Sunday Roundup - March 9, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media.  Today we look at the Pentagon budget, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Netanyahu's visit with President Obama, the Ukraine, the Central African Republic, and climate change.

The Pentagon Budget 
TomDispatch contributor Mattea Kramer writes about the Pentagon's phony budget war.  Washington is pushing the panic button, claiming austerity is hollowing out our armed forces and our national security is at risk...Yet a careful look at budget figures for the U.S. military -- a bureaucratic juggernaut accounting for 57% of the federal discretionary budget and nearly 40% of all military spending on this planet -- shows that such claims have been largely fictional. Despite cries of doom since the across-the-board cuts known as sequestration surfaced in Washington in 2011, the Pentagon has seen few actual reductions, and there is no indication that will change any time soon.  Kramer analyzes the positioning of the military-industrial-political-complex in an excellent March 6 post at TomDispatch.  "Ike" must be turning over in his grave.

Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talks
The original time frame for the current Israeli-Palestinian peace talks is rapidly approaching with no visible progress to report.  Former Palestinian negotiator Mohammed Ishtayeh doesn't believe there is much hope for an extension of the April 29 deadline for a framework deal.  “What we have seen in the talks is that the gap is growing, rather than narrowing,” said Mr. Ishtayeh, who resigned as a negotiator in November to protest accelerated Israeli settlement building.  For the Palestinians, the biggest obstacle is a new demand ... that they accept Israel as a Jewish state, he said. The Palestine Liberation Organization recognized the state of Israel when peace efforts began two decades ago and Mr. Abbas has argued this is sufficient.  Mr. Abbas cannot “under any circumstances” recognize Israel as a Jewish state because this would restrict the return options of Palestinian refugees...Israel’s land demands pose another serious obstacle.... Israel wants to annex these “settlement blocs,” but never has presented a detailed border proposal. The Palestinians say these blocs add up to about 12% of the West Bank. Israel also wants a long-term military presence in the Jordan Valley, which makes up 28% of the West Bank. [National Post/Associated Press, March 6]

Obama's Message to Netanyahu
Meanwhile Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington speaking with President Obama.  Juan Cole's March 5 Informed Comment opinion piece called Netanyahu’s visit even more of a disaster for him than might have been expected...It did not help that the Crimea crisis had broken out.... Most observers in Europe and even some in the US could see the hypocrisy of the US denouncing Russian troops in Crimea but supporting Israeli troops in Hebron.  Prior to his meeting with Netanyahu, Obama had been interviewed by Jeffrey Goldberg for Bloomberg.  Obama had a strong message for the Israeli Prime Minister on the peace process (see below).  Juan Cole called Obama's words more candid than those of any sitting president since the 1970s.  Cole's take on the President's statement is that Obama is trying to tell Netanyahu that we can see him...that the world is deciding that the Israelis intend to keep the Palestinians stateless and to constrain their lives with checkpoints and arbitrary arrest and property theft virtually forever...What Obama was...saying was that the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement to respond to Israeli colonialism against the Palestinians is unfolding in other venues where the US government doesn’t have a veto. The US cannot force the European Union states to disregard EU law. It cannot forestall lawsuits by Palestinian concerns in Europe against European companies involved in helping occupy them. Moreover, ...Palestine [as] a non-member observer state at the UN...could take Israel to the International Criminal Court over criminal Israel actions in the Occupied territories. Obama was simply observing that as the scales fall from the world’s eyes, Israel will be subject to sanctions, and the US government cannot do anything about it.

Ukraine
Crimea declared its intent to rejoin Russia after the demonstrations that removed President Viktor Yanukovich from office.  Russia Times reported on March 7: Over 65,000 people gathered on Friday for a demonstration in central Moscow to support residents of Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea. 

Juan Cole in an Informed Comment March 7 post noted the hypocrisy of US politicians for opposing the Crimean decision as a violation of international law.  He points to Yugoslavia, the Sudan and Iraq as countries where US politicians supported breaking up countries and suggests that George Mitchell’s careful agreement [for Northern Ireland]...would be a good model for keeping Crimea in Ukraine while recognizing Russian interests there.

Central African Republic
The Central African Republic, a land-locked nation of about 4.6 million people, is one of the world's poorest countries.  The Human Development Index,  a composite statistic of life expectancy, education, and income, places it in 179th place of the 187 countries with data.  These facts make the sectarian violence engulfing the country even more senseless and tragic.  The CAR has been in chaos since Muslim rebels seized power a year ago and then lost it around December as Christian militias fought back...Since then, revenge attacks on the Muslim minority community, including summary executions, torture and looting, have become more common. [The Economist, Feb 15]  A new president, Catherine Samba-Panza, has pledged to put a stop to the violence and to bring reconciliation to the country.  She took office on an interim basis in January but so far the violence has not abated.  Muslims are fleeing to neighboring countries, French troops are trying to maintain some semblance of order and the UN is considering bringing in a large peace-keeping force. With the mass exodus, the Bangui economy has gone into rapid decline, made worse by violence on the roads into the capital that has all but cut the city off from outside supplies.  A recent statement by Oxfam and Action Against Hunger highlighted the increased threat of food shortages in a country where 1.3 million are already in dire need of food. [The Guardian, Feb 14]
(Image of children in refugee camp at Bangui airport is by Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty Images and appeared in The Guardian Feb 21)

Climate Change
The world's oceans play a major role in maintaining our climate.  They convey heat from warm regions to cold and vice versa.   A disruption in the "thermo-haline" conveyors of the world's oceans and seas can lead to severe, and possibly abrupt, climate change.  Temperature (thermo) and salt (haline) content determine the density of ocean water.  Differences in ocean water density drive this (literally) world-scale conveyor belt.  If this conveyor belt receives a big enough shock - for example, large amounts of fresh water from melting glaciers or increased precipitation - the oceans will experience a decrease in salt content and density.  This will interfere with or shutdown the ocean conveyor belt.  The result would be somewhere between the Younger Dryas event (10-20 degree F. temperature drop) and a return to a full-blown glacial period.  If this catastrophe does occur, the change will be very quick - on the order of a decade.  Now a recent study reported at Smithsonian.com concludes that a surge in freshwater at the surface may have shut down mixing of water layers in the Weddell Sea in the Antarctic or in the more dramatic words at the Daily Kos website - The Antarctic Half of the Global Thermohaline Circulation is Collapsing - adding that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate models have not considered the effects the collapsing production of Antarctic Bottom Water and political policy has not kept up with the IPCC. We are moving rapidly into uncharted waters as the Arctic melts. Global political policies are not keeping up with the rate of change and our models have, to date, underestimated the rate of change. We are witnessing a total failure of global leadership to deal with changes we caused that are spiraling out of control.

Related Links

Obama's Interview with Jeffrey Goldberg: Time Is Running Out
In an hour long interview Thursday in the Oval Office, Obama, borrowing from the Jewish sage Rabbi Hillel, told me that his message to Netanyahu will be this: “If not now, when? And if not you, Mr. Prime Minister, then who?” He then took a sharper tone, saying that if Netanyahu “does not believe that a peace deal with the Palestinians is the right thing to do for Israel, then he needs to articulate an alternative approach." He added, "It’s hard to come up with one that’s plausible....There comes a point where you can’t manage this anymore, and then you start having to make very difficult choices,” Obama said. “Do you resign yourself to what amounts to a permanent occupation of the West Bank? Is that the character of Israel as a state for a long period of time? Do you perpetuate, over the course of a decade or two decades, more and more restrictive policies in terms of Palestinian movement? Do you place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel’s traditions?” [Bloomberg View website, Jeffrey Goldberg, March 2]

Central African Republic
Can Catherine Samba-Panza save the Central African Republic? [The Guardian, March 2]

President Eisenhower's Warning About the Military-Industrial Complex
You-Tube of the warning given in his Farewell Address (1961)

Sunday Round Up - January 12, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media. Today we look at the US military-industrial complex, health care in emerging nations, and poverty in the US 50 years after President Lyndon Johnson declared a "war on poverty."


The National Security State
What we used to term the military-industrial complex has grown far beyond President Eisenhower's deepest concerns when he warned us against it in his farewell speech in 1961.  In a January 5 post, Tom Engelhardt re-imagines national security as a proselytizing  warrior religion.   As Engelhardt writes: "The expansion of Washington’s national security state -- let’s call it the NSS -- to gargantuan proportions has historically met little opposition....At a cost of nearly a trillion dollars a year, its main global enemy consists of thousands of lightly armed jihadis and wannabe jihadis scattered mainly across the backlands of the planet....No matter how you cut it, the NSS is a Ripley’s Believe It or Not of staggering numbers that, once you step outside its thought system, don’t add up.  The U.S. national defense budget is estimated to be larger than those of the next 13 countries combined -- that is, simply off-the-charts more expensive.  The U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carrier strike groups when no other country has more than two....It is creating a jet fighter that will be the most expensive weapons system in history.  Its weapons makers controlled 78% of the global arms market in 2012.... After all, if the twenty-first century has taught us anything, it’s that the most expensive and over-equipped military on the planet can’t win a war.  Its two multi-trillion-dollar attempts since 9/11, in Iraq and Afghanistan, both against lightly armed minority insurgencies, proved disasters."  Calling the NSS a remarkable failure, he concludes that the national security state "has made other options ephemeral and more immediate dangers than terrorism to the health and well being of Americans seem, at best, secondary.  It has pumped fear into the American soul.  It is a religion of state power."



Health Care
As we struggle here in this country supporting our overblown military budget while looking for ways to cut the social safety net and deny access to affordable health insurance to the more vulnerable in our society, it's interesting to look at the approach to health care in developing countries.  James Akazili and Charlotte Soulary write in January's Le Monde Diplomatique that "In an unequal 21st-century world, access to healthcare is key to fighting poverty and ensuring social cohesion."  They describe the growing focus on  Universal Health Care in the developing world.  The World Health Organization, the UN General Assembly and the World Bank have come out in support of Universal Health Care (UHC). "Governments are taking action: China, Thailand, South Africa and Mexico are some of the first emerging economies scaling up public investment in health, and many low-income countries, especially in Africa, have introduced free healthcare policies as a first step towards universal coverage."  With the need for UHC generally acknowledged, the discussion now is focusing on finance mechanisms.  The authors warn against a one-size-fits-all approach in financing the health care system.  "According to the WHO, only eight low-income countries will be in a position to fully finance UHC from domestic resources in 2015. More long-term and predictable aid is vital, to help build effective public health systems and also to improve public financial management and taxation systems so that countries can become self-sufficient."



In another Le Monde Diplomatique article, Carina Vance writes of the prominent place that health care has in Ecuador's new (2008) constitution.  Article 32 of the Ecuadorian constitution states: “Health is a right guaranteed by the state and whose fulfillment is linked to the exercise of other rights, including the right to water, food, education, sport, work, social security, a healthy environment and everything that promotes well-being."  The result: "Ecuadorians are benefitting from an unprecedented redistribution of wealth. This historic effort has allowed public health to become a key factor in social justice. The increase in the number of hospitals and healthcare centres throughout the country has given millions of patients access to services from which they had been excluded, because of distance, poverty, discrimination or lack of information."


Poverty in America
Fifty years ago in his State of the Union address, President Lyndon Johnson declared an "unconditional war on poverty"  - a war, he said, the "richest nation on Earth can afford to win....We cannot afford to lose it."  A  Mother Jones post on January 8 looks back at the distance we've come in combatting poverty in the years since.   "Johnson's administration went on to design "Great Society" initiatives, including a permanent food stamp program, Medicare and Medicaid, Head Start, which provides early education to low-income kids, and increased funding to public schools....The war on poverty helped raise millions above the poverty line. During Johnson's years in office, the poverty rate dropped from 23 percent to 12 percent."  The article presents charts that show how the social safety net has reduced poverty, the steep decreases in elderly and child poverty, the lack of progress in preventing "deep poverty" (half the poverty line - i.e., those living on an income of less than $11,775 a year for a family of four), the number of Americans living on $2/day, the cost of living in various American cities, and the continuing racial disparity for the poorest 20%.  The authors (Erika Eichelberger, Jaeah Lee, and AJ Vicens) conclude "So have we won the war on poverty? If it means that the lives of millions of Americans in poverty have improved under the Great Society programs, yes. But by no means have we attained Johnson's goal of 'curing' poverty. The poverty rates of certain demographic groups remain stagnant and racial disparities are as wide as ever."

The Insane Military Budget

Fifty-one years ago,  Republican Dwight Eisenhower, the thirty-fourth President of the United States, warned against the increasing militarization of the United States in his famous speech on the "military-industrial complex."  John F. Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, once wrote in a letter to a Navy friend that "War will exist until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today."

Neither Eisenhower's warning nor Kennedy's vision have gained much of a foothold in the last half-century - this despite the end of the Cold War, despite the disastrous wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the misguided military incursions and interference in the internal affairs of Latin American countries, despite the trillions of dollars of expenditures, despite the tens of thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of foreign lives lost. 

Militarism has powerful and influential supporters in government.  Large swaths of the populace confuse it with patriotism.  The so-called defense industry has long provided a home for retiring politicians who can effectively act as lobbyists for the industry.  Republicans will cut just about every program imaginable except the bloated military budget.  Democrats, ever fearful of seeming not militaristic enough, have been ineffective at best and complicit at worst.  Neo-con dreams of an American Empire based on military intervention still gets a welcome hearing in many corners and the drumbeat for war with Iran is starting to be played by many of the same actors who misled us into Iraq. 

It's time for this to stop.  The money that is currently spent on paying for wars - past. present, and future - is totally out of control and totally unrelated to any real dangers that we now face.  This graphic from The Economist says it all:



The Economist notes that United States military spending in 2010 was more than the next seventeen nations combined. And this is using an official figure of $700 bn, which is not the whole story by a long shot. 

As Chris Hellman explained at TomDispatch.com, the Fiscal Year 2012 Pentagon budget starting at an official figure of $703 bn rises rapidly when we see the other military-related spending squirreled away in departments other than Defense or related to past wars and military expenditures.

Official Pentagon budget: 703 bn$
Counter-terrorism and homeland security: + 62 bn$
National Intelligence Program funding: + 53 bn$
Veteran programs:hospital,medical, disability, education: + 129 bn$
Other direct security spending (for example, military aid): + 18 bn$
Military and DOD pensions: +  69 bn$
Interest on debt for past Pentagon spending: +185 bn$

Total military-related spending = 1219 bn$ or 1.219 trillion dollars

The 1.2 trillion dollars is just under 1/3 of the total budget proposal for FY 2012 (~$3.75 trillion).  In other words, one of every three dollars in the 2012 budget is spent on the military.  Coincidentally (or maybe not), this 1.2 trillion dollars approximates the FY 2012 projected budget deficit ($1.1 - $1.3 trillion). 

Any rational and humane discussion aimed at reducing the deficit must start here.  Before we cut heating fuel subsidies, shred the food stamp program, slash Medicaid, underfund health care reform, increase student loan interest rates, privatize Social Security and end Medicare as we know it, we must address this out-of-control military spending.