personal matters even as homosexuals here continue to clamor as if they are somehow oppressed, since such clamor wins them political deference as a recognized special interest. As the old joke notes, what was, in the last century, "the love that dares not speak its name" cannot, in this one, shut up. The problem with the Family Institute's obsession with homosexuality is not that it has any chance of impairing anyone's rights but that it distracts from Connecticut's real family problem, which is also the state's biggest problem -- the decline of the family itself. This isn't the doing of homosexuals but of heterosexuals, who increasingly have children outside marriage and raise them neglectfully in fatherless homes, a catastrophically destructive phenomenon made possible mainly by the welfare system. The welfare system's destruction of the family is responsible for most of Connecticut's education, crime, drug, mental health and child-abuse problems and for many of its physical illness problems. The human, financial and governmental costs are incalculable. But the Family Institute has little to say about this and the Democrats, so sensitive to any lack of enthusiasm for homosexuality, have nothing to say about it, since their party, the party of government, sustains itself only by increasing dependence on government. Unlike the Family Institute, the Democrats are politically relevant, so their silence on the bigger issue is a far bigger threat. Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.
Robert L. Borosage: Help unions help middle class
Labor Day is supposed to be a celebration of workers, but it’s been a long time since workers have been celebrated — or for that matter, have had a reason to celebrate. That’s because the union movement that gave us this holiday is, at least numerically, a shadow of its former self.
If we really want to give workers something to cheer about, we need to revitalize unions. It’s no coincidence that prosperity was widely shared when unions were at the height of their power in the decades after World War II, and that inequality has soared as unions have been weakened.
That’s what I conclude in Inequality: Rebuilding the Middle Class Requires Reviving Strong Unions, a new Campaign for America’s Future report. My analysis tracks the simultaneous decline in the power of the labor movement and the fortunes of middle-class workers. It makes the case in simple terms.
One chart reinforces the point. It compares union membership with the share of income going to the top 10 percent since the 1920s. When only one in 10 workers belonged to unions in the early 1930s, the richest 10 percent pocketed nearly half of the nation’s income.
Then President Franklin D. Roosevelt began a set of bold New Deal initiatives that dramatically increased the power of workers to join unions and bargain collectively. The share of workers who were unionized rose to about one-third by the late 1940s. At that point, the bottom 90 percent saw a significant increase in their share of national income.
Today, as union membership declines to low levels last seen in the 1920s, the share of national income going to the top 10 percent is rising — to levels not seen since then either.
Combine that with lackluster economic growth and you get the result chronicled in an August report by Sentier Research. As The New York Times reported, Sentier found that median incomes, when adjusted for inflation, had fallen 3.1 percent since 2009. They remain significantly below what they were in 2000.
A corporate-driven propaganda campaign has for decades blamed labor unions for saddling American corporations with burdens that made them uncompetitive in the global economy.
That has proven to be cover for dismantling the forces that kept corporations from rigging the economic rules in their favor. When corporate power was kept in check by union power, workers and corporations at least had a fighting chance to prosper together. Without that check, workers are losing. As wages erode, benefits disappear, work conditions become harsher and jobs themselves become more unstable.
The good news is that a combination of worker-activist movements and bold political leadership is setting the stage for a potential resurgence of the labor movement. In Los Angeles and other cities, newly elected pro-labor officials are making companies that benefit from local zoning or contracts pay a living wage and accept unions when a majority of workers indicate they want one.
Across the United States, fast-food worker strikes are fueling state and municipal minimum-wage increases while injecting new energy and ideas to worker organizing efforts.
President Obama has used executive orders to raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers and require adherence to basic fair labor standards, including the right to organize. These orders could have effects that ripple through to private sector workers.
Labor Day would live up to its purpose if it not only gave workers a temporary respite from the rigors of their jobs, but also drove a national effort to empower workers once again to rebalance the economic scales so that we can rebuild a growing, stable middle class. It needs to be a day on, not a day off, in the effort to reclaim the American dream for working people.
Robert L. Borosage is the co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a center for ideas and action that works to build an enduring majority for progressive change. Distributed via OtherWords.org