Sunday Roundup - June 29, 2014

This is the second of four special editions of the Sunday Roundup.  Today we begin a look at the historical roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  This first part covers the period from World War I through the Lausanne Conference of 1949.

For hundreds of years prior to World War I, Palestine was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. The late 19th and early 20th century saw the beginning of Arab nationalist and Zionist (i.e., Jewish nationalist) movements. Both groups were trying to create homelands for their peoples in the region. At the outbreak of WWI, the population of what would later become British-ruled Mandatory Palestine was about 800,000, 92% of whom were Arabs.

World War I - 1915-1918 - Conflicting and Broken Promises

July 1915-January 1916 - McMahon–Hussein Correspondence declared that the Arabs would revolt in alliance with the United Kingdom against the Ottoman Empire. In return the UK would recognize Arab independence in Palestine.

May 1916 - Sykes–Picot Agreement, a secret agreement between the UK and France, defining proposed spheres of influence and control in the Middle East should Ottoman Empire be defeated.

June 1917 to Sep 1918 (Battle of Megiddo) - Arab uprising and British campaign led by General Edmund Allenby, the British Empire's commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, drove the Turks out of the Levant, thereby fulfilling the conditions of the McMahon-Hussein correspondence.

November 1917 - the Balfour Declaration, a memorandum from the Paris Peace Conference in which the other Allies implicitly rejected the Sykes–Picot agreement by adopting a system of mandates for the region wrested from the Ottoman Empire. Balfour also stated that the Allies were committed to Zionism and had no intention of honoring their promises to the Arabs.

The Franco-Syrian War and the British Mandate

July, 1920 - Arab Kingdom of Syria is dissolved following the Franco-Syrian War. Palestinian Arab nationalists return from Damascus to Mandatory Palestine to continue the Arab nationalist struggle for a homeland. Amin al-Husseini, an architect of the Palestinian Arab national movement, declared the Jewish national movement an enemy to his cause.

1922 - British were formally awarded the mandate to govern Palestine.

1920, 1929 and 1936 - Palestinian uprisings

The Aftermath of World War II

1947 - In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the end of World War II, Great Britain announces its intention to end the Mandate for Palestine.

Nov 29, 1947 - UN General Assembly approves Resolution 181, which recommends the creation of independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem. The recommendations for partition were rejected by Arab representatives but accepted for the most part by Jewish representatives to the talks. Arab rejection was based to a considerable on the ceding to Israel of 55% of Mandate Palestine when the Jewish population was 32% of the total.  Fighting breaks out between Arab and Jewish militias.

April 9, 1948 - Zionist extremists massacre 107 Palestinian villagers in Deir Yassin. News of the killings sparked terror within the Palestinian community, encouraging them to flee from their towns and villages in the face of Jewish troop advances, and it strengthened the resolve of Arab governments to intervene.

Spring 1948 - Jewish forces continued to advance and take Palestinian territory, creating a large scale refugee problem of Palestinian Arabs (the Palestinian Exodus). Between 700,000 and 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were forced to leave their homes. Palestinian villages were destroyed and abandoned Palestinian homes were taken by Jewish immigrants.

May 14, 1948 - Israel declares its independence. The ongoing civil war transformed into an inter-state conflict between Israel and the Arab states, becoming the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

September 17, 1948 - The UN mediator for the conflict, Folke Bernadotte, is assassinated by Zionist extremists. Bernadotte had proposed a two-state solution for the region, with boundaries drawn by the UN if the combatants could not agree, and the refugees' right of return.

December 11, 1948 - UN adopts Resolution 194 on the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

January - July 1949 - Armistice agreements are signed between Israel and Arab countries, ending the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. As a result of the war, the State of Israel retained the area that the UN General Assembly Resolution 181 had recommended for the proposed Jewish state and also took control of almost 60% of the area allocated for the proposed Arab state. No Arab Palestinian state was established.

April-September 1949 - Lausanne Conference. Israel rejects UN resolutions 181 (the original partition of 1947) and 194 (which called for the right of return for Palestinian refugees). Israel stated that its admission to UN membership, after it had set forth Israel's views regarding the Resolutions, meant that the UN considered them satisfactory; a contention the US Government rejected.

The Evolution of Palestine and Israel 1922 - 1949 (maps adapted from Wikipedia)

Mandatory Palestine           Jewish settlements            UN Resolution 181             1949 Actual 
         1922                         shown in blue -1947          proposed a Palestinian        After the war  
                                         Jewish population had       Arab state (green), a            Israel (white)
                                         increased from                 Jewish state (white),             Gaza Strip -
                                         83,790 in 1922 to             and an internationally-          occupied by
                                         608,000 in 1946;              administered Jerusalem        Egypt; West
                                         from 10.3% to 32%          (1948)                                Bank by Jordan


The 1949 armistice lines defining Israel's boundaries held until the Six-Day War in 1967.

The second part of this discussion will be posted July 6 and will cover the period from 1950 to the Camp David 2000 Summit Conference.

References
Wikipedia articles on the topics related to Israeli-Palestinian conflict are the major source for these posts. The articles on Palestine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were particularly useful.

Sunday Roundup - June 22, 2014

This is the first of four special editions of the Sunday Roundup.  Today we look back at the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the recent passing of  Maya Angelou.

A Couple of Maya Angelou Quotes 

================================

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, 

but people will never forget how you made them feel."

“When you learn, teach, when you get, give.”

==================================

Fifty years ago, on June 21, 2014, three civil rights activists - Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney - disappeared. The three had been working on the "Freedom Summer" campaign, attempting to register African Americans to vote in the South.  They left to investigate a church burning near Philadelphia, Mississippi and were never heard from again.  They were shot at close range by a lynch mob that included members of the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Neshoba County's Sheriff Office and the Philadelphia Mississippi Police Department.  Mississippi officials refused to bring murder charges against the perpetrators, who were eventually tried on Federal charges of conspiracy and "deprivation of rights under color of law." Seven men were convicted.  None served a sentence of more than 6 years.  Nationwide outrage over the killings assisted in Congress' passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Spurred by student sit-ins in restaurants, a black woman's refusal to move to the rear of the bus, peaceful marches led by charismatic clergymen, and the courageous actions of civil rights activists, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 put to an end ninety years of the infamous "Jim Crow" laws - the de jure segregation laws enacted in the states of the former Confederacy since the end of the Reconstruction in 1876.

The Civil Rights Act didn't end the racism that festers like a cancer in the American body politic, but it did put the force of Federal law on the side of people heretofore powerless in the face of white supremacists and of states determined to keep them in their place.

The Civil Rights Act didn't restore the right to vote to blacks in the South. (Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven states of the Confederacy had enacted laws that effectively disenfranchised African-Americans. ) The country had to wait another year for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (yes, that Voting Rights Act, the one purchased with the blood and beatings of civil rights activists...the one gutted last year by the Roberts' Supreme Court). But the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a step along the way.

The Civil Rights Act's greatest success was in the domain of public accommodations. The June issue of Harper's has a thoughtful article by Randall Kennedy, whose parents fled the Jim Crow South in the 1950's and who now teaches law at Harvard. He describes the tense holiday journeys from their home in D.C. to Columbia, South Carolina, where he was born. The elaborate preparations for the journey were thought by the Kennedy children as  an effort to make the eight-hour ride into a party...As I matured, I saw that once we crossed the Potomac and ventured into Virginia, we encountered a terrain that filled my parents with dread....The drive took us into territory that featured signs distinguishing "colored women" from "white ladies", signs indicating whether a business served blacks, signs designating which toilets or water fountains or entrances African Americans were permitted to use.

Kennedy writes of the fierce debates, the student sit-ins, the courageous actions, the heinous responses, and the political will that finally ended Jim Crow. The proponents had to overcome the longest filibuster in Senate history and counter arguments that will seem familiar to those listening to today's policy debates: Opponents of the Civil Rights Act warned that its implementation would further empower an already tyrannical federal government...Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett charged...that the bill was part of a communist conspiracy....Alabama governor George Wallace... [denounced] the bill as "a long step in a socialistic scheme...[to destroy] private property rights."

The struggle for racial equality in public accommodations has been more successful than on other fronts - education, housing, employment. Why is that so? For one thing, the provisions of the Civil Rights Act that address public accommodations attack a more easily provable target and one which was largely confined to the South. Also, in Kennedy's words, the desegregation of public accommodations did not require from white people [anything] more than psychic sacrifices...[and] gave many white business people cover to do what market forces would have nudged them to do anyway.

For these reasons, the Civil Rights Act is sometimes downplayed as mainly symbolic. But that misses the point. The law made a real difference in the daily lives of African-Americans, destroying de jure segregation and diminishing the blatant racism to which they were subjected. Kennedy concludes that symbolism can be of transcendent importance and that the Civil Rights Act was ultimately about historically oppressed racial groups being given equal respect. It was about the symbolism of inclusion.

Maya Angelou grew up before the Civil Rights Act.  She passed away May 28 at the age of 86.  The New York Times called her 1969 autobiographical  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings "a lyrical, unsparing account of her childhood in the Jim Crow South."  She was fortunate - she rose above the demeaning treatment inherent in the de jure segregation of that time.  She became a great writer who enjoyed critical acclaim and was hosted by Presidents.

Unfortunately, even those no longer subjected to the overt racism of their youth and middle years are in danger of losing one of their most basic democratic rights - a  right purchased with the blood and lives of civil rights activists like Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner.  I'm speaking, of course, of the nationwide voter suppression campaign by the Republican Party.  MSNBC and Empower Alabama tell the story of the disenfranchisement of a 93 year-old African-American in the June 3 Alabama primary elections.  Willie Mims, 93, showed up to vote at his polling place in Escambia County...for Alabama’s primary elections. Mims, who is African-American, no longer drives, doesn’t have a license, and has no other form of ID. As a result, he was turned away without voting. Mims wasn’t even offered the chance to cast a provisional ballot, as the law requires in that situation. Mims’s voter file showed he has voted in every election since 2000, as far back as the records go.  Welcome to the poll tax-2014 style.

"The caged bird sings 

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom."

—From Maya Angelou's poem "Caged Bird"

Links

Here is a beautiful rendition of the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome" performed at Pete Seeger's 90th Birthday Celebration in Madison Square Garden.

Sunday Roundup - June 15, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media. Today we look at Syria, pro-gun antics, the State Senator sellout and the Tea Party victory in Virginia, and Iraq.

Syria
According to the UN, more than 160,000 people have been killed in Syria's civil war.  Nearly three million refugees have sought sanctuary abroad and six million people have been displaced inside the country.  Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was re-elected to his third seven-year term on June 3 in an election held in government controlled areas.  On June 9, Assad announced a wide-ranging amnesty.  As reported by the Reuters news agency: In a decree published by state media, Assad commuted some death sentences to life imprisonment, reduced jail terms for many offences and canceled some others altogether.  Foreigners who entered the country "to join a terrorist group or perpetrate a terrorist act" would receive an amnesty if they surrender to authorities within a month, the decree said. Kidnappers who free their hostages and army deserters would also be covered.   On June 10, Reuters reported on the  internecine fighting among Assad's mainly Sunni Muslim opponents.  A six-week offensive by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) against rival Islamists in eastern Syria has killed 600 fighters and driven 130,000 people from their homes...The group follows al Qaeda's jihadist ideology but its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has defied orders by al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri to stop fighting in Syria and focus on Iraq. The UK-based Observatory said 241 fighters from ISIL and 354 from Nusra and other Islamic brigades had been killed in fighting since ISIL launched its offensive in Syria's Deir al-Zor province, seizing four oilfields from its rivals. Civilian deaths are estimated at 39.

Gun Violence
Mass shootings continue in the US with no Congressional action to even establish standards for universal background checks anywhere in sight.  Among other shootings in the past several weeks, a couple allegedly at the Cliven Bundy ranch shot to death two Las Vegas police officers and a bystander.  In a June 10 post, The Daily Kos analyzes the disappearance of the Tea Party terrorist story from Fox News reports after just one day.  Ordinarily, Fox, or any news operation, would grasp dearly to a story that had the emotional punch of police officers murdered in an ambush. It has the drama of a horrific crime and the sympathy reserved for a community's fallen heroes. For Fox to forgo all of that makes it clear that they are afraid of their own audience. They are not going to risk upsetting them with a story that indicts their most closely held principles. And Fox is surely not going to indulge in a story that contradicts everything they have stood for over the last seventeen years.

Meanwhile just when you thought the anti-gun-control fanatics couldn't get any nuttier, we are treated to the spectacle of packs of Open Carry Texas members carrying their rifles into commercial establishments and hounding gun control advocates, the NRA criticizing OCT actions and then retracting its criticism, "Joe the Plumber" insisting to parents of children killed at UC-Santa Barbara that the deaths of innocent people "don't trump" his constitutional rights, and a loaded gun being found in the toy aisle of a Target in South Carolina. Perhaps some of these pro-gun activists are afraid of universal background checks because they act so bat-shit crazy that, in any civilized society, they would be deemed unsuited to carry weapons.  President Obama asked for us as a nation to do some soul-searching and that may be all that happens for the foreseeable future on a Federal level.  With NRA money backing so many in Congress and with Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, don't expect too much by way of courageous action to stop the American gun slaughter.  

Virginia Doings
Referring to what appears to have been the bribery of a Democratic state senator by Virginia Republicans, Zoe Carpenter writing in The Nation wonders "What won't the GOP do to keep the poor uninsured?" Phillip Puckett, who served as a Democratic state senator for one of Virginia's poorest districts, resigned suddenly on Monday. His decision to step down appears to have been the result of a bribe offered by Republican colleagues bent on stopping the expansion of Medicaid. Puckett’s resignation gave Republicans the one seat they needed to take control of the Senate; it also put him in the running for a paid post on a state tobacco commission that is controlled by some of the very same Republicans. And it cleared the way for the chamber to appoint his daughter to a state judgeship. Turns out Puckett, in view of the uproar, may not be taking the post at the state tobacco commission.  But the damage was done.  By stepping down, Puckett effectively ended a months-long battle over the fate of the 400,000 Virginians who are too poor to buy insurance but don’t meet the state’s restrictive eligibility requirements for Medicaid. The state Senate had been on course to vote to expand the program under the Affordable Care Act, setting up a budget showdown with the Republican-controlled House. But with the GOP now in control of the Senate, both chambers are expected to pass a spending plan on Thursday that does not include the expansion.  Virginia is not the only state where Republicans have gone to insane lengths to keep millions uninsured, or to justify doing so.  Carpenter cites Missouri, Louisiana, Utah and Arkansas as examples of these Republican efforts.

In other Virginia political news, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was deemed too moderate (wow, Cantor pressured Boehner from the right!) for the likes of his constituents.  David Brat, an obscure right-wing professor of economics, supported by the Tea Party but outspent 25 to 1 by Cantor, defeated Cantor by 11 percentage points.  How did this happen? New York Magazine assessed it this way:  Brat ... benefited from the constant undercurrent of discontent emanating from the base that House Republicans had accommodated President Obama by failing to force him to accept their agenda — the still-extant pangs of anger that drove the party to shut down the government last fall.  But the biggest issue by far was immigration reform. Cantor was no reformer, really. He rejected the bipartisan immigration reform deal ...but he did hope to salvage some partial compromise, perhaps allowing some illegal immigrants who had been brought over the border as children.... Brat rejected even that. Any token of conciliation was too much. He still uses the old lingo, calling undocumented immigrants “illegals.” The chortling on the Democratic side has begun.  They are glad that Cantor has been defeated.  I wonder what they can possibly be thinking.  He was replaced on the 2014 Republican ticket in a secure Republican district by someone even further to the right than he is. Albeit this was one of the few Tea Party victories against the Republican establishment candidates in this primary season.

Map is from uniraq.org

Iraq

Iraq is facing its gravest test since the US-led invasion more than a decade ago, after its army capitulated to Islamist insurgents who have seized four cities and pillaged military bases and banks, in a lightning campaign which seems poised to fuel a cross-border insurgency endangering the entire region.  [The Guardian, June 11]  Al-Qaeda-linked extremists seized control of Nineveh province and Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city.  It puts terrorists in control of an enormous part of Iraq’s north and west.   As Bob Dreyfuss in a June 10 article in The Nation so correctly puts it: The crisis now engulfing Iraq provides the ultimate condemnation of the decision by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their cohorts—backed, of course, by Hillary Clinton and John Kerry—to invade Iraq in 2003. That action, which destroyed virtually all of Iraq’s institutions and created a power vacuum that led directly to an ethnic and sectarian civil war, is now playing out all of its terrible consequences.  The ongoing sectarian violence has taken a staggering toll in Iraq - with more than 8,000 killed in 2013 and monthly totals that suggest an even higher number of deaths this year; in May, 799 Iraqis died as the result of suicide bombings, car bombs, targeted assassinations, tit-for-tat killings and other civil war–like violence, according to the United Nations—and that data doesn’t even include Anbar province. 

Mother Jones, June 13 post: "What the Hell is Happening in Iraq Right Now?"

Sunday Roundup - June 8, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media. Today we look at Egypt, the Afghan prisoner swap, US income inequality, and the Palestinian unity government.

Egypt
Tom Englehardt, introducing Dilip Hiro's article "Behind the Coup in Egypt", calls Obama's speech to the 2014 West Point graduates "a bookend" to the disastrous policies underway when George Bush addressed the graduates of 2002.  As President Obama pointed out to the class of 2014, some of those “terror cells in 60 or more countries” [referred to by Bush] have by now become full-scale terror outfits and, helped immeasurably by the actions the Bush Doctrine dictated, are thriving.  In Afghanistan, a long-revived Taliban can’t be defeated, while neighboring Pakistan, with its own Taliban movement, has been significantly destabilized.  Amid the ongoing drone wars of two administrations, Yemen is being al-Qaedicized; the former president’s invasion of Iraq set off a devastating, still expanding Sunni-Shiite civil war across the Middle East, which is also becoming a blowback machine for terrorism, and which has thrown the whole region into chaos; Libya...is now a basket case; across much of Africa, terror groups are spreading, as is destabilization continent-wide.  "Behind the Coup in Egypt" details how Egypt's military and intelligence services orchestrated the protest movement against popularly elected President Muhammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood [and how]...Obama administration officials failed to grasp that the generals, in conjunction with Interior Minister Muhammad Ibrahim, were the prime movers behind the Tamarod (Arabic for “rebellion”) campaign launched on April 22, 2013. Hiro describes the increasing restrictions on Egyptian democracy, the phony trials for Morsi supporters, the relentless anti-Brotherhood campaign, the judge who set "the world's mass death-penalty record", the rewritten Egyptian constitution, and the eventual victory of one of the military leaders (Abdel Fattah el-Sisi) in a May 26 election that had only one opposition candidate and was marred by poor turnout.  Egypt is one of Washington's strongest allies in the region and the story is indicative of how from Kabul to Bonn, Baghdad to Rio de Janeiro so many ruling elites no longer feel that listening to Washington is a must. [TomDispatch.com, June 5]

Michele Dunne Carnegie Endowment for International Peace proposes "A U.S. Strategy towards Egypt under Sisi", June 5   Egypt is at a perilous juncture in a decades-long journey of change. Washington should focus on supporting the Egyptian people more than whoever is currently in power.

Afghan Prisoner Swap
In a June 4 post at Informed Comment, Juan Cole wonders if the "prisoner swap hysteria is a sign of GOP war withdrawal symptoms."  With the imminent end of war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the five former officials of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, held at Guantanamo as prisoners of war, would have to be released according to the Geneva Conventions.  Wars fulfill multiple functions for the US elite. They justify vast expenditures that benefit the political clients of the president. They throw tax-payer money to a small group of arms manufacturers. They can revive faded fortunes.  In the last decade the Republican Party...became the war party.   The problem for the happy warriors among the conservatives is that they can’t stop Obama from winding down America’s decade of war. They continually carp that Obama should have kept troops in Iraq past 2011...They are further unhappy that Obama has announced that as of January, 2017, there will be no US troops in Afghanistan. For the first time in over a decade and a half, the US will not be at war...The Republican Party, with the exception of its Libertarian wing, has become so wedded to perpetual war that it has been thrown into a fit of hysteria by this release of former Afghan officials. The hysteria has even led to the ridiculing of Bergdahl’s father for having a beard, which [at least one news] anchor likened to Taliban beards. Categorizing American critics of a war as the enemy is the most wretched sort of demagoguery...The GOP has to get over it. We won’t be at war much longer. And if their platform is again in 2016, as it was in 2012, that the US should have retained a division each in Iraq and Afghanistan and should intervene militarily in Syria and other conflicts as well, I think they will find that the public is just as unenthusiastic about that platform two and a half years from now as it was a year and a half ago.

The Nation, referring to a 1973 article in its magazine, discusses "the outpouring of truly vicious commentary about the return of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl from five years in Taliban imprisonment."  The 1973 article notes that, for the Vietnam War, To acknowledge the political motivations of many of the deserters—disbelief in the cause, disgust at fellow Americans’ behavior, moral objections to war generally—would be to undermine the foundations of the American project in Southeast Asia. It would, the Nation essayist concludes, “require an admission that massive numbers of ordinary, enlisted GIs rejected the war.”  That fear lies behind the attacks against Bowe Bergdahl.  Bergdahl, if the accounts are correct, served on the front lines of the American imperial machine with the unenviable misfortune of doing so with eyes wide open. The obvious psychological duress evident in e-mails Bergdahl sent to his parents just before his July 2009 disappearance was the consequence of seeing reality all too clearly. Those who stop just short—often not even that—of calling for his execution betray in their almost uncontrollable vituperation a refusal to acknowledge the reality of this most recent American adventure in Asia, just as the Nixon administration stubbornly clung to the war in Vietnam.

As right-wing operatives and media mouthpieces gang up to demonize the last US POW of these tragic and misguided wars, here's a link to a Daily Kos article "The GOP is heading for a world of hurt on Bergdahl, here's why" - interesting reading to say the least and probably the best antidote I've seen to the venom spewing from the right. Reviewing the Universal Code of Military Justice, the author concludes that, given the documented facts in the situation, it is impossible to prove desertion.  At worst, [Bergdahl] can be charged under Article 86: Absence Without Leave. That is a far less serious charge, and "time served" as a POW of the Haqqani network would probably be deemed sufficient punishment. Which, incidentally, would also considered an extenuating circumstance under that article.  

US Wealth Inequality

OWS poster - various websites

Referencing the master economic work and (unlikely as it is) best seller by French economist Thomas Piketty, Capitalism in the Twenty First Century , Peter van Buren in his TomDispatch post of June 3 asks and answers nine questions on unemployment and inequality.  3.5 million people in the US are considered "the long-term unemployed," whose benefits were cut off at the end of last year by the Republican-held House.  The striking trend lines of social and economic disparity that have developed over the last 50 years are clearly no accident; nor have disemboweled unions, a deindustrialized America, wages heading for the basement (with profits still on the rise), and the widest gap between rich and poor since the slavery era been the work of the invisible hand.  Here is a sampling from van Buren's article:

• On wealth inequality: At the same time as wealth is accumulating for the 1%, wages for middle and lower income Americans are sinking, driven by factors also largely under the control of the wealthy.  These include the application of new technology to eliminate human jobs, the crushing of unions, and a decline in the inflation-adjusted minimum wage that more and more Americans depend on for survival.
• On finding jobs: One in six men, 10.4 million Americans aged 25 to 64, the prime working years, don't have jobs at all, a portion of the male population that has almost tripled in the past four decades. They are neither all lazy nor all unskilled, and at present they await news of the uncharted places in the U.S. where those 10 million unfilled jobs are hidden....And how hard is it to land even a minimum-wage job? This year, the Ivy League college admissions acceptance rate was 8.9%. Last year, when Walmart opened its first store in Washington, D.C., there were more than 23,000 applications for 600 jobs, which resulted in an acceptance rate of 2.6%, making the big box store about twice as selective as Harvard and five times as choosy as Cornell.
• On why cutting unemployment and food stamps won't "force people back to work": 73% of those enrolled in the country’s major public benefits programs are, in fact, from working families -- just in jobs whose paychecks don’t cover life’s basic necessities. McDonald’s workers alone receive $1.2 billion in federal assistance per year.  Why do so many of the employed need food stamps? It’s not complicated. Workers in the minimum-wage economy often need them simply to survive. All in all, 47 million people get SNAP nationwide because without it they would go hungry.
• The most important step:...Raise the minimum wage. Tomorrow. In a big way...But while higher wages are good, they are likely only to soften the blows still to come.  Beyond this, van Buren is pessimistic, concluding that what most likely lies ahead is not a series of satisfying American-style solutions to the economic problems of the 99%, but a boiling frog’s journey into a form of twenty-first-century feudalism in which a wealthy and powerful few live well off the labors of a vast mass of the working poor...Absent a change in America beyond my ability to imagine, that's likely to be my future -- and yours.

Palestinian Unity Government
The technocratic Palestinian unity government was sworn in Monday June 2.  Both Hamas and the PLO back the government, ending several years of division.  Washington offered its backing several hours later.  This did not sit well with the Israeli Likud Government.  As reported in a June 5 post at Informed Comment: Several Israeli ministers expressed public anger on Tuesday after the US State Department said it was willing to work with the new Palestinian unity government put together by the West Bank leadership and Gaza's Hamas rulers. Israeli commentators categorized it as a new wedge in the relationship with the US.  That relationship was already under scrutiny following the collapse of Kerry's peace efforts, with Washington pointing to Israel's "rampant settlement activity" as a key element in the collapse of US-brokered talks with the Palestinians...Hardliners within Netanyahu's rightwing coalition have been pushing for Israel to take unilateral steps such as the annexation of the main Jewish settlement blocs in the occupied West Bank.  The security cabinet agreed...to set up a team to examine the annexation option, but ...commentator Shimon Shiffer said the move was a sop to ...hardliners rather than a serious policy change.  So far, Israel has imposed only limited sanctions on the Palestinians in response to the unity government.  It has frozen the transfer of $5.8 million of the $117 million it collects in taxes each month on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, and limited the new ministers' freedom of movement between Gaza and the West Bank. And even though it has pledged not to negotiate with the new government, it has not vetoed contact with Palestinian leaders, including Abbas...After discussing the issues raised and the difficulties facing the new unity government, Yossi Alpher. commenting in a post on the APN website, writes, perhaps somewhat optimistically, that this could be an important first step toward renewed Palestinian political and territorial unity that eventually leads to heavier pressure on Israel to engage seriously in two-state negotiations.

Coal Rules: Ten Things You Should Know

The much-anticipated EPA rules on emissions from coal-fired power plants were released today. The rules call for an average 30 percent reduction in CO₂ emissions from coal (against a 2005 base line) by 2030. The action has been variously described as Obama going around Congress (it's no such thing: agency rule-setting is part and parcel of the powers of the executive branch), America providing leadership in the battle against climate change (belated to say the least - 24 years after Kyoto), and a hit to the US economy (if you want to call accounting for the true cost of coal a hit to the economy, you may be unaware of (or ignoring) the damage to come from global warming - measured in the trillions). The new rules are bound to attract lawsuits from industry groups - even though two Supreme Court decisions (Massachusetts vs. EPA in 2007 and American Electric Power vs. Connecticut in 2011) clearly give the EPA the right to regulate greenhouse gases.

As we await the lawsuits and the ongoing cries of pain from climate-change-deniers, here are 10 facts about coal, the environment, and the new law.

1. Pound for pound, coal is the largest producer of carbon dioxide of any fossil fuel. When burned, coal produces about 60% more CO₂ per unit of energy than gasoline and more than double the CO₂ of that produced by methane (natural gas). And that is before the efficiency of energy production for the various fuels is taken into account. (Since coal-fired plants provide 40% of the electricity in the US, you may want to mention this to your friends who drive 100% electric cars.)

2. World carbon dioxide emissions rose to a record 36 billion metric tons in 2013. This is a 2.1 percent gain versus 2012 and a 61 percent increase since 1990, the baseline year for the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol, the only global agreement that places binding limits on national CO₂ emission levels. [1]

3. Carbon dioxide levels throughout the northern hemisphere hit 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in human history in April. Prior to the industrial revolution, atmospheric carbon dioxide was 280 ppm.

4. Releasing nearly 7 billion metric tons annually, the United States is the second largest producer of CO₂. Only China with its heavy reliance on coal and its 1.3 billion plus population produces more. The US emits nearly 20% of the world's total human-caused CO₂. [3]

5. Power plants and vehicles are the two biggest sources of this pollution in the United States, accounting for about 38 and 31 percent of carbon emissions, respectively. [2]

6. Domestic coal-fired plants produced 1.45 billion metric tons of CO₂ in 2012, according to Environmental Protection Agency data, equal to about 305 million cars. [2]

7. Sixty-three percent of US coal plants are at least 40 years old.

8. Will it be effective? The middle range of projections from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is a reduction of 544 million metric tons by 2020, equivalent to taking about 114 million cars off the road. [2]

9. How will the rule be implemented? The EPA will finalize its proposal in mid-2015. After that, the EPA will give states a year to design their implementation plans. It will let states meet emission targets for power plants several ways, including through plant upgrades, switching from coal to natural gas, or by improving energy efficiency or promoting renewable energy “outside the fence,” meaning outside the plant site. Each state has its own specific target.  West Virginia, for example, must reduce the pollution it puts out per amount of power by 19 percent compared to the rate in 2012.  The approach will give each state flexibility for meeting its specific target. [4,5]

10. What about China? At the November 2013 Warsaw Conference on climate change, China reiterated its commitment to achieve a target of reducing CO₂ emissions per unit of GDP by 40 to 45 percent by 2020 from the 2005 levels.  China is also introducing a set of new taxation policies designed to "preserve the environment", including a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. [6,7]

Hopefully, the new rules can be implemented without too much economic dislocation. The timing is clearly a gamble - it could cost Democrats the Senate in November. But the costs of continuing to not doing anything are great.  Paraphrasing the President, we don't want to give our children and grandchildren a world that it is too late to fix.  

References

[1] Reuters, November 18, 2013, "Global carbon emissions rise to new record in 2013: report"

[2] Mother Jones, May 30, 2014, "Obama's New Plan to Fight Climate Change Is a Really Big Deal"

[3] The Guardian interactive carbon dioxide emissions map

[4] Washington Post, June 1, 2014 "Everything you need to know about the EPA’s proposed rule on coal plants"

[5] Associated Press, June 2, 2014 "Obama administration orders big power-plant pollution cuts"

[6] Xinhua News Agency, Feb 19,2013  "China to introduce carbon tax: official"

[7] china.org.cn, Nov 21, 2013, "China will notably cut CO2 emissions by 2020"