Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century spent 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list this year - quite a feat for a 600-plus page work from a French economics professor. Analyzing international economic data from 1700 to the present, Piketty determines the reasons for the growing wealth and income inequality that the world has been seeing for the past several decades and suggests solutions. Piketty finds, unsurprisingly. that there is no inherent self-corrective market mechanism that can turn this around - a rising tide will not lift all boats.

The main argument from Piketty's exhaustive analysis of the data goes something like this. The inequality in wealth and income that we are seeing now has been consistent throughout history until the eve of the First World War. The movement towards equality that we saw in the mid-twentieth century was an anomaly produced by the shocks of two world wars and a depression and the government responses to these crises. In rich nations, the portion of national income coming from capital relative to the portion coming from labor has been growing steadily since the 1970's. This results from several factors: the "elasticity of substitution" between labor and capital (that is, it is "always possible...to find new and useful things to do with capital" in a modern industrialized society), an increased mobility of capital (e.g., investing abroad as nations compete for capital investments), an increase in capital's bargaining power vis-a-vis labor, and a slower growth rate. The average return on capital is greater than the growth rate in national income. Capital thus accumulates and concentrates in the hands of the wealthiest, the primary owners of capital. In the rich nations, the capital/income ratio is now approaching the levels seen before the First World War.

Piketty concludes that "there is no reason capital's share [will] decrease over the very long run." The principal lesson Piketty draws from his analysis of the capital/income ratio is that "there is no natural force that inevitably reduces the importance of capital and of income flowing from ownership of capital over the course of history." Rather political forces have been central to any corrective action. "Progress toward economic and technological rationality [does not inherently lead] toward democratic and meritocratic rationality. The primary reason for this is [that]...technology, like the market, has neither limits nor morality."

The story on income inequality is more nuanced. While the portion of national income of the 1% has been increasing since the 1970's in the "Anglo-Saxon" nations due to the rise of what Piketty calls the highly compensated "supermanager", there has been barely any increase in income inequality in the rich nations of continental Europe and Japan with their stronger social programs. In the US, the share in labor income⁽¹⁾ of the top 1% is now approaching 18%; in Britain, 15%. The share of the top 1% in the rich nations of continental Europe and Japan varies from about 7% in Sweden to about 11% in Germany.

One of Piketty's underlying assumptions is that significant wealth and income inequality is "potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based."  He doesn't specify exactly why this should be so but here are my thoughts - some warning flags, if you will, that capitalism has gone awry in the 21st century:

• The inequality is so great that basic needs are not provided for a portion of the population
• Wages are so low that a family must endure poverty even when the wage-earner is working full-time
• Accumulated wealth is used to drown out the voices of the majority, to distort the truth, and to influence laws to maintain its advantage at the expense of the common good

Just a brief look at recent headlines are enough to convince one that our standing as a just and democratic society is endangered :

• In 2012, 49 million Americans were in food-insecure households and 46.5 million were living in poverty. Prior to passage of the Affordable Care Act, nearly 50 million Americans were without health insurance. The massive misinformation campaign on the Affordable Care Act has helped keep this a political issue - one that can ultimately deny millions affordable access to health care.

• 

  At the funeral of Maria Fernandes
  Photo credit: Mel Evans/Associated Press

  The poverty level income for a family of four is $23,850. The minimum wage would need to be $12 per hour for a wage earner to keep his or her family out of poverty. The Federal minimum wage, last adjusted in 2009, is just $7.25/hour. Thirty-two-year old Maria Fernandes was working "three jobs, at three Dunkin’ Donuts stores in northern New Jersey, shuttling from Newark to Linden to Harrison and back."  Last Friday, she died while napping in her car - overcome by gasoline fumes from a tipped over can in the back of her SUV. [NYTimes, September 28]
• The Supreme Court's  Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions effectively granted corporations and individuals unlimited ability to spend money influencing elections.  If these decisions weren't enough, we got word last week that the well-funded conservative group Americans for Prosperity sent out incorrect voter registration information to hundreds of North Carolina voters and one cat. North Carolina passed one of the worst voter suppression laws in the country and these changes make it essential that information sent to voters is correct. Among the erroneous information sent out on the "official application form" were contradictory final registration dates, contradictory information on where to send the forms, and the wrong zip code for the Board of Elections.

From Capital in the 21st Century

Inequality also increases financial instability.  Pikkety notes that the share of the top 10% in US national income peaked twice in the past hundred years - "once in 1928 (on the eve of the crash of 1929) and again in 2007 (on the eve of the crash of 2008)."  In his view, "there is absolutely no doubt that the increase of inequality in the United States contributed to the nation's financial instability. The reason is simple: one consequence of  of increasing inequality was virtual stagnation of the purchasing power of lower and middle classes in the United States, which inevitably made it more likely that modest households would take on debt, especially since...banks and financial intermediaries, freed from regulation and eager to earn good yields on the enormous savings injected into the system by the well-to-do, offered credit on increasingly generous terms."

So what's the solution to wealth and income inequality and its associated ills and risks?  Piketty proposes to regulate capitalism with a global, progressive, annual tax on capital. "The goal is first to stop the indefinite increase of inequality of wealth, and second to impose effective regulation on the financial and banking system in order to avoid crises.  To promote these two ends, the capital tax must first promote democratic and financial transparency: there should be clarity about who owns what assets around the world."  Goodbye, tax havens and secret bank accounts; hello, international sharing of bank data.   Piketty provides an example - a blueprint for a European wealth tax. Given the very high level of private wealth in Europe today, "a progressive annual tax on wealth at modest rates would bring in significant revenues."  If applied to all the member states of the European Union, a "wealth tax of 0 percent on fortunes below 1 million euros, 1 percent between 1 and 5 million euros, and 2 percent above 5 million euros" would "affect about 2.5 percent of the population and bring in revenues equivalent to 2 percent of Europe's GDP."

Idealistic?  Utopian? Perhaps or, as Piketty, referring to the euro, would have it: "no more so than attempting to create a stateless currency,"  His analysis provides a data-based look at the direction capitalism is taking and what might be done to control it so that the interests of all, the common good, may be served. 

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Note 1: Labor income is that portion of income due to wages and compensation. It does not include the income from capital. The shares of the top 1% in total income from both capital and labor are greater than the figures given.

Five Nuggets from Capital in the Twenty First Century

The book is loaded with interesting facts and insights.  Here are a few:

"...if the rate of population growth observed from 1700 to 2012 --- 0.8 percent per year --- were to continue for the next three centuries, the world's population would be on the order of 70 billion in 2300."

"In regard to average return...the annual rental value of housing, which accounts for half of total national wealth, is generally 3-4 percent of the value of the property."

"The most striking fact is...that in all these societies, half of the population own virtually nothing: the poorest 50 percent invariably own less than 10 percent of the national wealth, and generally less than 5 percent."

"...inflation is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon.  Before that, up to World War I, inflation was zero or close to it."

"There are two main ways to finance [a government's] expenses: taxes and debt.  In general, taxation is by far preferable to debt in terms of justice and efficiency...[Debt] financing is in the interest of those who have the means to lend to the government.  From the standpoint of the general interest, it is normally preferable to tax the wealthy rather than borrow from them."

Sunday Roundup - September 28, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media. Today we look at the US airstrikes in Syria, the UN climate change summit, Ukraine, South Sudan, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and Derek Jeter.

US Airstrikes
This past week, the United States expanded its role in the Middle East war by conducting airstrikes inside Syria - targeting Khorasan, a previously obscure group, as well as Islamic State. Democracy Now! spoke with Patrick Cockburn, the Middle East correspondent for The Independent, on September 24.  Asked to explain why we are suddenly hearing about Khorasan, who have been painted as an offshoot of al-Qaeda with designs on US targets, Cockburn replied, "One’s a little suspicious that the administration, those who are carrying out the bombing, may want to say to its audience in America that here are people we’re attacking who are about to attack you in the homeland, which ISIS didn’t show much sign of doing. So that might be one reason why this obscure group is suddenly given such publicity."  The situation is chaotic - groups on both sides of the ongoing Syrian Civil War are now fighting ISIS - and the risk of civilian casualties is rising as the airstrikes hit targets near the Turkish border, close to an area where tens of thousands of Kurds have fled to escape from militants tied to the Islamic State group.  Without a truce in Syrian Civil War, U.S.-led strikes threaten more chaos for the world’s worst crisis.  Meanwhile Dan Roberts, writing in The Guardian on September 23, notes that US lawyers are tying themselves up in legal knots justifying the airstrikes in Syria.  The US...argued [to the UN] that there was legal right to pursue Isis inside Syria due to the weakness of that country’s government – a regime the US has been actively urging be undermined by rebel groups for much of the past two years....The legal circumlocutions to avoid requesting a UN security council resolution match similar efforts to avoid requesting specific legal authority from Congress.  Fearing that US politicians up for re-election in November may balk at voting for a third military attack on Iraq and being sucked into a Syrian quagmire, the White House has avoided seeking a fresh authorisation of the use of military force, preferring to rely on early authorisations against al-Qaida granted after the 11 September 2001 attacks.  

UN Climate Change Summit
In advance of the UN Climate Change Summit, marches were held worldwide to demand action on global warming.  ecowatch.com reported on September 21: Today in New York City more than 300,000 people attended what is now known as the largest climate action in world history.  The march in New York City was by far the largest of the 2,808 People’s Climate rallies that took place today in 166 countries from around the world. From the crowded streets of New Delhi to Melbourne to Johannesburg, hundreds of thousands of people took part in the weekend’s global events.  

From RTCC website
Note: COP20 is held in December, 2014

The Summit itself featured speeches and commitments to action.  Perhaps the most encouraging announcement was that of China's Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli  who went a step further than China has ever gone before in announcing that the country's emissions of manmade greenhouse gases would peak "as early as possible."  China, with its 1.3 billion people and heavy reliance on coal is the world's top emitter of carbon dioxide.  Xie Zhenhua, vice-chairman of China's National Development and Reform Commission, told reporters that "weather extremes have greatly affected the Chinese people." Xie said weather extremes have cost China more than 200 billion Renminbi [about $32 billion] per year. “The losses are extensive in China," Xie said, noting that climate impacts extend to "water, land and people." These impacts, along with China's staggering air pollution problem, are forcing China to take action both on climate mitigation...and adaptation. Perhaps the most disappointing item was the sorry state of the Green Climate Fund. The Green Climate Fund came out of the December 2009 Copenhagen Conference. Industrialized nations promised to provide financial assistance to developing countries to ease their transition off fossil fuels, and combat climate change impacts....On Tuesday, a total of about $1.3 billion in new pledges were announced from Denmark, France, South Korea, Norway, Mexico and three smaller nations. The lack of a U.S. financial commitment on Tuesday was noteworthy....“The pledges announced here still leave the fund with less than a sixth of the total developed countries should commit,” Tim Gore, head of climate policy for aid group Oxfam, said in a statement. "All eyes are now on those yet to stump up, including the U.S., UK, Australia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand, and on the devil in the detail of those pledges made today."  [Mashable, September 24]

Ukraine
The ceasefire in the Ukraine is holding but The Moscow Times reminded us of the human costs of the war.  After fleeing to Russia from Ukraine's conflict-torn east, nearly 390,000 people have formally registered as refugees, Russian children's ombudsman Pavel Astakhov said late Wednesday.  More than a quarter of the refugees — about 100,000 of them — are children...In total, some 870,000 residents of eastern Ukraine are currently in Russia,...However, the majority of those have not formally sought refugee status...The total casualty count, including civilians and combatants, stood at 3,500 in eastern Ukraine's rebel-held Donbass region. [The Moscow Times, September 25]

Earlier this month, the Ukrainian Parliament voted to grant additional autonomy to provinces of eastern Ukraine ("the Donbass").  On September 16, The Guardian reported on the legislation, which include, among other provisions:
• The rebel-held Luhansk and Donetsk regions will be granted a "special status" giving them broader autonomy for a three-year period...
• Use of the Russian language to be allowed in state institutions....
• The legislation also promises to help restore damaged infrastructure and to provide social and economic assistance to particularly hard-hit areas....
• Another bill on amnesty protects from criminal prosecution "participants of events in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions" 

South Sudan

The civil war in South Sudan continues.  The country has teetered for months on the brink of a man-made famine.  The Guardian's Andrew Greene reports on the agencies battling to stave off starvation in South Sudan’s civil war sanctuaries.  Jean-Louis de Brouwer, a senior European commission official, says that while the worst appears to have been averted for the time being, 3.5 million people still face severe food shortages.  Delivering aid to the stricken region is difficult - especially during the rainy season (April-November).  Over the past six months, the World Food Programme and UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) has turned to a rapid response mechanism (RRM). When the combatants allow, the agencies fly teams of experts by helicopter into remote areas to gauge food and health needs. Local leaders rally communities to come and register. While people sign up for food rations, health workers are on standby to put measuring tapes around children’s arms and quickly assess whether they are malnourished.  At the end of the registration, after health workers have started underweight children on a course of treatment and injected vaccines, there is a massive distribution of sorghum, lentils, salt and oil. Children who are under five years old also receive a heavily fortified porridge.  There have been 23 completed RRMs so far, reaching more than 460,000 people, according to Unicef.

Occupied Palestinian Territory
The Guardian reported on Thursday of the breakthrough agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority that would turn over the civil administration of Gaza immediately to officials of a Palestinian unity government led by President Mahmoud Abbas.  The agreement, negotiated in Cairo, is designed to ease the long blockade of Gaza by Israel and Egypt and open the way to reconstruction of the war-ravaged coastal entity. A recent Palestinian Authority study estimated the cost of reconstruction in Gaza following this summer’s 50-day conflict with Israel at $7.8bn (£4.8bn). Palestinian officials said the agreement would allow the Palestinian Authority to take control over the border crossings of the Gaza Strip, including the crucial Rafah crossing into Egypt.

From the antiwar.com website

Palestinians have been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. The occupation is currently the longest anywhere in the world and the only one in which the occupying power controls the entire homeland of another people.  The Guardian reported Friday on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' UN speech calling on the Security Council to support a resolution setting a clear deadline for Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories....Abbas declared the American-backed Israel-Palestinian peace process which has dragged on for two decades dead, saying it was “impossible to return to negotiations...that failed to deal with the substance of the matter and the fundamental question. There is neither credibility nor seriousness in negotiations in which Israel predetermines the results via its settlement activities and the occupation’s brutality.  There is no meaning or value in negotiations for which the agreed objective is not ending the Israeli occupation and achieving the independence of the state of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital on the entire Palestinian territory occupied in the 1967 war.  And, there is no value in negotiations which are not linked to a firm timetable for the implementation of this goal.”...[Abbas] also accused Israel of “war crimes carried out before the eyes of the world” during the recent 50-day Gaza war that ended in a ceasefire on 26 August...“We will not forget and we will not forgive, and we will not allow war criminals to escape punishment,” Abbas declared. Palestinian officials were expected to start working with members of the security council to seek backing for a resolution setting a time frame for the ending of what he called the “racist and colonial” occupation – a resolution certain to be opposed by the US....[ If he is faced with a veto of the resolution by the United States,] Palestinian sources say Abbas will accelerate moves to join UN and international bodies, including accession to the international criminal court.  

Derek Jeter

Derek Jeter after his game-winning hit
Photo by Corey Sipkin/Daily News/Published 9/26/14

Had one presented Hollywood with the story of Derek Jeter's final game at Yankee Stadium, the script would have been rejected.  Too implausible for today's movie audiences...no one would believe it.   The all-time baseball great said goodbye to his hometown fans with a flourish that those present will remember for the rest of their lives.  To start with, the game was in danger of being cancelled because of the rain showers soaking the metropolitan area all day.  The skies cleared a bit and, fifteen minutes before game time, a rainbow appeared over the stadium,  The game began.  Jeter knocked in 3 runs for the Yankees - one with a double in the first inning, one on a misplayed fielder's choice that put the Yankees ahead in the 7th, and then the game winner in the bottom of the ninth.  His appearance at the plate in the ninth was totally unexpected.  After all, the Yankees were up by 3 runs going into the top of the ninth and their ace closer was set to mow down the Oriole batters to preserve the victory, right?  Not. Baltimore scored 3 runs on two homers to tie the game.  In the bottom of the ninth with the Yankees at bat...a single, a pinch runner, a sacrifice bunt and there was a man in scoring position with Derek Jeter coming to the plate. On the first pitch, Jeter, as he had so often, lined a single to right.  The runner raced around third and beat the throw to the plate.  From the ESPN New York's blog: The walk-off single...caused Yankee Stadium to explode the way it had when Jeter and Yankees teams from a previous era were winning championships seemingly every year. Jeter was mobbed on the field after the game by current teammates as well as former ones, including Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, Bernie Williams, Tino Martinez and former manager Joe Torre.  The only place where Jeter lost tonight was in a battle with his emotions. As the crowd chanted his name and gave him a thunderous, spontaneous standing ovation in the eighth inning -- prompting him to tip his cap around the ballpark -- the normally stoic Jeter was clearly struggling to maintain his composure. 

There are quite a few "most memorable moments" slideshows and videos out there.  Here's a link to one of the best: The Top 10 most iconic GIFs of Derek Jeter's brilliant career [SB Nation, Sep 25]

The machinery of death

"From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death."

- Justice Harry Blackmun

Twenty years ago, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote an emotional dissent from the Court's decision not to hear the appeal of a mentally impaired Texas inmate on death row.  Blackmun had become convinced that the death penalty could no longer be carried out in a constitutional manner in our country. Several recent news items brought Justice Blackmun's dissent to mind. There may yet be some hope that the United States will join the rest of the civilized world in abolishing the death penalty.

On July 16, a federal judge ruled California's death penalty unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment".  From CNN and KFOR: "Judge Cormac J. Carney vacated the 1995 death sentence of Ernest D. Jones...Carney wrote: 'Allowing this system to continue to threaten Mr. Jones with the slight possibility of death, almost a generation after he was first sentenced, violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment...In California, the execution of a death sentence is so infrequent, and the delays preceding it so extraordinary, that the death penalty is deprived of any deterrent or retributive effect it might once have had...Such an outcome is antithetical to any civilized notion of just punishment.' "  

Through year-end 2013, there had been 317 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States. Earlier this month, we witnessed yet another case in which DNA evidence was used to exonerate two innocent men.  The New York Times reported on September 2, "Thirty years after their convictions in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in rural North Carolina, based on confessions that they quickly repudiated and said were coerced, two mentally disabled half brothers were declared innocent and ordered released Tuesday by a judge here. The case against the men, always weak, fell apart after DNA evidence implicated another man whose possible involvement had been somehow overlooked by the authorities even though he lived only a block from where the victim’s body was found, and he had admitted to committing a similar rape and murder around the same time." One brother was on death row and the other had served 30 years of a life imprisonment.

This North Carolina case was actually cited in 1994 by Justice Antonin Scalia justifying the use of the death penalty even in the case of mentally impaired defendants.  Heather Digby Parton writing at Salon.com excoriates Scalia and his views on the death penalty, which include his contention that the state is not doing anything immoral if it executes an innocent man as long as he has been given a fair trial. "Worst of all, Justice Scalia and other death penalty proponents who find nothing immoral in the state’s conscious, coldblooded taking of a life are equally unconcerned that they might be taking the life of an innocent person....This man claims that he could not be a judge if he thought his participation in the death penalty was immoral and yet he does not believe it matters under the Constitution if the state executes innocent people. How on earth can such a depraved person be on the Supreme Court of the United States? On what basis can our country lay claim to a superior system of justice and a civilized moral order when such people hold power?"

The problem goes well beyond Justice Scalia.  Although polls are showing a continuing downward trend towards the death penalty, 55% of the country still approve of the "state's conscious, coldblooded taking of a life." As a nation, we have a very long way to go before we brag about our moral superiority. Our executions in 2013 were exceeded only by China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea. In fact, the United States is one of just 22 nations that executed prisoners last year. The death penalty has been abolished outright or is under a moratorium in 155 countries. Just 40 countries still maintain a death penalty. With the sole exception of the United States, all of these 40 nations are in Asia, Africa or the Caribbean.   

There was a brief period, from 1972 until 1977, when the death penalty was suspended in the United States. By a 5 to 4 vote, the Supreme Court in its Furman vs. Georgia decision voided the death penalty statutes of the 40 states that had them. While we won't ever have again those enlightened justices (Douglas, Brennan, Stewart, White and Marshall), it should be noted that one of the dissenting justices in Furman vs. Georgia was Blackmun. Twenty-two years after that dissenting vote, Blackmun decided that the death penalty could not be imposed in a manner consistent with the Constitution. If some of the justices currently in favor of the death penalty change their opinions, that may be enough to declare it unconstitutional once and for all.

Demographically, younger people tend to oppose the death penalty more than older people. For example, a Barna Group poll found that just 23% of practicing Christian millenials supported the death penalty. They see it as a human rights as well as a moral issue.

Many religious leaders have spoken against the death penalty and that same Barna Group poll found that there was a significant difference in opposition to the death penalty between practicing Christians and the overall population. Perhaps no church has been more clear in its opposition to the death penalty in recent decades than the Catholic Church.   In 1999, Pope John Paul II speaking at a Papal Mass in St. Louis, Missouri, said,"The new evangelization calls for followers of Christ who are unconditionally pro-life: who will proclaim, celebrate and serve the Gospel of life in every situation. A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil. . . . I renew the appeal I made . . . for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary." In 2005, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote in A Culture of Life and the Penalty of Death, "Twenty-five years ago, our Conference of bishops first called for an end to the death penalty. We renew this call to seize a new moment and new momentum. This is a time to teach clearly, encourage reflection, and call for common action in the Catholic community to bring about an end to the use of the death penalty in our land." 

(Just a thought - six of the justices on the Supreme Court (including all five conservatives) are Roman Catholics. Okay, I get the need for separation of Church and State but surely one's conscience should play some role in deciding the justice and fairness of a law or statute.) 

Finally, there are the justice, fairness and practicality arguments against the death penalty.

• It has never been shown to be a deterrent.
• It is seldom applied to individuals who can afford a strong defense team and is disproportionately applied to persons of color. (The total death row population as of April 2014 was 43% white, 42% black, 13% Latino, and 2% other races.)
• Innocent people have been executed.
• The cost of capital cases are prohibitively high.

Although a SCOTUS ruling against the death penalty does not appear imminent, the states are taking action. The death penalty has now been abolished in 18 states and the District of Columbia. Moratoriums are currently in effect in another 7 states, and 2 states have not executed a prisoner in more than 15 years. (Source: The Death Penalty Information Center) 

Our Constitution, human rights' considerations, the teachings of religious leaders, the example of the world's other democracies, and justice, fairness, and practicality concerns all argue for an end to the death penalty. This barbaric and unnecessary practice, this cruel and unusual punishment, this "conscious, coldblooded taking of a life" by the state is a blot on our national character. We should rejoin the democracies of the world in barring it as soon as possible. If not now, then we'll need to wait until our wiser, more humane, less vengeful sons and daughters bring it about.

Links

Death Penalty Information Center

Amnesty International USA - US Death Penalty Facts

The Innocence Project

Sunday Roundup - September 21, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream corporate media.  Today we look at Ebola, Ukraine, rebuilding Gaza, Islamic State, and, in brief, Scotland, Obamacare, and the impact of unemployment benefits.

Ebola

Map is from WHO website

The death toll in the Ebola outbreak afflicting west Africa has now surpassed 2,600.  Besides the west African nations of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, cases have also been reported in Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo and Senegal.  Healthcare workers, already in very short supply in the impoverished countries hardest-hit by the outbreak, have paid an especially heavy price. 318 of them have been infected across four west African countries, 151 of whom have died.     Al Jazeera reported on Thursday: More than 700 more Ebola cases have emerged in West Africa in the past week week, a statistic that showed the outbreak was rapidly accelerating, the World Health Organisation has said....Later on Thursday, the UN Security Council declared the outbreak a "threat to international peace and security" and called on all states to provide urgent resources and assistance to help tackle the crisis. The alarm came as Sierra Leone readied for an unprecedented three-day nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of the Ebola in a controversial move which experts claimed could worsen the epidemic. The population of six million will be confined to their homes from midnight on Thursday as almost 30,000 volunteers go door-to-door uncovering patients and bodies hidden in people's homes.  The US has pledged to send 3,000 troops to help in the fight the disease. In addition, Cuba, Uganda, and China are all sending medical teams to the afflicted area.   As reported in The Guardian on September 16: President Barack Obama called the Ebola epidemic in west Africa a potential threat to global security as the White House pledged to send 3,000 troops to fight the worst ever outbreak of the disease in history...Almost $1bn (£620m) is needed to contain the Ebola epidemic raging across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, which could infect up to 20,000 people if unchecked by the end of the year, the UN warned..."If not dealt with effectively now, Ebola could become a major humanitarian crisis in countries currently affected," Valerie Amos, the UN humanitarian chief, told reporters in Geneva. The capacity of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia to provide even the most basic necessities was, she warned, "on the brink of collapse".  Scientific American posted a response to a NYT op-ed that raised the specter of the virus mutating to an airborne pathogen: Interviews with several infectious diseases experts reveal that whereas such a mutation—or more likely series of mutations—might physically be possible, it’s highly unlikely.  Let's hope so.

Ukraine

Map is from Al Jazeera February 27 article

The September 5 ceasefire in the Ukraine appears to be holding in spite of sporadic violations. The Independent reported on September 15: The conflict-wracked eastern Ukraine city of Luhansk had a rare day of jubilation yesterday as pro-Russian fighters paraded military vehicles victoriously through city streets – as other areas saw continued shelling in the conflict between government forces and the rebels...Luhansk’s population of about 250,000 people, reduced because of the war, emerged to celebrate “city day” yesterday, which opened on a sombre note as priests led hundreds of residents in prayer in commemoration of those killed during a government-mounted siege of the city.  Speaking at the open-air service by the Mother of Sorrows Church, local separatist leader Igor Plotnitsky mourned those that had been killed and in an unusually conciliatory public statement called for forgiveness for those responsible. Luhansk has suffered more casualties and damage from the conflict than any other city.  Alec Luhn, in a September 16 Foreign Policy dispatch, writes of the rebuilding effort there.  The pause in fighting has...been the first chance to assess the damage to the city and hopefully begin reconstruction. Residents have been trying to rebuild their homes, but most workplaces and banks have shut down, and many government benefits and pensions have not been paid for months. Construction materials, especially glass and artificial roofing, are in short supply. Winter is coming, but the gas pipes in many places have been shredded by shelling. And there's no guarantee that the fragile peace will last....If the cease-fire holds, the task of rebuilding will be the first test of the separatist government's ability to not just foment rebellion but also to run a state. "Life is returning to normal," the new head of the self-declared [Luhansk People's Republic], Igor Plotnitsky, told journalists after sharing a glass of champagne with a newly married couple accompanied by rebel groomsmen in camouflage. Not all residents are so optimistic.  Luhn quotes a woman selling spices in the midst of a burned out marketplace.  "We're hoping for the best, but we expect the shelling to start again...The number of [Ukrainian] troops outside the city is increasing." 

Gaza Reconstruction
Haaretz reported on Tuesday's announcement that the United Nations had brokered an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority that would allow reconstruction of the devastated Gaza Strip to proceed.  [UN Middle East envoy Robert] Serry told the UN Security Council that the United Nations had brokered the deal "to enable work at the scale required in the strip, involving the private sector in Gaza and giving a lead role to the Palestinian Authority in the reconstruction effort, while providing security assurances through UN monitoring that these materials will not be diverted from their entirely civilian purpose."  Damage to Gaza from the Israeli siege has been estimated to be as high as $7.8 billion.  On September 18, Haaretz also carried a Reuters report on Saudi Arabia's pledge of $500 million to help rebuild Gaza.  Saudi Arabia's commitment comes ahead of a conference in Cairo on Oct. 12 when Palestinian leaders hope other donors, including Turkey, Qatar, the European Union and United States, will step forward with promises of support. 

Islamic State

On September 18, the US Congress completed its approval of Obama's plan to provide arms and training for Syrian rebel forces, primarily Sunnis in a civil war with Syria's primarily Shia government.  Sunni Saudi Arabia lobbied Congressional leaders prior to the vote.  As the US begins its military action against Islamic State, getting ourselves into a sectarian fight that we should have no part in, many commentators see a danger of escalation.  Spencer Ackerman in The Guardian  argues that unclear military goals have been an American tradition for decades - resulting in the loss of countless lives and dollars.  A military lesson the United States seems doomed to constantly forget and painfully re-learn: unclear goals invite escalation.  Referring to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff's testimony before Congress that US military may engage in "close combat advising", Ackerman writes: Dempsey’s euphemism bursts the seams of Barack Obama’s insistence that US troops will not return to combat in Iraq. That was itself a rhetorical escalation from the White House’s earlier assurance against troops on the ground, full stop, which has proved difficult to square with the current 1,700 US troops now in Iraq, 1,600 more than were there in June. Perhaps more candidly, Dempsey said Obama has asked the general to come back for “case-by-case” authorization on involving US troops in combat, even as the president again forswore ground combat in a speech at MacDill air force base on Wednesday.  Obama's stated objectives in this third Iraq war are not clearly defined and there may be no way of knowing when they are achieved.  Ackerman continues: Obama follows in an ignominious presidential tradition. George W Bush’s goals for the second Iraq war pivoted from the mirage of eliminating weapons of mass destruction to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein to the preservation of something resembling democracy....The pattern has held, with few exceptions, since the second world war ended. Korea’s “police action” resulted in a gruesome stalemate once Douglas MacArthur reinvented the war from the preservation of a US ally in Seoul to the destruction of Moscow’s ally in Pyongyang. As many as two generations of US policymakers wish to get over Vietnam, their unrealistic guarantees to foreign proxies and preference for military solutions to entrenched, obscure political challenges repeat the central mistakes contributing to a traumatizing escalation.  US wars are more likely to end through an exogenous event – such as Russia’s diplomatic restraint of Serbia to end the 1999 Kosovo air war or Libyan rebels’ killing of Muammar Gaddafi to end the 2011 Libya air war – than through the deliberate application of military force.  

In Brief/Links

Scottish voters rejected independence from the UK on Thursday by a 55 - 45 percent vote.  The Scotsman reported on the promises from Labour and the Conservatives on greater autonomy for Scotland and on the resignation of Scotland's First Prime Minister, Alex Salmond, "after his lifelong dream of an independent Scotland was rejected by the people."  In the last weeks before the referendum. numerous British politicians came to Scotland to argue for a "no" vote.   The Independent had an interesting list of "eight things you never realized were Scottish". [The Independent, Sep 17]

Finally, here are two (more) stories that put the lie to fallacious GOP talking points.
Re: "People insured through the state and federal health care exchanges are not paying their premiums" - More than 90% of the estimated 8 million people originally signed up to get  their health insurance through the state and federal healthcare exchanges (7.3 million) are paying their premiums and remain in the program. [Kaiser Health News, Sep 19]
Re: "Extending unemployment benefits makes people lazy and drop out of the labor force."
Extending benefits to unemployed workers beyond the 26 weeks provided by most states has little effect on the unemployment rate and essentially no impact on labor force participation, a recent working paper released by the Federal Reserve Board found.  [Daily Kos, Sep 12]   Daily Kos blogger Dartagnan adds: Republicans have blocked every attempt to provide extended  benefits to the long- term unemployed since 2013...[and] haven't passed a single piece of job-creating legislation.  So what has been the result of this "experiment?"  The Labor Force participation rate is at a record low in this country: A record 92,269,000 Americans 16 and older did not participate in the labor force in August, as the labor force participation rate matched a 36-year low of 62.8 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

No threat to us and not our fight

Obama's proposed airstrikes against Islamic State are wrong on many levels.  To quote Phyllis Bennis, writing in The Progressive,  "We have to recognize that military attacks are not only wrong in a host of ways (illegal in international law, immoral because of civilian casualties, a distraction from vitally needed diplomacy) but also that those strikes are making real solutions impossible." Incredibly, we are now hearing bleatings from hawks for "boots on the ground" (again) in Iraq and (at last) in Syria to fight ISIS as well as calls for arming Syrian rebel forces.  This is a sectarian war - the discordant rumblings among Arab nations in the so-called coalition makes this eminently clear.  We should take no part in it.  In spite of the rhetoric from neocons, from various failed presidential and vice-presidential candidates, and from "perpetual war" believers, ISIS poses no imminent threat to the United States.  Islamic State has never made any threat to take the sectarian war being fought in the Middle East to the United States.

We've made mistakes before based on nonexistent threats - remember Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?  That's right - there were none.  Our unnecessary and unjustifiable invasion of Iraq set the stage for the creation of jihadist groups in the region. By destroying Iraq's government, military, and institutions, we ensured the rise of terrorist groups in countries where they were previously absent.  There was no al Qaeda in Iraq before our invasion brought them there.  There was no Islamic State in Iraq and Syria before we installed a partisan Shia to lead Iraq.  In spite of our role in destabilizing the Middle East by our totally misguided actions over the past 13 years, this is not our fight.

Why are we still giving any credence to those who misled us into those wars or to those who supported them?  Why is Obama caving in to the hawks and neocons, who should have lost all credibility by now?  The United States cannot be the world's policeman.  We tried that and failed.  The neocon dream of a new American century where all do our bidding is dangerous, costly and, ultimately, harmful to America.  Somehow we fail to understand that there is no military solution to this war.

A comprehensive diplomatic solution for both Iraq and Syria must be sought.  It is indeed the only solution to the sectarian strife now raging there.  Everyone in the region needs to be at the table - and that includes Iran.  (John Kerry, please take note.)

The arms flow to all parties must be stopped and the US should not arm any faction in these civil and sectarian wars.  Here again, diplomacy - diplomacy to weaken support for ISIS - is the right answer.  Continuing the arms flow to the combatants just prolongs these wars, adds to the death toll and ensures the continued misery of the civilian populations.

There's much that can be done short of military action.  Why these other courses of action are not being accorded the highest priority speaks volumes about the failure of political imagination and the downright stupidity gripping political "leaders".  "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."  The quote sometimes attributed to Albert Einstein pretty much sums it up.  Our political leaders are in the throes of military insanity.  They can't even learn from past mistakes.

Sunday Roundup - September 14, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news from sources outside the US mainstream corporate media. Today we look at Islamic State, Gaza, Texas politics, and in brief, the latest greenhouse gas data and the Scottish independence vote. 

Islamic State
The drums of perpetual war are beating again on the banks of the Potomac.  Without a Congressional vote or debate, American military might is being thrown at Islamic State (aka ISIS) in the midst of the sectarian war that has been gripping the Middle East.  On September 9, Sarah Lazare at Commondreams.org reported on a recently released study on the strange parallel between the arming of Islamic State and al Qaeda.  The Islamic State (IS) is now in possession of lethal weapons formerly owned by so-called "moderate" Syrian rebels, as well as large quantities of arms produced in the United States, a new report reveals.  The study — conducted by Conflict Armament Research, a research organization that tracks weapons proliferation in war zones — documents arms and ammunition captured by Kurdish People's Protection Units and Peshmerga forces from IS in Iraq and Syria from from mid-June to early August 2014...."This is one more piece of evidence of why military solutions have devastating consequences in the immediate and long terms," said Phyllis Bennis, senior fellow at Institute for Policy Studies, in an interview with Common Dreams. "We see an example of the consequences of the over-arming of the region if we look back at Afghanistan in the 1980s during the anti-Soviet War when the U.S. provided stinger missiles that can bring down aircraft to mujahedin guerrillas who morphed into al Qaeda."  We have 13 years of experience in knowing what doesn't work in these conflicts and here we are doing it again.

There are other options short of war to weaken ISIS. The above-quoted Phyllis Bennis wrote in The Progressive on September 10: We have to recognize that military attacks are not only wrong in a host of ways (illegal in international law, immoral because of civilian casualties, a distraction from vitally needed diplomacy) but also that those strikes are making real solutions impossible....weakening ISIS requires ending the support it relies on from tribal leaders, military figures, and ordinary Iraqi Sunnis.   Bennis then presents six steps short of war to accomplish this:  

• Stop the airstrikes. 
• Make real the commitment for “No boots on the ground.”  
• Organize a real diplomatic partnership to deal with ISIS. Even though the U.S. is carrying out airstrikes and deploying new troops in Iraq, everyone agrees there is no military solution. 
• Initiate a new search for broader diplomatic solutions in the United Nations. That means working to build a real coalition aimed at using diplomatic and financial pressures, not military strikes, at the international level in both Iraq and Syria.
• Push the UN...to restart real negotiations on ending the civil war in Syria. That means everyone involved needs to be at the table.
• Massively increase US humanitarian contributions to U.N. agencies for the now millions of refugees and IDPs in and from both Syria and Iraq.

Related

As usual in these poorly thought-out rushes to military action, some of the best analysis comes from The Nation.  Here are links to a trio of relevant articles.

Phyllis Bennis, "The Speech on Diplomacy That Obama Should Have Given Last Night"

Zoe Carpenter, "Is the War on ISIS Illegal?"

William Grieder, "Obama’s Long War in the Middle East"

Gaza

As Egypt gets ready to host a donor conference for the devastated enclave of Gaza on October 12, Noam Chomsky's September 9 article for TomDispatch.com "Ceasefires in Which Violations Never Cease - What’s Next for Israel, Hamas, and Gaza?" should be required reading for every pundit on the planet and for anyone wanting to understand the situation in Gaza.  Tom Englehardt's introduction makes clear that if what Israel wanted to accomplish in Operation Protective Edge was to destroy support for Hamas, they failed miserably.  Englehardt quotes a Palestinian poll taken just before the current ceasefire went into effect:  If new presidential elections are held today and only two [candidates] were nominated, [the Hamas candidate] Haniyeh, for the first time since we have started asking about his popularity about eight years ago, would receive a majority of 61% and Abbas would receive 32%.  

Chomsky notes the history of these ceasefires whose terms have basically remained the same since Hamas came to power in the 2006 elections.  The regular pattern is for Israel, then, to disregard whatever agreement is in place, while Hamas observes it -- as Israel has officially recognized -- until a sharp increase in Israeli violence elicits a Hamas response, followed by even fiercer brutality. These escalations, which amount to shooting fish in a pond, are called "mowing the lawn" in Israeli parlance. The most recent was more accurately described as "removing the topsoil" by a senior U.S. military officer, appalled by the practices of the self-described "most moral army in the world."  Chomsky has much to say about Israel's disengagement from Gaza in 2005, the world reaction to the internationally monitored 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power in Gaza and the West Bank, Operations Cast Lead and Pillar of Defense, the recently concluded Operation Protective Edge, and the latest Israeli land grab in the West Bank.  On the land grab: As Operation Protective Edge ended, Israel announced its largest appropriation of West Bank land in 30 years, almost 1,000 acres.  Israel Radio reported that the takeover was in response to the killing of the three Jewish teenagers by "Hamas militants." A Palestinian boy was burned to death in retaliation for the murder, but no Israeli land was handed to Palestinians, nor was there any reaction when an Israeli soldier murdered 10-year-old Khalil Anati on a quiet street in a refugee camp near Hebron on August 10th, while the most moral army in the world was smashing Gaza to bits, and then drove away in his jeep as the child bled to death. 

Quoting Israeli scholars, journalists, military and political leaders, Chomsky concludes that a viable two-state solution is not a strong consideration in Israeli political circles: The realistic alternative to a two-state settlement is that Israel will continue to carry forward the plans it has been implementing for years, taking over whatever is of value to it in the West Bank, while avoiding Palestinian population concentrations and removing Palestinians from the areas it is integrating into Israel...Gaza will likely remain under its usual harsh siege, separated from the West Bank.  And the Syrian Golan Heights -- like Jerusalem, annexed in violation of Security Council orders -- will quietly become part of Greater Israel.  In the meantime, West Bank Palestinians will be contained in unviable cantons, with special accommodation for elites in standard neocolonial style.....For a century, the Zionist colonization of Palestine has proceeded primarily on the pragmatic principle of the quiet establishment of facts on the ground, which the world was to ultimately come to accept.  It has been a highly successful policy.  There is every reason to expect it to persist as long as the United States provides the necessary military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological support.  For those concerned with the rights of the brutalized Palestinians, there can be no higher priority than working to change U.S. policies, not an idle dream by any means.

Related
For a discussion of what has happened to Palestinians politically and territorially, see "The Map: A Palestinian Nation Thwarted & Speaking Truth to Power" - Informed Comment (reprinted July 13, 2014)

Map is from Friends of Sabeel - North America website
and Informed Comment

Lone Star Politics
Over the past year or so, there have been various surges of optimism over the possibility of Democrats picking up a governorship or a US Senate seat now held by a Republican in a red state. The latest bit of unfounded optimism is the Kansas Senate race.  The Democrat is dropping out of the race and Democrats are supporting the independent.  Whether this last bit of optimism pans out or not, we'll have to see.  Earlier would-be upsets are now long forgotten and Democrats are trying desperately to hold onto Senate seats in swing states.  One of the early examples of this unfounded optimism was in the Texas governor's race.  As Rolling Stone journalist Mark Binelli noted in a July article: This was supposed to be the year Texas turned blue, or at least purple, the year female and Hispanic voters turned out in droves and carried Democrat state Sen. Wendy Davis to the governor's mansion. Battleground Texas, a group founded last year with the bold goal of transforming Texas into a swing state, targeted the swelling Latino population, which by 2020 is projected to overtake the white population of Texas....By Memorial Day, however, the Battleground Texas narrative, at least in this election cycle, had begun to look like Daily Kos fan fiction. Davis was trailing Abbott by 14 points. Meanwhile, back in her old Fort Worth Senate district, a Tea Party Republican named Konni Burton seems well-placed to win Davis' old seat in the fall.  The Abbott lead over Davis is still hovering in low to mid double digits and our second most populous state looks like it will remain "red.  The article "Lone Star Crazy: How Right-Wing Extremists Took Over Texas" explains how Texas fell "into the hands of gun nuts, border-sealers and talk-radio charlatans":  After nearly six years of pumping out cynical horror stories involving our nefarious president and a Washington bureaucracy run amok, the right-wing fear machine has managed to reduce its target audience to a quivering state of waking nightmare, jumping at shadows.  Binelli sees a parallel with the 1960's.  In the years after JFK's murder, Dallas was known as the City of Hate, an image which the city struggled for years to erase.  Nowadays, the City of Hate era has grown so distant that hate has been allowed to return as a winning campaign slogan in Texas. ...Then as now, the pot was stirred by reactionary preachers..., wealthy string-pullers.., political opportunists...and organized interest groups.  

Links/In Brief
Scotland
With less than a week until Scotland votes on independence from the UK on September 18, the most recent polls are saying that it is too close to call.  [The Guardian, Sep 12]

If the vote is for independence, a whole slew of constitutional questions arise.  And the exit of the overwhelmingly Labour Scottish MP's from Westminster has led to a (perhaps ill-founded) hope among Tories that Scottish independence will consign the rest of the UK to permanent Conservative government.  [The New Statesman, Feb 20]

Greenhouse Gases
Surging carbon dioxide levels have pushed greenhouse gases to record highs in the atmosphere, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has said.  Concentrations of carbon dioxide, the major cause of global warming, increased at their fastest rate for 30 years in 2013, despite warnings from the world’s scientists of the need to cut emissions to halt temperature rises. [The Guardian, Sep 9]

The Sixth Extinction

In the 525 million years or so since creatures with backbones first appeared on our planet, there have been five mass extinctions.  A mass extinction (aka an "extinction event") is a widespread, geologically rapid loss of biodiversity.  In each of the five events classified as mass extinctions, no less than 60% (Ordovician-Silurian event, ~450 million years ago) and as much as 96% (Permian-Triassic event, ~250 million years ago) of all species were lost.  The most famous mass extinction is that which doomed the dinosaurs (and many other species) about 65 million years ago.  An asteroid crashed into the Yucatan, the dinosaurs died off and mammals rose to the top of the food chain.

Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction takes a look at the evidence that we may be in the midst of a sixth mass extinction - what may come to be known as the Anthropocene extinction.  Referring to an article that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Kolbert writes, "If Wake and Vredenburg were correct, then those of us alive today not only are witnessing one of the rarest events in life's history, we are also causing it."

Until the late 18th century the idea that species could go extinct had few, if any, supporters. Evidence from the fossil record gradually proved that extinctions did occur and that there were some extinctions that were so massive that they only could have been caused by a catastrophic event - for example, an asteroid,  a huge volcanic eruption or a severe change in the climate.  Kolbert takes us on a journey through the causes of extinctions in a series of vignettes focusing on one or another creature that has become, or is in the process of becoming, extinct.

Panamanian golden frog (Wikipedia)

She first takes us to Central America where the Panamanian golden frog is disappearing - apparently from a previously unknown, but now ubiquitous, fungus.  There are two theories on how the fungus became so widespread.  The first theory is that it spread with shipments of African clawed frogs used in pregnancy tests in the 1950's and 60's.  The second is that it spread with the export of North American bullfrogs, often for human consumption, to Europe, Asia and South America.  In either case, without being loaded by someone on a boat or a plane, it would have been impossible for a frog carrying the fungus to spread from Africa or North America to other parts of the world.  The spread of the deadly fungus "appears to be, for all intents and purposes, unstoppable." Amphibians are the world's most endangered class.of animals. "But extinction rates among many other groups," Kolbert writes, "are approaching amphibian levels.  It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion."

Human hunters played a role, along with climate change, in the extinction of the North American mastodons.  The last of the great auks was killed by hunters on an island near Iceland in 1844.  But besides hunting animals to extinction, we've found less direct ways to endanger species. Since the Industrial Revolution began, the CO2 level in the atmosphere has increased by nearly 50%; atmospheric methane levels have more than doubled.  Our impact on the world around us is so great that some scientists are beginning to refer to the current geologic age as the Anthropocene.  "Roughly one-third of the CO2 that humans have so far pumped into the air has been absorbed by the oceans...a stunning 150 billion tons.  As with most aspects of the Anthropocene, though, it's not only the scale of the transfer but also the speed that's significant."

Coral reef near Fiji
The Guardian article on World Research Institute's 2011 Report: "Reefs at Risk"

Besides the impact on atmospheric temperatures and sea levels, the excess carbon dioxide being absorbed by the sea is acidifying the sea - to the detriment of sea life. Of the myriad possible impacts of this acidification,  Kolbert tells us, "probably the most significant involves the group of creatures known as calcifiers."  This varied group includes starfish, sea urchins, clams, oysters, coral, seaweed, algae, and many other species. Coral reefs, besides being threatened themselves, provide an amazing ecosystem. "Thousands - perhaps millions of species have evolved to rely on coral reefs, either directly for protection or food, or indirectly, to prey on species that come seeking protection or food."  Ocean acidification is just one of the threats facing coral reefs -overfishing and deforestation also endanger them - because of increased algae growth and susceptibility to pathogens,  Climate change also adds to the extinction threat - if water temperatures rise too high, coral reef bleaching occurs and the colony stops growing or, in the worst case, dies.  Quoting British scientists,  Kolbert writes: "It is likely that reefs will be the first major ecosystem in the modern era to go extinct."

Kolbert discusses forests and the impact of climate change on species distribution, invasive species and man's role in transporting them, and the near-extinction of the Sumatran rhino and its relationship to the mega-fauna extinctions that occurred 40,000 and 20,000 years ago.  She notes that people have directly transformed roughly 27 million square miles of the 50 million square miles of land on the planet that are are ice-free and habitat disruption plays a role in the loss of species.

She has an intriguing chapter on the disappearance of our older siblings - the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and the recently discovered homo floresiensis - and on the threat to our next closest kin - the great apes.  Chimpanzee and highland gorilla populations have dropped 50% over the past 50 years, while the lowland gorilla population has shrunk by 60% over the past two decades and Sumatran orangutans are now classified as "critically endangered".

The human ability for cooperative problem-solving, creativity,our restlessness and inquisitiveness, and, perhaps most of all, the capacity for symbolic representation and language - due to "a tiny set of genetic variations" - divide us from Neanderthals and other near relatives, "but that has made all the difference."

The anthropocene or sixth extinction will most likely not be as massive as any of the "Big Five." Writing about the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of Biodiversity, Kolbert asks "In an extinction event of our own making, what happens to us?"  There are two schools of thought on this. One possibility is that "we, too, will eventually be undone by our transformation of the ecological landscape."  The other, more optimistic, possibility is that "human ingenuity will outrun any disaster human ingenuity sets in motion"  - for example, by means of atmospheric re-engineering or, in the worst case, settling the planets and moons of the solar system. But in the end, perhaps the fate of our own species, Kolbert muses, is not "what's most worth attending to.  Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding. without quite meaning to, which evolutionary paths will remain open and which will be closed forever.  No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy."

Related
Our Closest Call [The Left Bank Cafe, July 29, 2012]

"Levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose at a record-shattering pace last year, a new report shows, a surge that surprised scientists and spurred fears of an accelerated warming of the planet in decades to come." [Washington Post, September 9]