America buys oil from Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.  We buy cars from Japan, South Korea and Europe.  And from China, we buy clothes, appliances, plastic goods, toys, shoes and medical equipment.

But for what goods and services are we the dominant world seller (that is, besides Spiderman movies and Lady Gaga)?

The answer is weapons.

According to a Congressional report released a few days ago, the United States dominates the world’s weapons market, selling almost 53% of the $40.4 billion in total world trade in arms in 2010.  In second place, with a mere 19.3% of world arms trade, was Russia.  And while the recession sent arms sales into a nose dive in 2010, going from $65.2 billion to $40.4 billion in the prior year, the U.S. percentage of total sales has been rising steadily. According to a Congressional report from a year ago, from 2006-2009, the United States had made only 38.6% of all agreements to sell weapons to other countries.  

And who is buying all of these bombs, guns, bullets, tanks and anti-aircraft systems? It turns out it’s the developing world, where governments tend to be less stable.  Of total arms sales last year, developing countries bought 76.2% of all implements of war, with the America supplying 48.6%—almost half—of all weapons of that total. 

Here’s the list of developing countries that bought the most bombs and bullets in 2010.  You tell me how many of these countries you want to have more weapons:

1. India
2. Taiwan
3. Saudi Arabia
4. Egypt
5. Israel
6. Algeria
7. Syria
8. South Korea
9. Singapore
10. Jordan

We’re perverting the words of the ancient prophet Isaiah.  Instead of turning swords into plowshares, we’re turning plowshares into swords, by arming to the teeth some of the most unstable countries or countries in some of the most unstable areas of the world. 

The weapons we sell are sophisticated, high-tech stuff that help countries perfect the art of mass killing: For example, The New York Times reported over the weekend that the Obama administration has supplied Israel with bombs capable of destroying buried targets.  My rhetorical question on this bit of news: will these bombs guide Israel towards a peaceful resolution with the Palestinians and a rapprochement with the Arab world, or will it embolden Israel to stoke the flames of Middle Eastern violence?

And even as the U.S. cash register for arms sales sounds a steady ka-ching ka-ching, we continue to develop more and more sophisticated arms like drone planes that turn war into a video game.  For a good overview of our drone program and other robotic weapons we are developing, check out Christian Caryl’s review of two books on the subject in the latest New York Review of Books.  This new generation of weapons makes it easier for aggressors to launch attacks that inflict maximum damage on the enemy and its innocent citizens with minimal damage to the soldiers of the attacking nation. 

One of our lesser presidents, Calvin Coolidge, once said that “the chief business of the American people is business.” Perhaps we should update his statement and say that the chief business of the American people has become war.

In baseball parlance, the anti-death penalty movement has batted 500 over the past 24 hours.  The Supreme Court of the United States stopped the execution of white man Cleve Foster, but the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles denied clemency to back man Troy Davis.  The racial contrast speaks for itself.

Much has been written about perversion of justice in the Troy Davis case.  Post-trial findings have put the testimony and other evidence used to convict him in grave doubt.   Even Amnesty International has gotten involved in organizing support for granting clemency to Davis.

Despite this substantial new information, the prosecutors have dug in their heels and insisted that they have the right man.  We can only assume that these prosecutors are not Christian and thus have not heard of Proverbs 16:18, “Pride goeth before a fall.”  No one likes to be proven wrong, so it’s only human nature for prosecutors to stare past a raft of new evidence.

But the Board of Pardons is not implicated in the mistakes of the prosecutors.   These five people, voting in secret, decided that the law is not the hand-maiden of justice but an end unto itself.  Once the law convicts someone, we can continue to punish him or her even if we find out that the conviction was in error.

Beyond the ho-hum barbarism of seeing a man fry who is probably innocent—and I call it ho-hum because we can see it every day in war reporting from around the globe—is the idiocy of capital punishment.

There are many arguments against capital punishment, including:

• Capital punishment is not a deterrent to crime or is not as great a deterrent as putting the money spent on the capital punishment process to other uses.  
• There is a racial bias to those convicted of capital crimes and those executed, created to a large degree by unequal access to legal help and a persistent streak of racism on society, especially regarding black-on-white crime.
• The huge cost to move someone convicted of a capital crime through the system, much more than curating the convicted in prison for a lifetime.

Of course, those serious proponents of capital punishment could respond by saying that the value of societal revenge is what matters, not deterrence; and that fixes to the system can drive out racism and cut the cost of the capital process by speeding it up (killing people faster!).

But one argument trumps all the others, and that is the ethical or moral one.  I won’t call it religious, since so many religions condone the taking of another person’s life.  As a society, we are supposed to be better than our worst elements.  If we kill, we stoop to the level of the killer. 

Sparing the killer’s life makes us more human and more humane than the killer, and increases the value that our society puts on human life.

Sparing the killer is an affirmation of our social contract to live in peace.

Sparing the killer tells him or her, and the world, that when we say that human life is holy we mean it.

Nobody likes pathological monsters who commit crimes heinous enough to justify our current capital punishment.  Those who do it are the scum of the earth.  But just as we have to protect the free speech rights of Nazis, pornographers and global warming deniers, so must we protect the lives of those who have killed others.  Let them rot in jail, but let them live.  Not for their sakes, but for our own.   

Bravo to President Obama for remembering his progressive roots and the location of his spine and proposing the Buffett tax, named after billionaire financier Warren Buffett who says he and his fellow ultra-wealthy should be paying more in taxes.

The Buffett tax would raise the minimum federal income tax that people with more than $1 million in annual income have to pay.  Right now, those in the million-per-annum club pay the lowest rates in the history of the income tax.  Most economists (not in the pay of right-wing institutions like the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute and the Cato Foundation) now agree that the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy in 2001 and 2003 are what caused our federal budget surplus from the Clinton years to turn to the greatest deficit in our history. 

Poll after poll after poll of voters over the past year show that more than 60% of Americans want to raise taxes on the wealthy.  So what Obama is proposing isn’t radical, by any means.

The Republicans were not wasting away in Margaritaville with the lesser Buffett when the President dropped the news.  Such right-wing luminaries as Representative Paul Ryan and Senators Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell immediately opposed the proposed tax.

Collectively, the Republicans gave four completely bogus arguments, the same ones they always give when someone proposes to raise taxes on the wealthy or opposes one of their frequent schemes to lower taxes on the same.   Here are the reasons, with an explanation of their “bogusness” (bogusity?) in bold:

1. The tax on millionaires is a form of class warfare: They have a lot of nerve talking about class warfare after trying to bust up public unions, end unemployment benefits and destroy Social Security and Medicare.
2. It hurts corporate investment and job creation: But corporations are not creating new jobs now, but instead building up profit and paying their executives (the millionaires) hefty sums.  With the additional money collected from the millionaire tax, the federal government could do more job creation of its own, something that it happens to do well.
3. It adds to uncertainty in the economy: Huh?  There is no greater uncertainty, just a new set of certainties.  The uncertainty argument when applied to taxes or regulation is always bogus. 
4. It punishes the people who create jobs: These people have gotten off pretty well these past few decades.  They control more of our wealth and make a larger share of total income than they did 30 years ago.  They also pay far less in taxes than they did 30 years ago. President Obama doesn’t want to strip them of their wealth and the many privileges that come with it, he just wants them to pay a little bit more. 

I have a feeling that even before this entry appears that others will have thoroughly analyzed the political angle.  With one bold action, Obama hopes to get the attention of his core progressive constituency, whom he has abandoned as he tacks further and further to the right on economic, environmental and military issues.  As long as the Republicans vociferously oppose the millionaire tax, the contrast between Obama and his rightwing opponents will be very clearly drawn, much more clearly than, let’s say, after the President deep-sixed needed environmental regulations a few weeks back.

I don’t believe that President Obama is going to make a case for reelection based on this one proposal.  He will need a number of proposals that put him on the progressive side of the issue and his Republican opponents, and then opponent, clearly on the other side. 

The tax cut part of the Obama plan is a big mistake because it gives more money to people who already have money, instead of directly creating jobs for people who don’t have jobs.

The centerpiece of the Obama plan, what he’s selling on his current road show, is that the temporary cut in the payroll tax be continued, and be extended to businesses.  The government assumes that both consumers and businesses will spend the extra cash, despite overwhelming evidence that the businesses will pocket the money as profit and some evidence that debt-ridden consumers will pay off loans instead of buying more things.

The other problem with further cutting payroll taxes is that we weaken the Social Security Trust Fund, since that’s where the taxes we are cutting go, or are eventually supposed to go.  As I have discussed in the past, Social Security needs a few minor adjustments to be sustainable through the retirement years of the enormous baby boom generation.  But if we keep robbing Social Security to pay for tax cuts today, we may create the retirement apocalypse that Rick Perry and others are predicting.

Apart from the Social Security issue, the simple fact of the matter is that lowering payroll taxes gives money to people who already have jobs at a time when we have more than 16% of the country unemployed or underemployed and a poverty rate of 15.1%, the highest in 52 years.  Why not directly create jobs?

• When the government funds the repair of roads, bridges, mass transit and sewers, it directly creates jobs.
• When the government gives school districts grants to hire more teachers, it directly creates jobs.
• When the government loans more money to companies developing solar, wind and other alternative energy technologies, it directly creates jobs.

And how do we pay for this government infusion of job-creating capital into the economy?  Not by lowering taxes, but by raising taxes.  So I like the part of the Obama plan that ends loopholes for people who make over $250,000 per year.  But it’s not enough.  We need to raise taxes on the wealthy more and invest that money directly into jobs.

A strong argument against my proposal is that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives will never go for it.  But all they say they’ll go for is further tax cuts for the wealthy, and maybe some cuts for the middle class as well.  And we know that this approach—also known as austerity government–will not work.  It’s what killed the recovery that we began to experience last year, and it’s what killed the initial recovery from the depression of the 1930’s. 

Why compromise to achieve a plan that isn’t going to work?  Obama would be better off laying out a plan that actually creates a lot of jobs and then winning the November 2011 elections by blaming the Republicans if the Republicans decide to continue to imitate the Roman Emperor Nero and fiddle away while the country burns.  Most surveys suggest that the country is really on the side of raising taxes on the wealthy, protecting Social Security and having the government invest more in creating jobs.  Rather than try to compromise into something that will fail, the President should stand up for what will work and let the voters see the contrast.

President Obama compromised when he said the Department of Justice would not pursue indictments against those who illegally create an American torture gulag.  He compromised when he extended the temporary tax cuts for the wealthy before the November 2010 elections and he compromised in January of this year when he agreed to pay for extending those cuts by cutting government programs for education, the unemployed and infrastructure development.  And he compromised by agreeing to link the debt ceiling increase to more cuts.

It’s about time for the President to stand up for the ideals that he claimed to uphold while serving in other offices and running for President.  Some people are saying that he is finally taking a stand with this jobs program.  The trouble is that the plan already makes the compromises before the discussion.  So once again, instead of standing up, our President is standing down before the skirmish begins.

USA Today today gave Texas Governor Rick Perry about 350 words to explain his position on Social Security, which he called a “Ponzi scheme” last week in the debate between Republican presidential candidates.

The headline, “Rick Perry: I am going to be honest with the American people,” said it all, but in the negative.  Mr. Perry has not been honest with the American people about Social Security and he has no intention of starting now.

Let’s begin with a discussion of “honesty of tone”: Social Security needs a few relatively easy adjustments to remain financially viable.  But Perry’s tone reminds me of the boy who cried wolf or the proverbial unpatriotic soul who cries fire in a theatre when there is none.  He is vociferously fearful, as if Social Security were the bubonic plague.

The truth is much less unsettling: Social Security has a temporary challenge that was created when the American public decided to have an historically large number of babies between 1946-1964, and then decided to have an historically low number of babies for the 20 years thereafter.  This demographic aberration (in which the rest of the world also participated) is resulting in a temporarily smaller base of workers to support retirees.  For decades, every year we collected more in Social Security taxes for the Social Security Trust Fund than we paid out in benefits. I think it was last year that we started paying out more than we took in, a situation that will continue for a while.  But the large surplus in the Trust Fund means that we won’t actually enter into deficit spending from the Social Security Trust fund for another 30-50 years (depending upon whose estimates you take).

Now that’s an easy challenge, one that we have a long time to address.  Thus, when Cowboy Rick talks about “the dire financial challenges” and “hard facts,” he is exaggerating the problem.  I think the stridency and frequency with which he slams Social Security transforms his exaggerations into out-and-out lies.

In his short USA Today Op/Ed piece, Perry sticks to generalities, but has the space to make an enormous assumption that is tantamount to a lie: “By 2037, retirees will only get roughly 76 cents back for every dollar that is put into Social Security unless reforms are implemented.” In fact, if nothing is done, the Social Security Trust Fund will continue to pay out benefits, but do so through deficit spending (which is how we’re paying $3 trillion for two useless wars!).  But if Perry has his way, reforms will reduce the amount paid out.  So in fact the fear of lost benefits that Perry is raising will come true with his reform.  That sounds like a lie to me.

Which does not mean I’m against reforming the system.  I just don’t want to do it Perry’s way, which I believe is to gut benefits and privatize the system.  I can’t really prove that’s what he believes for this OpEdge entry, however, since he has nothing about Social Security on his campaign website and his recent statements just tell us how much he hates it.  His general article in USA Today says nothing about what he would do to fix the system.  In fact, the piece does not contain the accusations in his book that Social Security is an illegal and unconstitutional Ponzi scheme.  I would call that a lie by omission.

One more lie, only implicit in his USA Today piece, is to pretend that all Social Security taxes get paid into the general government ledger.  It’s a common assumption for most of those who want to gut the system, but it’s not true: the money is paid to the Trust Fund, which loans money to the federal government.  By stating otherwise, opponents to Social Security paint a far worse financial picture for Social Security, but that dark view depends entirely on the United States dead-beating its own citizens.

Perry says that he wants us to have a “frank, honest conversation.”  If he were really interested in the truth, Perry would point out that we could easily solve the future Social Security problem if we took the cap off the income limit for the tax.  Right now, people only pay Social Security on their first $106,800 in income.  No one pays Social Security taxes on amounts they make in excess of $106,800.  Remove this cap and Social Security is fully funded into the foreseeable future.

But of course that would mean taxing the well-to-do and wealthy, who currently are enjoying the lowest taxes in the history of the industrialized world.  Cowboy Rick, long a friend of corporate interests and the wealthy, wouldn’t want that. And that’s no lie.