Sunday Round-Up - June 9, 2013

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media.  Today we look at various current examples where the right of assembly, freedom of speech or other civil liberties are being compromised.  Sources are Mother Jones, The Guardian, Haaretz, Reuters, and Human Rights Watch.

NSA Spying I

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

It was government overreach under Bush and it still is under Obama. The only thing new about the recent revelations of government telephone spying is that the practice is still continuing. The National Security Agency is sweeping up the telephone records of Americans suspected of no wrongdoing. David Corn in a June 6 Mother Jones post writes : "This is a sweeping surveillance program—the sort of activity that two Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee, Mark Udall of Colorado and Ron Wyden of Oregon, have been complaining about for years. The pair have warned that the government was engaged in a surveillance program under the Patriot Act that went beyond what most people would assume permissible given a reasonable interpretation of that law." In the statement issued by the Administration, there's this rejoinder: "As we have publicly stated before, all three branches of government are involved in reviewing and authorizing intelligence collection under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Congress passed that act and is regularly and fully briefed on how it is used, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizes such collection." The response from the ACLU was swift.  In a Guardian article on June 6, Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union is quoted as saying: "From a civil liberties perspective, the program could hardly be any more alarming. It's a program in which some untold number of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents. It is beyond Orwellian, and it provides further evidence of the extent to which basic democratic rights are being surrendered in secret to the demands of unaccountable intelligence agencies."

[Photo: Wikimedia Commons]

NSA Spying II

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..." - Fourth Amendment, US Constitution

Then there is the more recent revelation that besides the telephone records' program, there is another program, called PRISM, that is targeting search histories, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats.  If anything, this may be even more troubling. The story broke on June 6 in a Guardian article by Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill. "The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian....The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called Prism, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says....The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers." The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012. The named internet companies deny any knowledge of the program.

Honestly, America, isn't it time to undo the excesses unleashed by the "Patriot Act" and get back our constitutional liberties?

Palestinian Teenagers Under the Watchful Eye of the IDF

On June 6, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on the intimidation tactics of the Israeli Defense Forces against four teenage Palestinian demonstrators: "Israeli soldiers entered the West Bank village of Kafr Qaddum several days ago for an unconventional mission - to post leaflets that, from a distance, looked innocent enough, but upon closer inspection proved to be photographs of four youths from the village bearing the caption, in faulty Arabic: 'We are the army. Be careful. If we see you, we’re going to catch you or come to your house.' Demonstrations have been ongoing for years at the site because of the closure 10 years ago of the main road leading from this West Bank town to Nablus, another West Bank town. The article quotes a village resident: "...the army hasn’t been able to stop the demonstrations and has sought new ways to thwart them...Now they’ve put up the leaflets, they probably thought that people would be frightened to go to to the demonstration and that this would stop it, but we say it doesn’t matter what they do – they won’t stop the demonstration.” Still the intimidation has had a chilling effect. The father of one of the teenagers asks: "How can an army that claims to be the strongest in the region threaten children?”

Istanbul Park Protests

In Istanbul, an Occupy-style protest against the proposed demolition of Taksim Gezi Park as part of a redevelopment plan sparked a crackdown by the Turkish police.   Protesters started gathering in the park on May 27.   Police responded with pepper spray and tear gas and burned tents the protesters had set up on the site. The Guardian reported on June 6 that the protests have apparently fallen on deaf ears: "Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has vowed to press ahead with the controversial redevelopment of a square in Istanbul, in a move that puts him on a collision course with tens of thousands of anti-government protesters and could provoke further unrest across the country." Nevertheless, tens of thousands of Turks demonstrated on Saturday, defying the government's demand that protests stop immediately. [Reuters, June 8] 

Erdoğan is the leader of the AKP, a political party whose base is "the conservative Muslim bourgeoisie that first emerged as a result of Turgut Özal's economic policies in the 1980s. But, while denying it is a religious party, it has used the politics of piety to gain a popular base and to strengthen the urban rightwing." [The Guardian, May 31]  Hmm..."politics of piety to gain a popular base...strengthen the rightwing"...where did we hear something like this before?

[Photo: Reuters/The Telegraph (UK)]

Malaysia Blackout 505 Arrests

Meanwhile on the opposite side of the Eurasian land mass, Malaysian authorities are prosecuting activists and opposition figures involved in rallies protesting the recent elections. The well-ordered “Blackout 505” rallies in several Malaysian cities "attracted large numbers protesting the results of, and alleged malfeasance during, the country’s May general elections" according to the Human Rights Watch website. Human Rights Watch sent a letter on June 4 to the Malaysian Prime Minister Najim Razak protesting the arrests. “Prosecuting activists for organizing peaceful protests makes a mockery of the prime minister’s promises to establish a rights-respecting government in Malaysia,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of HRW. “The government should drop the charges against the six activists and publicly pledge to cease bringing cases against organizers of peaceful protests.”

Tornadoes, Hunger, and Getting Angry

Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

- Plato

The personal tragedies wrought by tornadoes over the past few weeks in Oklahoma are just the latest reminders of the difficulties faced by ordinary people in the course of everyday life in this country. Untimely deaths from disease and accidents, impoverished and malnourished children, homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, urban violence, hate crimes, student massacres ... the list is seemingly endless. That is why I can't understand the positions taken by today's Republican Party. If you have the opportunity to do something to relieve or prevent the suffering of the vulnerable in our society, why on Earth would you choose not to?

Former Republican presidential candidate and former Senator Bob Dole, answering a question put to him by Fox News' Chris Wallace, said that neither he nor Ronald Reagan would feel comfortable with the GOP's present membership. Dole said that the party should hang a “closed for repairs” sign on its doors until it comes up with a few positive ideas.    A May 28 NYT editorial put it like this: "The difference between the current crop of Tea Party lawmakers and Mr. Dole’s generation is not simply one of ideology....Republicans used to set aside their grandstanding, recognize that a two-party system requires compromise and make deals to keep the government working on the people’s behalf. The current generation refuses to do that. Its members want to dismantle government, using whatever crowbar happens to be handy."

Dole is a staunch conservative and holds many of the same general policy positions as the Tea Party Republicans - although admittedly less extreme. There are few moderate Republicans around nowadays - at least in the Republican Party. The closest you have to moderate "Eisenhower Republicans" - people like former Senators Mark Hatfield of Oregon and Clifford Case of New Jersey - can now be found within the Democratic Party. Whether because of Republican obstructionism or because of his belief in his role as Compromiser-In-Chief, Obama has effectively become an Eisenhower Republican. This is not what we voted for in 2008 or 2012.   That said, his policy and budget positions are generally better than or, at least, no worse than, those of the Tea-Party-controlled GOP. (For a comparison of the various 2014 budget proposals, here's a link to a one-page summary from the National Priorities Project.)

There is so much to criticize in the proposed Republican budget that time and space do not permit even a partial listing. Their proposed cuts to social services can best be described as Draconian. And then there is the infamous sequester brought about by the Budget Control Act of 2011, which in turn was the compromise response to the phony debt-ceiling crisis initiated by Republicans. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that 750,000 jobs will be lost or not created because of this austerity measure in this year alone.

"But", in the immortal words of Arlo Guthrie, "that's not what I come to talk about tonight." What I really want to talk about is hunger in America and the current and future proposed cuts to the food stamp program. The World Food Summit of 1996 defined food security as existing “when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life”. Food insecurity then is the opposite: when you don't have enough food to maintain a healthy and active life.

Take a guess. How many Americans, citizens of the wealthiest country on Earth, live with "food insecurity"? Well, in 2011, 50.1 million Americans lived in food insecure households, 33.5 million adults and 16.7 million children. [Feeding America website] That corresponds to about 1 American out of every 6.

What was our elected representatives' response to hunger in America? The Republican-controlled House Agriculture Committee proposed cuts of $20.5 billion to the food stamp program over the next 10 years. The Senate Agriculture Committee proposed cuts of $4.1 billion. This is all part of the response to the phony deficit crisis - imposing austerity measures in the midst of a recession. On May 21, the U.S. Senate blocked an amendment to reinstate the $4.1 billion for food stamps. It was not just Republican obstructionism this time. For whatever reason, 28 Senate Democrats voted with all the Republicans for the 2013 Farm Bill which put corporate welfare ahead of  low-income families.

The differences in the farm bills will now be resolved in a joint House-Senate committee. As of December 2012, approximately 48 million people relied on food stamps. That's more than at any time in history and a direct result of the number of people thrown into poverty in the Great Recession. The House bill would drive 2 million low-income people off food stamps. Paul Krugman's excellent op-ed of May 30 analyzes these untimely and mean-spirited cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and concludes:

"Look, I understand the supposed rationale: We’re becoming a nation of takers, and doing stuff like feeding poor children and giving them adequate health care are just creating a culture of dependency — and that culture of dependency, not runaway bankers, somehow caused our economic crisis.  But I wonder whether even Republicans really believe that story — or at least are confident enough in their diagnosis to justify policies that more or less literally take food from the mouths of hungry children. As I said, there are times when cynicism just doesn’t cut it; this is a time to get really, really angry."

Yup.

RIP Frank Lautenberg

New Jersey lost one of its finest Senators in history on Monday morning. Frank Lautenberg had a consistently liberal voting record and he will be missed by the Senate majority. He had been ill for a while. But so important was his vote and so total his dedication, he was brought to the floor for several important Senate votes during his illness - including gun control. Unfortunately, thanks to the Republican filibuster, these last public services from the ailing Senator Lautenberg generally went for naught. You can rest assured that Republican Governor Christie will appoint a Republican until the special election later this year. Times will be even tougher for the Senate majority. With the next chance of changing Senate filibuster rules in 2014 and with the unlikely return of the House with its gerrymandered Congressional seats to the Democrats until the next census (2020), it will be a hard time for progressives.

Sunday Round-Up - June 2, 2013

Syrian Peace Talks in Jeopardy

Wednesday's Guardian reported on the increasing difficulty of getting all the parties to the peace table to end the Syrian conflict: "Plans for Syrian peace talks in Geneva next month appeared in danger of being derailed on Wednesday night as the country's divided opposition movement issued a fresh demand for Bashar al-Assad's government to be excluded from the political process, while Damascus insisted the Syrian president would stay in power until 2014 and possibly beyond...Russia and France also clashed over whether Iran should be allowed to attend the talks, and diplomats suggested that the mid-June target date might have to be pushed back. Turkey warned that if the negotiations failed, it would mark the end of the road for diplomacy and open the gates to the wholesale arming of opposition forces." On the issue of Iran's participation in the talks, the May 19 issue of Al Monitor Week in Review commented: "For the Geneva II conference on Syria to have the best chance of enacting a cease-fire and beginning a transition, Iran needs to be there...It should be a no-brainer to have all parties to a conflict represented at a peace conference. There is no 'transition' in Syria absent a cease-fire, and no cease-fire without Iran, which provides the military and intelligence lifeline to the Assad regime."

A New Arms Race? A New Cold War?

Michael Klare posted an article in Thursday's TomDispatch on the international arms trade titled "The Cold War Redux?" In it, Klare provides some recent examples of "arms deals ...that suggest a fresh willingness on the part of the major powers to use weapons transfers as instruments of geopolitical intrusion and competition." Two such examples of these arms deals are:

 

"In early May, ...Russia ... supplied several batteries of advanced anti-ship cruise missiles to the embattled Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad. With those missiles, the Syrians should be in a better position to deter or counter any effort by international forces, including the United States, to aid anti-Assad rebels by sea or mount a naval blockade of Syria."

 

"In April, during a visit to Jerusalem, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced a multibillion-dollar arms package for Israel.... At least two of the items, the KC-135 refueling planes and the anti-radiation missiles,...could only be intended for one purpose: bolstering Israel’s capacity to conduct a sustained air campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities, should it decide to do so."

The recent Global Arms Treaty gave the world some hope to reducing conflict and armed violence but Klare concludes "such expectations will quickly be crushed if the major weapons suppliers, led by the U.S. and Russia, once again come to see arms sales as the tool of choice to gain geopolitical advantage in areas of strategic importance. Far from bringing peace and stability -- as the proponents of such transactions invariably claim -- each new arms deal now holds the possibility of taking us another step closer to a new Cold War with all the heightened risks of regional friction and conflict that entails."

Bachmann Won't Run

On Tuesday night, Michele Bachmann announced her intention to not seek re-election in 2014. Jim Graves, her once and (maybe*) future opponent for the job, said after her announcement: "This is a good day for America." Off-the-deep-end only starts to describe this icon of the lunatic fringe. Known for her outrageous and counter-factual claims about everything from American history to health care to foreign relations, she is "honored" in a May 30 Informed Comment postby Juan Cole titled "Top Ten Michele Bachmann Goofs on the Middle East". Cole notes that "nowhere has she left a trail of mayhem and misinformation more colorful than in regard to the Middle East." From closing the American embassy in Iran (it hasn't existed since 1979) to her "insight" into a plot to give half of Iraq to Iran to her claim that Iraq should reimburse the United States for having invaded and occupied it, the list leads us to wonder as Cole does at one point: "Why she is allowed to serve on the Intelligence Committee, none of us can understand."

* Graves announced Friday that he was indefinitely suspending his 2014 campaign.

The Recession
 

As the Occupy protests become a dim and rather fuzzy memory here in America, conditions in Europe have spawned the Blockupy Movement. As blogged in the Guardian by Graeme Wearden and Katie Allen on Friday: "Thousands of Blockupy demonstrators were out in the rain in Frankfurt to cut off access to the European Central Bank in protest at what they see as its role in imposing austerity measures on southern European nations." The protests come as "Eurozone unemployment hit a fresh record high of 12.2%. Youth unemployment was double that at 24.4%." In another Guardian post on Friday, Larry Elliott warns that "Europe now faces a triple crunch: an interlocking human, economic and political crisis that will have devastating consequences if left unattended" and that the "mistakes now being made in the eurozone mirror those in the United States and Germany early in the Great Depression." Meanwhile in the US, a Federal Reserve report Thursday states that American households have rebuilt less than half of the wealth (45%) they lost during the recession. Most of this recovery has been in the form of increased stock prices and Mother Jones quotes a Washington Post reporter: "Recent gains in the stock market mean that the recovery of wealth is nearly complete for white and Asian households and older Americans." I guess he meant older Americans who own a lot of stock. Not good news for anyone else though - especially those whose home was their sole source of wealth. "Because the housing market is improving overall, there is less of an incentive for the government to push any new measures to help underwater homeowners. Prominent economists say that allowing initiatives that would reduce borrowers' loan principle balances is the single most important thing the administration could do to help the Americans who lost all that home wealth."

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."