Remembering the Fallen

Today, the last Monday in May, is Memorial Day here in the United States. It's a day set aside to remember those Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice. As we remember them, we should also pause to remember the devastating toll that war has taken on all the peoples of the world - military and civilian alike.

The numbers are staggering. In what is described as an "incomplete" list of the approximately 3000 wars in recorded human history, a Wikipedia article puts the minimum figure for deaths due to war at more than 340 million. The totals for each war in the list "usually include both the deaths of military personnel which are the direct results of battle or other military wartime actions, as well as the wartime/ war-related deaths of civilians, which are the results of war induced epidemics, diseases, famines, atrocities etc."

Besides the deaths from war, tens of millions of civilians have become refugees - either fleeing to another country or "internally displaced". Currently, according to the World Refugee Day website,  there are 43.7 million of them.  Were they a country, refugees would rank about 30th in population amongst the nations of the world.
UPDATE: A report released in June 2014 by the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, shows that the number of refugees, asylum-seekers, and internally displaced people worldwide has, for the first time in the post-World War II era, exceeded 50 million people. [The Guardian, June 20]

Greed, hatred, nationalism, perceived wrongs, balance of power, economic systems, religious beliefs, quest for power, bloodlust - mankind has found many reasons to go to war. They are all wrong. They all basically stem from the perception of "the Other", someone you can dehumanize because he is different from you.

Will it ever change? One would hope so. John Kennedy once said "War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today."   Fifty years after Kennedy's death, that day remains distant. 

Still we got to start somewhere. So I'll close with a few quotes and a few songs that look to that brighter distant day when men will no longer take up arms against their brothers and sisters.  Here's a link to blues guitarist Lead Belly singing "Ain't Gonna Study War No More".   (Apropos of nothing in particular: George Harrison has been quoted as saying "No Lead Belly, no Beatles.")

Albert Camus: "There are causes worth dying for but none worth killing for."  

Here's a link to Original Caste's "One Tin Soldier". 

"Peace on Earth" was all it said.

 

Joan Baez: "If people have to put labels on me, I'd prefer the first label to be human being, the second label to be pacifist, and the third to be folk singer."  Here's a link to Joan Baez singing Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind".    (In spite of the actual title Dylan gave his song, Joan Baez pronounces the "g" at the end of Blowin'.) The linked video also has some great shots of the young Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.  Dylan just turned 72 this past Friday and does that ever make me feel old!  Happy Birthday, Bobby. 

How many deaths will it take 'til he knows

that too many people have died? 

  

Mahatma Gandhi: "What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?"



 

Finally, here's a link to Pete Seeger's rendition of "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream"

Last night I had the strangest dream I never dreamed before.

I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war.

Photos

Normandy Cemetery from American Battle Monuments Commission photo on britannica.com

Leadbelly from womex.com (adapted from Lead Belly Publicity Shot on Wikipedia Commons)

Albert Camus from wikispaces.com 

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan from Wikipedia Commons

Gandhi from myincrediblewebsite.com

Pete Seeger from The Guardian

Sunday Round-Up - May 26, 2013

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media. Today we look at Secretary Kerry's Israeli-Palestinian peace effort, the German press's dawning understanding that austerity "may not be working" in Europe, Pope Francis' comments on the world's poor, the NRA convention, Obama's counter-terrorism speech, and preparations for the Syrian peace talks. Sources: Haaretz, Der Spiegel, Pravda, Opera Mundi, Mother Jones, and Al Jazeera.

Kerry and the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talks

Haaretz reported Friday that US Secretary of State John Kerry, in the Middle East for the fourth time in two months had "considered holding another round of talks with two sides on Monday, but said now is not the right time....'Netanyahu and Abbas have to take a week or two to make some difficult
decisions that would allow peace talks to resume', Kerry said before his departure. He urged both sides to exhibit leadership in order for that to happen." Kerry made clear (again) the US position on the Israeli settlements on Palestinian land: "construction must end." A senior Israeli official was quoted as saying "we are prepared to launch direct negotiations with the Palestinians immediately."

 

 

 

 

[Map is from Wikimedia Commons.]

 

 

German Media on the Euro-recession

The German magazine Der Spiegel reported on the increasing number of German newspapers acknowledging that the austerity policies put in place by the European central banks and supported by Merkel's government "may not be working." Charles Hawley writing in the May 16 post of Spiegel Online points to France's "new membership in the recession club as just the latest indication that the current strategy may not be working." The German business daily Handelsblatt comments on the austerity measures: "That one slides into a recession at the beginning is part of the plan. But the fact that it is lasting so horrifically long leads one to suspect that Europe's path is making the Continent sicker rather than healthier." While the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung focusses on France's situation and asks "where are the ideas or the visions for how the EU can exist in our highly competitive world?", the left-leaning Die Tageszeitung notes that "alternative models for how to stimulate Europe's economy and fairly tax wealth exist only on paper and must be finalized."

 

The Pope, the Chancellor and European Youth

[Link to the Washington Post article on the rally at St. Peter's]

Pope Francis met with Angela Merkel, Germany's leader, recently selected again by Forbes magazine as the world's most powerful woman and "a leader largely identified by Europe’s economically suffering citizens as a champion of debt reduction, including painful austerity across much of the continent." The timing was exquisite. They met right after a 200,000 strong rally in St. Peter's square at which Pope Francis said “If investments, the banks plunge, this is a tragedy, if families are hurting, if they have nothing to eat, well, this is nothing, this is our crisis today.” Francis said his church “opposes this mentality” and pledged that it will be dedicated to “the poor people.” After the meeting, Merkel "joined the pope in expressing concern about the many victims of Europe’s economic crisis."  In a May 20 article Der Spiegel noted the particular hardships of the young people in Europe during the recession. With unemployment above 23%, the youth of Europe are in danger of becoming "a lost generation."  Unemployment is even worse in Spain (upper 50's%) and Greece (over 60%). Although almost nothing has been done either in the South or the North, the continually escalating unemployment numbers appear to have had an impact at last: "Suddenly Europe is scrambling to address the problem. Youth unemployment will top the agenda of a summit of European leaders in June. And Italy's new prime minister, Enrico Letta, is demanding that the fight against youth unemployment become an 'obsession' for the EU."

Guns, Kids, and the NRA

The United States' idolization of guns is covered in a May 15 Pravda article on the NRA's 142nd annual convention in Houston, Texas. Noting the attempt to appeal to young people, the article relates several cameos from the gun show at the convention, including this one: "Nearby, Sandy holds a small rifle. Pointing to the ceiling, concentrating. Closing one eye. Breathe. Shoot. Reload. The trebuchet is pink, small, looks like a toy. It has a plastic butt, but the metal pipe is black. Sandy smiles. At age four, she and her father, Eric, are choosing their first rifle. In a few months a birthday and, consequently, they will be able to bring the "gift" home....A rifle exactly like the one Sandy has caused a tragedy on April 30, in Cumberland County, State of Kentucky. A five year old boy shot his twin sister by accident, killing her. The gun had been given as a gift a year earlier." Frightening, huh? The article (translated from the Portuguese language "Opera Mundi" where it originally appeared) concludes: "The end of the first day of the convention in Houston is reached, participants are ready to sleep armed to the teeth. Like the rest of the U.S."

Obama's Counter-Terrorism Speech

David Corn in a May 23 post in MotherJones sees a glimmer of hope for civil liberties in President Obama's speech on counter-terrorism policies. Obama made the speech a day after the Administration admitted to the killing of four US citizens by drones. I'm not sure I see as much of a glimmer of hope as Corn does but at least it's better than what probably would have happened under a Republican administration. The President placed new restrictions on the use of drones and talked again about the necessity of closing Guantanamo. Corn admits that "Obama is not renouncing his administration's claim that it possesses the authority to kill an American overseas without full due process" and "not declaring an end to the dicey practice of indefinite detention or a conclusion to the fight against terrorism". But he concludes: "Obama, at the least, is showing that he does ponder these difficult issues in a deliberative manner and is still attempting to steer the nation into a post-9/11 period.." Two of the more positive highlights from the speech:

• The call for an end to "the post-9/11 authority to wage war Congress granted the president: 'I intend to engage Congress about the existing Authorization to Use Military Force, or AUMF, to determine how we can continue to fight terrorists without keeping America on a perpetual war-time footing."
• The unreasonableness of the Congressional restrictions on closing the Guantanamo prison: "These restrictions make no sense. After all, under President Bush, some 530 detainees were transferred from Gitmo with Congress’s support. When I ran for President the first time, John McCain supported closing Gitmo. No person has ever escaped from one of our super-max or military prisons in the United States. Our courts have convicted hundreds of people for terrorism-related offenses, including some who are more dangerous than most Gitmo detainees." Obama is appointing " a new, senior envoy at the State Department and Defense Department whose sole responsibility will be to achieve the transfer of detainees to third countries" and he is lifting the restrictions on detainee transfers to Yemen (86 of the 166 still imprisoned are from Yemen).

Syrian Peace Talks

More than 80,000 people have been killed in the Syrian conflict since the March 2011 uprising. 1.5 million have fled the country. On May 21, Al Jazeera reported that "Syria's opposition and government are preparing to take part in an internationally-sponsored peace conference, according to Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations-Arab League mediator....Meanwhile, Moaz al-Khtaib, the former president of the Syrian National Coalition, said the opposition is open to negotiating with the government of President Assad. At a meeting of Syrian opposition groups in Spain on Tuesday, Khtaib said the opposition forces have no objection to a political solution to the conflict."   Several days later (May 24), the NYT reported that a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman had stated that the "Syrian government has agreed to participate in an international peace conference coordinated by Russia and the United States."

 

Mars Or Bust (Continued)

This is the second of two posts on the colonization of Mars.

We can overcome the technological challenges of getting humans to Mars. We can select the right kinds of people for a colony. But how do we make the venture self-sustaining? The costs of getting a person to Mars are untold times greater than sending an expedition across the Atlantic ocean to set up a  Jamestown colony or settling the American frontier with homesteaders. Obtaining the resources for self-sufficiency will require much development and innovation. Unless we want to limit the colony to billionaires who can pay the cost of their own ticket, government support will be needed. Since no single nation is prepared to prioritize these costs for the foreseeable future, the most likely case would involve an international cooperative effort.

Complementing this international, government-supported effort would be investments from private entrepreneurs willing to invest their capital for some share in the eventual long-term benefits. The emphasis here is on long-term.  Benefits from near-Earth asteroid mining, the first potential source of income, will take decades to become profitable. Likewise, a Martian colony will take decades to become self-sufficient. Among the first, and, according to Buzz Aldrin (Mission to Mars), imperative steps for the latter is in situ resource utilization (ISRU). ISRU projects would include "extraction and long-term storage of oxygen and/or hydrogen from available Martian resources..., hydrated minerals on the surface, and digging into Mars to utilize subsurface ice....[New] ISRU can be tapped, such as methane, perchlorates, and sulfur." The vision is to reduce the need for resupply missions by extracting from the Martian environment "water, oxygen, silicon, metals for life support, rocket fuels, and...construction materials."

The same long-term time frame holds for the technological spinoffs that will inevitably result. Looking back at the earlier space program, we see a slew of these spinoffs. Kidney dialysis machines, CAT scanners, advances in water purification technology, engine and exhaust dampening insulation, MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) technology, vacuum metallizing techniques, cordless power tools and appliances, and surface enhancement coatings are just some of the 1400 documented NASA inventions from the space program - primarily from the Apollo Missions. What innovations might we expect from the Mars project? Perhaps there will be innovations on how to grow crops with minimal fresh water, materials science advancements coming from combatting the high levels of radiation, new techniques for mineral extraction, processes for weather control, or inventions that we cannot even imagine now. [Space.com webpage] 

Another benefit noted in Mission to Mars is that Mars, with a surface area equivalent to the land area of Earth, makes possible a "second home for humankind....Not only is the survival of the human race then assured, but the ability to reach from Mars into the resource-rich bounty of the Martian satellites and the nearby asteroids is also possible."

How long all of this will take is anybody's guess. Eric Anderson, in James Fallows' April Atlantic article, estimated that in 30 to 60 years we would see an "an irreversible human migration to a permanent space colony". In 100 years the colony would "grow from a few thousand to a few million".  Science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson laid out another scenario in his Mars trilogy. Red Mars, written in 1993, had the first human colonists arriving on Mars in 2026. Green Mars had a thriving, terraformed Mars complete with plants in the early 22nd century. Then 100 years after that, in Blue Mars,terraforming had advanced to the point where liquid water - in the form of rivers and seas - could exist on the Martian surface.  Ben Bova also has written on the colonization of the solar system - starting with Mars - in his "Grand Tour" novels (1992-2009).   In Bova's chronology, the international project to colonize Mars gets underway in 2020 - 28 years from the publication of Mars.

Hmm...I'm beginning to see a trend here. Every time someone guesses at a time frame for the start of a Mars project, it's about a generation away -28 years (Bova), 30 years (Anderson, lower estimate), and 33 years (Robinson). It kind of reminds me of my former life as an engineer. As chemical plants would be starting up for the first time or restarting after a maintenance downtime, a critical step would be the startup of the "process compressor". No matter when you walked into the control room and asked when the compressor would be starting up, the answer was always "in about 3 hours". The good news is that the compressor and the plant always did eventually start up. Hopefully the same will happen with Mars.

 

 

 

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."

Mars or Bust

 

Last week (May 6-8), George Washington University hosted the second annual "Humans2Mars" Summit.  Hundreds of scientists, astronauts, engineers and entrepreneurs gathered to discuss what it will take to get us to Mars. Manned space flight into the solar system has been dormant for decades - basically ever since the US beat the Soviets to the moon. Since then, no one seems to have had the energy, the imagination, or the resources to put together a program to get a human being beyond Earth orbit - not even to the moon.

The goal of the H2M conference was to address the major challenges that need to be overcome to send humans to Mars by 2030. Agenda topics included human and robotic precursor missions, science and engineering needed for the program, creating a viable space economy, agriculture and food production, biomedical challenges, international cooperation and other subjects. Among the many agenda topics were robotic and human precursor missions, launch systems, Mars transit challenges, space suit design, biomedical challenges, entry, descent and landing, in situ resource utilization, surface power, science goals, agriculture and food production, international cooperation, and creating a viable space economy. [Picture is from the NASA website. "This computer-generated view depicts part of Mars at the boundary between darkness and daylight, with an area including Gale Crater beginning to catch morning light."]

Well at least people are beginning to think about it. And it's not just limited to the H2M gang. The April issue of "The Atlantic Monthly" had an interview with Eric Anderson, the co-founder of Space Adventures and the head of two other companies including Planetary Resources, which plans to extract minerals from near-Earth asteroids. James Fallow's article was titled "Life on Mars". Anderson's vision is breath-taking: "In the next generation or two - say the next 30 to 60 years - there will be an irreversible human migration to a permanent space colony." He thinks the location of this permanent colony will be Mars and that it will grow within a hundred years from a few thousand people to a few million. Anderson considers economics to be the only real challenge - that technological and engineering solutions already are available. Mining the asteroids is the path he thinks will make the economics attractive.

Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, one of the featured speakers at H2M, has devised a master plan for missions to Mars – the “Aldrin Mars Cycler” – a spacecraft transportation system with perpetual cycling orbits between Earth and Mars. Aldrin explains the concept in his new book, Mission to Mars. The cycler would require a "substantially large vehicle that would provide radiation shielding and spacious quarters in order to guarantee the safety and comfort of outbound-to-Mars and inbound-to-Earth astronaut crews." The Aldrin Cycler would travel around the sun, making close flybys of Earth and Mars - a trajectory that is continuously repeated every two and a half years with astronauts boarding and disembarking the cycler via a "small but speedy space taxi". Taking advantage of Newton's Laws of Motion, the Cycler could shuttle continuously "without requiring a significant amount of propellant to keep on track." [Photo is of Buzz Aldrin on his moonwalk.  Buzz was the second man on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969.

Mission to Mars gives a comprehensive picture of the "Flexible Path architecture" for going to Mars. Flexible Path architecture combines a lunar strategy with near-Earth-asteroid-mining missions and uses the Martian moon Phobos as a way point to Mars. Aldrin suggests that "going to Mars means permanence on the planet. It cannot be run as a series of one-shot deals as were the moon landings - you know: fly there, plant a flag, take a picture and come home. Rather this will involve astronauts committing to "living out his or her life on the surface of Mars." As he points out: "Living far from Earth in a remote and confined will surely induce physiological and psychological stresses." Hmm, to say the least...it will also take a pioneering spirit beyond anything we have had on Earth during the Age of Exploration from the late fifteenth century on. Indeed the permanent residents of Mars will be homesteaders rather than explorers. In Aldrin's vision, they will employ in situ resource utilization to reduce the costs of resupply.

It's good that we dream these dreams. Without such, we will never move into the greater universe. But there is a practical side too - namely, the benefits Earth can derive from a permanent colony on Mars, which has, after all, a land mass equivalent to that of Earth.

(To be continued...)

 

Links

 

News article on H2M conference from space.com .

 

Humans2Mars Conference website

 

Space Adventures website: "the only company to have sent private citizens to space"

 

 

Sunday Round-Up - May 12, 2013

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media. Today we look at the still-open Guantanamo Bay prison, Secretary of State Kerry's Moscow visit and Syria, Italy's failure to form a progressive government after the February elections, and the Bangladesh factory collapse. Excerpts are from TomDispatch.com, The Guardian, The Asia Times, Pravda, and The Nation.

Guantanamo Bay Prison

One of the first things Barack Obama did when taking office in 2009 was to pledge the shutdown of the Guantanamo Bay prison. Guantanamo was being used as a facility for the indefinite detention of prisoners in the "war on terror". Well, four years later, prisoners are still being held in indefinite detention and a hunger strike is underway.   Hopefully Obama will make good on his latest pledge to finally close this, as Peter Van Buren calls it, "crown jewel of the offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice that the Bush administration set up in January 2002." Van Buren continues in his May 9 post on TomDispatch.com: "The fact that relatively few Americans seem fazed by this should be startling. No charges, no trials, but never getting out of prison: that would once have been associated with the practices of a totalitarian state....Guantanamo now holds 86 prisoners (out of the 166 caged there) who have been carefully vetted by the U.S. military, the FBI, the CIA, and so on, and found to have done nothing for which they could be charged or should be imprisoned." Most of these vetted prisoners are Yemeni and Obama has imposed a moratorium on transferring prisoners there.

 

 

Syria and Kerry's Visit to Moscow

Secretary of State John Kerry was in Moscow Tuesday, May 7, on a "working visit" trying to enlist Russian assistance in ending the Syrian civil war. The civil war has resulted in more than 70,000 deaths. The recent Israeli airstrikes in Syria and the Hezbollah and Syrian reaction to it have brought to the forefront the potential for the situation to spill over and destabilize the entire Middle East.  Stephen Lendman notes in a May 9 post in Pravda: "Russian condemnation of Israeli air strikes preceded Kerry's arrival. Moscow's Foreign Ministry called them 'a threat to regional stability.' ... Moscow wants Syrians to decide who'll lead them. Foreign intervention is rejected. It doesn't want another allied regional government toppled. Doing so leaves others more vulnerable. It gives Washington greater control. It harms Russia's strategic interests." The Asia Times continued the theme of the strange run-up to Kerry's Moscow visit. Besides noting Moscow's angry reaction to the Israeli airstrikes, M K Bhadrakumar writes "the US senate's foreign relations committee took up a draft bill proposing American military help for the Syrian rebel fighters. It was no doubt a barely-disguised pressure tactic threatening Moscow that unless it compromised on Syria, Obama would arm the anti-regime fighters." In the end, Kerry and Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, "pledged [their countries] to convene an international conference aimed at ending the civil war in Syria, hoping to give the situation a new diplomatic push following two years of bloodshed...Kerry said at the midnight press conference that the conference would be held 'as soon as practical, possibly, hopefully as soon as the end of the month'. " [The Guardian]  Then in a Friday editorial, The Guardian endorses the persuasive arguments of the European Council on Foreign Relations for de-escalation and a diplomatic solution. "It means pressuring the Gulf states to starve rival militias of arms. Without that happening, there is no political solution....For Russia and Iran to cut their military support, Assad's fate has to be a product of the transition, not a precondition of it." As events of the past couple of weeks show, a "war that has already killed 70,000 Syrians, displaced 4 million and forced 1 million to flee could get a lot worse. That is why it is right for Barack Obama to resist pressure from Britain and France to arm the rebels, and to instead make another attempt at an internationally brokered settlement with the Russians."

 

 

Italy's New Not-So-Progressive Government

 

Italy's new government of center-left and center-right coalitions was formed two months after the elections after Beppe Grillo refused to take his Five Star Movement party into any coalition.   Frederika Randall writing in The Nation examines Italy's failure to form a progressive government. She writes: "There was one sunny week this spring when it looked like change might finally come to Italy. A week when an ossified and gerontocratic political class looked like it might give way to new faces and new ideas. When the combined forces of youth and progress looked strong enough to defy European austerity." Unfortunately, "hopes for a progressive government failed, thanks to suicidal divisions among the center-left and Beppe Grillo’s demagogic posturing."

 

Bangladesh Garment Factory Tragedy

Finally on May 8, The Guardian carried a sad update on the factory collapse in Bangladesh. The death toll had risen above 800.   "The disaster is the worst ever in the garment sector, far surpassing fires last year that killed about 260 people in Pakistan and 112 in Bangladesh, as well as the 1911 garment disaster in New York's Triangle Shirtwaist factory that killed 146 workers." As to the possible cause of the collapse, officials "say the building's owner illegally added three floors and allowed the garment factories to install heavy machines and generators, even though the structure was not designed to support such equipment." (By Friday, the death toll had soared over 1,000.  That day, there was a miraculous rescue of a seamstress who had been trapped in the rubble for 17 days. [Washington Post/AP])

Sunday Round-Up May 5, 2013

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media. Today we look at views and news on income inequality, bees and pesticides, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and the Israeli campaign to get the United States to bomb Syria.  Special thanks to Le Monde Diplomatique, Mother Jones, The Guardian, and Haaretz.

In a May 1 article in Le Monde Diplomatique, Serge Halimi writes of the growing worldwide social and economic inequality.  He quotes Francis Fukyama: “Inequality per se has never been a big problem in American political culture, which emphasises equality of opportunity rather than of outcomes...But the system remains legitimate only as long as people believe that by working hard and doing their best, they and their children have a fair shot at getting ahead, and that the wealthy got there playing by the rules”. Halimi's analysis of the current economic situation (for example: "The 63,000 people — 18,000 in Asia, 17,000 in the US and 14,000 in Europe — who have a fortune of over $100m collectively own $39,900bn.") leads him to conclude that "All over the world this age-old faith, whose effect can be calming or anaesthetising, is evaporating." And the impact on democracy is telling.  In the US, Congress often does not enact laws that the majority want because of the influence of and pressure from well-funded lobbyists. "We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” ( Louis Brandeis, US Supreme Court Justice from 1916 to 1939)

In MotherJones, Tom Philpott reports on the European Commission's April 29 vote "to place a two-year moratorium on most uses of neonicotinoid pesticides, which are a widely used class of chemicals suspected of contributing to a severe global decline in honeybee health...In the wake of Europe's decisive action, the US Environmental Protection Agency dithered."

 

 

In Friday's Guardian, Ian Black reports on the attempt by a group of European leaders to break the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Elements of the appeal include recognizing the following: The Madrid and Oslo agreements "are moribund. Solutions based on the West Bank but excluding the Gaza Strip while perpetuating the split between the PLO and Hamas, will not work. The EU...must have a more equal role alongside the US. The Palestinian territories are under occupation. A 'peace process' that maintains and finances the status quo must end." One of the signatories Sir Jeremy Greenstock notes, "Whatever his rhetoric Barack Obama has not done anything significantly different from George Bush on this issue. We wanted to say with emphasis: 'It's time for a fresh start.' "

With Saturday's news that Israel launched an airstrike into Syria [see article in Huffington Post], this item from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz appears timely. Gideon Levy warns that Israel's "fear campaign calling upon Obama to bomb Syria has one real goal in mind. It's not helping Syria's civilians. It's a strike on Iran." Let's hope Obama is smart enough to ignore the Israeli advice and not get tricked into another war in the Middle East.

May Day

International Workers' Day was celebrated May 1. It's a bank or national holiday in much of the world. - although not in the US or Canada where the contributions of workers are celebrated in September.

Across Europe and even here at home, May Day protests were held against austerity programs that aim to reduce deficits in a time of recession by cutting benefits for the less well off and decreasing government jobs. CNN's website has a series of photos and videos of the European protests.  NBC News has coverage of the Seattle and Los Angeles demonstration.

So where do the workers of the world and of the US stand 123 years after the first May Day was observed?

On the plus side:

• The eight-hour workday is fairly universal in the industrialized West. This was what workers in the late 19th century were struggling for: eight hours work, eight hours sleep, eight hours recreation.

• Discrimination against women and minorities in the workplace is ending. Here at home, we had to pass the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009 to reverse a 2007 ruling by the conservative US Supreme Court that placed new time limits on when discriminatory pay complaints could be filed.

• In the US, the only Western industrialized nation without a single payer health care system, businesses over a certain size must now (starting in 2014) provide a health care plan for their full-time employees thanks to the Affordable Care Act. SCOTUS has already ruled on its constitutionality but Republicans continue to mount attacks against the act. We are not out of the woods yet on this one. Congressional legislators can affect the funding and Republican-controlled state legislatures can hamper implementation.

On the negative side:

- It still can be dangerous to be a worker.

• A recent explosion at a Texas fertilizer plant killed 15. Apparently the various agencies responsible for monitoring the safety of the plant (the agencies whose regulations Republicans abhor and try to defund) as well as the plant management failed to recognize the danger of storing large quantities of ammonium nitrate.

 

• A building collapse in Bangladesh killed more than 500 garment workers. [Huffington Post] These deaths occurred a day after a five-story crack opened in the building. The workers had been threatened with a loss of pay if they did not go to work the day of the collapse. If companies want to reap the benefits of globalization, they need to act morally. That is, they (or at the very least our government) should demand the same safety and health standards be applied in developing countries as in our own.   Saying that you contract out your work does not relieve you of the responsibility for the safety of the workers nor does it relieve you of the obligation to ensure that safety audits of contracted facilities are conducted competently.

- The global recession continues unabated throughout most of the world.

• Unemployment in the Eurozone (the 17 countries using the Euro) reached an overall record high of 12.1% in March. Greece and Spain are much worse than the average - at about 27% unemployment in each. Youth (15-24 years old) unemployment is staggering with Greece and Spain again the worst off (56% in Spain and 59% in Greece).
• The austerity nonsense (read this as "deficit reduction in the midst of a recession") that is in vogue in Europe and the US has clearly been unable to help countries recover economically. In Great Britain, which is not in the Eurozone, unemployment in February rose to 7.9%. In mid-April, after cutting its forecast for UK economic growth, even the IMF is asking Prime Minister David Cameron's governing coalition to "consider easing up on its austerity drive amid a weak economic recovery." As the WSJ reports: "The U.K. economy has barely grown since Mr. Cameron took office and is at risk of shrinking for the second consecutive quarter in the first three months of 2013, which would push it into its third recession in five years."
• Here at home, official unemployment stands at 7.5%, down slightly from March's 7.6%. 165,000 new jobs were created in April - which is about what is needed to absorb the new workers entering the US labor force each month.
• Some common sense is prevailing - in, of all places, Italy. Italy's new Prime Minister Letta has said growth policies must be urgently adopted to counter an austerity drive under which the country was "dying". "Italy is dying from austerity alone," he said. "Growth policies cannot wait."
• Unfortunately, no such common sense seems to exist in the US where economic ideologues, the so-called "deficit hawks" are driving the discussion towards the same measures that have failed to work in Europe. How Obama can be taken in by these right wing arguments is beyond my comprehension. Trying to reach a "Grand Bargain" with the proponents of the economic philosophy that drove us into this ditch and that has prevented us from emerging from it (supply side economics (aka trickle down); deregulation) - with the opponents still geared to denying him victories even as a lame duck president - is ludicrous. (See Senator Toomey's comments on the failure of gun legislation.) The shadows of Reagan and Thatcher continue to cast their palls on recovery in the US and UK. 

- Income inequality is growing - particularly in the United States.

 

 

 

• The gap between the very wealthy and the rest of us in this country continues to grow. It is no coincidence that this gap has grown as the influence of unions and union membership have declined.  In the graph above (taken from the Center on Budget and Policy Prioities website), the influence of Reaganomics and the policies promoted by the Chicago School can be clearly seen.  Until about 1980, all income levels were sharing in the growing prosperity.  Afterwards the slope of the curve for the wealthiest begins to deviate significantly from the slope of the curves for the rest of us.  Trickle down?  I don't think so.

• Per the Global Post webpage on the income gap and the Gini methodolgy used by social scientists to measure inequality: "Income inequality is surging, and there are few countries where it is rising faster than the United States. The distance between rich and poor is greater in America than nearly all other developed countries, making the US a leader in a trend that economists warn has dire consequences."   In the Gini methodology, 0 represents perfect equality and 1 represents a state where everything is owned by one person.  Among the member nations of the OECD, only Mexico and Chile have greater inequality than exists in the US.

 

Other Stuff

May Day

International Worker's Day is celebrated on May 1. It is a national holiday in more than 80 countries and celebrated unofficially in many others. It originally started as a commemoration of the Haymarket Affair, which began as a peaceful rally in Chicago in 1886 in support of workers striking for an eight-hour day. An unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at police as they acted to disperse the public meeting. The bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians; scores of others were wounded. [Wikipedia]

 

 

 

Union Membership

In January, the NYTimes reported that the percentage of unionized US workers had dropped to its lowest level in 97 years.  In spite of a gain of 2.4 million jobs in 2012, union membership dropped by 400,000.  The percentage of unionized workers is down from 32-35% in the post WWII years.  It bears repeating: the exponentially widening income gap in the United States is partly due to the weakening of unions in this country.  The other part of the equation is the shifting of manufacturing jobs overseas.  Manufacturing jobs are being replaced by less-well-paid jobs in the services industries. 

So I guess I'll close with Paul Robeson's fantastic rendition of the worker's song Joe Hill.  And a hope for a rebirth in the validity of the American Dream for our upcoming generations.