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About Portland observer. (Portland, Or.) 1970-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 3, 2018)
January 3, 2018 Page 13 Opinion articles do not necessarily represent the views of the Portland Observer. We welcome reader essays, photos and story ideas. Submit to news@portlandobserver.com. O PINION On the Verge of another Unnecessary War Will government leaders regret their complicity? l isa f uller President Bill Clin- ton’s greatest regret was his failure to re- spond to the Rwandan genocide. He estimat- ed that U.S. intervention could have saved 300,000 lives. The Vietnam War was former Secretary of Defense Robert Mc- Namara’s biggest regret. He wrote an entire book to explain why he was “terribly wrong.” Former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Sen. Tom Harkin, and Sen. Walter Jones have all said that they deeply regret authorizing the war in Iraq. Jones once lamented, “I helped kill 4,000 Americans, and I will go to my grave regretting that.” In each case, government leaders regretted their complicity in hun- dreds of thousands of deaths. In each case, they had chosen to prioritize by politics above ethics. Today’s po- litical leaders are about to make the same mistake. We are now on the verge of another unnecessary war — this time with North Korea — and it is likely to wreak more havoc than Vietnam, Iraq and Rwanda combined. Top nuclear security expert Scott Sagan warns that the risk of war is far higher than during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and predicts that one million people could die on the first day - a figure that exceeds the death toll of the entire Rwandan geno- cide. Even more worryingly, Russia and China are making military prepa- rations, suggesting that a Korean war could quickly escalate into a world war. Despite this horrific scenario, Pres- ident Trump continues to ratchet up tensions by issuing bombastic threats and overseeing provocative military exercises. He is increasingly keen to launch a “preventative” strike, and there are multiple indications that he plans to do so within the next three months unless North Korea agrees to denuclearize. At the same time, he is forbidding diplomacy, blocking any possibility of a peaceful solution to the crisis. Put simply, war could be inevitable if Trump remains in power. Govern- ment leaders therefore have an ethical obligation to remove him from office before he fulfills his dream of using nuclear weapons. Impeachment, however, is no lon- ger a viable solution- the impeach- ment process takes several months, whereas Trump is reportedly looking to drop the first bomb by March. Congress or Trump’s Cabinet will therefore need to invoke the 25th Amendment, which would immedi- ately suspend Trump’s presidential authority on the grounds that he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” While the amend- ment can be invoked on political grounds alone, Trump’s behavior sug- gests he has a cognitive inability to do his job: Neurologists warn that Trump is displaying symptoms of dementia, while prominent psychiatrists have ar- gued that Trump’s particular brand of mental instability poses a grave risk to national security. There are, however, measures short of dethroning Trump that would be helpful. Congress could pass legisla- tion such as the Preventing Preemp- tive War in North Korea Act, the Re- stricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act or the No First Use Bill. All three bills would constrain the President — be it Trump or any of his succes- sors — from unilaterally launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Congress has yet to prioritize any of these bills, and they have all remained at a stand- still since they were introduced. Finally, government officials should follow the leads of lawmakers like Sen. Chris Murphy and Rep. Ted Lieu and speak out frequently and loudly to mobilize public opposition to a poten- tial war. Political leaders who muster the courage to act may be taking a politi- cal risk, but they will save themselves from the prospect of spending the rest of their lives wondering if they could have prevented a historic tragedy. Lisa Fuller is a former civilian peacekeeper who worked in war zones such as Iraq, South Sudan, and Sri Lanka. Help for Struggling Millionaires Is On the Way Gutting the estate tax is a bad idea c huck c ollins It isn’t easy being a millionaire these days, especially if you’ve got less than $20 million. Fortu- nately, Congress is watching out for you. Yes, the Republican tax cut bonanza targets lower end millionaires for special relief. Now those struggling to scrape by with $15 million or $20 million can breathe more easi- ly. And even lowly billionaires will be able to keep more of their wealth. Why? Because Congress just increased the amount of wealth exempted by the estate tax, our nation’s only levy on inherited wealth. In the bad old days, a fam- ily had to have $11 million in by wealth before they were subject to the tax. This exempted the 99.8 percent of undisciplined taxpayers who, in the words of Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, had squan- dered their wealth on “booze, women, and movies.” Now no family with less than $22 million will pay it (or indi- viduals with less than $10.9 million). This gift to “grate- ful heirs” will cost $83 billion over the next decade. Gutting the estate tax is a bad idea — it raises substan- tial revenue from those with the greatest capacity to pay. Even in a weakened state, it would have raised over $260 billion over the next decade. The estate tax was estab- lished a century ago during the first Gilded Age, a peri- od of grotesque inequality. Champions of establishing a tax on inherited wealth includ- ed President Theodore Roos- evelt and industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who viewed it as a brake on the concentration of wealth and power. Modern Republicans, how- ever, paint the tyrannical “death tax” as an unfair pen- alty on small businesses and family farmers. But that’s a myth. The most vocal champion of estate tax repeal is Rep. Kristi Noem, a South Dakota Republican who became the GOP poster child for farm- ers touched by the estate tax. House Speaker Paul Ryan ap- pointed her on the tax confer- ence committee to advocate for estate tax repeal because of her compelling story. Noem says her family was subject to the tax after her fa- ther died in a farm accident in 1994, a story she repeats con- stantly. The only problem, as jour- nalists recently discovered, is that her family paid the tax only because of a fluke in South Dakota law that was changed in 1995. Her expe- rience has little to do with the federal estate tax, which has been substantially scaled down in recent decades. And while Noem was com- plaining about government taxes, the family ranch has collected over $3.7 million in taxpayer funded farm subsi- dies since 1995. Noem attacked the reporting as “fake news,” even though it was based on legal documents she filed herself. The reality is that the small number of estate tax benefi- ciaries aren’t farmers at all. They’re mostly wealthy city dwellers. Still, the fact that the estate tax lives on creates an oppor- tunity to make it better. Lawmakers should insti- tute a graduated rate struc- ture, so that billionaires pay a higher estate tax rate than families with a “mere” $22 million. And loopholes should be closed so they can’t pay wealth managers to hide their wealth in complicated trusts and offshore tax havens. Estate tax revenue could be dedicated to something that clearly expands opportunity for everyone else. Bill Gates Sr. argues that the estate tax should fund “a GI bill for the next generation.” In exchange for military and community service, young adults should be able to get substantial tuition assistance for higher education or voca- tional training, paid for by a progressive estate tax. If Congress were concerned about the middle class, that’s the kind of proposal that would become the law of the land. Chuck Collins directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies.He’s the au- thor of the recent book Born on Third Base. Distributed by OtherWords.org.