With exploding violence in Ukraine capturing the world’s attention, the European Union has already agreed to impose sanctions on those Ukrainian officials responsible for the violence while the US is considering similar measures. First, sanctions are instruments capable of exerting long-term pressure on governments; they are not necessarily effective in the short-term. Second, the targeting of leaders helps send a message, yet it makes it far more difficult for them to let go of power and leave their home countries, if a peace agreement demands such concessions.
Third, the violence in Ukraine is driven by pro-Russian policies, thus action by America would essentially turn a violent crackdown by an overreacting government into an international issue. Given that during the Arab Spring Revolutions, the US was idle when Saudi Arabia and other American allies, who used heavy-handed violent tactics to quell unrest, one-side action by the US would only feed the Russian argument that America is hypocritical as it is doing the same as Russia; therefore, Russia is further incentivized to pressure the Ukrainian government to continue supporting the pro-Russian policies that sparked the violence in the first place. If the International Community has a role in the Ukrainian internal conflict, the US and EU must seek to collaborate with Russia in order to pressure the Yanukovych government to respect the rights of peaceful protestors and avoid violent clashes. Given Putin’s recent pursuit of soft power options, doing so would either force Russia to help end the violence in Ukraine or undermine Russia’s diplomatic position relative to the US, if Putin refused to cooperate. Moreover, sanctions may not be the best option as their effectiveness is weak and they encourage an antagonistic dynamic with Russia when Putin needs to see an international incentive to discourage Ukrainian violence.
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With the recent release of a 400-page Commission of Inquiry on North Korea report detailing the heinous human rights violations under the Kim dynasty, calls for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to act have been growing. Although the severity and pervasiveness of human rights violations in North Korea are paralleled only by those committed at the hands of the Nazis regime, the findings of the Commission are far from unexpected.
That said, the ICC has no role at this time in dealing with North Korean as the perpetrators of these crimes cannot be brought to justice. In fact, involving the ICC may well complicate any future efforts to effectively deal with the Kim Jon Un government due to technical issues that will incentivize the regime to tighten its grip when threatened. It is important to recognize the North Korean government’s is abusive, because it is trying to cater to its interests, i.e. stay in power at all costs, thus it must perceive its interests are better served by respecting human rights before it will. Although UN officials desperately want to stop the inhuman treatment of the North Korean People, relying on international law and a court lacking any ability to enforce itself own proclamation only serves to validate the importance of international institutions like the UN and ICC in the eyes of those who support them. For those who do not, which certainly includes the highly isolated North Korean government, threats to “prosecute” individuals for war crimes are received as a silly little joke perpetrated by politicians. Dealing with North Korea requires real action by the International Community, not empty, meaningless threats. America’s first President George Washington was a very generous and cordial host who would often entertain uninvited guests at his home after he left the White House. Aside from the closing of banks and an extended weekend for students, unless they need to make up a snow day, little fanfare is made of President’s Day. Following President Washington’s example, President’s Day should be a day when our local and national political leaders reach out to their constituents, specifically those whose views are often neglected by their elected officials. It should be a day about democracy and constructive political discourse as well as an opportunity to say thanks for the leadership that has helped make our Country what it is today. Just as Thanksgiving and Independence Day are marked by generosity and celebration, political leaderships should seek to revive this national holiday by reaching out to those who are often neglected by the political system, especially considering the division seen in our government these days.
Fortunately, the political class is embracing the long-time need to address growing economic disparity and poverty, but the war to save the American Dream and US economic supremacy is a long and difficult one that offers no assurance of victory. There are reasons our political elite have avoided dealing with the underlying economic issues that have been driving America’s financial problems since the 1970s when America’s prosperity started to falter. There are reasons economic advisors have avoided dealing with economically depressed regions like Detroit and Philadelphia by advising the most talented of workers capable of moving to follow the jobs while focusing on the successes of Wall Street instead of Main Street.
One of the largest reasons is that the influential elite of our society do not comprehend the psychological of the disadvantaged and disenfranchised well enough to recognize what limitations the growing poor classes must overcome, so they can help develop solutions that actually address these roadblocks, which often seem trivial to the more advantaged. The views of the more elite socioeconomic classes are built on a series of intellectual exercises, thus they understand economic disenfranchisement only in pieces and lack the intuitive understanding needed to offer a comprehensive vision of how to address the issues of those who are limited by their circumstances. The perpetual poor, on the other hand, do not necessarily know how to intellectualize the consequences and limitations that come with a lack of sufficient income. That is, they did not how to break down what they intuitively know to be their needs and help policymakers develop anti-poverty strategies. After all, the poor tend not to be adequately trained in law, economics, accounting, business etc. Even if they do, they may not necessarily have the resources or opportunity to overcome seeming nonsensical barriers. For many of those who ascended the economic ladder from nothing, there is a tendency to superimpose their path to prosperity onto others, thus they can only offer limited insights, while there are many who do not understand the circumstances of others and still others who resent those who need help to succeed. Our Nation has spent two generations throwing massive amounts of money at the poverty problem with weak results that are now being rapidly undermined by growing economic disparity. It is because few have a comprehensive enough understanding of the issues to offer a vision for the future and effective needed strategies to move forward. On the Left, there is too much reliance on education and subsidies, i.e. public assistance, tax credits, etc. On the Right, there is too much reliance on misguided faith in market forces, i.e. markets do not what we want or need them to do; they do what they are set up to do, and problem avoidance via the abuse of concepts like personal merit and responsibility. The word choice, for example, is a powerful term that can be grossly misleading while it is not well understood by the advantaged who often use it as an excuse to avoid their positional responsibilities as social leaders. People of privileged backgrounds have the ability to make near instant and direct choices; whereas, the less affluent must correctly make a series of smaller choices to achieve the end result of the one choice that the more affluent individual has had the opportunity to make. Because these choices cost in terms of resources, including money, time, missed opportunities, energy, and emotion, the disempowered can quickly become exhausted when dealing with seemingly minor barriers, thus they are essentially set up to fail by circumstances and they will most likely fail. Furthermore, there is also historic bias and bad thinking that prevents in-power generations from properly addressing the interests of younger generations. Baby Boomers and their children experienced the advantage of prosperity as they entered an era of decline; whereas, the current generations must overcome an era of decline to achieve prosperity, America’s Greatest Generation. For the Baby Boomers, simply trying meant the difference between success and failure, or less success, while their children struggled or thrived depending on their successes and failures. The current generations, whether advantaged or disadvantaged, face a world of ever intensifying, often destructive, competition where failure is a becoming a more likely scenario and exhausting oneself may only be rewarded with less failure. The views of older generations on education, as one example, are outdated. Where elder generations were taught specific skills, unless they acquired broader skill as they approached the doctoral level, younger generations have benefited from growing trends that inadvertently favored a focus on “learning to learning” where students are taught how to acquire highly dynamic skills sets, how to acquire new skill sets on their own, and how to derive/acquire/process/apply massive amounts of data. In other words, good students of the younger generations do not need to take a lengthy class to learn a new piece of software or balance their checkbook. The thoughtful individuals of the younger generations can learn anything they need to learn, if given the opportunity and some timely guidance from an expert. As such, more education is not so much needed as education needs to focus more on teaching children how to learn to learn. More importantly, employers need to start recognizing this shift in human resource capacity, i.e. the skills of the unemployed or inappropriately employed are not necessarily perishable while on-the-job training has renewed merits. For non-technology and non-scientific oriented fields, further educating our population will do little except drive degree inflation. Degrees do not mean jobs; requiring someone to have a masters degree to do a job that a high school graduate can do does no one any good. Relying too heavily on education to address growing economic disparity will drive degree inflation while it is an economic strategy that best reflects the needs of small countries. At the same time, the slow shift toward assessments tools that evaluate the skills of potential workers are only useful if there are well-paying jobs in the United States, which means outsourcing must be addressed more aggressively with improved trade agreements and tax policies that incentivize innovation. For technology and scientific fields that drive innovation, researches and creators need resources, which are often very significant, to pursue their novel ideas, which means we need to build an economy for innovators while we also need platforms for marketing any products that might come from research and a consumer base with sufficient income to support those products. It is also important to recognize only a certain segment of the population is capable of pursuing these fields and an even smaller segment has the will to pursue these fields while the incentives to do so are lacking due to too much competition for fewer underfunded opportunities and a payoff worth far less than the struggle. Unfortunately, research and innovation are returning to an elitist hobby when we need an economy driven by innovation and wealth generated from intellectual capital. In other words, America needs to put money in the hands of individuals who can give our economy what it needs and empower those capable of changing our society for the better. Republicans are threatening political backlash against Volkswagen, if they allow workers to unionize under the AUW, as part of a larger political campaign to push their so-called “right-to-work” agenda. Quite frankly, this is none of the GOP’s damn business.
First, unions exist to help workers balance their interests with company interests, thus representative groups like unions are needed to ensure individual employees have enough leverage to defend their needs. Clearly, corruption is an issue, but such is true of any influential organization. Second, government should be helping to balance the interests of American workers/citizens and businesses. After all, our government needs to foster an economic environment that actually serves the interests of the American People. Third, government should be helping to ensure American owned companies embrace practices that best reflect American interests by pushing foreign owned companies to do the same. Clearly, Americans can only hold onto quality jobs when foreign owned businesses are not undermining them for doing so. Where VW is leaving workers to decide how they are represented, which is a stance that should be praised, members of the GOP are damning our free market system and democratic values for their political agenda. There are times when government should just get out of the way and this is one of those times. |
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April 2020
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