A hegemony-ending war?

Well, that was a day, wasn't it? After threatening that "a whole civilisation will die tonight" if he didn't get what he wanted, the orange shitgibbon has decided that actually its time for a ceasefire. The terms of which - a continuation of Iranian nuclear enrichment, and Iran and Oman getting to toll the Strait of Hormuz in lieu of reparations - are effectively an admission of US defeat. The US says it will be "negotiating" over the next two weeks to try and change that, with the threat of restarting bombing, but its clear to everyone else that that won't get them what they want, and that it would be much better to simply walk away, and let the uneasy ceasefire eventually become effectively permanent.

And hopefully the rest of the world will spend the next two weeks persuading America to do that. Because America has made it clear that they are the enemy of the world, and we simply cannot take their shit any more. The way they export instability with their perpetual interference in other countries, the way they start wars and fuck up the entire world on the whim of their demented mad king. And while its tempting to see this as a problem of their current leadership, he is just the symptom of a society which believes itself exceptional and so entitled to do this to us.

Our global system is now too interconnected and too brittle to withstand such constant sabotage. And that means that America needs to be constrained, diplomatically and economically.

The good news is that this disaster of a war looks to be the beginning of the end for American hegemony. They've alienated the allies they depend on for their power, and shown that hosting their bases creates insecurity, not stability. If America is allowed to station forces in your country, they will use those forces to start a war with your neighbours, without asking or warning you, then leave you to burn when the inevitable retaliation comes. If they are allowed to use your airspace for military purposes, they will do so to commit or enable war crimes. All while sitting safe in their fascist "homeland", which of course is sacrosanct and is never allowed to be attacked. That's not a recipe for good relationships. Countries hosting US bases should be seriously reconsidering whether they want to keep doing so, and hopefully kicking America out. Meanwhile, they've also demonstrated the limits of their military power. Like their friend Russia, they are in fact incapable of defeating a middle power. While they can bomb for a month, smash stuff up, kill people, destroy infrastructure, and commit war crimes from the air, all that does is piss people off (Who knew?) And even that power is now constrained, because they've burned most of their arsenal on murdering Iranian schoolchildren and enabling Israel to do the same.

So, while this probably isn't the last American imperialist war, I think its all downhill for them from here. The world is already looking to China, simply because they manage to appear normal, and aren't constantly bombing people. If they can keep that up, and resist the urge to exploit America's weakness to steal from their neighbours, then the hegemonic position occupied by America will simply fall into their lap as the status quo coalition aligns behind them. I'd rather have no hegemon (because fuck hegemons and fuck empires), but a peaceful, non-predatory one is better than the American monster.

No deals with the US

So, Shame Jones is officially trying to sell our country to Donald Trump, by negotiating a secret critical minerals deal behind everyone's back. My immediate reaction - along with a lot of other people's - is "fuck that"! And there are all sorts of good reasons why we should not be pursuing any deals with the US - and the Trump regime in particular - at present.

Firstly, there's the US's present status as a rogue nation. Aotearoa depends on a rules-based international order, but as Canadian prime minister Mark Carney pointed out, the United States has destroyed that order. We should not be rewarding them for doing so. Instead, following Carney's suggestion, we should be working with other like-minded countries to reconfigure the international order around the US. Which means no deals.

Secondly, there's Trump himself. It ought to be obvious to any observer by now that Trump does not regard any "deal" as binding on him, instead viewing them as a form of criminal interview, testing whether his chosen victim will resist escalation or comply. Just look at his various "deals" with Canada: he broke NAFTA to force them to negotiate the USMCA, then broke that by imposing tariffs, then broke the settlement he reached on that with more tariffs, and on and on it goes (Trump is currently threatening tariffs against Canada for making a trade deal with China, and is going to ground half the US domestic air passenger fleet by attacking the Canadian aircraft industry). So there is simply no point to making any "deal" with him, and instead we ought to be refusing to on principle, simply because his word can't be trusted.

And then of course there's the fascism... should we really be supplying critical minerals to a fascist state who will use them to wage war on the world (and on China, our largest trading partner) and oppress its own people?

We should have no fucking part of any of this. Even if you thought the US was once our ally, that situation has clearly changed. The US is now a nakedly predatory power, openly threatening its allies while working with imperialist Russia to enable aggression. I don't think any New Zealander wants that sort of world. And while Trump won't last forever, the underlying dynamics in the US political system which have brought them to this don't seem like they'll change any time soon. We shouldn't be making deals with them under these circumstances. Instead, we should cut them out of our lives as much as possible, and work with like-minded nations to build a new world system which does not depend on them. A regime which meets this situation by seekign deals with the US are simply quislings and traitors.

The enemy of the world

Over the weekend the United States mounted an unprovoked attack on Venezuela, killing a hundred people, and kidnapping its president. Since then, they have threatened further attacks, as well as similar action against Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Iran and Greenland. All of which is illegal under international law, but I think it's pretty clear by now that the US doesn't give a shit about that, or anything other than naked force. What we are looking at here is a rogue empire, using force or threats of force to extort territory, resources, or even just money from the rest of the world. And the world - and in particular the status quo coalition of countries who want peace and quiet - needs to wake up and start treating it as such.

How can the rest of the world respond to such a state? We already know part of the solution, because the US has done it to those it has deemed "rogue" before: comprehensive trade and financial sanctions. Unfortunately, this is difficult when the US is the center of so much, but personal sanctions against regime members and their supporters are eminently possible, and likely to have an impact. The US has done this to ICC judges and officials in an effort to intimidate them into dropping cases against Israel and US troops in Afghanistan; but we can do the same to them. And it will hurt. Trump's a billionaire, he has money and investments all over the world. Ditto Musk, Bezos, Thiel, and the rest of his fascist cabal. We can take it from them. They will scream like Russian oligarchs if they can't access the money they've stashed in their foreign tax havens, or holiday in their usual places. And that in turn means internal pressure on the regime.

Longer term, its pretty clear that the US can no longer be trusted as a responsible member of the international community. Even if the current regime is overthrown and things return to "normal", it might happen again. Better therefore to reduce our dependence on them as much as possible. If we want a peaceful, stable world where we can just get on with our lives without fear of random attack, that world can no longer include the US.

Making the world a more dangerous place

Like much of the rest of the world, I've been watching in horror for the last week as nuclear-armed, genocidal Israel started a war of choice against Iran, bombing its military facilities and cities, then screaming like a Russian when its victim hit back. And now they've dragged the nuclear-armed US into their little war, making things even more dangerous.

Firstly, the war is clearly an illegal act of aggression under international law. Iran had taken no aggressive action against Israel, let alone the US, and there was not a clear and imminent threat of it doing so which would justify a pre-emptive strike. Instead, its just Israel kicking over another neighbour in an effort to distract from its ongoing genocide in Gaza. It is a clear international crime - the supreme international crime, even - and its architects should be facing trial in The Hague for it. Which makes the New Zealand government's refusal to condemn the attacks pure cowardice, a betrayal of our long-standing support for peace and international law.

The ostensible purpose of the war is to "stop Iran getting a nuclear weapon". Which is ridiculous on a number of levels. Most obviously because Iran has been a member of the non-proliferation treaty for over 50 years, and had renounced weapons of mass destruction in 2003. Israel and the US didn't believe them, so they signed an anti-nuclear deal in 2015, which subjected them to enhanced monitoring in exchange for a relaxation of sanctions. The first Trump administration tore it up, simply out of hostility to anything done by his predecessor. In response, Iran began to gradually do the things it was no longer forbidden to do, to remind the US of why it had signed the deal in the first place, and the US finally seems to have figured out that withdrawal was a mistake. They were due to restart negotiations to restore it a week ago - the day before Israel started bombing. And then, when Iran was about to start talking to the EU (who were also partners to the deal), the US started bombing. You'd almost get the impression certain countries had simply renounced diplomacy entirely...

But even taking the supposed goal seriously, it seems unlikely to succeed - and more likely to have the opposite effect. On the immediate level, the US has now admitted that it has no idea where Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium is anymore, while Israeli bombing means the IAEA has lost track of all sorts of stuff. Nuclear material and equipment may have been destroyed, or it may have been moved to be used in secret later, so any future monitoring effort is basically doomed. But given that the bombing has destroyed all trust between Iran and the IAEA, that's pretty much moot.

In the longer term, if Iran didn't already have a Bomb, it now has a very strong incentive to get as many as possible as soon as possible, to deter future bullshit. And apparently a bunch of countries are willing to help them with that. Along with the invasion of Ukraine, its basically the death of the NPT, and the birth of a more dangerous, nuclear-armed world. Oh joy.

And that's the real tragedy here. Nuclear weapons were invented 80 years ago, and are now well-understood technology. There are now nine nuclear-armed states, a bunch of countries like Japan, Germany, and South Korea who can build them at the drop of a hat, and a much larger group who could build them if they set their mind to it. Iran is one of those countries. Its a large, modern state, with universities, research institutes, and a nuclear power program. The interesting question isn't whether it has nuclear weapons, it's why it doesn't. And the answer to that is the same as for other large, modern states: because it didn't want them. Because weapons are wasteful, and it didn't feel the need - even when its spent the last 20 years being constantly threatened by Israel and the US. The Israeli-US bombing campaign has almost certainly destroyed that, both for Iran and a bunch of other countries who feel threatened (or might feel threatened) by the hegemon or their neighbours. It is stupid, counterproductive, and dangerous. But its the world Netenyahu and Trump have given us. And we should curse them forever for it.

(As for the Iranian regime, fuck ‘em, they’re tyrants. But that’s a problem the Iranians will deal with in their own time and in their own way. And again, its hard to see how Israel or the US are helping to do anything other than keep the tyrants in power...)

Aotearoa should sign the Disappearance Convention

There's horrible news from the US today, with the Trump regime disappearing Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University student, for protesting against genocide in Gaza. Its another significant decline in US human rights, and puts them in the same class as the authoritarian dictatorships they used to sponsor in South America.

How can Aotearoa signal its disapproval of this abuse? Back in 2006, the UN agreed the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPPED). The Convention requires its parties to take various steps to prevent forced disappearance, as well as criminalising it in international law. When it was established, Aotearoa refused to sign, officially because of a slight technical difference in wording with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, but really because our "ally" the US was disappearing and torturing people as part of its extraordinary rendition program. And we wouldn't want to disagree with that, would we?

But times - and the international situation - have changed, and its time to revisit that decision. When Aotearoa refused, the ICPPED had fewer than 20 parties. Now it has almost a hundred - including almost all of Europe and South America. Basically, everyone we consider to be "like-minded" in supporting that "rules-based international order" we talk about so much. These states are all also members of the International Criminal Court, so its pretty clear that the inconsistency we were supposedly so worried about can be managed to the satisfaction of the majority of the international community.

Signing and ratifying the Convention would establish safeguards against disappearance here and improve human rights in Aotearoa. It would also signal our disapproval of disappearance internationally, and allow us to punish those responsible if any of them ever set foot in Aotearoa. That seems like a Good Thing. The question is, will the government do it, or are they still chickenshits about human rights?

United States of betrayal II

Like everyone else outside Russia, I watched Saturday morning's shitshow between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky in horror. Sure, the US had already thrown Ukraine under the bus, demanding that it accept Russia's theft of land - but there's a difference between that, and berating someone in front of the world for refusing to surrender to a genocidal invader. With this, the Trump regime - and the US Republican Party - has made it crystal clear which side it is on. And it is not the side of democracy and human rights.

Fortunately, Europe seems to be stepping up. And they've also got the message - also sent last month, but not really believed because it was a reversal of 80 years of policy - that the US will not defend them either. And that even if there is regime change in the US, no future US regime can be trusted ever again on anything. And now they've got that message, they can move forward on building a European defence alliance serving European priorities, rather than just being an adjunct of the US. Which almost certainly means less European involvement in American imperial wars in future (great for Europe, bad for the USA, which will have to do all its own dying. Oh dear. How sad. Never mind).

It should also be focusing minds here. Because if the US won't defend Europe, it sure as shit won't lift a finger for Aotearoa (assuming they can even find us on a map). The AUKUS partnership they are trying to tempt us into is worthless. In fact, given their explicit support for tyrannical regimes and of global corruption, we should be regarding them as an enemy, not a friend. And we should be withdrawing from the Five Eyes, rather than continuing to feed intelligence to a corrupt and hostile threat to global peace.

Meanwhile, the US is now openly threatening to withdraw from the UN. Which is terrible: the withdrawl of fascist states from the League of Nations was one of the reasons for its failure to prevent the Second World War. OTOH, if they're going to do it, we can't do anything about it, and at least there's a silver lining. Because the UN has a veto problem, and one of the major impediments to fixing it is... the US veto. If they leave, then it is at least an opportunity to fix that, and the world should refuse to let the US back in unless they accept it.

Showing the Americans how to do it II

In 2022, Brazilian voters kicked president Jair Bolsonaro out of office. He responded with an attempted coup. And now, he's being prosecuted for it:

Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president, was charged Tuesday with overseeing a vast scheme to hold on to power after he lost the 2022 election, including one plot to annul the vote, disband courts and empower the military, and another to assassinate the nation’s president-elect.

The accusations, laid out in a 272-page indictment, suggested that Brazil came strikingly close to plunging back into, in effect, a military dictatorship nearly four decades into its modern democracy.

Brazil’s attorney general, Paulo Gonet Branco, indicted Mr. Bolsonaro and 33 other people, including a former spy chief, defense minister and national security adviser, accusing them of a series of crimes against Brazil’s democracy. The charges essentially adopted recommendations from Brazil’s federal police made in November.

This is how democracies defend themselves: with law and criminal charges. And as with South Korea, the contrast with America couldn't be clearer. And the refusal of America's political elite to defend their democracy and constitution from a violent insurrectionist is now having consequences all around the world.

United States of betrayal

As expected, Donald Trump just threw Ukraine under the bus, demanding that it accept Russia's illegal theft of land, while ruling out any future membership of NATO. Its a colossal betrayal, which effectively legitimises Russia's invasion, while laying the groundwork for the next one. But Trump is apparently fine with that too.

That's bad, but then it got worse, with US Defence Secretary (and chief drunk) Pete Hegseth effectively withdrawing the US from NATO, and telling Europe that it would not defend it:

Donald Trump’s newly appointed defence secretary told allies on his first international trip that the US was no longer “primarily focused” on European security and that Europe would have to take the lead in defending Ukraine.

[...]

The Pentagon chief said he was “here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe”, though the language was notably toned down from a draft briefed in advance to the press.

I'm not exactly a fan of NATO, given its recent use as American expeditionary foederatii. But I'm willing to acknowledge that its original mission of deterring war in Europe was a necessary evil during the cold war, and one that has unfortunately - thanks to Putin - become necessary again. So the US basically abandoning it, and telling Putin "go ahead; invade the Baltics!", is terrible. It makes the world a much less safe place. It also tells the world that America's word can't be trusted on anything, even things which have been considered absolutely crucial for 75 years, and so no-one should make any deals with them - but that really sounds like an "America" problem now.

But its terrible for another reason too. Because NATO served another important purpose: nuclear non-proliferation. As long as NATO members felt that the US would defend them, including by deterring nuclear attack, they did not need to develop their own nuclear deterrent. And now that the US has said "we will not deter for you", that sets a very unpleasant precedent. Putin's invasion of Ukraine - a country which voluntarily gave up nuclear weapons - sent a very clear message that if countries with aggressive neighbours wanted to be safe, they needed nukes. US support for Ukraine (and for NATO) may have kept a lid on that. But now that that support has been withdrawn, and no country can rely on US promises, there is a clear incentive for those countries to get their own bombs. And that means not just Ukraine and Poland, but also Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan.

Nuclear weapons are dangerous. A world with more nuclear-armed states is a more dangerous world, with more trigger points for nuclear war, and a greater chance of nuclear famine. And the incentives set by nuclear weapons, to strike before your enemy can deter, leads to greater instability (just look at the last twenty years duelling between the US/Israel and Iran). So by betraying its allies and abandoning its commitments, the US has made the world a much more dangerous place for everybody. They've committed us to nuclear proliferation, regional arms races, and global instability. And as Eisenhower said, that has a cost: "every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed".

So, fuck Trump, and fuck America. And fuck their boss Putin, for starting this shitfest in the first place. They're wrecking the world. The quicker they're all run out of office, the better.

United States of corruption

The US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has been a vital tool in combatting international corruption. It forbids US companies and citizens from bribing foreign public officials anywhere in the world. And its actually enforced: some of the world's biggest companies - Siemens, Hewlett Packard, and Bristol Myers Squibb - have paid huge fines after being convicted or settled cases brought under the law. But not anymore, because Donald Trump has decided that it's "bad for business":

Donald Trump has ordered the Department of Justice to halt the enforcement of a US anti-corruption law that bars Americans from bribing foreign government officials to win business.

“It’s going to mean a lot more business for America,” the president said in the Oval Office after signing an executive order on Monday directing Pam Bondi, the US attorney-general, to pause enforcement of the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

A White House official said: “American national security depends on America and its companies gaining strategic commercial advantages around the world, and President Trump is stopping excessive, unpredictable FCPA enforcement that makes American companies less competitive.”

This is of course nakedly corrupt, and it puts the US in violation of the OECD anti-bribery convention, to which it is a party (it may also put it in violation of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption). But as withdrawl from the Paris Convention or Trumps ignoring of trade-agreements shows, the US will no longer keep its word on the international stage. Which means there is no point ever negotiating any agreement with them, because they can't be trusted to keep it.

It also seems a bit weird that congress can pass a law, and then a future president can just say "actually, we're not going to enforce that". It seems contrary to both the rule of law and the separation of powers, allowing the president to arbitrarily rewrite the law to suit their whims. But I guess arbitrary executive power is just another way in which America is "exceptional".

Showing the Americans how to do it

Just ten days ago, South Korea's president attempted a self-coup, declaring martial law and attempting to have opposition MPs murdered or arrested in an effort to seize unconstrained power. The attempt was rapidly defeated by the national assembly voting it down and the people flooding the streets to defend democracy. And now, after one failed attempt, the national assembly has impeached the insurrectionist scumbag. Yoon will now be suspended and be sent for trial with the constitutional court to determine whether he will be permanently removed from office. Assuming he's not tried and convicted on criminal charges of insurrection first...

The contrast with America's handling of Trump's insurrection couldn't be greater. There, Republican legislators refused to defend democracy, voting against Trump's impeachment in the Senate. Criminal charges were dragged out and delayed, and have now been dismissed. And the Republican Supreme Court allowed him to stand for re-election, despite crystal clear constitutional language barring insurrectionists from federal office. The clear message is that the US political elite doesn't care about democracy or the rule of law. And Americans will find out the consequences of that on January 20th.

About fucking time

The US Supreme Court has been rogue for years, with openly corrupt judges making the law up as they go to suit themselves, their billionaire buyers, and the Republican Party. But now, in the wake of them granting a licence for tyranny, President Biden is actually going to try and do something about it:

President Biden is finalizing plans to endorse major changes to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks, including proposals for legislation to establish term limits for the justices and an enforceable ethics code, according to two people briefed on the plans.

He is also weighing whether to call for a constitutional amendment to eliminate broad immunity for presidents and other constitutional officeholders, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

Both of these measures are pushing shit uphill, requiring congressional majorities (and a Senate supermajority to overcome the inevitable filibuster), or the consent of the states. It would require the US to be a functioning state, rather than a dysfunctional one. On the other hand "we all know we have a problem, and I need your help to try and fix it" is a powerful campaign platform. And who knows? Maybe it will work. It definitely beats the alternative of using the licence the Supreme Court gave him to simply create vacancies and/or a sudden judicial change of mind.

America's dark future

Today is July 4th, the day the US traditionally celebrates its independence. But in the wake of the Supreme Court's turning the clock back 375 years to rule that America's president actually is an unaccountable absolute monarch after all, effectively creating a turnkey tyranny for the next Republican president, there seems to be nothing to celebrate.

American democracy has been in trouble for a long time: since the 90's, when it became clear that Republicans would not accept losing elections; or the 2000 election, when the Republican Supreme Court decided they'd pick the president; or 2016, with the election of Trump; or the 2020 election, and the various Republican attempts to overturn the will of the people; or Trump's attempted coup on January 6th; or the recent lawless rampage of the Republican Supreme Court. But the trajectory from here on out seems particularly dark. In four months, there will be an election, in which one of the candidates promises a dictatorship from day one. If he doesn't win, and he fails to steal it (because he will try), then in six months time there will be another attempted coup. And if that fails, then we can expect the same again in four years time, and four years after that, and four years after that, because the US Republican Party has decided that they are done with democracy and elections and done with pretending. And they only need to win once to end democracy in America (and in fact they might not even need to win at all, if stopping the monster makes monsters).

That's terrible for America, but its bad for those of us in other democracies too, because American diseases spread. Look at the way Trumpism has infected even parties in quiet little Aotearoa. So if they go fascist, things could get very ugly in a lot of the world.

I have no message of hope here. America desperately needs deTrumpification - but that's simply not going to happen. And the far-right billionaires pushing to end democracy are not going to stop. So all I can say is: if you are American, good luck. Please don't take us down with you.

A licence for tyranny

That's the only way to describe today's US Supreme Court ruling that the US president is above the law. Oh, it officially applies only to "official acts", but reading the fine-print, that basically means everything - even apparently inciting a mob to storm Congress in an effort to disrupt the certification of a federal election and hang the Speaker and Vice-President. And they were quite explicit that any order given to any part of the executive is inherently official. So, the US President can legally order the FBI to round up members of opposition political parties and put them in camps, the Secret Service to assassinate rival politicians (or judges), the army to machine-gun protestors, and the air force to bomb Congress or the Supreme Court. Nixon's famous assertion - rejected by the Supreme Court in 1974 - that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal" - is now the law of the land. The President really is "as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time". And if they use that absolute power to murder their political enemies and subvert the constitution to remove the second bit, well, the Supreme Court is apparently fine with that.

The underlying idea here is that apparently a President can't President without doing crimes. That government is inherently criminal. Anarchists would agree. But its hardly a position you'd expect from self-proclaimed "conservatives" (until you remember that the essence of conservativism is hierarchy and unaccountable power - "laws that protect but do not bind"). The Supreme Court may also have sold it to themselves as protecting past presidents from legal persecution by their successors. But with this ruling, a president doesn't need to prosecute their predecessors. They can simply have them murdered instead.

While the ruling permits Biden to order the immediate murder of Trump - or of the Republican majority on the Supreme Court - I don't for a moment expect that to happen. Like most elected politicians in other democratic states, Biden seems to be a relatively normal, non-murdery person, who sees the criminal law as a proper constraint on power, rather than as some obstacle, and his voters would never support such action even if he did. Instead, this ruling effectively authorises a future criminal president - Donald Trump, if he wins or seizes power after November, or the president after him, or the one after them - to act on their worst impulses, without constraint. And given the ideology of violence and power floating around on the American right at the moment, those impulses look like they will be very ugly indeed.

If allowed to stand this ruling effectively signals the end of the rule of law and of democracy in America. Unfortunately Biden's post-ruling speech gives no confidence he will try to build a movement to overturn it.

Police don't fight crime

What are police for? "Fighting crime" is the obvious answer. If there's a burglary, they should show up and investigate. Ditto if there's a murder or sexual assault. Speeding or drunk or dangerous driving is a crime, so obviously they should respond to that. And obviously, they should respond to violent crimes in progress. But statistical data from the US shows that that is not what they actually do. Instead, they spend most of their time pointlessly harassing innocent people:

A new report adds to a growing line of research showing that police departments don’t solve serious or violent crimes with any regularity, and in fact, spend very little time on crime control, in contrast to popular narratives.

[...]

More notably, researchers analyzed the data to show how officers spend their time, and the patterns that emerge tell a striking story about how policing actually works. Those results, too, comport with existing research showing that U.S. police spend much of their time conducting racially biased stops and searches of minority drivers, often without reasonable suspicion, rather than “fighting crime.”

Overall, sheriff patrol officers spend significantly more time on officer-initiated stops – “proactive policing” in law enforcement parlance – than they do responding to community members’ calls for help, according to the report. Research has shown that the practice is a fundamentally ineffective public safety strategy, the report pointed out.

An officer-initiated stop could be pulling over a speeding or suspected drunk driver, but when three quarters of such stops result in no action or a warning, it looks unlikely. The report calls it “a routine practice of pretextual stops” - basically, harassing the innocent. And most of police department budgets are spent on this, a colossal waste of public money.

It would be interesting to see a similar data from Aotearoa, to see if the gang in blue are as useless as their American counterparts. And with the amount of money we spend on policing - $2.6 billion last year - you'd think it might be a priority to see if we're getting value for that colossal amount of money.

Climate Change: Making polluters pay

Climate change threatens human civilization. It threatens to kill a billion people. The costs of stopping it, and of adapting to the damage already done - of moving people and infrastructure to protect them from sea-level rise, and of dealing with the resulting floods, droughts, cyclones, heat-waves, and other extreme weather events - are enormous. So how do we pay for it?

The moral principle here is simple: polluters must pay. And in the US, states are finally moving towards that, with "climate superfund" legislation aimed at billing them retroactively for the damage they have caused:

It’s called a climate superfund bill, and versions of it are floating through legislative chambers in New York, Massachusetts, and Maryland, in addition to Vermont. Though each bill is slightly different, the general premise is the same: Similar to the way the federal Superfund law allows the Environmental Protection Agency to seek funds retroactively from polluters to clean up contaminated sites, states will seek to bill fossil fuel companies retroactively for the costs of addressing, avoiding, and adapting to the damages that the emissions from their products have caused.

[...]

If [Vermont's bill] gets past the governor’s desk, the bill will kick off a multiyear process that, in the most optimistic case, could bring money into the state by 2028. The first step is for the state Treasurer to assess the cost to Vermont, specifically, of emissions from the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels from 1995 to 2024, globally. Regulators will then request compensation from responsible parties in proportion to the emissions each company contributed. The state will identify responsible parties by focusing only on the biggest emitters, companies whose products generated at least a billion tons of emissions during that time. The money will go toward implementing a state “resilience and implementation strategy” to be mapped out in the next two years.

Obviously, we can and should do this here. We already have a model: the retroactive liability for decommissioning costs imposed on the fossil fuel industry. But we need to go further than its targeting of previous permit-holders, and impose costs on owners and directors where they have used limited liability and bankruptcy to avoid paying. These people have ruined the world, and profited by doing so. It is only fair that they pay to fix it.

Disqualified

When Donald Trump incited the storming of the US capitol on 6 January 2021 in a failed effort to overturn an election an re-install himself as president, he was unquestionably engaged in an insurrection against the constitution. And now, the Colorado Supreme Court has finally enforced the US constitution, ruling him ineligible for office, and therefore ineligible to appear on the ballot in 2024:

Former President Donald J. Trump is ineligible to hold office again, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday, accepting the argument that the 14th Amendment disqualifies him in an explosive decision that could upend the 2024 election.

In a lengthy ruling ordering the Colorado secretary of state to exclude Mr. Trump from the state’s Republican primary ballot, the justices reversed a Denver district judge’s finding last month that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — which disqualifies people who have engaged in insurrection against the Constitution after having taken an oath to support it from holding office — did not apply to the presidency.

They affirmed the district judge’s other key conclusions: that Mr. Trump’s actions before and on Jan. 6, 2021, constituted engaging in insurrection, and that courts had the authority to enforce Section 3 against a person whom Congress had not specifically designated.

“A majority of the court holds that President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of president under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the court wrote in a 4-to-3 ruling. “Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado Secretary of State to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot.”

It will go to the Supreme Court, of course. So I guess we'll see if the US constitution actually means anything, or whether the far-right majority will manage to contort it to allow the man who appointed them to run.

Women win in Ohio

Last year, the Republican Supreme Court overturned the longstanding Roe v. Wade precedent, allowing Republican states to state banning abortion. But that isn't turning out how the Republicans planned: voters in Kansas and Kentucky have already rejected state constitutional bans, while Ohio voters have just added abortion rights to their state constitution:

Ohio voters have added the right to access abortion care to the state's constitution, NBC News projects — another major political victory for abortion-rights advocates in the nearly 17 months since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.

The passage of the Issue 1 ballot measure inserts language in the state constitution guaranteeing every person in Ohio the right “to one’s own reproductive medical treatment, including but not limited to abortion,” and barring the state from “burdening, penalizing or prohibiting” those rights — though it specifies that abortion will remain prohibited after the point a doctor judges a fetus would most likely survive birth, with exceptions to protect the woman’s life or health.

(They also voted to legalise marijuana, so they're ahead of Aotearoa on that...)

Somehow I don't think this was what Republicans had in mind when they said they wanted states - or voters - to decide. And it bodes well both for further referenda, and for overturning Republican political majorities.

Merry Trumpmas again!

At the beginning of the month, former US president and would-be dictator Donald Trump was finally charged in federal court for trying to overturn the 2020 federal election. But his efforts to overturn democracy happened all over the US, and now the state of Georgia is getting into the act, prosecuting him for racketeering over his fake electors:

Donald Trump and some of his closest confidantes have been indicted on state racketeering and conspiracy charges over efforts to reverse Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election in Georgia. This indictment makes the former US president a criminal defendant in a fourth case as he campaigns to recapture the presidency.

The sprawling 41-count indictment, handed down by a state grand jury in Atlanta late on Monday night, charges Trump himself with 13 counts and accuses him of orchestrating a criminal enterprise.

In addition to Trump, prosecutors in the office of the Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis charged 18 other defendants, including his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as well as his 2020 election lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro.

The charges mark a moment of significant legal peril for Trump, since the charges come at the state level and he would not be able to undo any potential convictions through measures such as a self-pardon or appointing a sympathetic attorney general if he were re-elected president in 2024.

Of course, Georgia has a Republican governor and a Republican legislature, so there's plenty of scope for Republican corruption of the judicial process. Still, every indictment is something to celebrate, a sign that the US may be turning away from the path of dictatorship and returning to being a normal democracy.

An essential part of the US's democratic correction

When former US President Donald Trump was charged back in April with falsifying business records, many people expressed disappointment that he hadn't yet been charged with his real crime of attempting to overturn an election by force. Now, that's finally happened:

Former President Trump has been indicted on four counts following a special counsel investigation into efforts to stop the transfer of power after his 2020 election loss and his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

The charges are conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, conspiracy against rights and obstruction or attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. The indictment alleges that Trump pursued discounting legitimate votes and subverting the 2020 presidential election results through three criminal conspiracies.

Good. This is an essential part of holding the Trump regime accountable, and an essential part of the US's democratic correction. A country that wishes to remain democratic cannot just let a politician attempt to overthrow an election! And hopefully it will result in both Trump being convicted, jailed, and barred from office, and in other Republicans being deterred from following in his footsteps.

One state at a time...

The US state of Washington has officially abolished the death penalty:

Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee signed Senate Bill 5087 on Friday, which removes state laws that Washington’s Supreme Court determined are invalid or unconstitutional. The state’s high court struck down the death penalty in 2018, but the law remained on the books.

“It’s official. The death penalty is no longer in state law,” Inslee said on Twitter after the signing. He also thanked legislators and other leaders who were part of the decade-long effort to end the practice, including Attorney General Bob Ferguson.

In 2014, Inslee issued a moratorium on the death penalty. In 2018, Washington’s Supreme Court unanimously struck down the death penalty, calling it arbitrary and racially biased.

Given the tendency of US courts to just change their minds on settled law when Republicans stack them, repeal seems like a useful extra safeguard. But really, they need to start putting death penalty bans (and death penalty non-cooperation clauses) in state constitutions, just to be on the safe side.