The Silver Bullet for Climate Stabilizationo

In 1994, the Clinton administration induced Congress to terminate development of the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) at Argonne National Laboratory, describing it as unnecessary, and told its developers to shut up about it.  Thus a technology that has been called the silver bullet we need to stop global warming disappeared into a memory hole.

What is this technology about?

As World War II ended, the US started researching civilian uses of nuclear fission, specifically to heat water for steam turbines that generate electricity.  The research proceeded on two tracks: (1) “thermal” reactors that consume their fission fuel—uranium enriched by increasing the proportion of its “fissile” (readily fissionable) isotope, U‑235, from less than one percent to about four percent; and (2) breeder reactors that optionally replenish their fission fuel— plutonium bred from the “fertile” isotope, U-238, that comprises 99 percent of natural uranium.  While thermal reactors create plutonium as a byproduct and fission it, plutonium is the primary fission fuel of breeder reactors while uranium is their breeding fuel.

Thermal reactors “moderate” the speed of the neutrons created by fission because slow neutrons do a better job at fissioning U-235 than fast neutrons.  Breeder reactors don’t moderate because fast neutrons produce more (fast) neutrons in fissioning plutonium than slow neutrons do and accordingly produce a higher breeding ratio.  Of the neutrons produced by a fission, all but the one that is needed to perpetuate the fission chain reaction are potentially available for breeding, which occurs when U‑238 “captures“ a neutron and becomes (through transmutation) fissile plutonium Pu‑239.

What emerged as the standard for commercial nuclear power was the “2^nd generation” thermal Light Water Reactor (LWR), the first of which was installed at Shippingport, PA in 1957.  LWR uses uranium oxide as a fuel and light (ordinary) water as both a coolant and a moderator.  Today more than 350 commercial reactors are operating in 27 countries, including 100 in the US that produce 20 percent of the electricity.

Meanwhile, breeder development continued at Argonne.  In 1964 the Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II) started up to test what eventually became the IFR and kept going for 30 years.  Instead of a water coolant, IFR uses liquid metal sodium, which doesn’t moderate neutron speed.  As a fission fuel it settled on a solid metal alloy consisting of uranium enriched with plutonium and mixed with zirconium in something like a 70-20-10% ratio, with uranium used by itself as a fertile “blanket” around the fuel assemblies when IFR is operating as a breeder.

The choice of metal fuel is unique among current “4^th generation” breeder technologies and has important advantages.  Foremost among them is its inherent safety, which in the last analysis means not letting any radiation escape into the outside world.

Metal expands when heated by fission, and when it gets too hot the expansion allows more neutrons to run away, thus “passively” reducing or even stopping fission and lowering the temperature.  In public tests conducted in 1986, neither loss of the internal coolant flow nor loss of the heat sink transferring heat to the steam turbine—the causes of all three of the operating LWR accidents at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima—made EBR-II fail.  Given “a couple of chances to melt down” and release radiation, as one of the nuclear engineers commented, “It politely refused both times.”

Another advantage is pyroprocessing, IFR’s technique for reprocessing its metal fuel and fuel assemblies through standard electro refining to cleanse them of impure fission products.  Performed remotely in a highly radioactive “hot cell” that no one can enter, electro refining mixes the reprocessed fuel in a mixture that makes the plutonium element too impure for use in weapons.  Thus, unlike oxide fuel reprocessing, pyroprocessing poses no risk of nuclear proliferation.

The slow process in IFR operations is breeding—upwards of a decade is needed for an IFR reactor to produce enough surplus plutonium to start up another IFR reactor.  Which raises the question, where will the first commercial IFR reactors get their start-up plutonium?  Although it’s a natural element like uranium, plutonium has no mineable sources.

Bit LWRs have left a large amount of radioactive spent fuel containing plutonium that’s waiting to be buried in some tomb like Yucca Mountain NV for hundreds of thousands of years.  And what’s toxic waste to the LWR is potential fuel to the IFR.  With the addition of a facility to reduce oxide fuel to metal, pyroprocessing can reprocess it and save the US government hundreds of million dollars a year in waste handling costs.

Counting both the uranium that is “depleted” by stripping it of the U-235 that enriches LWR fuel and the fuel itself, LWRs use only one percent of the uranium they mine.  IFR, by contrast, keeps reprocessing its fuel until all of the longest-lasting radioactive elements including plutonium are used up, leaving a much smaller amount of much less toxic waste that needs to be sequestered for only 300 years.  And since depleted uranium is still fertile, IFR can use it, too.

While uranium resources are plentiful, they’re not unlimited.  But IFR extracts a hundred times more energy out of uranium than LWRs.  If IFR reactors supplied all of the world’s electricity needs, uranium would last as long as the planet.  In this sense IFR is as “renewable” an energy source as solar, wind, water and geothermal power.

The economics of IFR as a base load power producer have yet to be established.  But given the intermittence and geographic limitations of these alternative non-carbon energy sources, and the high cost of LWR waste, IFR should be very competitive.  And compared to fossil fuel power, if the negative externalities of their greenhouse gases and toxic emissions are properly accounted for, IFR should be like Secretariat at the Belmont in 1973—a runaway winner.

IFR generates power safely and efficiently and is the key to climate stabilization.  The problem is political: how do we get it back on track?

The Strategic Corporal in Afghanistan

In 1999 Commandant of the Marine Corps Charles Krulak wrote an article on “The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three Block War.”  It depicts a corporal, the entry level for non-commissioned officers (NCOs), who is equally skilled at leading a squad of a dozen volunteer enlisted Marines in warfighting, in peace-keeping and in humanitarian assistance.

The Three Block War is a metaphor for the environment in which all of these skills may be needed more or less simultaneously.  “In Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia the unique challenges of military operations other-than-war . . . were combined with the disparate challenges of mid-intensity conflict.”  In conflicts like these “Marines may be confronted by the entire spectrum of tactical challenges in the span of a few hours and within the space of three contiguous city blocks.”

The reason why the corporal in charge is a Strategic Corporal is that he may at times “be the most conspicuous symbol of American foreign policy and …  potentially influence not only the immediate tactical situation, but the operational and strategic levels as well.”

It’s a lot to ask of a 19-22-year-old corporal with 2-3 years of service.  All the more so since generals also expect NCOs to “be able to read the cultural terrain” like majors and colonels.

Afghanistan may not be the kind of Three Block War General Krulak had in mind, but it certainly involves military operations other-than-war since the US is engaged in a counter-insurgency (COIN) campaign (even if we’ve stopped calling it that) to win the hearts and minds of Afghan civilians as we suppress what we regard as an insurgency by the militant Islamic Taliban faction.  Think of it as a Two Block War.

But in this war where every soldier or Marine has a cell phone with camera and texting and 24/7 connection to the Internet, we are far more likely to hear about bad symbols of US foreign policy than good ones.  To mention one of the worst, in March 2012 Robert Bales, an Army staff sergeant and family man with a good record and three prior combat tours in Iraq, left his base one night and murdered 16 Afghan men, women and children.

To the Afghans, however, the carelessness of  US military authorities in burning copies of the Koran in its possession was even more horrendous.  If their violent reaction surprised you as it did me, we both obviously need help reading the cultural terrain.

Is this just war as it always has been?  Is Afghanistan just Vietnam for slow learners?  

I see differences.  One is that many of the troops who fought in Vietnam were draftees.  The protests of their family and friends and veterans and sympathizers back home became noisy and raucous as the war continued without apparent progress for eight years.  To derail such opposition, President Nixon let the draft expire, and we’ve fought every war since with all-volunteer forces (AVF).  Although the Afghan war has gone on without apparent progress longer than Vietnam, there are few protests.  The public is unengaged.

So is Congress.  Current defense budgets are higher in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars than at any time since World War II, including the Vietnam years, but we have fewer combat brigades (look inside this book) because fewer budget dollars trickle down to the AVF.  So to fight two smaller-than-Vietnam wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has had to resort to multiple combat deployments, not only of regular forces but also of reserve and National Guard units.  How do reserve and Guard members hold a job when every third year they’re called back into active duty?

Another difference is in the nature of combat.  Mines and booby traps are part of every war, but in Iraq and now in Afghanistan it’s as if they’ve taken it over, at least in the minds of the AVF on the ground.  Their name, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), suggests how easy they are to make and install, and indeed they’re encountered in every block of the Two Block War.  IEDs also cause injuries that may be worse than the military is prepared to recognize or knows how to treat.  Inadequately treated, the trauma may be exacerbated by the strains of successive combat deployments.  How else to understand what Sergeant Bales did?

A fourth difference is that Vietnam never had any strategic justification other than the domino theory, which was based on serious misreading of the cultural terrain in Southeast Asia and, for that matter, in world communism.  Afghanistan, by contrast, had a clear justification: attacking Al Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11, and denying them their safe haven under the Taliban.

But today Al Qaeda is in hiding across the Afghanistan border in Pakistan with many of its leaders killed, including its founder, Osama bin Laden, and others hounded by aerial drones and commandos.  It has no safe haven under the Taliban (whose leaders are also in hiding) or anywhere in Afghanistan.  Nor has it successfully attacked the US since 9/11.

Our war with the Taliban has now come to resemble Vietnam—without apparent progress or strategic purpose—and is impairing both the health and morale of the AVF.  It is time to end the former and restore the latter.  Given our refusal to deal with the greater threats of global warming, as another Marine general warned, we’re going need the AVF for other wars.

Annulling Healthcare?

It seems unreal that the Supreme Court might kill the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on the grounds that requiring everyone who can afford health care insurance to have it by 2014 or pay a compensatory penalty is unconstitutional.  Although Congress can regulate health care and insurance under the Constitution’s grant of power to Congress “To regulate Commerce . . . among the several States,” a majority of five justices may decide that the individual mandate (as the requirement is called) isn’t included in that power.

ACA is complex, but its purpose is clear – and clearly tied up with the individual mandate.  In an e-book I recently published, Vote 99 Percent, which is about key issues that voters in 2012 need to understand, I undertook to explain the gist of each issue in 200-300 words.  Here’s what I wrote about ACA:

The purpose of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, most of which doesn’t take effect until 2014, is to provide American citizens and legally resident aliens with access to affordable health care through affordable health care insurance.  People who can’t obtain affordable insurance through an employer and don’t qualify for Medicaid will be guaranteed access to insurance through new health benefit exchanges, with subsidies for those with low income.

Uninsured people who can’t afford health care when they have to have it are often treated at public cost in hospital emergency rooms.  Under ACA they will also be able to obtain insurance at normal rates since insurers will no longer be able to deny coverage or charge more because of current illness or preexisting medical conditions.  But letting people avoid buying insurance until they’re sick increases the insurance risk and its cost for everyone else.  To minimize these costs, ACA’s “individual mandate” requires almost everyone who can afford insurance to have it by 2014 or pay an annual penalty.

Since ACA defers to our current for-profit health insurance system rather than replacing it with a single government payer like Medicare, which insures seniors, ACA’s version of universal health care is less efficient and more expensive than in other industrialized countries like Canada.  But along with Medicare and safety-net programs like Medicaid, ACA will be as vital to the economic security of the 99% as Social Security.

Congress should not eliminate or privatize or cut back on any of these programs.

                                                                —

Insurance companies control their risks by excluding people with higher risks of illness either by denying them coverage in the first place or by capping the amount of their coverage or canceling their policies when they get sick.  ACA will eliminate these practices, thereby increasing the risk and consequently the cost of insurance.  But requiring healthy people to buy insurance will lower the risk and cost of insurance, offsetting in some measure the increased risk and cost of covering less healthy people.

That’s the essential scheme of ACA—finance the cost of extending health care to high-risk people who really need it but can’t get it without ACA by creating the individual mandate.  Universal health care means everyone’s in, and taxes on insurance and pharmaceutical companies and wealthier individuals will subsidize health care for poorer people who can’t afford to buy insurance.

For the Supreme Court to decide that buying health care insurance is part of interstate commerce that Congress can regulate but not buying insurance is not part of interstate commerce would be truly bizarre.  All the more so since universal health care could be achieved by expanding Medicare to cover everyone and financing the additional coverage through payroll taxes.  Doing so would rely on Congress’ Constitutional power to lay and collect taxes to provide for the general welfare, the power that Congress exercised when it created Social Security and Medicare in its present form.  Everyone is taxed, so wouldn’t need an individual mandate—or for that matter private health insurance.

During oral argument the most senior associate justice on the court suggested that if the power to regulate interstate commerce justified the individual mandate, it could justify anything, including making people buy broccoli.  “Everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food.  Therefore, everybody is in the market.  Therefore, you can make people buy broccoli.”

Well, maybe.  But since the price of commodities like broccoli is largely determined (in the absence of scarcity) by the costs of producing and distributing them, making everyone buy them isn’t likely to lower their price very much.  But the price of health insurance is determined by the health risks that determine when (if ever), how often and how much money the insurer will have to pay out.  Adding healthy people to the insured pool lowers its health risks and therefore its price.

Economists understand this, and indeed the leading expert on the individual mandate is MIT economist Jonathan Gruber.  He estimates that losing the individual mandate would reduce the number of currently insured people who will be covered by ACA from 32 million to 8 million and perpetuate “our unfair individual insurance markets in a world where employer-based insurance is rapidly disappearing.”

Economists understand the difference between health insurance and broccoli, but if five of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court don’t, ACA will be gutted.  We’ll find out in June.

Standing Your Ground While Armed

Early in the dark and rainy Sunday evening of February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, a tall, slim 17-year-old African-American boy, walked from the home of his father’s fiancée in Sanford, FL, a suburb of Orlando, to buy a can of ice tea and a package of Skittles candy from a 7-Eleven.  Martin, who lived with his mother in Miami, was visiting his father during a ten-day suspension from high school after traces of marijuana were found in his book bag.

On his way back from the 7-Eleven, Martin was observed by a neighborhood watch coordinator named George Zimmerman, a hefty white man in his latter 20s whose mother was Peruvian.  Zimmerman thought Martin looked suspicious and called 911 from his SUV.

The neighborhood in question was a gated community called Retreat at Twin Lakes which had a problem with burglaries.  The previous fall, at Zimmerman’s request, a representative of the Sanford Police had met with a couple of dozen Twin Lakes residents to set up a neighborhood watch.  Their role, the representative told them, was to be the eyes and ears of the police, not vigilantes, and they should avoid confrontations and call the police from the safety of their homes or cars.

The residents designated Zimmerman as their watch coordinator.  Zimmerman, who worked as an analyst at a mortgage firm, watched the Twin Lakes neighborhood in the evening.

Despite some history of violence, Zimmerman had obtained a permit to carry a concealed handgun, which is easy to get in Florida.  Although neighborhood watchers don’t possess police powers and supposedly don’t carry weapons, on the evening of February 26th Zimmerman was carrying a concealed 9 millimeter handgun.

When he called 911, Zimmerman told the police dispatcher of his suspicions about the person he described as a black teenager and then commented, “These assholes, they always get away.”  (At minute 1:38 of the first of eight edited tapes later released by the police)  The dispatcher (at 2:23) asked if Zimmerman was following the teenager, and when Zimmerman said he was, the dispatcher said that the police don’t need you to do that.  But Zimmerman, who had gotten out of his SUV, continued to do that.

Meanwhile, according to a girlfriend with whom Martin was conversing through a headset connected to a cell phone in his pocket, Martin mentioned someone was following him.  She told him to run, but he wouldn’t.

Shortly thereafter, before the police arrived, Zimmerman and Martin met up.  According to Zimmerman, he had lost sight of Martin and was returning to his SUV when Martin came up behind him and accosted him.  They got into an argument and then Martin decked him with one punch, jumped on top of him and started banging his head on the walkway.

Zimmerman was calling for help, according to one eyewitness, who told Martin (presumably) to stop and then went into his home to call 911.  Before he reached his phone, he heard at least one gun shot.  “And then, when I got upstairs and looked down, the guy who was on the top beating up the other guy, was the one laying in the grass, and I believe he was dead at that point.”

Another eyewitness, a teenage boy who was walking his dog, told the 911 operator that he saw a man in a red shirt (Zimmerman) on the ground who was screaming and needed help.  Later, chasing his dog, he heard a gunshot and then the screaming stopped.

By that time, several residents were calling 911.  When the police arrived, Zimmerman admitted that he killed Martin but claimed self-defense.  The police made a cursory investigation, found no reason to doubt Zimmerman and released him without charges.  Over the course of the next month, protests over the police inaction and the killing grew rapidly throughout the country and even abroad.

But the Sanford police inaction was consistent with how the courts interpret Florida’s law on the justifiable use of force, which is to free assailants claiming self-defense unless they determine that there is probable cause that the use of force was unlawful.  In a case in Miami a month after Martin was killed, the judge dismissed a murder case against a young man who had chased down and stabbed a suspected burglar on the grounds that his claim of self-defense was credible.

In 2005 Florida enacted a Stand Your Ground law promoted by the National Rifle Association (NRA), which exists to promote the sale of firearms.  A key section provides in part that “a person is justified in the use of deadly force and does not have a duty to retreat if:

“(1) He or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony;” [emphasis added]

In the years since enactment, justifiable homicide cases have tripled.  Florida is on its way to becoming a new state-wide O.K. Corral reality show.  Who or what is to blame?

In the senseless and tragic death of Trayvon Martin, however the conflicting stories are resolved, George Zimmerman is to blame.  He became a vigilante—a person who is not a member of law enforcement but who pursues and punishes persons suspected of lawbreaking—in pursuit of an innocent man whom he killed with a concealed weapon.

In the larger context, the real culprits are Florida’s Stand Your Ground law and the state’s policy of encouraging its residents to arm themselves and carry concealed weapons.  In concert they elevate every angry confrontation into a potentially lethal one.

Vote 99

My excuse for scant posting to this blog recently (and tweeting not at all) is that my head has been focused on writing a short e-handbook (21 pages in print format) about today’s critical political issues which divide conservatives from non-conservatives and reduce Congress to impotence.  The book, cover shown below, is dedicated to the 99 Percent and seeks their participation in an effort called VOTE 99 to elect candidates for Congress who are pro-99% on the issues and are not beholden to the 1%.

The ultimate goal, which I imagined in my first blog post last October and which will take multiple elections to accomplish, is a Congress controlled by members who refuse large individual campaign contributions (over $200 per contributor, or even less) which, as the Center for Responsive Politics concluded here, here and here in the 2009-2010 election cycle, are predominately made by “business executives and professionals”—that is, the 1%.

The book discusses 12 issues presented as questions for Congressional candidates followed by a short explanation and hyperlinks for further information.  Here’s the first issue in its entirety.

Candidate Question #1

Which is more important in 2012—creating jobs or cutting the deficit?

The right answer for the 99% is creating jobs.  Here’s why.

According to mainstream economists, problem #1 today is lack of jobs.  During 2000 when the economy was booming, 81.5 percent of working-age Americans between 25 and 54 years of age were working.  In 2011 only 75.1 percent were working.  Although the percent improved in early 2012, our economy still employs 6 fewer people per hundred than it should.  

The US government has a lot of public debt, but what’s keeping the economy in a deep slump is all the private debt that many homeowners took on during the recent housing price bubble.  (Two-thirds of 99% households own their homes.)  When housing prices collapsed along with the value of retirement savings invested in the stock market, homeowners began worrying about their finances and started saving more and consuming less.  Since our economy depends on consumer spending, businesses responded by cutting back on production and construction and laying off workers.  Then consumers worried about jobs and spent even less, causing more layoffs.

The fastest way to create jobs in a deep slump is by government spending.  Cutting the government’s budget deficit does just the opposite—it eliminates jobs.

The best way to cut the budget deficit is to restore full employment and full production, thereby increasing the government’s tax receipts from workers and businesses and reducing unemployment compensation and slump-related safety-net spending.  If more adjustments are needed to balance the budget, that’s the time to make them—during the economic boom created by full employment and production, not during the slump.

Links for further information

Economists saying jobs are #1 concern include Nobel winners Stiglitz and Krugman

US Bureau of Labor Statistics data on working age employment to population ratio

According to Keynes, the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity

4 million lost their jobs in 1937-1938 when the New Deal cut spending to reduce deficit

----------

Historically, US voter participation has been terrible, declining from 80 percent of adult citizens in 19^th century Presidential election years to hardly more than 50 percent today.  If we can interest some significant margin of the 99 Percenters—and I’m thinking especially of those in the 18 to 29 year old age group—in the issues that divide those who believe in Social Security, health care for all, unemployment insurance, food stamps and school lunches from those who believe in cutting taxes to the level where they support a strong military and little else, then perhaps more of the 99 Percenters will become regular voters.

If that happens, the day will come when we’ll able to replace a corrupt Congress beholden to the 1% who buy favoritism from its members with a new Congress beholden to the 99% who don’t.  And then we’ll have the power to end needless subsidies of Corporate America and the 1% who control it, restore free-market capitalism with appropriate regulation to keep it transparent and competitive, balance the budget with a fair tax system, insure economic freedom for all, take care of the only planet we have to live on and recover the democracy that our Founding Fathers entrusted to us.  VOTE 99 can change the world.

The book, when I get it converted to the proper format, will be published as a 99 cent Kindle book and possibly later in other formats.  Aaron Nickles is developing a model web site as an integral part of VOTE 99 for local organizers to provide voters with information on the candidates running in their election district and present local requirements for registering to vote and for voting.  When the site is ready, it will include a copy of the book that can be read online for free.

Any suggestions for implementing VOTE 99, including how to locate local organizers and qualify them for licensing (which will be without charge) will be appreciated.  You can reach me by e-mail here.

One Percent Capitalism

In 2011 President Obama appointed Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, to lead the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.  Not surprisingly, the appointment raised eyebrows among those concerned about jobs since GE (per The New York Times) eliminated a fifth of its US workers in the last decade and now (per Bloomberg) employs more people abroad than in the US.

Nonetheless, Immelt’s record on competitiveness is impressive.  He refocused GE’s operations (and employment) from domestic manufacturing to more profitable overseas financing.  In the 1990s, according to the Times article, three-quarters of both revenue and profit came from domestic operations.  Today more than half of its revenue and more than four-fifths of its profit are earned overseas.  In 2011, in the midst of a worldwide economic slump, GE’s revenue, 150 billion dollars, was 6th highest of all US corporations and produced a profit of 11½ billion dollars.

Thomas Edison’s manufacturing powerhouse has become a very profitable international bank.  How does this bank compete?

The Times concluded that “one of the most striking advantages of General Electric is its ability to lobby for, win and take advantage of tax breaks.”  Much of that ability is embodied in GE’s tax law firm, said to be the best in the world.  What’s different about it is its size – almost a thousand people – and the fact that everyone works exclusively for GE.  The “firm” is GE’s tax department. 

GE encourages these employees to spend half their time on complying with tax laws and the other half on finding ways to avoid them.  The second half makes the GE tax department a profit center with its own lobbyists.

One significant tax break, called “active financing,” allows GE and other banks to avoid US taxes on interest income earned abroad as long as the income remains abroad.   When in 2008 the Democratically controlled Congress was considering letting the tax break expire, GE sent in the head of its tax department and its lobbyists to preserve it.  A key convert was Representative Charles Rangel of New York City.  A month after his conversion, Immelt announced in his presence that GE was donating 30 million dollars to New York City schools including schools in Rangel’s district. 

By tax expert David Kay Johnston’s reckoning, over the period 2008-2010, GE received 56 dollars and 40 cents in tax refunds for every dollar that it spent on lobbying.  That’s 56.40 times 80.4 million dollars—its lobbying expenses—for a total of 4½ billion dollars in tax refunds.  According to another report, GE received almost 8½ billion dollars in tax subsidies of all kinds during this period, making its effective tax rate minus 45 percent.  The tax rate for business corporations is supposed to be plus 35 percent.

But as the late Chicago economist Milton Friedman instructed us, there is

"one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

Spending corporate resources to engage in open and free competition to influence Congress through lobbying is not only lawful but constitutionally protected as an exercise of any corporation’s First Amendment right to petition the government.  If such activities are designed to increase its profits, then according to the Friedman doctrine the business corporation has a social responsibility to engage in them.

By this standard GE, led by the President’s new chief of jobs and competitiveness, is one of the best.  Its investors are surely grateful, if not so much the US job holders that it fired.  And not so much, perhaps, the group of investment professionals who want GE and other public corporations to disclose their spending on political activities.  Their reasoning is in part economic (read closely):

“Political spending disclosure helps prevent corporations (and unaccountable corporate executives) from using corporate treasury funds to obtain competitive advantages through political means, rather than by adding value in the marketplace. . . .  Secret political giving undermines free enterprise and creates unearned advantages in the marketplace.  These activities distort the workings of the market, and result in misallocations of capital.  Mandatory corporate political spending disclosure would further a marketplace where companies compete and win based on superior products and services, rather than by superior access to lawmakers.”

So in the view of these professionals, using corporate money to obtain competitive advantages through political means—which surely include lobbying Congress even when it’s disclosed—undermines free enterprise, creates unearned advantages and distorts the workings of the market.  But of course they’re talking about the free market guided by Adam Smith’s invisible hand.  In the 1% capitalism of Milton Friedman, Jeffrey Immelt and Corporate America, the invisible hand has been replaced by money and competition by the political advantages that it buys.

To change back to free-market capitalism, forget the likes of GE—change Congress.

Militarized Police State

The video of the pepper-spraying of student #Occupy protesters by University of California-Davis campus police in riot gear was a real eye-opener.  When I went to college, the campus police were un-uniformed and as far as I knew un-armed.  Their main function seemed to be ferreting out girls in dorm rooms after curfew.

Now they might be cruising around in armored personnel carriers.  Since 1997 the Department of Defense has given away more than 2½ billion dollars of excess equipment to 17,000+ state and local law enforcement agencies including body armor, night vision gear, assault rifles, grenade launchers, armored vehicles, helicopters, riverboats and robots.  The Department of Homeland Security has a grant program under which law enforcement agencies can acquire even more equipment.

The Texas Department of Public Safety has its own surveillance drones.

In October, California’s Alameda County Sheriff’s Department hosted Urban Shield, an annual training exercise  to coordinate responses to a terror attack or natural disaster in the Bay Area.  The exercise, which included a 50-hour SWAT competition on the UC-Berkeley campus, was attended by police teams from the US and other countries, notably Israel, which as “the Harvard of antiterrorism” has had a major influence on how US police handle civilians.

A month later, Oakland and UC-Berkeley #Occupiers were overpowered by police who had participated in the exercise.

As the police become more militarized, the military becomes more involved in law enforcement.

In 2008, US Northern Command, which was added to the military’s combatant commands after 9/11 to defend the US homeland, acquired its first active army unit, a brigade combat team assigned to the command’s US Army North.  The unit, designated a Consequence Management Response Force, is being trained in “crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.”  Army Times, however, emphasized that the training is only for “war-zone operations, not for any domestic purpose.”

“Not for any domestic purpose” is to steer clear of the Posse Comitatus Act.  Enacted in 1878 after Congress ended Reconstruction and withdrew federal troops from the South, the Act prohibits the use of the US Army for law enforcement – “executing the laws” -- unless “expressly authorized by the Constitution or by act of Congress.”

The major act of Congress that expressly authorizes federal troops to execute federal and state laws is the Insurrection Act of 1807.  Earlier legislation, particularly the Militia Act of 1795, authorized the President to call up State militias (now called the National Guard) in case of rebellion against a State, if the State legislature or governor so requested, or in case US laws could not be enforced.  The 1807 Act allowed the President to use the army and navy in any case where calling up the militia was authorized.

The Civil Rights Act of 1871, aimed at the Ku Klux Klan, extended the power of the President to use militia and federal forces to any “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” that deprived people in a State of their constitutional rights or obstructed US laws.

All this legislation, still quaintly referred to as the Insurrection Act of 1807, endured without significant change for the last 130 years until an amendment to it was buried in the Defense Authorization Act of 2007.  With an eye to Hurricane Katrina, recent flu epidemics and 9/11, Congress greatly enlarged the President’s authority to use armed forces for law enforcement by extending it to “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition” leading to domestic violence that local authorities cannot control.

Now, as we speak, a bipartisan Congress is about to complete the militarization of our National Police State by putting the military in charge of terrorism with the authority, say two retired Marine generals, to “indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil.”  The Marines, a former Commandant and a former commander of Central Command, urged President Obama to veto the legislation (which Obama has molded to his satisfaction) because it “would extend the battlefield to include the United States – and hand Osama bin Laden an unearned victory long after his well-earned demise.”

We might bear in mind that the terrorists with whom our National Police State is obsessed are mostly nonstate actors who rarely get loose in the US or, if home-grown, are rarely beyond surveillance.  Since real terrorists are scarce, police agencies are honing their new military skills on largely peaceful #Occupiers and students.  Whom are they protecting?

Terrorists have been prosecuted by US civil authorities in accordance with the US Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, but not successfully by the US military.  Turning people whom the President suspects of being terrorists over to the military subjects them to preventive detention under martial law with no right of habeas corpus.  Whom will that protect?