This is the weekly selection of news and opinion
from sources outside the US mainstream media. Today we look at the
ongoing Eurorecession, the Netanyahu government's (non) response to the Arab
League's peace proposal, the money going to contractors supporting
the US military presence overseas, and climate change's
"grim milestone". Also we have a special guest "op-ed"
from the (sort of) mainstream media. Sources: EU
Observer, The Guardian, Antiwar.com, TomDispatch.com, Mother Jones
and, for the "op-ed",
Harper's Magazine.
Eurorecession
It's official. The
ongoing recession in Europe has become the region's longest slump of
the postwar era. The austerity measures imposed for deficit
reduction purposes have utterly failed to bring about
recovery. The EU Observer reported: "The eurozone economy continues to shrink as Germany's
economy grew by a meagre 0.1 percent in the past three months, while
France slid back into recession, according to data from the EU
statistics office Eurostat published on Wednesday (15 May). Shrinking
by 0.2 percent in the first three months of 2013, the eurozone
economy has now been in recession for the past one and a half years."
France has been granted a two-year extension on its deficit
reduction in one of the more reasoned moves made by the EU. Also
Phillip Inman blogging in Thursday's Guardian points
to a (finally) rebounding Japanese economy: "Gross domestic
product rose 0.9% from the previous quarter, which translates into an
annualised 3.5% growth rate." The growth is attributed to "the
stimulus package put together by new prime minister Shinzo Abe[,
which] could be generating the kind of feelgood factor Japan needs to
end two decades of virtually zero growth. The eurozone needs to look
and learn." I'd add not just the eurozone. The phony
deficit-reduction-crisis hysteria brought to the table by Republicans
and subscribed to by some Democrats will damage the slow, fragile
recovery here in the US. If there is anything to be learned from the
austerity failures in Europe, it is this: deficit-reduction austerity
measures will only prolong the pain from the recession for those that
are suffering the most.
Arab League Peace Proposal
In late April, the Arab
League presented a peace proposal that offered land-swaps that
Israeli officials had previously insisted were necessary to a
permanent settlement. In a May 15 post on Antiwar.Com, Jason Ditzwrites that, now that there is an offer on the table, "Israeli
officials have clammed up, waiting for those offers to fall out of
the headlines so they can get back to claiming the lack of progress
isn’t their fault." The Arab League proposal has been dubbed
a 'big step forward' by Secretary of State Kerry and "a great
opportunity" to resume the stalled talks by former Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert. Ditz continues: "The current Israeli
government, however, has offered no response to the proposal, apart
from a few speeches condemning the Palestinians, while privately
officials have conceded their biggest fear is that the offer is
sincere, and that the US might be on board with it as well."
$365 Billion to Contractors
in "Baseworld"
The US has a military budget
larger than the next 13 highest-spending countries combined. This
enormous waste of resources did nothing to prevent the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001. In the post cold war era, these
expenditures are just plain obscene. David Vine in a May 14 post ontomdispatch.com sheds some light on where much of this money
is going: "Set foot just about anywhere on this planet other
than China, Russia, and Iran, and you’re likely to find some kind
of U.S. base, installation, or shared facility, and some news that
goes with it, though you could pay endless attention to the U.S.
media and never know that." He estimates that we have about
1000 military bases overseas even with our occupation of Iraq ending
and the Afghanistan War drawing to a close. And where does much of
this money go? Vine writes: "I estimate that the Pentagon has
dispersed around $385 billion to private companies for work done
outside the U.S. since late 2001, mainly in that baseworld. That’s
nearly double the entire State Department budget over the same
period."
Climate Change's "Grim
Milestone"
Tim McDonnell and James West
post in May 10's Mother Jones: "Over the last couple
weeks, scientists and environmentalists have been keeping a
particularly close eye on the Hawaii-based monitoring station that
tracks how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, as the count
tiptoed closer to a record-smashing 400 parts per million (ppm).
Yesterday, we finally got there: The
daily mean concentration was higher than at any time in human
history, NOAA reported today." The 400 ppm is 50 ppm
over what NASA scientist James Hansen called, in 1988, "the safe
zone for avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. There is a
bit of good news in the US, although not enough to change the trend
of CO2 continuing buildup in our atmosphere. "Thanks to energy
efficiency gains, increased use of renewable power, and policies to
cut emissions from cars and power plants, carbon emissions in the US
have fallen 13 percent in the last seven years." Unfortunately,
I think that at least some of this decrease is due to the fact that
the US for a good portion of those seven years has been in the midst
of the biggest economic downturn since the Depression.
Guest "Op-Ed"
Since my college days,
Harper's has been one of my favorite magazines. When much of
US journalism was being bamboozled by neocons as to the legitimacy
of invading Iraq and when the corporate media were wetting their
collective pants about being "embedded" in the military
during this blatantly illegal, unnecessary, costly and tragic
exercise in American imperialism, Harper's consistently
opposed the invasion. Harper's April 2013 issue has a chapter of
John le Carré's
new novel, A Delicate
Truth, as well as an
Afterword by le Carré,
who broke onto the world's literary scene in 1963 at age 31 with the
publication of The Spy
Who Came in from the Cold. Here's
an excerpt from his Afterword. Le Carré
has just quoted Spy's
fictional chief of the British secret service's predictable answer to
the question: how far can we go in the rightful defense of Western
values without abandoning them along the way? (Something to the
effect that we can't be less ruthless than our enemy.) Le Carré
continues: "Today the same man, with better teeth and hair and a
much smarter suit, can be heard explaining away the catastrophic
illegal war in Iraq, or justifying medieval torture techniques as the
preferred means of interrogation in the twenty-first century, or
defending the inalienable right of closet psychopaths to bear
semiautomatic weapons, and the use of unmanned drones as a risk-free
method of assassinating one's perceived enemies and anybody who has
the bad luck to be standing next to them....What have I learned over
the last fifty years? Come to think of it, not much. Just that the
morals of the secret world are very like our own."
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