Saturday, May 18, 2013

Sunday Round-Up - May 19, 2013


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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