Sunday, May 10, 2015

Weekend Roundup

We had four or five straight days this week of "elevated" severe weather threats. Most of the real damage took place in Oklahoma and north Texas, but we did have one EF-3 tornado on the ground for 15 miles near Rose Hill, about ten miles west of here. Rain itself has been spotty, and most likely we're still below average year-to-date. More surprising to me is Tropical Storm Ana appearing a month ahead of the Atlantic hurricane season -- the earliest such storm since 2003. Wikipedia says the forecast for hurricanes this year is about 20% below the 1950-2014 average, but such an early storm strikes me as ominous.

This week's scattered links:

  • Mark Bittman: Obama and Republicans Agree on the Trans-Pacific Partnership . . . Unfortunately: I gather from Twitter (err, TPM) that Obama dismissed Elizabeth Warren's opposition to TPP by saying, "The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else." Obama, on the other hand, is so far above the political fray that he's got George Will applauding TPP as "Obama's best idea." Of course, it's easy for Obama to dismiss the concerns of Democrats as "speculation" because he's spent the last five years negotiating TPP in secret. [Yves Smith: "There would be no reason to keep it so secret if it was in the public interest."] Indeed, it's only come up now because he wants Congress to write him a blank check to negotiate whatever without allowing future amendments. You'd think folks as paranoid as the Republicans in Congress would never go for that, but evidently the fix is in. Bittman normally writes about food -- I can recommend his cookbooks How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food and The Best Recipes in the World: More Than 1,000 International Dishes to Cook at Home -- so it's surprising to see him wander into political waters, but he points out:

    Even if you look "only" at food and the environment, the TPP should be ripped apart and put back together with public and congressional input. The pact would threaten local food, diminish labeling laws, likely keep environmentally destructive industrial meat production high (despite the fact that as a nation we're eating less meat) and probably maintain high yields of commodity crops while causing price cuts.

    It would certainly weaken food safety. For example, more than 90 percent of our seafood is imported, a figure that includes fish that were caught domestically and sent overseas for processing before coming back in, which makes the inspection process even more complicated. All told, that's more than five billion pounds of imports annually, and according to the Center for Food Safety, just 90 federal inspectors guarantee its safety. (The Food and Drug Administration inspects less than 2 percent of imported seafood.) By reducing restrictions on Southeast Asian imports, the TPP would allow more fish containing chemicals that are illegal in domestic aquaculture to reach our shores; by making inspections less effective, it would virtually guarantee that those chemicals make it to our tables.

    The agreement would even allow countries to challenge one another's laws, so that "equivalency" may simply mean that the least powerful regulations become the norm. The United States would have no special standing: If our laws are seen as restraining trade or limiting profits, they could be challenged in special courts, per the TPP's "investor state" clause. Philip Morris is suing Uruguay over that country's antismoking laws under just such circumstances; there are several examples of American companies' flouting local laws and citing trade agreements as an excuse; and Mexico has been sued repeatedly for theoretically diminishing investor profits.

    When individual governments have little say, corporate "efficiency" amounts to the global economy's being run as an ill-regulated business model (an equally egregious trans-Atlantic agreement is currently being negotiated). The projected benefits to the public -- as usual, "job creation" leads the list -- are mythical, and you don't have to take my word for it.

    Some other relevant links:

  • Paul Krugman: Race, Class and Neglect:

    Every time you're tempted to say that America is moving forward on race -- that prejudice is no longer as important as it used to be -- along comes an atrocity to puncture your complacency. Almost everyone realizes, I hope, that the Freddie Gray affair wasn't an isolated incident, that it's unique only to the extent that for once there seems to be a real possibility that justice may be done.

    And the riots in Baltimore, destructive as they are, have served at least one useful purpose: drawing attention to the grotesque inequalities that poison the lives of too many Americans.

    Yet I do worry that the centrality of race and racism to this particular story may convey the false impression that debilitating poverty and alienation from society are uniquely black experiences. In fact, much though by no means all of the horror one sees in Baltimore and many other places is really about class, about the devastating effects of extreme and rising inequality.

    Take, for example, issues of health and mortality. Many people have pointed out that there are a number of black neighborhoods in Baltimore where life expectancy compares unfavorably with impoverished Third World nations. But what's really striking on a national basis is the way class disparities in death rates have been soaring even among whites.

    Most notably, mortality among white women has increased sharply since the 1990s, with the rise surely concentrated among the poor and poorly educated; life expectancy among less educated whites has been falling at rates reminiscent of the collapse of life expectancy in post-Communist Russia.

    And yes, these excess deaths are the result of inequality and lack of opportunity, even in those cases where their direct cause lies in self-destructive behavior. Overuse of prescription drugs, smoking, and obesity account for a lot of early deaths, but there's a reason such behaviors are so widespread, and that reason has to do with an economy that leaves tens of millions behind.

    Actually, the adverse effects of inequality have been well documented (see, e.g., Ichiro Kawachi/Bruce P Kennedy: The Health of Nations: Why Inequality Is Harmful to Your Health and Richard Wilkinson: The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier). Still, the Russian analogy is shocking (if I recall correctly, life expectancy for males dropped from close to 70 to 49 in a decade, which probably hasn't happened anywhere else since WWII). It's hard to believe that the US economy and safety net have sunk that far, but the sheer indifference of many political figures borders on cruelty, and the cult of austerity has convinced many people that public action is impossible. It's curious that one effort no one has lined up to celebrate the 50th anniversary of is the War on Poverty: even the heirs of its supporters don't seem to have the energy or vision (or memory) to recall that it actually was working until sabotaged by political indifference (Nixon) and contempt (Reagan) and cowardice (Clinton).

    Also see Jeff Madrick: The Cost of Child Poverty.

  • Dean Obeidallah: Muslim-Bashing Can Be Very Lucrative: Geller got more than the usual press this week when her "Draw Muhammad" cartooning event in Texas provoked a couple of overly sensitive American muslims to commit martyrdom-by-cop trying to shoot their way into the event. That may have seemed like a PR coup, but I haven't seen anyone -- even muslimphobes like Bill Maher -- stand up to identify with her. Author looks at the money trail, such as it is, citing a "Fear, Inc. report that found that certain key foundations have donated close to $60 million in recent years to these anti-Muslim advocates." Geller's only getting a small slice of that, but she's more than making ends meet.

Also, a few links for further study:

  • Dean Baker: The Reconnection Agenda: The Fun and Easy Route to Broadly Shared Prosperity: Review of Jared Bernstein's new book, The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity -- available as a free PDF, a cheap Kindle book, or a moderately priced paperback. Bernstein was briefly famous when VP Joe Biden hired him as economic advisor in 2009, although I ran into him earlier when I read his 2008 book Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries). As the Biden appointment shows, obviously not a flaming radical, but much of what he argues for -- like full employment -- proved unthinkable even within Obama's circle of "confidence men." Bernstein's book looks to be heavy on policy wonkery -- i.e., he describes what could be done if we wanted to do it, rather than exploring why such political will doesn't exist (at least at the level of practical politicians). Baker adds some quibbles, notably pointing out that the persistent trade deficit (and overvaluation of the dollar) is something that exists because certain US interest groups favor it.

  • Andrew Cockburn: The Kingpin Strategy: Subhed: "Assassination as Policy in Washington and How It Failed, 1990-2015." I've been inclined to attribute Washington's jones for targeted assassination to a case of neocon Israel envy, but Cockburn finds earlier roots in the War on Drugs' "kingpin strategy": a program to put faces on various "drug cartels" and mark progress by knocking off their heads -- Pablo Escobar, of the Medellin cartel in Colombia, was an early target. (Of course, now that I think of it, this is the Vietnam Phoenix Program all over again.) Of course, it turns out that killing drug kingpins actually resulted in more drugs at lower prices -- the cartels, after all, were just that, so breaking them up only increased competition. With the War on Terror, drug kingpins gave way to HVIs ("high-value individuals"). Turns out that didn't work so well either:

    The results, [Rivolo] discovered when he graphed them out, offered a simple, unequivocal message: the strategy was indeed making a difference, just not the one intended. It was, however, the very same message that the kingpin strategy had offered in the drug wars of the 1990s. Hitting HVIs did not reduce attacks and save American lives; it increased them. Each killing quickly prompted mayhem. Within three kilometers of the target's base of operation, attacks over the following 30 days shot up by 40%. Within a radius of five kilometers, a typical area of operations for an insurgent cell, they were still up 20%. Summarizing his findings for Odierno, Rivolo added an emphatic punch line: "Conclusion: HVI Strategy, our principal strategy in Iraq, is counter-productive and needs to be re-evaluated."

    As with the kingpin strategy, the causes of this apparently counter-intuitive result became obvious upon reflection. Dead commanders were immediately replaced, and the newcomers were almost always younger and more aggressive than their predecessors, eager to "make their bones" and prove their worth.

    Cockburn, by the way, has a new book: Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins. Article also at TomDispatch.

  • Seymour Hersh: The Killing of Osama bin Laden: Much new detail here, if you're into that sort of thing -- I didn't bother with any of the Seal memoirs, although I wonder how clear they were that Bin Laden was an ISI prisoner, or that the raid was arranged with collaboration and consent of Pakistani officials. For instance:

    One lie that has endured is that the Seals had to fight their way to their target. Only two Seals have made any public statement: No Easy Day, a first-hand account of the raid by Matt Bissonnette, was published in September 2012; and two years later Rob O'Neill was interviewed by Fox News. Both men had resigned from the navy; both had fired at bin Laden. Their accounts contradicted each other on many details, but their stories generally supported the White House version, especially when it came to the need to kill or be killed as the Seals fought their way to bin Laden. O'Neill even told Fox News that he and his fellow Seals thought 'We were going to die.' 'The more we trained on it, the more we realised . . . this is going to be a one-way mission.'

    But the retired official told me that in their initial debriefings the Seals made no mention of a firefight, or indeed of any opposition. The drama and danger portrayed by Bissonnette and O'Neill met a deep-seated need, the retired official said: 'Seals cannot live with the fact that they killed bin Laden totally unopposed, and so there has to be an account of their courage in the face of danger. The guys are going to sit around the bar and say it was an easy day? That's not going to happen.'

    They did make the operation more dramatic by crashing a helicopter, which they then had to blow up while ordering in a replacement. Hersh's final lines:

    High-level lying nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no.

  • Costas Lapavitsas: The Syriza strategy has come to an end: An interview with the Greek economist, author of Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (2014, Verso), on the various differences in Europe, especially between Germany and Greece, and how they're tearing the Eurozone apart.

  • Nomi Prins: The Clintons and Their Banker Friends: Adapted from her book, All the Presidents' Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power, recently reprinted in paperback. Although Bush and Obama did more to bail out bankrupt banks, no one made them more money, through generous legislation and hands off regulation, than Bill Clinton.

  • Sandy Tolan: The One-State Conundrum: What makes Tolan's The Lemon Tree one of the most accessible books on Israel-Palestine is how he uses a couple very real individuals as a prism for the big picture story. His new book, Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land, picks another such example, a Palestinian violinist who founded a music school in the Occupied Territories. Example:

    I have spent the last five years documenting both the harsh realities of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Ramzi Aburedwan's dream of building a music school that could provide Palestinian children with an alternative to the violence and humiliation that is their everyday lives. I sat with children in the South Hebron hills, who had been stoned by Israeli settlers and set upon by German shepherds as they walked two miles to school. I met a 14-year-old girl who was forced to play a song for a soldier at a checkpoint, supposedly to prove her flute was not a weapon.

    Farmers in villages shared their anguish with me over their lost livelihoods, because the 430-mile-long separation barrier Israel has built on Palestinian land, essentially confiscating nearly 10% of the West Bank, cuts them off from their beloved olive groves. I've seen men crammed into metal holding pens before being taken to minimum-wage jobs in Israel, and women squeezed between seven-foot-high concrete blocks, waiting to pray at Jerusalem's Al Aqsa Mosque. I've spoken with countless families who have been subject to night raids by the Israeli military, including one young mother, home alone with her one-year-old boy, who woke up to the sight of 10 Israeli soldiers breaking down her door and pointing guns at her. They had, it turned out, raided the wrong apartment. The baby slept through it all.

    Ramzi and the teachers at his school, Al Kamandjati (Arabic for "The Violinist"), see it as an antidote to the sense of oppression and confinement that pervades Palestinian life. And it's true that the students I talked to there regularly reported that playing music gave them a transformative sense of calm and protection -- and not only in the moments when they picked up their instruments and disappeared into Bach, Beethoven, or Fairuz.

    Hope they play some Ellington too.

  • Philip Weiss: 'NY Review of Books' says Tony Judt didn't really mean it when he called for the end of a Jewish state: A rebuttal to assertions made in a review of Judt's essay collection When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010 by Jonathan Freedland (paywalled). The late historian's piece, included in the book, dated from 2003, and as Weiss points out included a number of predictions which have held up rather well. Weiss writes:

    I don't think I've seen anything like this before: such a retraction, issued after the author's death, of a signature portion of his beliefs. And I understand why; it anguished liberal Zionists to hear anyone thoughtful come out against the idea of a Jewish state, won so heroically over 80 years of battle in the chambers of western officials. It was a betrayal of an article of faith, by someone who had previously been a Zionist.

    The New York Review of Books has done all it can to bury Judt's essay. It never asked Judt to expand on his views in the years that followed, let alone ask Ali Abunimah or Ghada Karmi or any other Palestinian who can pick up a pencil to respond. No, this was an all-Jewish event. And the retraction here is being performed by a man who wrote a year back that Ari Shavit is a "liberal" and the right person to talk to American Jews about the conflict (Shavit who "opposed the Oslo Agreement, calling it 'a collective act of messianic drunkenness' and defending its most prominent opponent, Netanyahu, against charges that he was partly to blame for its failure . . . [who] during the Second Intifada, . . . praised Sharon for having 'conducted the military campaign patiently, wisely and calmly' and 'the diplomatic campaign with impressive talent' [, who in] the final week of the war in Gaza this summer that took the lives of 72 Israelis and more than 2100 Palestinians, . . . wrote that strong objection to Israeli conduct was illegitimate and amounted to anti-Semitic bigotry").

    As he's explained in his memoirs, Judt was very attached to Israel, even working on a kibbutz there, so his 2003 essay had the impact of a jilted believer -- Judt was a huge fan of a collection of essays by disenchanted ex-Communists, The God That Failed, so he would have appreciated that a comparable book could collect key essays by ex-Zionists.

  • Some links on the UK (and other) elections: I still have enough residual sense of international solidarity to at least root for left-leaning parties all around the world, although UK "New Labour" leader Tony Blair's "Bush's Poodle" act sorely tried those sympathies, and it seems like France's Socialists have long tended to be more enthusiastic about French imperialism than the competing Gaullists were. On the other hand, I keep favoring the Democratic Party here in the USA, even though they have the worst record of all, so I'm not unaware of how these travesties happen. My sense of solidarity even extends to Israel's Labor Party (if indeed it still exists). But beyond oft-frustrated sympathies, I haven't tried to sort out what's just happened in the UK. I'll just note some links for future reference:

Ask a question, or send a comment.