The United States then was in a Cold War with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex included the U.S. Department of Defense, members of Congress, and companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman who were the chief suppliers of military hardware.
Eisenhower feared a runaway nuclear arms race stimulated by the “unwarranted influence” of military contractors and the creation of an arms industry that would dictate American foreign policy. He spoke of vigilance stating that “only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” could ensure future peace while the global ideological confrontation with the Soviets was ongoing.
Biden’s speech doesn’t sound that different. The outgoing President warned about “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.”
Biden described an oligarchy taking shape in America. The word oligarchy is one we usually associate with Russian billionaires close to Vladimir Putin, not typically to describe America’s ultrawealthy.
Biden noted the concentration of power and influence “literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” He pointed to a previous period in American history, the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th century, dominated by robber barons whose concentrated wealth set them above the laws of the land. It wasn’t until Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency that laws were passed to bring the ultrawealthy in line and get them to “play by the rules everybody else had.”
Biden borrowed Eisenhower’s words “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” in describing the rising tech-industrial complex and the techno-billionaires that pose “real dangers for our country.”
He didn’t name names, but I can. He was talking about Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Steve Ballmer, Jensen Huang, and other technology titans who collectively are worth trillions of dollars.
Musk alone gave President-Elect Trump’s campaign more than $260 million. This appears to have bought him outsized influence in shaping the incoming administration and future U.S. government policy. Biden described hidden campaign contributions called “dark money” that likely is playing a part in the future makeup of the incoming administration. The proposed cabinet of President-elect Trump is described by the Washington Post as “the wealthiest group of presidential advisers in modern history.”
Near the end of his speech, Biden described the danger that “the concentration of power and wealth” represents, describing it as eroding the country’s “sense of unity and common purpose.” He noted, “It causes distrust and division. Participating in our democracy becomes exhausting and even disillusioning, and people don’t feel like they have a fair shot” and an “even playing field.”
The outgoing President called for safeguards to protect the country from the abuse of power that techno-billionaire oligarchs could unleash. He stated that billionaires in the U.S. need to “pay their fair share” and this can only come to fruition through revisions to the tax code which could serve as the guardrails of democracy. Biden also called for term limits for Supreme Court justices, and banning members of Congress from trading stocks.
Technocracy isn’t limited to the U.S. It very much is alive and well in China but there it is under the firm control of the Communist Party. China uses technology to control every aspect of its citizens’ lives. Techno-billionaires there rise and fall at the behest of the good graces of the Communist Party. The same is true for Russia which although no longer Communist-run, appears to be more like the Soviet Union of the past under Vladimir Putin.
Technocracy run by billionaires in the U.S. is already undermining the country’s democratic processes. Their technological expertise through the apps they have developed that have Americans hooked is exerting influence on the shaping of the country’s future. Unelected, techno-billionaire money speaks for them, suborning the roles of elected representatives to create policy and the laws of the land. This is more than disturbing and goes well beyond the U.S. border in terms of influence.
It is one thing to pull the levers of domestic government. It is quite another to exert influence on the politics of other countries. We accuse China and Russia of political interference in democratic elections. Now, U.S. techno-billionaires like Musk are doing the same by stirring the pot in Britain, the European Union, Canada and elsewhere. They along with their President-elect appear to have little respect for other democracies.
That’s why the threat to American democracy that Biden talked about in his farewell speech is also a threat to democracies elsewhere and the self-determination of nations. The warning does not end at the 49th parallel and the Rio Grande.
]]>I will start with the one most blog readers would be unfamiliar with unless you’re Canadian that is and know the name of our Prime Minister. His father Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister, and the son has followed in his footsteps with three terms in office.
Where Pierre Trudeau bowed out of politics on a snowy February 29th evening, his son has yet to take the hint that it is his time to leave. Justin Trudeau is a classic example of being dead right; right on social policy, right on environmental policy, but not right in timing his departure.
Trudeau has implemented carbon pricing and stuck with the program that will in future years be seen as landing on the right side of history. Trudeau has made efforts to reconcile the country’s colonial history with its Indigenous population, also the right thing to do. He has instituted programs and policies like national pharmacare, dental care, childcare, and urban housing initiatives. He has bought a moribund pipeline company and completed the project to rescue landlocked oil sands operations to get their products to market, and done this despite it countering his stated goal to decarbonize the country’s economy to mitigate climate change.
It doesn’t matter that he has done all of the above because one thing he is not doing has made him dead right. He has overstayed his welcome after nine years in charge. Canadians in poll after poll see him as the problem. He doesn’t and that’s the definition of being dead right. He needs to resign as Prime Minister. A by-election this week in a Liberal bellwether riding in Toronto, a bastion for the federal political party could persuade him to go. By doing this he may save all the policies and initiatives he instituted from going down with him in a federal election expected a year from now.
Second on our list is Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s embattled Prime Minister. Netanyahu is not an easy man to like. By staying in office he has avoided corruption charges for accepting gifts from foreign entities.
In my opinion, he has been on the wrong side of issues more than being on the right. In the latest election, to return to the prime minister’s office, he brought extremist parties into his government.
His surreptitious policy of supporting payments to Hamas in Gaza for years, with Dubai being the middleman, has kept them in power while continuing to separate Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza from establishing a united front. The money has served Hamas well, politically and militarily. No doubt this money helped to buy the weapons used on October 7th and continues to help it in spreading knowledge of its victimhood all over the Internet.
Post the October 7th, 2023 raid into Israel, Netanyahu has vowed revenge on Hamas. Most Israelis at the time agreed. Most people around the world detested what Hamas did on that day. Hamas still holds more than one hundred Israelis hostage and scores of bodies of those they captured or killed that day or who have subsequently died as captives.
Netanyahu has avenged the Gaza attack ten times turning Israel’s victimhood into the opposite in the view of many around the world. In swearing to wipe out Hamas and put the Gaza Strip and its people under Israeli military control, Netanyahu has instituted a policy bound to fail. Netanyahu’s revenge may seem right to him but it is a policy that is dead right. He has overstayed his welcome. If he cannot be pushed from office by the members of his cabinet, by the mass protests in Israel happening every weekend, then the Knesset’s members need to vote and replace him.
The longer Netanyahu remains in power, the less likely Israel and Palestine will find a peaceful resolution to a land dispute that has gone on for more than a century with origins in World War One and the Balfour Declaration.
The third on my list of leaders who are dead right is Joe Biden, President of the United States. When first elected Biden stated he would be a one-term President. As a one-term president, he would reverse the course set by the worst impulses of his predecessor, Donald Trump.
His progressive agenda on climate has made him an environmental champion. He is reindustrializing the American heartland. He has expanded the public health mandate. He has rallied Western democracies to help Ukraine in fighting Russia’s war of aggression.
He has largely stayed away from condemning the actions of the previous administration, and the attempt by Trump and his minions to overthrow election results.
What he hasn’t done is stay younger than his 81 years now show. He has noticeably aged in office and despite having done so much right, in running again, he is dead right. By staying on he may end up with the one result he doesn’t want, the return of Donald Trump to the presidency.
My U.S. friend who recently became a Canadian citizen, when asked if there would be any more elections for President if Trump is returned in November said: “Not while Trump is still alive.”
To not be dead right, Biden can still name a successor from the ranks of the Democratic Party or a prominent independent before or at the upcoming convention. It will cause a political earthquake but the shockwave may bring Trump tumbling down and prevent what could turn into a disaster for America.
I first came across the concept of “dead right” while working for a very large U.S. high-technology company. We were in the middle of a hostile takeover of a prominent competitor. We succeeded but those in the acquired company were unhappy. In a parting shot, the former CEO talked about our company leaders as being dead right. He said there would be consequences and he was right. Scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission of both the takeover and my company’s financial reporting unleashed a scandal and charges being laid against our management with several ending up in jail. I had long departed before all of that came home to roost but the phrase “dead right” remained with me.
The meeting of the G7 leaders ended this week and some of them on display will soon find themselves equally dead right. Add Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, as one, and Emmanuel Macron, the President of France as another. It seems being dead right is a virus and transmissible when it comes to world politics.
Dead right may soon reappear in the technology world as the industry goes nuts over artificial intelligence (AI). In the last week, Apple jumped into the AI arms race with Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Amazon and others. Each tech behemoth is trying to outflank the other with AI algorithms that train on billions of pages of unstructured data scraped from the Internet with little thought or rationale beyond keeping ahead of the competition to be first to create artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Without guardrails, one or more of these decision-makers will prove to be dead right when AGI makes humanity that much poorer and increasingly dependent on algorithms as substitutes for human intelligence and creativity. These tech giant enablers will make money for shareholders in the short term. But we will all suffer in the end. To me, those who lead us down this path will obtain the ultimate “dead right” prize.
]]>Vision Zero is a newer strategy for eliminating deaths and severe injuries from road traffic and other unsafe urban infrastructure. First implemented in parts of Europe, the strategy has successfully gained traction in North American cities.
Most drivers today are conditioned to think fatalities on the road are inevitable, but the reality is that there are now resources to prevent such accidents. The key to a preventive approach is to prioritize traffic safety as a public health issue.
In 2020, more than 40,000 people in the United States were killed in crashes. This significant loss of life exacts a tragic toll. Pedestrian deaths in 2020 increased 21% from 2019 even with fewer vehicles on the road because of the pandemic and economic downturn. Not only was there personal loss, but also deep community impacts including economic and healthcare costs as well as emotional trauma for the victims and their families.
Vision Zero is a different approach to traffic safety. It begins with a premise that all of society deserves the right to experience safe use of roadways. It also makes it the shared responsibility of policymakers, system designers and technology experts to implement safe road infrastructure. This is far different from the traditional approach to traffic which makes the responsibility that of the individual whether driver or pedestrian.
For policymakers and planners, committing to Vision Zero means unlearning old ways of designing roads and transportation infrastructure. It means focusing on roadway environment improvements to dramatically lessen the number and severity of crashes.
What are the technologies involved in Vision Zero? They include video analytics using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to analyze massive amounts of video data of complex traffic situations. These companies include Waycare, Derq and Applied Information, developers of software designed to:
These advanced video analytics can trigger pedestrian signage to blink and alert a driver who may not see someone crossing a road. The software also can alert city operators to send emergency responders to locations when collisions are detected.
Real-time AI analytics also can provide additional context including incident identification, near-miss heatmaps and accurate traffic counts to share with traffic engineers and operators, to allow them to better understand traffic patterns and proactively improve road safety.
President Biden’s administration recently released a proposal to spend an estimated $1 trillion US on infrastructure projects. The proposed legislation includes a large piece devoted to innovation for smart infrastructure. The Vision Zero strategy is designed to go hand-in-hand with what the legislation proposes.
Biden’s infrastructure plan has set aside:
Advocacy groups have been calling for such a plan which through implementing the technologies envisioned in Vision Zero, can become a reality.
]]>But since the inauguration of Joe Biden in January 2021, he has made fighting climate change his top priority and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other relevant government agencies have moved front and centre to highlight the evidence.
In its latest effort to get back on track, the EPA released its long-awaited report that represents an accumulation of climate data from dozens of government, academic, and non-profit sources. The report, which had been buried by the Trump administration for several years, indicates unprecedented levels of climate change including rising atmospheric temperatures, increased ocean acidity and sea-level rise, growing extreme weather events, increases in coastal and inland flooding, and rising incidents of drought and wildfires.
The new EPA website lists indicators that provide a more granular look including:
We now know for a fact that 2020 was the second-warmest year on record, only surpassed by 2016. And we now know for a fact that heat waves which averaged two in the 1960s increased to six annually in the 2010 decade which just ended.
The EPA site is accompanied by other U.S. government agency sites equally unmasked by the Biden administration to becoming informative sources for studying climate change.
A redesigned National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate.gov site provides Americans with a global climate dashboard for reference.
And NASA‘s work on climate change is once more visible. Considering the space agency’s fleet of Earth-observation satellites, it can now reveal the detailed data it tracks about our planet’s vital signs. You can check out the scorecard which as of the writing of this post shows:
NASA provides a climate time machine to visualize the changes in all of these key metrics over time.
Back in January of this year, none of the above was anywhere evident. Now it is front and centre where it should be. Let’s hope that the policies and actions that follow will help bend the GHG curve downward so that Americans and the rest of the global community can collectively begin to heal our planet.
]]>