80% of Americans want tax increases to form part of a responsible, viable, comprehensive debt and deficit-reduction plan. Only 20% of Americans agree with the radical Tea Party position that there should be zero new revenues to help fund a comprehensive plan for debt and deficit-reduction. Even among Republicans, only 26% believe a serious debt and deficit-reduction plan should be done entirely with spending cuts.

The news has anti-tax ideologues rapt with dismay and outrage, because they cannot believe 80% of people would want to see their own tax burden increased, especially during a slow economic recovery, but the figures are not Obama’s; they come from Gallup. The Gallup poll does not indicate that 80% of people want their own taxes increased, only that they want tax increases of some kind to be part of the overall deal. And there is good reason for this.

Anti-tax ideologues make constant reference to ordinary people’s standard response for a household budget crunch as a guide for how to respond to the budget deficit. This is why they are constantly shouting: “We’re broke! We have to cut spending!”. The problem with this analogy is that most people understand very well that their household budget crunch would not be a budget crunch at all, if they only had more revenues.

Most household budget crunches result from revenue hardship, not from personal irresponsibility, and people tend to stop spending when they run out of money, mainly because they have run out of money, not because they like the politics of Grover Norquist. What’s more, deep cuts to spending will put even more pressure on slim household budgets, making what crunch there is potentially far worse.

To cut spending that helps working and middle-class families to fund basic needs means to transfer that cost to their household budget, reducing the revenues available to them for other things. And the government has the ability to increase its revenues. 80% of all Americans, and fully 74% of Republicans, want tax increases to be part of the debt deal, because they recognize how the cost-burden of not including them will fall on their household budgets, now and into the future.

When massive tax reductions for the wealthy, and for multinational corporations, are passed into law with no plan to cover the resulting budget gap, the cost of those tax cuts must be paid for in one of two ways: either with resulting cost increases for everyone else, imposed directly or indirectly, or with massive, unfunded government borrowing.

It is the irresponsible “cut, cap and balance” plan, with no strategy for funding debt repayment or deficit reduction, that will result in higher debt repayment costs and a longer period of repayment and elevated government borrowing. Without new revenue to help accelerate repayment of outstanding government debt, we will have to continue funding our debt repayment with more cuts and new borrowing.

80% of Americans, and 74% of Republicans, believe we need to include at least some targeted, moderate tax increases, in any responsible debt and deficit-reduction plan, because they do not want to be subsidizing historically low tax rates for the über-wealthy and for multinational corporations earning record profits. The fact is, household budgets are not in a state to be so generous to those who feel no crunch and no need to generate new wealth by hiring.

It would be very foolish politics for Pres. Obama to sign off on a debt deal that doesn’t include a moderate increase in taxes on the wealthy and on multinational corporations. To rely solely on spending cuts will harm working Americans and middle-class families, reduce the income available for consumer spending—which constitutes 70% of the American economy—and further slow job creation.

Republicans who have earned their place in politics by occupying the conservative side of the political center need to pay attention to these polling numbers. Only a very narrow segment of even their own party’s supporters agree with the radical spending-cuts-only approach to debt and deficit-reduction. The immense majority of the American people seem to feel that in order to “trust but verify” that elected officials will lower their future debt burden, revenues would give peace of mind, and a way to move toward balance.

After what now looks like significant foot-dragging, for fully one month, Japanese authorities have finally admitted the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is undergoing a level 7 nuclear emergency, the worst possible. There is still an effort to slow-walk this news, with repeated claims the radiation release has not been as significant as Chernobyl, also a level 7, but the Fukushima disaster involves 6 reactors, with at least 4 considered to be at ongoing risk of meltdown.

Last week, radiation levels in water leaking from the plant were found to be at 7.5 MILLION times the legal limit, and it was acknowledged that officials had been deliberately dumping highly radioactive water directly into the Pacific Ocean. The news that, on day one of this emergency, there may have been as much as 10% of the Chernobyl event’s radiation released suggests the still mounting crisis is far from contained, and the evacuation area should be expanded.

There is concern authorities are still making an effort to obscure the true extent of the disaster, and many question why if the American nuclear agency was prescient enough to extend the recommended exclusion zone to a wider radius than what currently surrounds Chernobyl, weeks ago, the Japanese authorities appear to have been cooperating with Tokyo Electric in downplaying the gravity of the crisis.

According to the Guardian newspaper:

“At Chernobyl, the reactor itself exploded while still active, which is completely different from the situation at Fukushima,” Hidehiko Nishiyama said.

He added that the decision had been taken a month after the accident because experts needed time to analyse the data.

Japan’s nuclear safety commission estimated that the Fukushima plant’s reactors had released up to 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactive iodine-131 per hour into the air for several hours after they were damaged in the 11 March earthquake and tsunami.

The pattern of underreporting, adjusted reporting, and moving from aggressive downplaying to ever more contrite admissions, seems for many to parallel the reaction of BP to its own industrial disaster in the Gulf of Mexico last year, the single worst release of oil in world history, aside from Saddam Hussein’s military attempt to destroy Kuwait’s oil infrastructure during the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

To this day, much of what BP knew about how much oil was released during last summer’s catastrophic blowout remains unknown to the public, and the oil giant is now suing to avoid paying the $20 billion it agreed to pay as restitution to the region and for cleanup.

There is good reason to scrutinize the reporting coming from Japan, as both the plant operator and the government appear to view it as in their interest to underreport the magnitude of the catastrophe.

If as much as 10% of the release of just one isotope from the Chernobyl disaster was released just on the first day of the Fukushima Daiichi crisis, and we are now at day 32, and at least 4 o ut of 6 reactors —and/or their exposed spent-fuel cooling pools— are at risk of meltdown, and they have not yet found a way to contain the radioactive water pooling around the reactors, the ultimate release from Fukushima could be far worse.

We do not yet have adequate information to make that determination, but are being given a model whereby the authorities slow-walk the crisis response, downplay the official emergency rating, and appear to be imposing an inadequate radius of exclusion, while scientists study the data, in hopes of being able to produce a less than worst-case reading of the history of this crisis.

That is not adequate effort to protect the local population, the wider public, the human food, water and air supply, beyond Japan’s borders, or the future stability of the Japanese economy. The situation in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture may yet be the most grave, costly, and consequential nuclear disaster in world history, and local officials and world authorities need to organize their response as if it were so.

THE KNEE-JERK LOGIC OF ‘LESS LETHAL WEAPONS’ MAY POSE A SERIOUS THREAT TO THE PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF DEMOCRACY

It has been said in recent decades that leaders of nuclear-armed states have a “finger on the button”. It is an alarming yet somewhat convenient concept, but it has not generally been all that accurate. It turns out, as we look back on the Cold War “brinksmanship” of mutually-assured destruction (MAD), that both the USSR and the USA guarded their superpotent polarity with carefully complex systems of security, multiple-key activation and other failsafes.

In terms of how younger nuclear regimes, conditioned by different political environments, are operated, it is not as clear —just as it wasn’t clear when the Cold War was at its bitter coldest—, but it remains true that it seems rhetorically useful for new nuclear powers to behave as if the failsafes were not all that failsafe, as if their leaders did have a “finger on the button” and according to the strategy espoused by both Kruschev and Nixon at different times of giving the appearance of being at least a bit irrational.

The central question for nuclear diplomacy to resolve is whether or not everyone comprehends and signs up to the essential boundaries of the nuclear game. It has long been the case that having the option is a better choice thanusing it, that bargaining power is, yes, too attractive to make global bans work, but careful negotiation can tempt otherwise maverick regimes to seek resilience in diplomacy via disarmament — reference Libya, c. 2004.

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It is also, thankfully, true that the esoteric and complex science behind controlled nuclear chain reactions is layered and intricate enough that a “button” does not suffice as a trigger. This, then, is the moment to alert the reader: this is not an essay about nuclear science. Instead, we address here an idea that was a metaphor and now is myth, and which has spread throughout contemporary consciousness: the Button as fast-track to problem solving.

Perhaps a logical basis for, and a logical derivation of, the idea of the “finger on the button” rhetoric is that the official in such a position will be tempted to use the darkest of all weapons as a tool to quickly solve otherwise intractable difficulties, to wipe out an enemy’s will with the touch of a button. While world powers condemn rogue states that would use “nuclear blackmail” as leverage in diplomatic tussles, it is the underlying “button” assumption that makes theleast immoral use of this genocidal weapon that of artful diplomatic extortion, as evinced by the strategies of the great powers during much of the 20th century.

This, then, leads to a whole new set of references and metaphorical excursions. By that, I mean that the push-button answer becomes a kind of presumed logical premise, around which policy begins to be structured. The irony, of course, is that the nuclear-confrontation system that spawned this mythical problem-solving option, never actually permitted or embraced its implementation. The Button, however close a resemblance it may bear to one or more steps of the technical process, was always a nuclear metaphor, a tool for talk, not for direct eradication of any given problem.

But somehow, as the proverb seeped into popular consciousness —perhaps helped along by the conventient way in which telecommunications technologies place information literally at the user’s fingertips—, it mobilized related streams of thought and envisioning. People came to expect that those who preside over superpowers must enjoy a kind of superhuman prowess to effect results, to shape reality. And so, the idea that a “push-button solution” is available gains momentum, and that logic is applied to a range of issues.

Free-trade-favoring politicians adopt the idea that “liberalizing” markets, which means taking down tax barriers and regulatory framework, automatically leads to prosperity, democratization and individual liberties. Labor leaders adopt the idea that mass action is inherently just, beneficial to all, and the only way to negotiate fair terms. Religiously-minded activists and preachers will say that faith triggers salvation —regardless of whether that “faith” is limited to a narrow dogma, a distortion of ancient teachings or includes any genuine self-criticism—, that virtue is born of professed belief and constructed discourse and not from personal beneficence, tolerance or charity.

The easy replaces the authentic: the complex world of natural systems, phenomena and experience, where negotiation trumps magic and harmony comes from agreement not from conquest, is replaced by a defiant belief in metaphysical simplifications in which one’s will is supposed to be effectuated automatically, by pushing the mythical Button, be it nuclear, financial, legislative, emotional or dogmatic.

It could be argued, with good reason, that this is but one more fold in the fabric of human foible and complexity, but the push-button ethos is more problematic than that: it poses a radical departure from modern civilization’s emphasis on dialogue, learning, tolerance and negotiation; it refutes the entire concept of the rule of law and proposes a kind of “will-for-willing’s-sake” doctrine.

Author Jonathan Schell, in his book The Unconquerable World, presents a thorough and studied historical argument that war is obsolete. He does not argue that it will not occur, but rather that it is no longer necessary, that civilization now presents a wealth of other options to accomplish most of the goals warfare once served and that the rest of those goals are now recognized, quite officially, in international law as illegitimate.

Essentially, war was once a means of obtaining without compromise, obtaining the unavailable or fulfilling territorial concerns without negotiation, whereas now, the entire international system is arranged to avoid armed conflict. Yet still, push-button militarism is seen as a useful idea to some in powerful places, and governments everywhere are still amply tempted.

The advent of a new class of what were formerly called “less-than-lethal” weapons, as an alternative to firearms in police-work and riot-response, have presented governments with the idea, though not exactly the possibility, of halting turbulent incidents with the deployment of weapons made more usable by their claim not to be harmful to the health of the target.

Sadly, the use of these weapons has migrated, and many now allege they are prone to what is known as “mission creep”, adding new uses for which they are not optimal or may in fact be totally out of place. Now called “less lethal”, a phrase whose increasing frequency almost seems an admission by officialdom of their proven threat to human life, weapons like the “taser” and “flash-bang” are increasingly popular among governments fearful of unrest or terrorist incidents.

The flash-bang, so named for its sensory effects, emits a deafening explosive sound and blinding light and is intended to startle and disorient its target, disabling or confusing their sensory function long-enough for agents to overpower them. In at least one case in New York where an elderly woman’s apartment was accidentally raided in a drug-bust, the apparent result of the “bang” was heart attack and death.

The mission creep seen in the deployment of these weapons regards their use in “subduing” or “apprehending” ordinary citizens who are not accused of any serious or violent crime and who clearly pose no physical danger to the responding officers. The Utne Reader documents a case where a woman was repeatedly “tased” by an officer ordering her to step out of her vehicle during a routine traffic stop.

The taser, now nearly a generic term derived from the company that pioneered their manufacture, is a type of gun which projects two dart-like electrodes on the end of long cords into the target, and then jolts their body with 50,000 volts of electricity, creating intense physical pain and temporarily immobilizing the body. The device permits its user to control the time during which the shock will continue and typically ranges from 5 seconds down to 1 second, and there are many cases reported where the charge was repeated until the target was rendered unconscious. Some targets with heart conditions have reportedly died within days of experiencing the shocks.

In recent years, the taser device has morphed into a subdue-and-detain tactic with almost no clear reference in American law. Police departments have begun using the taser as a means of interrupting contentious situations, which they argue could have led to even more extreme force. In 2007, a student was tasered at a John Kerry speech at the University of Florida, essentially for the crime of asking hard questions and being annoying. In the video (shown above), one of the policemen can be seen smiling as they repeatedly shock the screaming student.

The student was surrounded, seized, tackled, restrained, cuffed and then, while several police officers knelt on him, was electrocuted deliberately for reasons that have never been clear. Amnesty International, USA, has identified 357 individuals it says died after receiving electrocution by taser. The company Taser International says the figures are inaccurate and that underlying ill health may have contributed to those deaths. Taser International charges police officers $295 to attend a course in which they are trained in proper use of the device.

It has often been argued that the firm’s contention that the device is “less-than-lethal” contributes to an attitude of near carte blanche to use the electric shock device to end difficult exchanges with people they confront in the course of their duties. Civil liberties advocates suggest that taser-type devices should be treated as potentially “deadly weapons” and their application should come only in place of deadlier weapons, when such force would be justified by law, not as intermediate options for achieving the short-term goal of taking control of a given person.

Debate has become more heated and the weapons themselves are coming under fire, for not meeting their initial promise of being “less-than-lethal”. Experts, including high-ranking police officials, have recommended that national standards be set in the US, allowing the weapons to be used only when there is a serious threat of bodily harm to officers from a recognized weapon clearly in the possession of a criminal suspect, but at present no national standard of the kind is in place.

Consequently, these “less lethal” weapons are being given new roles in a number of different scenarios, including crowd control. It has been argued that soon to be available new weapons could be widely used in dispersing demonstrators. Among such tools are two highly controversial Pentagon projects: the Active Denial System (ADS) and Pulsed Energy Projectiles (PEP).

ADS, according to the New Scientist (July 23, 2005), would pose a serious danger to anyone who might be carrying metal in their pockets. The device is a 95-gigahertz microwave beam designed to “rapidly head skin and cause an unbearable burning sensation that will send rioters fleeing from its path within seconds”. [Utne]

PEP is reported to be a laser pulse, possible sent from a distance of one mile or more, which would have the effect of delivering an “invisible punch”, creating intense pain but leaving no physical damage. Human rights groups and many in the scientific and legal communities have expressed concern that the new weapons would be used to stifle free expression or political assembly and/or as a means of performing abusive interrogations without leaving any physical evidence.

It is also widely speculated that serious physical trauma could result and that phychological trauma would also ensue. But simply on a philosophical level, the devices pose very serious concerns: first of all, it is a monumental departure from existing law, in the US and elsewhere, to actively promote the deliberate induction of intense physical pain or unconsciousness as a means of securing an area or quieting down an unruly crowd.

In the end, it is the problem of the automatic solution, the push-button off-switch negation of difficulty or complexity. A wrinkle in the fabric of society can be smoothed over with the flip of a switch. That logic is fundamentally flawed and based on untrue assumptions. At this stage of the development and experimental use of these tools, it is clear that overuse is a real risk and that their intended use is possibly contrary to basic civil liberties provisions of constitutional law.

Thankfully, there is no button which exists by which the human mind or body can be instantly, harmlessly, switched off. And it is for that reason that laws and law-enforcement practices must address the problem of raucous crowds, of political dissent or even of violent conflict with unruly criminal suspects, from the point of view that government does not actually have any legal authority by which to instantaneously, on the snap judgement of an agent on the street, “turn off” the minds or bodies of its citizens.

• Originally published 24 November 2005, at Sentido.tv
• Updated & republished 29 June 2009, at Words Against Chaos