The Handwriting on the Wall

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Newton’s Third Law of Motion

This maxim seems to be equally applicable to politics these days, and nothing substantiates that theory like our new highly exclusionary immigration policies. Younger educated emigres, often unmarried, are more willing to travel to the United States for jobs. “‘It’s the old story of immigrants coming to the U.S. and California seeking a better life for themselves and their children,’ says Hans Johnson, an immigration and demographics expert at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

“‘What’s different now is the trend toward immigrants coming into California with high levels of education. The share of those who already have completed college is extremely high. Asian immigrants are the best educated group in California, better than U.S.-born. Immigrants from India are the single best educated group in our state.” Los Angeles Times, May 20th. 

But as they get older, missing their families, many return to their home countries these days… taking the experience and skills with them… to compete against America. And those who already have families… well, increasingly they choose Canada or England over the U.S.

Not only are highly-desirable engineers, mathematicians and scientists – the real job-creators – deterred from emigrating to the United States or leave to return home (because their families often cannot travel with them), not only is growth curtailed by reason of fewer consumers, but the reaction on the job front is not to create more low-end jobs to replace lost farmworkers – employment that almost no U.S. citizens will take at any pay level – it is to amp up our focus on robots to fill the void. And that void may start with the low-end work, but it very rapidly moves up the skill chain to replace the very workers whose jobs the tight immigration policy was intended to secure.

All over the world, tighter immigration policies are rapidly depleting agricultural workers, bottom-end construction laborers, kitchen help and even workers in abattoirs. Case in point, as Ashley Robinson, Lydia Mulvany and David Stringer, writing for the May 20th Los Angeles Times, illustrates: “Robots are taking over farms faster than anyone saw coming.

“The first fully autonomous farm equipment is becoming commercially available, which means machines will be able to completely take over a multitude of tasks. Tractors will drive with no farmer in the cab, and specialized equipment will be able to spray, plant, plow and weed cropland.

“Dot Technology Corp. in Saskatchewan, Canada, has already sold some so-called power platforms for fully mechanized spring planting. In Australia, SwarmFarm Robotics is leasing weed-killing robots that can also do tasks such as mow and spread… The companies say their machines are smaller and smarter than the gigantic machinery they aim to replace. Industry leaders Deere & Co. and CNH Industrial NV haven’t said when they’ll release similar offerings.

“Sam Bradford, a farm manager at Arcturus Downs in Australia’s Queensland state, was an early adopter as part of a pilot program for SwarmFarm last year. He used four robots, each about the size of a truck, to kill weeds.

“In years past, Bradford had used a 16-ton spraying machine that ‘looks like a massive praying mantis.’ It would blanket the field in chemicals, he said. But the robots were more precise. They distinguished the dull brown of the farm’s paddock from green foliage, and targeted chemicals directly at the weeds. It’s a task the farm does two or three times a year over 20,000 acres. With the robots, Bradford said he can save 80% of his chemical costs.

“‘The savings on chemicals is huge, but there’s also savings for the environment from using less chemicals and you’re also getting a better result in the end,’ said Bradford, who’s run the farm for about 10 years.

“Cost savings have become especially crucial as a multi-year rout for grain and other prices depresses farm incomes and tightens margins. Meanwhile, advances in seed technology, fertilizers and other crop inputs have led to soaring yields and oversupply.

“Farmers need to get to the next level of profitability and efficiency in farming, and ‘we’ve lost sight of that with engineering that doesn’t match the agronomy,’ said SwarmFarm Chief Executive Andrew Bate. ‘Robots flip that on its head. What’s driving adoption in agriculture is better farming systems and better ways to grow crops.’

“Deere hasn’t yet released fully autonomous equipment because the technology that’s out there still isn’t good enough to replace people, said Alex Purdy, head of John Deere Labs and director of precision agriculture technology.

“Machinery that uses automation for tasks right now is more beneficial to farmers than autonomous equipment, Purdy said. Artificial intelligence, deep learning and advances in computer vision are going to transform agricultural machinery even further, he said.

“A modern tractor does thousands of tasks, and to provide a fully autonomous solution, a deep understanding of each of those tasks is needed, said Brett McClelland, product manager of autonomous vehicles at CNH Industrial. One of the areas that are still evolving is the ability of machines to see.” And that technology is already far along in development.

Indeed, a migrant labor field crew sweeps a field ready to harvest and moves on. They harvest everything in sight, letting the sorters later decide what is saleable and what is not. Then they move on to another field somewhere else. The machine pictured above, harvesting apples, doesn’t shake the tree to have all the fruit fall off. Instead, the smart arms scan the available apples, picking only those fruits ready for harvest, leaving the rest to mature as needed.

The reality of artificial intelligence backing sophisticated automation is not a rapid revolution… it is a slow, steady evolution that carries with it the power to erode global economic systems woefully unprepared to accept its obvious consequences. But as governments are loath to accept, you cannot turn back the clock (no one has done that yet) and you cannot force the world to accept economic dominance simply by legislation and restrictive trade agreements. The world needs a plan. America needs a plan. Instead, our government policies are pretty much “just make all this change just go away.”

              I’m Peter Dekom, and as I said, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

A Crisis We Know Nothing About

Ethiopia is a landlocked nation of over 100 million people, with a sprinkling of many faiths but mostly roughly two-thirds Christian and one-third Muslim. This land on the Horn of Africa is a complicated multi-ethnic federation with more than 80 ethno-linguistic groups. It is the second fastest growing economy on the continent. It is also a humanitarian mess. For nearly three decades, a heavily repressive central government kept the lid on ethnic tensions that have riddled the nation throughout its history. With a lifting of that boot and the rise of new political leadership, free speech has unfortunately often morphed into hate speech, resurrecting conflicts that were simmering all the while.

The net result: A vast array of “inter-ethnic conflicts raging in Ethiopia that have given the country an unenviable distinction: Last year more people fled their homes there than in any other nation on Earth… In total, 2.9 million people had been displaced by December 2018, more than those dislodged in Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan combined, according to estimates published this month.

“The upsurge in communal violence has coincided with the early days of Abiy Ahmed’s tenure as prime minister and is arguably the greatest threat to his lofty ambitions… Elected prime minister in April 2018, Abiy won international praise for his sweeping political and economic reform in Africa’s second-fastest growing economy. But the huge displacement during his tenure is the biggest black mark against the ambitious leader’s first year in office.

“‘Officials and others [outside the Abiy administration] have been focused on the opportunity for democratic progress, and they have been reluctant to also recognize this serious humanitarian and security crisis,’ said William Davison, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, a think tank.

“Appointed by the ruling party to steady Ethiopia after two years of anti-government protests, Abiy has won over much of the country with promises to reform authoritarian politics. He has released jailed journalists and political prisoners, welcomed exiled dissidents back into the country, declared peace with longtime foe Eritrea and has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.” Tom Wilson writing for the Los Angeles Times, May 30^th. 

People violently driven from their homes, death and destruction as local war lords and self-appointed ethnic leaders have too often incited their “people” to violent intolerance of competing ethnic groups.

In order to reverse the growing fears about national stability, Abiy is collecting displaced people by the busload to transport them back to their home territory. Claiming to have tamed most of the bad actors creating the violence, Abiy is trying to present an image of his country that just might not exist.

“More than 200,000 ethnic Oromos have been evicted from the western Benishangul-Gumuz region since September, while Benishangul authorities last month accused members of another ethnic group, the Amhara, of killing more than 200 people in a territorial dispute. Similar disputes have flared on Oromia’s eastern border with Ethiopia’s Somali region.

“In southern Ethiopia, Guji and Gedeo groups have periodically clashed over access to productive farmland, but the recent conflict was marked by an unusual intensity. [About 700,000 people have fled their homes in this dispute alone.]

“In the villages around the town of Dilla… the government has begun putting displaced people on buses to return them to their homes, in what they said was an effort to regain the initiative…. Aadi Tigistu Boyalla, an official in charge of the response in the Gedeo zone, told the Financial Times that any security issues had been resolved and that the plan was for all the area’s 446,420 displaced people to be returned by the end of the month.

“However, humanitarian workers accuse the government of rushing the process by returning people against their will to areas where the underlying causes of the conflict have not been addressed. Some were being taken back to homes that had been burnt or occupied, said one aid worker who declined to be identified… ‘You just don’t wake up one day and return half a million people. You need to plan,’ the worker said. ‘Two years is a viable time frame, not two weeks.’…

“‘The government’s actions are making an ongoing humanitarian crisis even worse,’ the Refugees International aid organization said last week…. ‘Pushing people to return to their home communities prematurely will only add to the ongoing suffering,’ senior advocate Mark Yarnell said.

“The prime minister’s office said all returns had been compliant with international best practices but warned that unnamed “hostile” actors had sought to disrupt the process. “There are elements exploiting victims of displacement and conflict for their own agenda,” a spokesperson said.

“One explanation is that political and community leaders from the Oromia region have seen the rise to the prime minister’s office of Abiy — who is also from Oromia — as a chance to assert the rights of the region’s people. Other officials say that the conflicts are an unavoidable consequence of Ethiopia’s attempt to move from a de facto one-party state to a pluralist democracy.” LA Times. 

How many Americans even know about this horrific violence? How many even care? The world is a dangerous place, and sooner or later, all of these seemingly distant struggles and disruptions find their way onto the global stage… and impact us all.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and an awareness of severe pain in a nation of over 100 million people is simply too big for us to ignore.

The Big Joke – American Foreign Policy

Following up on the side show at the G-20 conference in Osaka Japan – see my June 28th China’s Not Our Friend, But… blog – it is clear that President Trump didn’t expect much from the conference itself. He was night. As far as the U.S. is concerned, that was exactly the conference itself produced. Zip! If anything was going to happen, it would be in separate one-on-one conversations with the leaders at the conference, notably Russia’s Vladimir Putin (Friday, June 28th) and China’s Xi Jinping (Saturday, June 29th). So how did those meetings go?

Putin? After the Mueller report rather unequivocally iterated legions of data and supporting evidence, fully corroborated by all of our major intelligence agencies, that Russia materially interfered with our 2016 presidential election – by planting fake news reports across social media, using bots to tailor messages to voters undermining Clinton and building up Trump, discouraging minority voters from casting ballots, to name a few nefarious efforts – Trump met in Osaka with Vladdy, his bromance partner of old. Putin has continuously denied Russian involvement in those efforts, even as several other Western powers have uncovered covert Russian efforts to undermine their elections as well.

Unable to admit that his 2016 election was tainted by these efforts – leading even the affable Jimmy Carter to challenge Trump’s bona fides as an elected president – or that his popular support was almost three million votes fewer than those of his opponent, Trump continues to deny Russian influence was remotely relevant… if it happened at all. 

Even continuing in interviews that there is no reason he would fail to “listen” to a foreign agent with dirt on an opponent, maybe telling the FBI… maybe not, Trump’s recent statements seem like an open invitation to Russia to do whatever they want in 2020. The meeting with Putin, quick and largely vapid, was more a moment of purported humor – Congress and the American people weren’t laughing – than a serious meeting of substance.

“After a reporter asked Trump at the start of their meeting if he would tell the Russian autocrat not to meddle in the U.S. campaign, Trump used the assembled TV cameras to leave no doubt that he had followed through… ‘Yes, of course I will,’ Trump responded before turning toward Putin.

“‘Don’t meddle in the election, please,’ Trump said, smiling and briefly pointing his right index finger toward Putin. ‘Don’t meddle in the election.’… Putin did not respond verbally, but he appeared to laugh at the lighthearted reprimand. So did Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo and several others in the room… Trump’s playful demeanor with Putin — he also winked at him — suggested he was joking. Critics were quick to jump on the mirthful exchange as minimizing the risk of foreign interference in a U.S. political campaign.

“‘Russia’s proven and blatant interference in our elections in 2016 is no laughing matter,’ said Michael McFaul, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia under President Obama. ‘Yet again, President Trump has demonstrated that he doesn’t take the security of our elections seriously.’

“Over the last two years, Trump has repeatedly scoffed at the determination, first by U.S. intelligence agencies and then by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, that a Kremlin-backed operation hacked and released Democratic Party emails and manipulated social media in an effort to help Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.

“A summit between the two leaders in Helsinki, Finland, last July was marred when Trump openly accepted Putin’s denial of having meddled in the 2016 election, and dismissed U.S. intelligence conclusions to the contrary.” Los Angeles Times, June 29th.

And the meeting on Saturday with President Xi? “Better than I expected,” said Trump. A few concessions from China – China agreed to buy some agricultural products that faced PRC tariffs – but the biggest concessions came from the United States. Chinese telecom manufacturing giant Huawei (the company targeted by the Trump administration) is once again permitted to buy high-tech U.S. products and, as long as negotiations are ongoing, Trump’s tariffs will stay at their present levels. 

And yes, what everyone knew was going to happen anyway was agreed – trade negotiations would resume. In short not much new. Trump has begun acknowledging that his grandiose promises to deliver the “best trade agreement ever” is not so easy. I’m in “no hurry,” Trump accepted as if he knew that from the inception of his international economic missteps.

After the Osaka conference, and after a meeting Seoul and a joint press conference with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Sunday, June 30th, Trump and Moon headed off for a “photo-op” meeting, in lieu of a major breakthrough, with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un in the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas. Trump actually stepped onto North Korean soil, the first U.S. president to do so, as the Kim and Trump did what the rest of the world expected: agree to restart denuclearization talks later this year. Kim’s brutality aside, Trump continued to raise that murderous North Korean leader’s international status by courting him and touting his special relationship. This time on Kim’s own turf.

That “no hurry” mantra has crept into Trump approach on that sticky foreign policy issue: Expected progress in denuclearization talks with North Korea. “Hey, base,” Trump seemed to be saying, “don’t expect a deal with the North before the 2020 elections, but I am the only one who can do this.” Trump ignored his diplomatic staff, genuine specialists in Korean realities, at the last meeting with Kim in Vietnam in February that resulted in failure. Trump’s believing only he can do it, the idea that Kim will give up the weapons that guarantee his dictatorship without something that most Americans and regional allies will be comfortable, is a stretch. 

And while Kim’s testing of ballistic missiles (but not other missiles capable of reaching regional American allies) and nuclear weapons may have ceased, experts say that no more testing is actually required since those weapon systems are now fully developed. Talking is good. Shooting from the hip without expert help is back. But now Trump can use that fact that talks are even happening, as opposed to his earlier pledge of an amazing breakthrough fast, as signs of his “success.” He labeled his meeting with Kim as “legendary.” The Nukes are still there. The missiles are still there. After The Donald’s courtship, Kim is now “legendary”… Trump remains simply notorious.

Trump returned to the United States, where his failed tax reform only benefitted the rich and further exacerbated America’s income inequality, where his immigration policies have created more asylum-seeks at our gates than ever before (with horrific consequences, especially for deprived children separated from their parents), his unproductive brinkmanship with Iran, and where America is more polarized than any time in its history since the Civil War era. But photo ops, using powerful and wildly inaccurate tweets and sloganeering are at the core of Trump’s style. Results… not so much.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and having an arrogant, publicity-seeking amateur who dismisses the best and brightest foreign policy experts in international subtleties is downright terrifying.