We Need to Hold Israel to a Higher Standard

 

According to the organization Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel has dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip since the start of its large-scale war on 7 October, equivalent to two nuclear bombs.

The actions of Hamas militants on October 7th were horrific war crimes as is the Israeli Defense Force's (IDF) massive bombing campaign, which is killing and maiming huge numbers of non-combatants, including over 4,000 children according to the Hamas Health Ministry, numbers that have been independently corroborated by UN observers. Numbers that will inevitably rise as the bodies of victims trapped under the rubble of their homes are counted.

However, Hamas is a terrorist organization with no political legitimacy (there hasn't been an election in Gaza in over a decade) led by fanatics sworn to violence, while Israel is a liberal democracy that ratified the Geneva Convention. Western Democracies have every right, and indeed an obligation, to hold Israel to a high standard in terms of their respect of human rights and in their protection of non-combatants in the war zone.

Quite clearly, Israel has not taken into adequate consideration the risks to women and children of their bombing campaign in which they are ostensibly targeting Hamas militants and their network of subterranean tunnels.

However, as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak (who led Israel on a previous expedition into Gaza) recently pointed out, it is impossible to reach Hamas from the air. Hamas is sheltering in a deep and extensive network of subterranean tunnels that bombs cannot easily reach, so the bombs only serve to destroy the buildings and kill the people living above the tunnels. The IDF, knowing this fact, have persisted in their bombing campaign with a seeming capricious and arbitrary plan whose tenor very early on seemed more rooted in rage and vengeance than in any legitimate military objective. The selection of targets has been hard to understand for outside observers. For example, the IDF recently demolished three blocks of luxury high-rise towers in a middle-class section of Gaza City. It seems as if the IDF is identifying assets linked to the Hamas leadership and targeting those for destruction.

All of this is regrettable. The Palestinians have long accused the Israeli Government of a disregard for human rights and Israeli prosecution of this war is causing countries all over the world, including countries like Spain who are allies of Israel, to call for a break with Israel. I fear that the damage to Israel's reputation and prestige in the world will last for decades after this struggle is over.

Apart from having responded faster to the Hamas incursion on October 7th, what could Israel have done differently? I have formulated an action list that I would have advised Israel to undertake:

• On Day One, secure the Egyptian border by entering Gaza in the South at Kerem Shalom and by sea near the Gaza/Egypt border, creating a secure zone along the border under Israeli control (to include the city of Rafah, population 160,000) in order to control who and what gets in, and more importantly who gets out, with the objective of preventing the escape of Hamas leadership and preventing them from rearming.
• Continue to supply Gaza with water, electricity, food and medical supplies, making it clear to the Gazans that they are not the enemy.
• Take time to mourn and bury the dead, time in which Israel can consolidate global public opinion in their favor and prepare the global consciousness for the coming conflict.
• Construct large refugee camps in the zone in Southern Gaza annexed at the outset of the conflict.
• Open up the camps to women, children and the elderly, focusing first on refugees from Gaza City.
• Enter the Gaza Strip in two locations: from the east between Khan Younis and Gaza City and from the north near the Erez Crossing. (This is how the IDF have initiated the land invasion of Gaza).
• Moving from north to south, and using artillery and air support as needed, root out the entire Hamas tunnel infrastructure with the goal being the complete demilitarization of the Gaza Strip (this operation is currently underway).
• Remain in Gaza until a pan-Arab security force, led by Egypt, can be readied to take over security responsibilities.

It is regrettable that there has been so much destruction and death in Gaza. Revenge cannot and must not be a public policy, even if biblical. cultural and historical mores call for it (Exodus 21:23-27). The United States failed Israel, failed the Palestinians and failed the World by not talking down Israel from the edge when the rage and anger was at a crescendo. The Gazans (and Hamas alongside them) are trapped like fish in a barrel. There was no reason to move hastily. The operation could have been executed in a way that had the least effect on the Gazans, the greatest effect on Hamas, and the best reputational outcome for Israel in the eyes of the World.

Xinjiang Sanctions Hurt the Uyghurs

 

The U.S. sanctions on products produced in the Xinjiang Region will not be effective and will tend to harm the Uyghurs more than the Han Chinese.

Xinjiang is over 50% Uyghur and Uyghurs produce the majority of the goods there.

Sanctions against products manufactured in Xinjiang using "slave labor" will have a generally depressive effect on demand for all products produced in the region, not just those produced in prison camps.

Therefore, the worst impact will be on the Uyghur majority in Xinjiang and will only have a slight effect on Han Chinese generally.

The repressive policies in Xinjiang come out of Beijing and Beijing should be held responsible.

If sanctions are to be used, they should be on Chinese exports generally, not exports from the Xinjiang Region specifically.

Other policies should be studied that might be of assistance to the Uyghurs.

However, we should temper our expectations, particularly when we consider the abject failure of international efforts to free Tibet, which is a region bordering Xinjiang that is also subject to severe Chinese persecution and control.

Expand NATO to Include Russia

 

This is about as friendly as it got in Geneva.

While the United States and Europe have grown since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Russia has steadily gotten smaller and weaker, such that Moscow now commands 76% of the geographic area, 51% of the population, and only 26% of its former gross national product. This puts Russian somewhere between Mexico and Nigeria in terms of overall population and somewhere between Kazakhstan and Panama in terms of per capita GDP.

What Russia has in abundance are nuclear warheads (#1), geographic area (#1) and proven oil reserves (#8).

But, the clock is ticking on Russia, because many of those warheads date back to the Cold War and will soon be unreliable (and are exorbitantly expensive to upgrade), the Russian population is ageing and shrinking, the Russian economy is stagnant and in forty or fifty years future fossil fuels will become an anachronism, making all those reserves virtually worthless.

Vladimir Putin must be acutely aware of this predicament. It seems to me that he may yearn for the Soviet heydays when Russian power rivaled that of the United States. However, those days are long past, and unlikely to ever return. Today, Russia wields the purchasing power of the State of New York, which is not the hallmark of of a global superpower (no offence intended toward New Yorkers, of course, who similarly yearn for superpower status).

Geopolitically, the world is fast approaching a tipping point, where the center of the world, in terms of economic and military power, is shifting closer and closer to Beijing. Russia, literally and figuratively, straddles this divide. If Putin wants to see Russian greatness restored in his lifetime, does he hitch his cart to the economic engine of China or does he soften his tone and seek alliances with the West?

At the present, Putin seems to be eyeing China. For example, in December of 2020, Russian and Chinese heavy bombers flew a training mission that included a brief incursion into Japanese and South Korean defense zones, prompting the scrambling of jet fighters from both countries. In September 2020 China participated with Russia in massive military exercises in the Caucasus region of southern Russia. Most recently, in the lead-up to the Geneva summit, Russia conducted naval maneuvers near Hawaii while Chinese warplanes repeatedly invaded Taiwanese airspace.

So, is it too late to swivel the Russian gaze back toward the West? What can the U.S. and NATO offer Russia in exchange for an alliance and a lasting peace? Can we finally bury the skeletons of the Cold War and move toward denuclearization? Will Russia ally itself with the West as a bulwark against Chinese hegemony?

The problem lies in what fundamentally links Russia and China: authoritarianism. Authoritarian leaders do not like to share power within their sphere of influence. Authoritarian leaders can work with other authoritarian leaders without having to endure the constant, annoying buzzing of human rights groups protesting this or that abuse of human rights. Authoritarian leaders take pleasure when other authoritarians annex land and expel people (as long as it isn't their land or their people, of course). Authoritarian leaders seek to work with other leaders whose power is absolute in order to have confidence that their secret agreements won't be subject to the vagaries of the next election cycle.

So, at least from the perspective of two authoritarian leaders, Xi and Putin seem to be a match made in heaven, and what can the U.S. and NATO possibly offer to lure Russia into the fold?

It all depends upon Vladimir Putin and what he, in his heart of hearts, values most. Does Putin value the interests of the Russian people over the desire to see Russia command respect on a global scale, even if that respect has to be coerced at the point of a tactical nuclear warhead?

Unfortunately, the prospects of bringing Putin around to our way of seeing things doesn't look very good on that front, either. If you analyze Putin's domestic political strategy, he is certainly not seeking any sort of consensus of political views. He is actively involved in a war against progressive values and is accelerating the debasement of Russian democratic institutions. Putin is effectively a fascist dictator (think Stalin without Marx) seeking to rid the nation of "undesirables" and coalesce the population into a force that will do his bidding without question. In Stalin's time as many as 20 million "undesirables" perished during a period referred to as the "Great Purge" (out of a population of 168 million at the time, or more than one person in ten). Under Putin's leadership, Stalin's image in Russia has seen a tremendous resurgence. Today, 45% of Russians have a positive view of Stalin, a man who was the greatest genocidal megalomaniac the world has ever seen. Putin believes that Stalin was a man of "good intentions" and that the 20 million who died was a sacrifice that was justified by the country's great goals at the time.

So, it seems fairly clear that Putin's management style isn't necessarily a good fit for roundtable discussions with the leaders of the great Western democracies, as the failed summit in Geneva served to prove. But, what is Vladimir Putin's end game? It seems that he is starting to follow the North Korean playbook, another autocratic nation with nuclear weapons that periodically engages in bad behavior to try and keep itself relevant in a world that is literally racing ahead of it. If Putin seems poised to bet everything on China, what could China be possibly promising him in return?

It is starting to become clear that China is looking to escalate existing confrontations beyond the breaking point, particularly in the case of Taiwan and the South China Sea. Their actions in these areas, when combined with their brazen abrogation of the "Handover Treaty" that protected civil rights in Hong Kong and the consolidation of power around Xi, point to a probing and testing of Western resolve that seems to inevitably lead to the occupation of Taiwan and the full-scale exploitation of energy resources in the South China Sea. Either of these actions would lead to a break with the West and the imposition of strict sanctions against China which would effectively shut off oil from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. However, China has been slowly but surely transitioning from Saudi oil to Russian oil, up from 11% in 2014 to over 16% today, and is prepared to import more. When China decides to seize Taiwan they will be solely dependent on Russia, Iran and Malaysia for their oil supplies. Additionally, China dramatically accelerated their oil stockpiling when COVID-19 made oil cheap and are adding additional storage tank capacity at the rate of over 100 million additional barrels per year. In other words, China is preparing to lose access to its Saudi pipeline and will depend on its stockpiles, Russia and Iran for its supply.

Putin, on the other hand, would be in a position to demand a significant premium over market oil prices if China were become almost solely dependent upon him for oil. With China being the largest oil consumer in the world, this would be quite the choice customer to command.

So, the answer seems to be that Russia is allying itself with China in anticipation of the reunification of Taiwan with Mainland China and the geopolitical shock waves that this will create, in the interest of profiting mightily by supplying energy to China.

How did we get into this situation in the first place? When NATO won the Cold War and the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States and Russia had a unique opportunity to forge peace out of the fallen Iron Curtain. However, instead of working with Russia to develop their economy, build a democracy and to integrate economically with the West (like we had done at great expense with Germany and Japan post WWII), the United States and Europe virtually turned their back on Russia, gloating in their victory and instead focusing on helping the Soviet satellite states break away and gain their footing. Over this time massive Soviet-era industries were privatized and fell into the hands of the cronies of Boris Yeltsin for pennies on the dollar, financed by loans from European banks. These oligarchs are who now run Russia, with Putin overseeing everything. Instead of helping Russia to develop an evolved system of government they were left, essentially, to their own devices and Russia devolved in something akin to a Mafia State.

On the military front, NATO never altered it mission from one of containing Russia, even when the idea of containing Russia had become quaint at best and ridiculous at worst. Apart from its ability to launch a nuclear attack, Russia posed no real threat to the West. Toward the end of the Soviet Empire, the size of its military began to shrink dramatically, which only accelerated after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, Russia has 15,000 tanks versus the 55,000 that it had in 1990. In spite of knowing that Russia was a mere shadow of its former Soviet self, NATO kept its gunsights trained on Moscow.

I mentioned earlier that Russia, on a per capita basis, is not a wealthy country. Can you imagine if you were a Russian in 2010, earning less than $10K per year and having wealthy neighbors like Germany ($41K/yr) performing war games and continually expanding those war games into countries that were former members of the Soviet Bloc, right up to your borders?

How about when you, as a Russian, try to build a pipeline to export natural gas to Europe, only to have the United States oppose the project every step of the way on security grounds based on Cold War logic? Would you be made to feel that NATO and the United States wished to be your friends or were, in fact, rivals and antagonists?

I think you understand where I am going with this. Russia is in something of a sorry state for a country of its size and rich history, and that in and of itself is a difficult pill to swallow for the Russians. NATO needs to acknowledge this and reach out to Russia to facilitate solutions to some of their most enduring problems such as an extreme overdependence on energy production, weak governmental institutions and poor social cohesion (including the highest rate of alcoholism in the world and a declining life expectancy). We should be trading MORE with Russia, not less. We should be providing humanitarian aid and social services to Russia. We should be figuring out how to bring Moscow into Europe where it belongs.

If the NATO can openly admit to its mistakes and convince Russia to trust it we will pull an important leg out from under China's expansionist ambitions and will facilitate a free and modern Russia to the benefit of the European continent and the world.

If Putin agrees, of course.

Replace the Corporate Tax with a National Sales Tax

Source: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/

Why should the government tax corporate earnings if they will be taxed as soon as they are distributed anyway? That is a good question, and many economists argue that corporate earning should NOT be taxed. However, there are issues with the elimination of the corporate tax that should be discussed.

The primary problem with a zero corporate tax rate is that the corporations depend heavily on the government for support. Corporation use roads and highways, they utilize the communications networks, they depend on law enforcement and border protection, they engage in interstate commerce, they export goods to other countries, etc. All of these activities have a cost, and if the corporations are paying taxes on their income at a zero rate all of these costs will be passed along to the investors and other taxpayers which may not sufficiently cover the impact of corporate activities on society at large.

Therefore, I propose, as an alternative to the corporate income tax, a national sales tax on all revenue generation, including foreign revenue that is generated when goods are imported into the United States. Since a sale typically involves the movement of goods or of intellectual capital across our physical and digital highways, a national sales tax will directly address the related costs. Also, by taxing foreign revenue in the form of a duty on imports, the impact of foreign goods entering the U.S. will be similarly mitigated.

I estimate that a national sales tax rate of 2% would be more than adequate to replace the revenue lost to the government by the elimination of corporate income tax.

By eliminating the corporate income tax and replacing it with a national sales tax, the United States will benefit in several ways:

• Greater fairness in taxation by eliminating the double-taxation of corporate earnings.
• Increase in domestic savings which can be used to finance loans by eliminating all incentives to shelter corporate earnings in foreign tax havens.
• Greater potential for economic growth and employment since the money saved by corporations can be plowed back into their operations.
• The capture of income on revenue earned by foreign corporations who wish to access our market.

Prosecute Cops and Watch Crime Rates Spike

 

Freddy Gray Struggles to Avoid Being Detained

In April 2015, Freddy Gray was arrested in West Baltimore, after a foot chase, for carrying a spring-assisted knife that was legal in Maryland but illegal in Baltimore City.

He was handcuffed and shackled, placed in the back of a paddy wagon and was driven around West Baltimore before arriving at the police precinct for booking. At some point he suffered a spinal injury that led to his death. It was alleged that the driver of the van deliberately accelerated and braked in such a way that Mr. Gray, who was not belted in, would fly around in the back.

Subsequent to Freddy Gray's death, the City of Baltimore brought charges against all six officers involved in the arrest, including the driver, Caesar Goodson, Jr.

The six officers prosecuted for the death of Freddy Gray

The decision to charge these officers was extremely unpopular amongst the rank-and-file officers of the Baltimore Police Department. After a series of mistrials, all officers either had the charges dismissed or were found not guilty, and they proceeded to sue the City of Baltimore for the way that they were treated.

In the month after the death of Freddy Gray, Baltimore experienced a massive spike in homicides, to the highest level in over forty years, and the year-end total ranked as the third highest rate ever recorded.

Washington, DC, which is only about 50 miles from Baltimore and which has many criminal connections to Baltimore, also experienced a spike in crime during this same period.

Philadelphia, PA, which is about 100 miles north of Baltimore, also experienced an increase in murders, although to a lesser extent.

It should be pointed out that the prosecution of the six Baltimore police officers was closely watched by police forces nationwide, but in particular in neighboring cities like Washington DC and Philadelphia. The displeasure felt by the police in these cities was expressed through an unwillingness to perform dangerous foot and bicycle patrols, an unwillingness to chase suspects, and an unwillingness to arrest suspects for low-level criminal activity.

Freddy Gray was someone the Baltimore Police Department knew well and someone they hoped to get off the streets. At 25 years of age, Freddy Gray had a long arrest record, having been arrested eighteen times, including four times in 2015 prior to his final arrest in April 2015.

Today there are unprecedent calls across the country to defund police departments and prosecute police officers, and crime in areas where police have been prosecuted all have shown spikes in crime similar to what was seen in Baltimore in May of 2015.

While it is important to weed out bad cops who are guilty of using excessive force in the execution of their duties, it is important to distinguish clearly between "good cops" and "bad cops" and to make it clear that society is not at war with law enforcement personnel IN GENERAL. Unfortunately, that is exactly the feeling that we, as a society, are giving the police officers who risk their lives to get illegal guns and other weapons off the streets.

Therefore, expect to see dramatic increases in violent crime in urban centers across the country, which is going to cause untold heartbreak and loss.

Gun Control is a State's Rights Issue

 

Every time there is a mass shooting in America, the Federal Government makes another power grab in an effort to limit or restrict the rights enshrined in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The problem with this is that the Second Amendment exists precisely as a limit on Federal Authority and efforts to undermine it are unconstitutional.

The text of the Second Amendment is as follows:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

At the time this amendment was penned, each state fielded its own militia, and it was these militias that waged war on England during the U.S. Revolutionary War (1775 - 1783). These militias were comprised largely of citizen volunteers, mainly farmers, who owned their own muskets and who were available at a moment's notice to rally to the defense of the fledgling nation.

It is precisely these citizen warriors, who served by authority of their own state's militia, that the Founding Fathers were thinking of when they penned "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

The fear of the Founding Fathers was that a national army would come to replace the militia system and that the Federal Government would concentrate power and seek to confiscate weapons from the citizenry to prevent rebellion and insurrection. It is well documented that the formation of a standing army was one of the Founding Father's greatest fears. They believed that keeping a standing army at the ready in times of peace could only lead to mischief and to a loss of freedom generally.

Instead, they preferred the concept of state militias over that of a national standing army, to be regulated by each State's legislature. Basically, each state was to maintain its own militia to be organized (and armed) as that state saw fit, and that the new federal government must not take any action to disarm the citizens that comprise these militias.

However, the Founding Fathers did not want the nascent nation to devolve into the chaos of internecine violence. For this reason, they imagined (or hoped, really) that each state would field a "well regulated" militia, with proper discipline and training. They always felt that the right to keep and bear arms must be for a specific purpose, that being in support of the state militias in defense of each state and, by extension, the defense of the nation.

Therefore, the Constitution strictly outlaws the regulation of arms at the federal level, but not at the state level. In fact, the Constitution demands the regulation of arms at the state level. The problem we are facing as a nation is that too many states have failed to properly regulate their own citizens which has led to the chaos and internecine violence that the Founding Fathers feared could emerge.

The solution is for state legislatures to take up this matter and enact regulations that will make their states safer from gun violence. The Federal Government can enact legislation to help states fund these efforts, but they must not enact legislation that usurps this essential authority.

Split Afghanistan Across the Middle

The United States is attempting to broker a power-sharing arrangement between the secular government of Afghanistan and the Taliban, but it is not going to work. 

The Taliban have proven themselves to be too persistent and too durable, and the secular government too weak and too corrupt. 

And, perhaps more importantly, the vision that the Taliban has for the future of women in Afghanistan is incompatible with the secular model and will be impossible to reconcile. 

If the United States pulls out, the secular government will quickly fall and Afghan women and girls will lose their freedoms.

I propose dividing Afghanistan across the middle, along a line that is roughly defined by Herat in the West and Jalalabad in the East, making good use of the Koh-I-Baba mountain range that runs through the middle of the country as a natural border. The vast majority of the residents of the three cities that fall along this line, Herat, Kabul, and Jalalabad, are opposed to Taliban rule and so are automatic candidates for inclusion in a secular Afghanistan. Also, creating an international border between the southern and northern areas will help prevent the incursion of Taliban assassins and spies who have been responsible for such suffering amongst the educated class of Afghanistan.

The fine points of the geographical division can be left to the negotiators, but physically separating the two warring groups will present the best chance of a lasting peace and will make the work of defending the secular government much easier by keeping the NATO forces out of areas controlled by Taliban sympathizers.