Great idea. While we are at it we should have the 53 Republican Senators who voted to block the authorized weapons sale to Ukraine to pony up $1M+ each to aid Ukraine. And then seize and sell off all of Trump's properties financed by (and used to launder stolen funds) his Russian pals. Those who enabled Putin should be held accountable. Just sayin'.
I hate disagreeing with you, but I believe that American public opinion will swing AGAINST Ukraine if there is a $1 pump tax. I am already seeing kvetching and whining on an olympic scale from my less-informed Facebook Friends about the rise in gas prices. There are about fifty cents-a-gallon away from becoming Putin supporters. In fact, I am convinced that if Vladimir Putin guaranteed Americans $1/gallon gas they would overwhelmingly vote to make him dictator-for-life of our country. Your grandfather and my father were members of what was called The Greatest Generation. They sacrificed comfort and safety in order wear the uniform of the U.S. Army and stand for democracy and freedom. This current generation is The Comfort Generation; it is selfish, greedy and largely ignorant of history. While I see the rise in gas prices and your proposed buck-a-fillup special tax as the price of supporting democracy, an appreciable number of Americans don't think democracy is worth any sacrifice.
I tend to think you're right, George. As soon as Russia invaded Ukraine, the so-called mainstream media started acting as if the only serious consequence was higher gas prices. And since the Republicans don't care about democracy *here*, do we really expect to tighten their belts for democracy in Ukraine?
George, I hate like hell to have to agree with you, but I do. I live in Georgia, where every mother’s son thinks he’s the second coming of Richard Petty, and you can hear the howling about gas prices from the next county over. I’m also a Boomer, and the behavior of way too many of my contemporaries, especially those who never lived anywhere else, shames me.
Sad to say, you're unfortunately right. The gravy seals (who can't be bothered to actually enlist in the military) will be the first to whine about how their 'freedumb' is being impacted by Biden and it will only stoke their hatred of anyone who isn't Donald Trump.
Most Trump supporters would support Putin only because Donald does, because he's their god and that's who he reveres.
I say send them all to Ukraine equipped only with a rifle and a knife and see if they make it home alive.
Then gas prices can rise and nobody will complain.
I wouldn’t object to paying a buck a fillup because I always wait til my tank is nearly empty and always top it off. I can remember as a young man sometimes only having a couple bucks in my pocket and needing gas. Instead of $2 of gas, I get $1. This idea could screw people who don’t have the money to fill their tank. It also disproportionally affects those who only get a few gallons at a time. Not fair to the working poor who need to drive to work. I’m against it for that reason alone.
Me, too. There must be a better way I, who can afford it, can automatically contribute more, but the single moms and struggling laborers I know don't. Like a graduated tax. Oh, we have that! But it stops "graduating" when income becomes investments and stocks and write-offs and ...
I could support a voluntary donation of a buck, matched by another dollar donated by the oil company. They're pulling in record profits, and if not sourced to Russian oil, that's all to the good. Make it worldwide so we can bankrupt them.
Lucian, here in CA. gas is $5 and up a gallon. Many people have vehicles that are running on unleaded gas but some have cars that are taking premium unleaded and there are many who are driving EV vehicles, like Teslas, or Ford Focus, etc. Then you have the working poor who are physically and mentally taxed. To add to their misery at the pump would increase their hardships. Not everyone can afford the increase.
Where I live in MA, we're no stranger to $5/gallon. It doesn't affect me much because I'm a freelance editor who works from home, but it affects plenty of people I know who have to drive a lot.
The Allies should NOT have vilified the USSR at the end of WWII — they really won it for us against the Nazi regime. If only the Russians had been part of NATO...but let's review the history:
1. The USSR saved the world from Nazi Germany and won WW2. The fact that they teach you that the USA won is a lie.
2. The USSR was denied an invitation at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 instead of bringing them into the fold of the international economy despite surrounding Berlin and being the most consequential ally in WW2. Big mistake and a lost opportunity.
3. NATO predates the Warsaw Pact by six years. The USSR asked to join in 1949 and was denied, turning an ally into an enemy. This was the impetus for the Cold War.
4. NATO made verbal promises never to make defense pacts or extend membership to bordering USSR nation states, but as soon as the Soviet Union fell apart,they did exactly that for the next three decades.
This is verifiable history. The west has always played by a different set of rules. After this war, we must insist on a change, all of us.
Gee, Jordan, I guess I'm misremembering the Luger pistol I used to play with as a boy in my grandfather's study that belonged to Field Marshall Kesselring before grandpa took it from him on the day he surrendered his army of 1 million German soldiers in Northern Italy in April of 1945. Or maybe I've somehow gotten mixed up about the nationality of the soldiers in the 5th Army who defeated those same 1 million German soldiers in Italy. Or maybe they were Russians in U.S. Army uniforms? Can you help me out here?
The numbers don't lie: The Soviets lost 8 to 10 million soldiers in the war to defeat Nazi Germany. The number of US military deaths? 416,800. An enormous sacrifice.
I fail to see how the number of soldiers the Russians lost means they won the war. The units serving under my grandfather in North Africa, Sicily and Italy and Southern and SW France lost thousands of soldiers, a weight he carried with him all the way to his grave. I don't think I ever spent a day with him as a boy that he wasn't depressed. That war and what he had to do and the number of American soldiers he lost stayed with him the rest of his life, but so did the tens of thousands of Germans his units killed. Have you considered that Russian losses in WWII reflect poor leadership, bad tactics, some really stupid things the Russian army did that made it easier for the German army to kill more of their soldiers? You seem to be engaged in a body-count contest. I'm not.
None of this is the point — which is that the US narrative is that the Allies won the war, but we really don't think of the Soviets as having been our allies; it was a marriage of convenience for US capitalists, which immediately in 1945 they turned into the Cold War. It did not have to be that way. I'm saying our lack of vision, grace and greed and US imperial ambitions are to blame for the divisions we see today. Imagine, the Cold War could have been avoided — but then a few fat cats and their senators wouldn't have gotten rich, or richer.
Well, you're really talking about politics and capitalism, and maybe you should knock off talking about how many young soldiers the Soviets lost in that terrible war. I am reminded that the Soviet army had political commissars attached to units and they were empowered to shoot their own soldiers when they felt the soldiers weren't following orders. That also meant the Soviet army had what amounted to two chains of command: the purely military chain, and the Communist Party chain, and I would imagine that the tension between those two may have confused things somewhat on the battlefield.
Jordan, it was also a "marriage of convenience" for Stalin, who had previously married, also for convenience, Nazi Germany. If you'd stop putting everyone into good/evil boxes, you might begin to understand what was going on.
History is very complex. Examine all of the facts and contexts. No one denies the Russian losses and contributions. The Allies worked together. We all beat the Axis powers. It’s pointless to boil a complex process into a binary we:they.
Well, if death tolls are the measure of merit, how many died in Stalin's purges? How many died in the (preventable) famine of the early 1930s? And all to perpetuate a regime that gave Hitler's a run for its money.
Have you talked to anyone who fled westward from eastern Europe in 1945 because they knew what the Red Army was doing? When the Berlin Wall was up, how many people risked their lives to flee to the east? Riddle me this, sir.
hooweee, jordan, bless your little heart, you poked the hornet's nest here.
you are truly sadly mistaken on your opening point. the russians did not win over the nazis. they just simply threw their soldiers' bodies down and backed up over their land making the germans stumble along until they were too far from their supply logistics and they litteraly just froze in place. sure they weakened the nazis but not as an military offensive action to "win the war".
By this argument, are you seriously proposing that the Russians deserve a free pass at destroying a sovereign country now just because 80 years ago they helped win the war we and Europe fought to free Europe from the Nazis?
No. It just doesn't work that way.
What the Russians are doing right now is beyond the moral scope of forgiveness and our ability to fight back effectively right now is hampered by one very serious problem: the nuclear arsenal they and we have both in our respective countries.
The world has changed a great deal in 80 years and that is why we have to move past the history and look at the circumstances right now in front of us, which are:
Vladimir Putin has launched an unprovoked attack against an independent sovereign nation for the purposes of bringing it back into the destroyed "Soviet Empire" he wishes to recreate at the cost of the destruction of said sovereign county.
There is no equivalency argument here. Putin is a monster, just as Stalin was. Do not argue that we should overlook the actions of either.
By the way, according to my history books, the Germans and Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact that only lapsed when Germany invaded Russia. We all know how that one turned out, because it led to the defeat of Germany which you alluded to, but after which the Russians decided to seize a lot of the real estate that they 'liberated' from Germany.
And Putin never forgot that, which is why he's trying to recreate that same Eastern Bloc.
Where did I suggest that Putin was anything but a despicable autocrat, to be condemned not only for his invasion of Ukraine, but previous occupations in Crimea and elsewhere? What I'm asking is that we attempt to imagine a way in which the US and Europe works with future Russian leaders to change this Cold War discourse. The Soviets wanted to join NATO at one point, and that was a missed opportunity. The more the West opens to Russians, the more likely it is that we have peace with its leaders. We need to end this arms race and our own imperial ambitions, and instead become good shepherds of the planet — supporting every country's right to elect its own leaders, even if they don't wind up giving our corporations sweetheart oil or other resource deals. Ruling by coercion and force is not the way to peace.
That's all well and good for the future, but right now we're talking about limiting and ending this invasion and aggression right now while we can.
Being a good shepherd of the planet is nice but not when you don't have anything left to be a shepherd of.
Putin isn't going to open his arms willingly to us or anyone. He is a dictator and willing to kill everyone in his way to get what he wants. We have to end this somehow without blowing the entire planet to bits.
We're just dealing here with the situation he's given us. When it changes then we can deal with the future. Right now we're living moment to moment with a man who happens to be able to do almost anything he likes and there's not a whole lot else we can do but try to isolate him.
Mary, I don't mean to disparage your remarks — but we know all that. It's simple, really: foreign relations are like a marriage, where both parties have responsibility for the marriage. So I would ask all Americans, what has been the complete history of our "marriage" with the Soviets/Russians? What's our responsibility? Because if the Russian people and the American people continue to regard one another as citizens of the Evil Empire, we're doomed. We have to change that script; the couple needs to get into serious couples counseling. Right now we have to hope that the Russian generals/oligarchs/people overthrow Putin and pull out of Ukraine. I think change will have to start from the inside; ditto on our side as Americans. We've got to get hold of our own government, which means making Congress, the Supreme Court, the Executive Branch and the military answerable to us—the people, not to the (often hidden) corporate-intelligence interests. Have a fine day. Jordan-Montpellier
I didn't mean to be so terribly abrasive, but the coverage of senseless carnage has me pissed off no end.
We do indeed have to work on our own problems and sometimes it seems too overwhelming when some mad man is trying to destroy the entire world. Our military-industrial complex is just as responsible for our wars as anyone is. They make a lot of profit from them.
Putin doesn't care about responsibility, alas. He just wants what he wants and he doesn't care who knows it.
I don't know if the Russian people have the will to overthrow him. We can hope, but they're in the dark about the events and he's made it impossible to report it without being imprisoned for it.
That's how desperate he is. He can't stand any kind of criticism, and he'll kill people to make sure it doesn't happen.
Have a fine day. It's spring almost-a reason for hope.
Great idea. While we are at it we should have the 53 Republican Senators who voted to block the authorized weapons sale to Ukraine to pony up $1M+ each to aid Ukraine. And then seize and sell off all of Trump's properties financed by (and used to launder stolen funds) his Russian pals. Those who enabled Putin should be held accountable. Just sayin'.
Brilliant idea!!👏🏼👏🏼
Right on, bro!!
I hate disagreeing with you, but I believe that American public opinion will swing AGAINST Ukraine if there is a $1 pump tax. I am already seeing kvetching and whining on an olympic scale from my less-informed Facebook Friends about the rise in gas prices. There are about fifty cents-a-gallon away from becoming Putin supporters. In fact, I am convinced that if Vladimir Putin guaranteed Americans $1/gallon gas they would overwhelmingly vote to make him dictator-for-life of our country. Your grandfather and my father were members of what was called The Greatest Generation. They sacrificed comfort and safety in order wear the uniform of the U.S. Army and stand for democracy and freedom. This current generation is The Comfort Generation; it is selfish, greedy and largely ignorant of history. While I see the rise in gas prices and your proposed buck-a-fillup special tax as the price of supporting democracy, an appreciable number of Americans don't think democracy is worth any sacrifice.
I tend to think you're right, George. As soon as Russia invaded Ukraine, the so-called mainstream media started acting as if the only serious consequence was higher gas prices. And since the Republicans don't care about democracy *here*, do we really expect to tighten their belts for democracy in Ukraine?
George, I hate like hell to have to agree with you, but I do. I live in Georgia, where every mother’s son thinks he’s the second coming of Richard Petty, and you can hear the howling about gas prices from the next county over. I’m also a Boomer, and the behavior of way too many of my contemporaries, especially those who never lived anywhere else, shames me.
‘Les Deplorables’
Sad to say, you're unfortunately right. The gravy seals (who can't be bothered to actually enlist in the military) will be the first to whine about how their 'freedumb' is being impacted by Biden and it will only stoke their hatred of anyone who isn't Donald Trump.
Most Trump supporters would support Putin only because Donald does, because he's their god and that's who he reveres.
I say send them all to Ukraine equipped only with a rifle and a knife and see if they make it home alive.
Then gas prices can rise and nobody will complain.
How do we get the Republicans to come up with this idea?
Couldn’t we just tax rocket fuel for space tourism instead? Maybe a couple million per launch. That crowd seems more able to afford it.
I wouldn’t object to paying a buck a fillup because I always wait til my tank is nearly empty and always top it off. I can remember as a young man sometimes only having a couple bucks in my pocket and needing gas. Instead of $2 of gas, I get $1. This idea could screw people who don’t have the money to fill their tank. It also disproportionally affects those who only get a few gallons at a time. Not fair to the working poor who need to drive to work. I’m against it for that reason alone.
Me, too. There must be a better way I, who can afford it, can automatically contribute more, but the single moms and struggling laborers I know don't. Like a graduated tax. Oh, we have that! But it stops "graduating" when income becomes investments and stocks and write-offs and ...
Ukraine is so important to us for so many reasons and her people have been so bravely standing up to the Bear. YES! I would support this!
I’m in!! We need to think globally here & help.
A dollar at the pump is hardly a hardship for anyone in our country, especially those who fill up their inefficient fuel-hogging honking vehicles….
And then there's the rebuilding of Ukraine, which good grief will cover infrastructure and buildings and the human toll that this war has exacted.
I'm pumping my fist in support of your proposal, LT.
I could support a voluntary donation of a buck, matched by another dollar donated by the oil company. They're pulling in record profits, and if not sourced to Russian oil, that's all to the good. Make it worldwide so we can bankrupt them.
Lucian, here in CA. gas is $5 and up a gallon. Many people have vehicles that are running on unleaded gas but some have cars that are taking premium unleaded and there are many who are driving EV vehicles, like Teslas, or Ford Focus, etc. Then you have the working poor who are physically and mentally taxed. To add to their misery at the pump would increase their hardships. Not everyone can afford the increase.
Where I live in MA, we're no stranger to $5/gallon. It doesn't affect me much because I'm a freelance editor who works from home, but it affects plenty of people I know who have to drive a lot.
The Allies should NOT have vilified the USSR at the end of WWII — they really won it for us against the Nazi regime. If only the Russians had been part of NATO...but let's review the history:
1. The USSR saved the world from Nazi Germany and won WW2. The fact that they teach you that the USA won is a lie.
2. The USSR was denied an invitation at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 instead of bringing them into the fold of the international economy despite surrounding Berlin and being the most consequential ally in WW2. Big mistake and a lost opportunity.
3. NATO predates the Warsaw Pact by six years. The USSR asked to join in 1949 and was denied, turning an ally into an enemy. This was the impetus for the Cold War.
4. NATO made verbal promises never to make defense pacts or extend membership to bordering USSR nation states, but as soon as the Soviet Union fell apart,they did exactly that for the next three decades.
This is verifiable history. The west has always played by a different set of rules. After this war, we must insist on a change, all of us.
Gee, Jordan, I guess I'm misremembering the Luger pistol I used to play with as a boy in my grandfather's study that belonged to Field Marshall Kesselring before grandpa took it from him on the day he surrendered his army of 1 million German soldiers in Northern Italy in April of 1945. Or maybe I've somehow gotten mixed up about the nationality of the soldiers in the 5th Army who defeated those same 1 million German soldiers in Italy. Or maybe they were Russians in U.S. Army uniforms? Can you help me out here?
The numbers don't lie: The Soviets lost 8 to 10 million soldiers in the war to defeat Nazi Germany. The number of US military deaths? 416,800. An enormous sacrifice.
I fail to see how the number of soldiers the Russians lost means they won the war. The units serving under my grandfather in North Africa, Sicily and Italy and Southern and SW France lost thousands of soldiers, a weight he carried with him all the way to his grave. I don't think I ever spent a day with him as a boy that he wasn't depressed. That war and what he had to do and the number of American soldiers he lost stayed with him the rest of his life, but so did the tens of thousands of Germans his units killed. Have you considered that Russian losses in WWII reflect poor leadership, bad tactics, some really stupid things the Russian army did that made it easier for the German army to kill more of their soldiers? You seem to be engaged in a body-count contest. I'm not.
None of this is the point — which is that the US narrative is that the Allies won the war, but we really don't think of the Soviets as having been our allies; it was a marriage of convenience for US capitalists, which immediately in 1945 they turned into the Cold War. It did not have to be that way. I'm saying our lack of vision, grace and greed and US imperial ambitions are to blame for the divisions we see today. Imagine, the Cold War could have been avoided — but then a few fat cats and their senators wouldn't have gotten rich, or richer.
Well, you're really talking about politics and capitalism, and maybe you should knock off talking about how many young soldiers the Soviets lost in that terrible war. I am reminded that the Soviet army had political commissars attached to units and they were empowered to shoot their own soldiers when they felt the soldiers weren't following orders. That also meant the Soviet army had what amounted to two chains of command: the purely military chain, and the Communist Party chain, and I would imagine that the tension between those two may have confused things somewhat on the battlefield.
Jordan, it was also a "marriage of convenience" for Stalin, who had previously married, also for convenience, Nazi Germany. If you'd stop putting everyone into good/evil boxes, you might begin to understand what was going on.
History is very complex. Examine all of the facts and contexts. No one denies the Russian losses and contributions. The Allies worked together. We all beat the Axis powers. It’s pointless to boil a complex process into a binary we:they.
The civilian casualties in the siege of Leningrad were pretty appalling too.
Could you be more blunt TC?!
Well, if death tolls are the measure of merit, how many died in Stalin's purges? How many died in the (preventable) famine of the early 1930s? And all to perpetuate a regime that gave Hitler's a run for its money.
Have you talked to anyone who fled westward from eastern Europe in 1945 because they knew what the Red Army was doing? When the Berlin Wall was up, how many people risked their lives to flee to the east? Riddle me this, sir.
hooweee, jordan, bless your little heart, you poked the hornet's nest here.
you are truly sadly mistaken on your opening point. the russians did not win over the nazis. they just simply threw their soldiers' bodies down and backed up over their land making the germans stumble along until they were too far from their supply logistics and they litteraly just froze in place. sure they weakened the nazis but not as an military offensive action to "win the war".
Which is pretty much what the Russians did to Napoleon, with nary a soviet in sight. :-)
By this argument, are you seriously proposing that the Russians deserve a free pass at destroying a sovereign country now just because 80 years ago they helped win the war we and Europe fought to free Europe from the Nazis?
No. It just doesn't work that way.
What the Russians are doing right now is beyond the moral scope of forgiveness and our ability to fight back effectively right now is hampered by one very serious problem: the nuclear arsenal they and we have both in our respective countries.
The world has changed a great deal in 80 years and that is why we have to move past the history and look at the circumstances right now in front of us, which are:
Vladimir Putin has launched an unprovoked attack against an independent sovereign nation for the purposes of bringing it back into the destroyed "Soviet Empire" he wishes to recreate at the cost of the destruction of said sovereign county.
There is no equivalency argument here. Putin is a monster, just as Stalin was. Do not argue that we should overlook the actions of either.
By the way, according to my history books, the Germans and Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact that only lapsed when Germany invaded Russia. We all know how that one turned out, because it led to the defeat of Germany which you alluded to, but after which the Russians decided to seize a lot of the real estate that they 'liberated' from Germany.
And Putin never forgot that, which is why he's trying to recreate that same Eastern Bloc.
Where did I suggest that Putin was anything but a despicable autocrat, to be condemned not only for his invasion of Ukraine, but previous occupations in Crimea and elsewhere? What I'm asking is that we attempt to imagine a way in which the US and Europe works with future Russian leaders to change this Cold War discourse. The Soviets wanted to join NATO at one point, and that was a missed opportunity. The more the West opens to Russians, the more likely it is that we have peace with its leaders. We need to end this arms race and our own imperial ambitions, and instead become good shepherds of the planet — supporting every country's right to elect its own leaders, even if they don't wind up giving our corporations sweetheart oil or other resource deals. Ruling by coercion and force is not the way to peace.
That's all well and good for the future, but right now we're talking about limiting and ending this invasion and aggression right now while we can.
Being a good shepherd of the planet is nice but not when you don't have anything left to be a shepherd of.
Putin isn't going to open his arms willingly to us or anyone. He is a dictator and willing to kill everyone in his way to get what he wants. We have to end this somehow without blowing the entire planet to bits.
We're just dealing here with the situation he's given us. When it changes then we can deal with the future. Right now we're living moment to moment with a man who happens to be able to do almost anything he likes and there's not a whole lot else we can do but try to isolate him.
Mary, I don't mean to disparage your remarks — but we know all that. It's simple, really: foreign relations are like a marriage, where both parties have responsibility for the marriage. So I would ask all Americans, what has been the complete history of our "marriage" with the Soviets/Russians? What's our responsibility? Because if the Russian people and the American people continue to regard one another as citizens of the Evil Empire, we're doomed. We have to change that script; the couple needs to get into serious couples counseling. Right now we have to hope that the Russian generals/oligarchs/people overthrow Putin and pull out of Ukraine. I think change will have to start from the inside; ditto on our side as Americans. We've got to get hold of our own government, which means making Congress, the Supreme Court, the Executive Branch and the military answerable to us—the people, not to the (often hidden) corporate-intelligence interests. Have a fine day. Jordan-Montpellier
I didn't mean to be so terribly abrasive, but the coverage of senseless carnage has me pissed off no end.
We do indeed have to work on our own problems and sometimes it seems too overwhelming when some mad man is trying to destroy the entire world. Our military-industrial complex is just as responsible for our wars as anyone is. They make a lot of profit from them.
Putin doesn't care about responsibility, alas. He just wants what he wants and he doesn't care who knows it.
I don't know if the Russian people have the will to overthrow him. We can hope, but they're in the dark about the events and he's made it impossible to report it without being imprisoned for it.
That's how desperate he is. He can't stand any kind of criticism, and he'll kill people to make sure it doesn't happen.
Have a fine day. It's spring almost-a reason for hope.
Spot on!
Especially here in DeSantistan where there is no state income tax.
And, remember, Trumpsters, these refugees are WHITE folks!!!
Hurrah!I have forwarded a copy to my DEMOCRATIC congresswoman. Very humane, reasonable and smart…even if she is a Naval Academy grad.
I’m in.
‘Any Travel Agency’s offering a Combat Tour Package?
Totally agree.