Recently in Politics Category

The Boston Globe has reached a deal with their labor unions to hopefully keep the paper running. Turns out one of the most contentious parts of the negotiations had nothing to do with compensation - it had to do with guaranteed lifetime employment. This is one of the things that makes my mind spin at the labor unions.

I've never worked in a unionized job, so maybe I just lack some critical angle on the whole deal here. But it seems pretty clear that the unions are no longer a bastion of hope against the unfair practices of evil management. It's one thing to organize against sweatshop wages and unsafe work environments. But it's a joke to organize so you blackmail management into a suicide pact - and that's what lifetime employment guarantees are. When business is growing, there's no real impact to an enterprise from that agreement. But it's no wonder that management at any enterprise needs to get those provisions struck when business is weak.

As the economic downturn picked up over this last year, I've consistently heard stories about how unions have threatened the economic viability of businesses. The obvious examples from the Detroit car companies are just the tip of the iceberg. Unionized labor may have been a good thing in the past, but I have to wonder if there will be a point in time when government labor regulations will reduce unions to nothing but a poison pill that threatens both management AND labor with their demands.

I voted with an absentee ballot this year, since I'm traveling full time for my current job. But it would appear that the election board disclosed the fact that I requested an absentee ballot to at least one of the candidates that I have the option of voting for. I'm more than a little surprised that such a disclosure is allowed! I plan on following up with the State Board of Elections after Election Day to find out what the situation is.

An interesting article on how truthful candidates are. Enjoy.

Ars Technica has an interesting synopsis of a recent article in Science. The point of the article is that we should stop pussy-footing around at Yucca Mountain and start storing nuclear waste there. Based on the synopsis, the authors are making a few excellent points.

1. Waiting indefinitely before using Yucca Mountain isn't the safest course of action. The current network of 72 storage sites for nuclear waste is far more dangerous than activating Yucca Mountain and starting pilot programs to store waste there.
2. The nature of Yucca Mountain - a facility which hopes to store waste material for a duration longer than the entirety of human civilization - means that we will most likely never have definite answers to some of the questions we all have about the facility. It's hard to predict how a structure of that scope and subject to radioactive forces will react over a 100,000 year period when we've really only known about radiation for less than 100 years.
3. Scientists need to start educating the public on what science can accomplish and what it can't. Science isn't a tool for establishing certainty - it is a tool for refining "best guesses" to ever higher quality. It's important that the public understand that an undertaking like Yucca Mountain will always have a large level of uncertainty about it. They argue that the best case scenario is to start pilot programs at Yucca Mountain and begin developing real world experiences that can be used to refine our understanding of how Yucca Mountain will perform over the long haul.

Overall, I'd have to say I agree with their arguments. If we're serious about decreasing our environmental impact, we'll have to face the fact that an increased use of nuclear power is a logical part of the solution. The sooner we take steps to find a way to store nuclear wastes, the better.

The recent Congressional hearings for the candidate Attorney General has left me more disappointed than usual in our political process. For starters, the current debates are nothing more than a semantic argument. The real issue is the actions of the interrogators, not the definition of the word torture. Interrogation techniques cover a whole spectrum of coercion -- ranging from asking politely to mutilation and fatal abuse. The difficulty in dealing with this spectrum is that there isn't a clear line between "acceptable" and "unacceptable".

Congress seems more concerned with semantic games around the word "torture" than stopping the behavior itself. We're seeing the natural evolution of the culture that gave us Bill Clinton pondering the meaning of the word "is", instead of admitting he had an affair and telling the world to butt out of his business.

The embarrassing truth is that Congress makes the laws, not the Attorney General. If something needs to be declared illegal, Congress itself has that power! If Congress is truly concerned about water boarding, they don't need to find an Attorney General to fix it for them; they need to pass a law to outlaw it. The fact that they haven't is a testament to their investment of politics above the moral ideals of our society.

It's informative to consider the role of certain of our government agencies and the positions they've taken on the issue of water boarding. The military is the de facto agency responsible for using coercion upon our enemies. Military intelligence operations are aimed at operationally useful information.

Civilian intelligence agencies are aimed at developing objective information to support decision making by the executive branch. However, our intelligence agencies are increasingly influenced by political forces.

Military intelligence has long outlawed water boarding. However, the civilian agencies that are more susceptible to political influence apparently feel they can get results from a technique that the military abandoned long ago.

The White House and their supporters also feel that the public debate should be silenced to prevent giving our enemy any information about techniques. This argument ignores the corrosive effects of such secrecy on democracy. The government must be controlled by the will of the people. When secrecy becomes as systemic as Bush desires, the public is no longer informed well enough to manage government.

The enemy's propaganda already portrays us as cruel and immoral; actually behaving cruelly does nothing but lend them credibility. This is a fundamental aspect of the conflict. This is billed as a "War on Terror", but this war does not fit the traditional sense of war. In the traditional sense of war, the military is capable of winning. But the "War on Terror", much like the wars on drugs or poverty, cannot be won militarily.

This new conflict is fundamentally a conflict of culture and values. As such, anything short of genocide will not resolve this conflict by force. In a conflict of values, one of the conditions for victory is to maintain the values of your culture. The steady erosion of personal liberty and human rights is effectively defeating us in this conflict.

The unilateral nature of the Bush administration is also self-defeating. In this conflict the principle victory condition is to make cultural allies of those who oppose us. By acting unilaterally, we alienate our existing allies and reduce our influence with countries like Saudi Arabia which are not fully aligned with us. It is precisely countries such as Saudi Arabia that we must transition into full fledged cultural allies, not just allies of convenience.

Quick, how much tax did you pay last year?

Have a hard time answering that question? Me too. The income tax system is ridiculously complex, and thanks to the miracle of payroll withholding, most of us don't even know how much we're paying in taxes. (If you think of April 15th as "Refund Day", take a few seconds to read the "tax due" line on your return before you file it next year.)

I just finished reading The FairTax Book, which talks about replacing the income and payroll tax systems with a national sales tax. It's an interesting read, and more details about the plan are available on Wikipedia and FairTax.org. While I'm taking a grain of salt with some of the claims in the book, it's not hard to convince myself that it would be a huge improvement in the current tax mess.

Probably the biggest weakness in the plan is that it calls for people to have to political will to keep Congress in check. It seems self-evident at this point -- people who spend most of their day worrying about whether Brittney or K-Fed get the kids for the weekend aren't going to be involved enough to keep Beltway greed under control. But I don't think that's a reason to avoid making the change.

What do you think?