By Saed Bannoura | IMEMC & Agencies | February 10, 2012
File Photo
The Israeli daily, Haaretz, reported Friday that an Israeli soldier and two young female settlers were arrested by the Israeli Police for writing anti-Arab, Anti-Islam graffiti in the Al-Lubban Ash-Sharqiyya Palestinian village, south of the northern West Bank city of Nablus.
The three were arrested on Thursday at night; the soldier is a resident of the Itamar illegal settlement, near Nablus.
The soldier and two young female setters were caught on tape by a surveillance camera infiltrating into the Palestinian village last Tuesday at 1:30 A.M.
He drove a car into the village and one of the female settlers stepped-up and used a knife to cut open some cement sacks.
Later on, the three sprayed graffiti including “Death to Arabs”, “Mohammad is a pig”, and “Price Tag” in the village.
Dozens of residents in the village, woke up on the sound of the settlers’ vehicle driving in their village, and tried to intercept the car; an argument took place and the soldier used his automatic rifle to scare the residents away; the three settlers then drove out of the village.
The District Court in Jerusalem decided to remand the soldier under interrogation until Monday; he admitted to the vandalism act, while the two young women, Orien Nizri, from Jerusalem, and Sarah Goldberg from Tapuach illegal settlement, will remain in detention, until Tuesday, pending further legal action.
Price Tag attacks carried out by extremist settlers, including Israeli soldiers who are also settlers, are continuously being carried out against the Palestinians, their property, their orchards and farmlands, and against holy sites; such attacks included burning several mosques and a church.
These attacks also targeted offices and property that belong to leftist Israeli groups, including offices and property of members of the Israeli Peace Now Movement.
The settlers blame Israeli peace groups, and the Palestinians for any evacuation of illegal settlement outposts in the occupied territories.
February 10, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Anti-Arabism, Itamar, West Bank |
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Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan has entered his 55th day of hunger strike. He has long passed the critical stage and is in danger of organ failure any moment now. In other words, Khader Adnan is dying.
The silence from international media is deafening. Much of the publicity highlighting Adnan’s case came from social media via Twitter and blogs.
Does a young father of two arrested in the dead of night from his home, held under illegal administrative detention i.e. no charges have been brought against him, beaten and tortured during his interrogation, hunger striking since December 18th—a day after his arrest—not warrant headlines?
Does his identity as spokesperson for the Islamic Jihad cloud the editors’ judgments? Does his long beard — most of which has now fallen out due to the effects of starvation — not make for sexy media attention?
Yesterday a group of Palestinians called up Al Jazeera’s Jerusalem Bureau, demanding to know the reason for the bureau’s nonexistent coverage regarding Khader Adnan. Why Al Jazeera English? Why not the myopic BBC—who’ve recently proclaimed their censorship of the word “Palestine” from their music programmes—or The Guardian or CNN? (The last one was a joke.)
As an Arab news source based in Jerusalem, Al Jazeera English holds the responsibility to report what is happening to Palestinians. Not only are they not covering the bombings in Gaza, but they are ignoring the ethnic cleansing happening under their noses in Jerusalem. They have also completely ignored the weekly, daily popular protests in Palestine, while at the same time attempting to present themselves as the voice of the people who are revolting against oppression in the Middle East.
The litany of crimes that Israel commits on a daily basis against Palestinians is long and ranges from land theft, ethnic cleansing, violence against men, women, and children, bi or tri-weekly bombing campaigns on the besieged people of Gaza, political arrests of dozens of Palestinians on a weekly basis including children as young as 13 years of age and institutionalized racism and discrimination that Palestinians face every day which prohibits them from living anything resembling a normal life. As a result many of us turn to blogs and twitter to find out what is happening which begs the question, what exactly is AJE correspondent Cal Perry being paid to report on in Palestine?
Furthermore, while all political prisoners are a shame to the countries imprisoning them, what was the criteria that Al Jazeera used to determine that a self professed Egyptian Zionist, Maikel Nabil, was more worthy of coverage than a Palestinian anti-Zionist?
Coverage of Maikel Nabil from Al Jazeera English:
Al Jazeera simply cannot state that Khader Adnan’s hunger strike is not news worthy as international human rights organizations have expressed alarm and condemnation over his detention and concern for his deteriorating health.
The following conversation took place between one caller and a woman from Al Jazeera English Jerusalem office, in response to that caller’s question about why Khader Adnan has been receiving so little exposure from Al Jazeera English.
“But there are other important stories we’re covering.”
“But Khader Adnan has been on hunger strike for 54 days in administrative detention and he’s dying.”
“But there are people dying everywhere.”
The caller was then directed to the editor, who said:
“With all due respect, it’s not up to you to tell us what to cover. I’m only accountable to my superiors in Doha.”
The editor continued to say that there will be a story on the website today so perhaps “you should wait before passing judgments.”
Did that mean that the caller should wait until Khader Adnan dies before he can get decent coverage?
The disrespect and arrogance that Al Jazeera English has shown to Palestinians with the lack of coverage has been nothing short of shocking. If Al Jazeera cannot commit itself to doing actual reporting about the cruelty of the Israeli occupation on a daily basis against Palestinians then it would be best for them to move their office to Tel Aviv or head back home to Qatar.
February 10, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture | Al Jazeera, Human rights, Hunger strike, Khader Adnan, Palestinian prisoners in Israel |
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492183.mp3
Sheffield PSC last night hosted a talk by Professor Keith Whitelam, author of The Invention of Ancient Israel, the Silencing of Palestinian History and Palestine, the Bible and the Imperial Imagination.
Keith Whitelam’s book has caused some controversy in academic circles, as explained by Simon Targett
Like other sceptics, Whitelam, a soft-spoken Quaker with a Lincolnshire lilt, contends that ancient Israel is an invention of modern scholarship. He believes that the picture of a thriving Iron Age Jewish kingdom headed by David and Solomon is “a fiction”. Unlike other sceptics, he goes one key step further, contending that the scholarly debate has been driven by a dominant “biblical discourse” fuelled by a tankful of “unspoken and unacknowledged” assumptions. The main effect, he says, has been “the silencing of Palestinian history”.
According to Whitelam, the history of Palestine has been distorted by the deference shown to the Hebrew Bible. All the great biblical scholars – from the earliest explorers like Edward Robinson through mid-century biblical specialists like the German Albrecht Alt and the American William Albright, to modern scholars like Israel Finkelstein – have been diverted by the search for ancient Israel, and particularly the Davidic empire. This search, he maintains, has sometimes been underpinned by more controversial political assumptions, which have a bearing on the fraught contemporary politics of the Near East.
The audio provides an interesting introduction to the ideas that Professor Whitelam explores in his book, along with some up to date commentary.
In case you missed it:
Jerusalem does not belong to Jewish-Israelis: “The Bible Came From Arabia”,
- The Bible Came From Arabia (middleeastatemporal.wordpress.com)
- The Bible Unearthed (The Documentary) (middleeastatemporal.wordpress.com)
February 10, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Bible Came From Arabia, Israel Finkelstein, Palestine |
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The Nuclear Menace
As the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approves a construction/operating license for two new reactors in Georgia, alarming reports from Japan indicate the Fukushima catastrophe is far from over.
Thousands of tons of intensely radioactive spent fuel are still in serious jeopardy. Radioactive trash and water are spewing into the environment. And nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen reports that during the string of disasters following March 11, 2011′s earthquake and tsunami, Fukushima 1′s containment cap may actually have lifted off its base, releasing dangerously radioactive gasses and opening a gap for an ensuing hydrogen explosion.
There are some two dozen of these Mark I-style containments currently in place in the US.
Newly released secret email from the NRC also shows its Commissioners were in the dark about much of what was happening during the early hours of the Fukushima disaster. They worried that Tokyo might have to be evacuated, and that airborne radiation spewing across the Pacific could seriously contaminate Alaska.
Reactor pushers have welcomed the NRC’s approval of the new Westinghouse AP-1000 design for Georgia’s Vogtle. Two reactors operate there now, and the two newly approved ones are being funded with $8.3 billion in federally guaranteed loans and state-based rate hikes levied in advance of the reactors’ being completed.
NRC Chair Gregory Jazcko made the sole no vote on the Vogtle license, warning that the proposed time frame would not allow lessons from Fukushima to be incorporated into the reactors’ design.
The four Commissioners voting to approve have attacked Jaszco in front of Congress for his “management style,” but this vote indicates the problem is certainly more rooted in attitudes toward reactor safety.
The approval is the first for a new construction project since 1978. The debate leading up to it stretched out for years. Among other things, the Commission raised questions about whether the AP1000 can withstand earthquakes and other natural disasters. Even now the final plans are not entirely complete. Only two other US reactors—in neighboring South Carolina—are even in the pre-construction phase. As in Georgia, South Carolina consumers are being forced to pay for the reactors as they are being built. Should they not be completed, or suffer disaster once they are, the state’s ratepayers will be on the hook.
The industry is heralding the Vogtle approval as a major boon to the “Nuclear Renaissance.” But it comes alongside the announcement that all 17 reactors owned by the Tokyo Electric Company are shut, as are all but two of Japan’s 50-plus nukes.
Germany has decided to shut all its nukes by 2022. New reactor financing in Great Britain is under legal attack, as it is in Florida. India has announced that in 2011 it led the world in new green energy projects. China has yet to make its future nuclear commitments clear in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. And no American utility is readily available to follow in Vogtle’s path, with operating reactors in Vermont and New York’s Indian Point under fierce governmental attack. Florida’s Crystal River is beset by huge bills for faulty repair work, and may be headed for permanent shutdown. Both currently licensed reactors at California’s San Onofre are closed following radioactive leaks, and a disturbing pattern of tube holes in newly installed steam generators has surfaced at a number of reactors across the US.
But the biggest shock waves this week were caused by Tama University Professor Hiroshi Tasaka, a key advisor to Prime Minister Naoto Kan during the Fukushima disaster.
Warning that Fukushima is “far from over,” Tasaka said official assurances of the complex’s alleged safety were based on “groundless optimism.” Tasaka cited more than 1500 fuel rods dangerously exposed to the open atmosphere at Unit Four alone. The waste problem has gone nationwide, he said in a newly published book, as “the storage capacities of the spent fuel pools at the nation’s nuclear power plants are reaching their limits,”
Tasaka’s statements came as a new temperature spike unexpectedly stuck Fukushina Unit Two. For reasons not yet clear, heat releases in excess of 158 degrees Farenheit spewed from the core, prompting Tokyo Electric to pump in more water and boric acid meant to damp down an apparently on-going chain reaction. Prof. Tasaka and others warn that this in turn will contribute to spreading still more radiation into the water table and oceans.
With bitter debate raging in Japan, the US and elsewhere over the killing power of Fukushima’s emissions, the certification of a new US reactor design may someday be remembered as a bizarre epitaph for the 20th century’s most expensive failed technology.
Without state ratepayers and federal taxpayers being forced to foot the bill, new reactor construction in the US is going nowhere.
And without a final resolution to the on-going horrors at Fukushima, the entire planet, from Tokyo to Alaska to Georgia and beyond, remains at serious radioactive risk.
February 10, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Nuclear Power | AP1000, Japan, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Vogtle Electric Generating Plant |
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The problem with US policy in the Middle East is that it now operates almost entirely at the political level: gone are the days when area experts were the heavyweights in the command center, weaving historical context, relationships and nuance into vital policy decisions.
Today you are more likely to have single-issue interest groups, commercial projects and election cycles impact key deliberations. It’s a short-term view: tactical more than strategic and black and white in its approach. Like a high-octane marketing campaign, it is heavily focused on key phrases, scene-setting, and narrative building.
The spotlight on Syria in recent weeks has been intense and the propaganda has been incessant: Regime massacres in Homs, evil Russia and China, a benevolent UN Security Council trying to save Syria, 1982’s Hama slaughter resuscitated, and an American ambassador left “disgusted” at the gall of others using veto power.
But take the hysteria down a notch or two, bring the debate back into the hands of measured, experienced observers, and the storyline may be tangibly different. Over the weekend, I had the privilege of receiving an email that reminded me of a time when area experts at the US State Department delivered honest assessments of events so that wiser decisions could be taken.
The missive was from a former US diplomat with service experience in Syria who has asked to remain unnamed. I am publishing the email below in its entirety for the benefit of readers:
I have serious problems with all the talk about military intervention in Syria. Everyone, especially the media, seems to be relying solely on anti-regime activists for their information. How do we know 260 people were killed by the regime in Homs yesterday? That number seems based solely on claims by anti-regime figures and I seriously doubt its accuracy.
I served over three years in Damascus at the US Embassy and I know how difficult it is to sort fact from rumor in that closed political society. We were constantly trying to verify rumors that we had heard about assassinations, regime arrests, etc., and that included the Agency, which was just as much in the dark as everyone else. Today, we have a skeleton embassy which I am sure is under constant surveillance and with very few personnel to go out and report on what is happening. When I was in Damascus over two years ago, I was less than impressed with the Embassy’s sources and with its understanding of the dynamics of what was going on Syria. And the same is true when I talk to officials at the State Department.
The media, and to an extent the Administration, have personalized the conflict in Syria as being about Bashar Assad and his family. They have consistently underestimated the sectarian nature of the conflict there. It is not just Bashar Assad and his family that are hanging onto power at all costs, it is the entire Alawi system of control of the country, including the military, the security services and the Baath Party. I believe that Alawites firmly think that if they lose power, the Sunnis will slaughter them, That was one reason Hafez and his brother Rifaat were so ruthless in Hama thirty years ago. And everyone in the West conveniently forgets the campaign of assassinations and suicide bombings carried out in the three or four years before Hama by the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the country. I personally witnessed the aftermath of such bombings in which several hundred people were killed. While the State Department, the CIA and other organs of government may have short historical memories, the people in Syria do not.
There have been few good analyses of the conflict in Syria. With the exception of the journalist Nir Rosen and the International Crisis Group, most reporting has been superficial and biased in favor of opponents of the regime. This is no basis on which to base policy, especially if officials in Washington are contemplating some form of military intervention. We would be opening a Pandora’s box of sectarian conflict that could easily spread to Lebanon, Israel, Kurdish areas of Iraq and elsewhere.
One irony of the current situation compared to thirty years ago is Iraq’s role. Then, we had reasonably good information that Saddam Hussein was supporting the Brotherhood with arms, explosives and facilitating the smuggling of both across the Syrian-Iraqi border. Today, the Maliki government in Baghdad appears to be supporting the Assad regime. And thirty years ago, we also had information that the Brotherhood leadership was given sanctuary in Jordan by King Hussein and in Saudi Arabia.
I don’t think we know how to play in this arena, just as we don’t understand how to play in the Afghanistan-Pakistan arena. US military intervention, whether under the guise of NATO or some other umbrella, could have serious unforeseen consequences for the US, Europe and the region. Officials in Washington should have the law of unforeseen consequences hammered into their heads every morning.
These thoughts are from a US diplomat with direct and fairly recent experience in Syria. Why don’t we ever hear similarly sober assessments from the figures in Washington? Part of the reason, of course, is the over-politicization of the policy-making process, which has long been wrested from the hands of able area experts and delivered into the arms of hawks, ideologues and politicians building campaign warchests.
It is worth mentioning that much of the US administration’s focus on Syria derives from its unhealthy fixation on Iran. In supporting Iran’s worldview that US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East must end, Syria has put itself in the crosshairs of American policy priorities.
The New York Times’ David Sanger wrote shortly after the Arab Awakening had devoured its first two dictators, Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak:
“Every decision — from Libya to Yemen to Bahrain to Syria — is being examined under the prism of how it will affect what was, until mid-January, the dominating calculus in the Obama administration’s regional strategy: how to slow Iran’s nuclear progress, and speed the arrival of opportunities for a successful uprising there.”
Efforts to undermine Bashar Assad’s government were a longstanding policy objective, even in the years before popular revolts hit the wider Middle East in 2011. WikiLeaks has revealed a veritable goldmine of information about Washington’s interventions in Syria, which include direct US financial assistance to opposition groups.
Dirty politics and geopolitical mudslinging aside, at the heart of this matter rests an issue that is fundamental to good policy-making: When do handy narratives simply become lies that spawn bad policies?
This WikiLeaks cable from 2006 illustrates Washington’s efforts to identify “opportunities” to expose “vulnerabilities” in the Syrian regime and cause sectarian/ethnic division, discord within the military/security apparatus and economic hardship. How will the US achieve this? The cable lists a whole host of Syrian vulnerabilities to be exploited, and then recommends:
“These proposals will need to be fleshed out and converted into real actions and we need to be ready to move quickly to take advantage of such opportunities. Many of our suggestions underline using Public Diplomacy and more indirect means to send messages that influence the inner circle.”
Propagandizing the American Public
Public Diplomacy, in effect, means propaganda – which under the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 specifies the terms in which the US government can disseminate information to foreign audiences. In 1972, the Act prohibited domestic access to information intended for foreign audiences – in other words, it became illegal for the US government to propagandize Americans.
But Washington has found many ways around this. After all, US citizens need to be “on board” the myriad overseas military adventures undertaken by successive administrations. How, then, does government stay within the confines of the law while propagandizing Americans so that they are pumped up for wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, maybe Iran), weapons sales to questionable allies (Saudi Arabia and Israel), and human rights violations (Guantanamo, drones)?
The fake story of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) targeting the US and its allies was an essential narrative in the build-up to military intervention in Iraq. Recall then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s testimony about evidence of Saddam’s WMD activities and President George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech when he falsely accused Iraq of procuring yellowcake uranium from Niger – the media scrutiny of these statements was wholly justified: it is illegal to lie to the American people.
Officials are careful about how they circumvent the restrictions of Smith-Mundt. The quickest way to feed Americans inaccurate, tainted or sometimes entirely false information is through “leaks.” Peruse any newspaper of record in Washington, New York or Los Angeles and you will see the foreign news sections chock full of leaks from “officials.”
The internet, too, is a natural playground for the dissemination of disinformation. Its vast reach across the globe, its millions of blogs with varying credibility – these lend themselves well to the game of public diplomacy.
Powell’s former Chief of Staff Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson – another ex-official who has spoken candidly about policy and process shortcomings since leaving his post – told me in April 2010: “(Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld and others, for example, just ignored the law. They would put a story in a Sydney newspaper, for example, and then ‘internet it’ back to the United States. So you’re propagandizing the American people.”
Wilkerson insists: “we have a statutory divergence that needs to be fixed first – legislation that says you can’t mix public affairs, which is aimed at the American people, and public diplomacy, which is aimed at the international audience. We need to stop propaganda, period. We need to tell the truth. I understand we don’t give out state secrets, but why don’t we tell the truth?”
The problem with foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, is ultimately about the kinds of people making the decisions – ideologues with clear agendas: against Iran and for Israel; against the Syrian “dictator” but in favor of the Saudi, Bahraini, Yemeni, Qatari ones; against Iranian nuclear capability, defending 200 nukes in Israel; abusing UN veto power (80+ times), deriding others for exercising a veto (Russia, China), and so on and so forth.
“It’s broken – it’s utterly dysfunctional,” Wilkerson says about the decision-making process in government: “They put ideologues in to corral, corner, orchestrate, cajole, push, wheedle the civil servants into doing something that they think ought to be done.”
Back to Syria.
A reporter from a major western cable news network just emailed me about his visit to Syria: “I got back from Homs last month unconvinced that the country was rising up against the Assad regime, and far from convinced that there are any good guys.”
Very little is known about what’s going on in the country. And it is not necessarily because there is limited media there: the Arab League mission report lists 147 foreign and Arab media organizations in Syria. The reason we still do not know what is taking place in Homs is because there is a ferocious battle for narratives between two rigid political mindsets. And the current dominant narrative is the one coming out of Washington – which, according to Wikileaks, has been waiting for “opportunities” to seize upon “vulnerabilities” to undermine the regime of Bashar Assad.
Not give us the truth, mind you. But to pursue a policy objective that US citizens have not agreed upon because they are unaware of the facts.
Sharmine Narwani is a commentary writer and political analyst covering the Middle East. You can follow Sharmine on twitter @snarwani.
February 10, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Homs, International Crisis Group, Middle East, Syria, United States Department of State |
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The seven Iranian engineers and specialists abducted while working on a power plant project in the Syrian city of Homs in December have been released.
“The engineers who were working on the development of Syria’s Jandar power plant were kidnapped by terrorist groups in this country based on unfounded claims such as collaboration with Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps,” an informed source with the Iranian Energy Ministry said on Friday.
Five of the seven freed Iranians were kidnapped by unknown armed gunmen on their way to the 450-MW power plant in the troubled Syrian city of Homs on December 21.
The technicians have been building the city’s Jandar power plant for the past two years.
The two other released Iranians were abducted one day after the initial kidnapping while on a mission to establish the whereabouts of the missing engineers.
Iranian engineers and experts are currently implementing development projects in Syria, valued at more than 1.7 billion dollars.
A group of 11 Iranian pilgrims, who were kidnapped by the ‘Free Syrian Army’ on a road connecting the Syrian city of Hama to the capital, Damascus, on February 1, were handed over to Iranian officials in the Turkish city of Adana on Thursday.
The Free Syrian Army is affiliated to the Syrian opposition groups which have cordial relations with Ankara.
However, the whereabouts of another 11 Iranians, who were abducted on January 26 by a group of unidentified armed men on a road connecting Damascus to the northwestern city of Aleppo, remains unknown.
Syria has been experiencing unrest since mid-March 2011. While the opposition blames the government, the Syrian government says “outlaws, saboteurs and armed terrorist groups” are responsible for the unrest, which is being orchestrated from abroad.
February 10, 2012
Posted by aletho |
War Crimes | Free Syrian Army, Syria |
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Russia accused the West on Friday of being an “accomplice” to the violence in Syria and said the country’s opposition bore full responsibility for ending the ongoing violence.
Speaking to ITAR-TASS news agency, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said that “Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s promise to stage a new constitutional referendum meant that it was now up to the armed resistance movement to take the next step.”
He also warned that “Russia was ready to follow this month’s veto of a draft UN Security Council resolution on the crisis with additional strong measures if the West continues to refuse acknowledging the opposition’s role in the crisis.”
“The Syrian leadership has assured us of its readiness to quickly hold a referendum on a new constitution and move toward elections,” Ryabkov said.
“This means that the opposition bears full responsibility for improving the situation and finding a way to stop the bloodshed… Western states that push the Syrian opposition into uncompromising measures, which arm them and give them advice and instructions are accomplices in the process of inflaming the crisis,” he added.
“The responsibility rests with those who while holding the levers of influence over the opposition still fail to call it to order and demand that it accepts the Syrian government’s offers and begin real talks,” the Russian deputy foreign minister further pointed out, warning that “Russia will have to again and again resort to strong measures at the Security Council if Western states introduce new resolutions on the crisis that only blame Assad.”
In addition, Ryabkov dismissed joint efforts by the United States and Turkey to organize an international conference on the crisis and possible relief efforts for the opposition.
“Russia does not share the West’s views about so-called humanitarian intervention,” he said.
February 10, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Russia, Sergei Ryabkov, Syria |
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Britain has decided to help the Israeli regime steal water from Palestinians, while even the Israeli press describe the act as a ‘water occupation.’
British Water, which represents the UK water industry supply chain, signed an agreement with Israel in December which received no media coverage. The agreement was not even published on British Water’s website. However, the Israeli regime’s embassy in London proudly reported the agreement.
This comes as Israel’s 400-mile apartheid wall illegally encloses key water supplies. The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled the apartheid wall is ‘contrary to international law’ and that “all States are under an obligation not to recognize the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by such construction.”
Israel’s apartheid wall is not even built along the so-called Green Line which itself is not a legal and official border. It bites deep into the occupied Palestinian West Bank and its construction is aimed at stealing Palestinians’ water and selling them their own water at an inflated price.
Palestinians have no access to the Jordan River because of the Israeli regime’s closures. Moreover, during the Gaza Massacre in 2008, Israel destroyed more than 30 kilometers of water networks and 11 water wells in a ‘deliberate and systematic’ manner, as described by a UN Fact Finding Mission.
Despite the establishment of a Joint Water Committee, which was set up to secure water supply to Palestinians, Israel was given veto power.
This way, Palestinians are forced to buy their own water, which is extracted from wells within their own land.
Although between 100 and 150 liters of water per day are necessary to meet health needs, an individual in marginalized Palestinian communities in the Occupied West Bank live on less than 20 liters of water a day. This comes as an average Israeli consumes 280 liters of Palestinians’ water each day.
Britain’s complicity with Israel in robbing the Palestinians of their water comes as even the Israeli newspaper Haaretz admitted that “some 450,000 [illegal] Israeli settlers on the [Occupied] West Bank use more water than the 2.3 million Palestinians that live there.”
The newspaper even considered the situation as a ‘water occupation’ that the Israeli regime has launched against the Palestinian people.
Given the bigger picture of the establishment of the Zionist state which would not be possible without Arthur Balfour, Britain’s foreign secretary from 1916 to 1919, and the UK Trade and Investment Department’s commitment to benefit Israel such acts on the part of Britain are not unexpected.
“In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. The four powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now occupy that land,” said Balfour in his Balfour Declaration back in 1917.
Balfour’s comments were made as Britain had promised “the 700,000 Arabs” that had “occupied the land” independence in return for their assistance in defeating the Ottoman-German Alliance in World War I.
However, after “Turks were smitten,” as described by Stephen Ostrander, the British government gave no thought to its promise as it surrendered Palestine for the establishment of a Zionist state.
February 10, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Balfour, Zionism |
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Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected demands presented by representatives of the European Union (EU) to release a number of Palestinian political prisoners under a confidence-building measure that would also increase popular support to president Mahmoud Abbas.
The Palestine News Network reported that a number of EU counties also called for creating a “Blacklist” that would include the names of extremist Israeli settlers, in order to prevent them from traveling to EU countries. The settlers will likely be those who did not only attack Palestinians but also attacked Israeli soldiers and policemen.
The Israeli daily, Maariv, reported that Abbas and the Quartet Committee for Middle East peace (the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia), called on Israel to approve a request made by Abbas demanding the release of Palestinian detainees who have been imprisoned by Israel since before the Oslo Peace Agreement that was signed between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993.
According to Maariv, the envoys asked Netanyahu to release 123 detainees, members of the Fateh movement of Mahmoud Abbas, and other factions that are part of the PLO; this excludes, among other factions, detainees who are members of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.
It is worth mentioning that the same proposal was presented by EU Foreign Policy Chief, Catherine Ashton, during her visit to the region last month.
Netanyahu refused the proposal and told Quartet envoys that now is not the time to release political prisoners to boost Palestinian support to president Abbas.
He added that the release of prisoners should not be a “demand, or one of preconditions” for the resumption of talks, but hinted that he might grant the Palestinian Security Forces more privileges in the in Area B in the West Bank. Area B is under full Israeli Security control.
February 9, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | European Union, Palestine Liberation Organization |
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What’s Driving Economic Inequality
Let me begin with the good news. Our nation has tackled this problem before — and successfully so. A century ago, during the original “Gilded Age,” we experienced extremely high levels of inequality, levels comparable to those we are seeing today. Over the span of several decades, policymakers, backed by strong labor unions and other social movements, turned that inequality around. Through fair taxation and effective social programs and standards, we had achieved much lower levels of inequality by the middle of the twentieth century. We had laid the foundation for a strong and stable economy and put in place a middle class that was broader than any the world had ever seen. There is much to learn from that experience.
Executive compensation as a key driver of inequality
The Institute for Policy Studies has particular expertise in one aspect of our nation’s drift into deep and extreme inequality: executive compensation.
For nearly 20 years, we at IPS have been publishing an annual analysis of the upward spiral in CEO pay. Our Executive Excess series has helped track and explain this trend, which has contributed significantly to the rising share of national income that flows to our nation’s top 1 percent. Increases in executive compensation do not tell the whole story behind our growing economic divide, but they do offer an important lens into the broader problem.
Some select indicators of just how disproportionately large rewards for executives have become: The ratio between CEO and worker pay has risen from 42-to-1 in 1980 to 107-to-1 in 1990 to 325-to-1 in 2010.1
Average compensation for S&P 500 CEOs reached $10.8 million in 2010, more than six times the level for large company CEOs in 1980, after taking inflation into account, and triple the level in 1990.2
Executives and financial professionals account for 70 percent of the increase in the share of national income going to the top 0.1 percent between 1979 and 2005.3 Combined compensation for the top five executives by corporate enterprise increased as an average percentage of corporate profits from 5 percent in the period 1993-1995 to nearly 10 percent in the period 2001-2003.4
Why should policymakers be concerned about excessive executive compensation?
1. Excessive compensation encourages executive behavior that harms the broader economy
Over nearly two decades, my colleagues and I at the Institute for Policy Studies have examined how extremely high levels of compensation affect executive behavior. Such massive jackpots, we’ve found, give executives incentives to behave in ways that may boost short-term profits and expand their own paychecks at the expense of our nation’s long-term economic health.
Among our research findings:
- In last year’s annual Executive Excess report, we looked at the intersection between executive compensation and tax dodging. We found that among the top 100 highest-paid CEOs in 2010, 25 had made more in personal compensation than their companies had paid in federal income taxes.5
- In 2010, we found that CEOs of the 50 firms that had laid off the most workers since the onset of the economic crisis had made nearly $12 million on average, 42 percent more than the CEO pay average at S&P 500 firms as a whole.6
- In 2009, we found that the top five executives at the 20 banks that had accepted the most federal bailout dollars had averaged $32 million each in personal compensation during the three years leading up to the 2008 meltdown.7
- In 2004, we found that CEOs at companies which had outsourced the most U.S. jobs to other countries were rewarded with bigger paychecks than their peers. Average CEO compensation at the 50 firms that had outsourced the most service jobs increased by 46 percent in 2003, compared to a 9 percent average increase for all large company CEOs. Top outsourcers earned an average of $10.4 million, 28 percent more than the average CEO compensation of $8.1 million.8
- In 2002, we found that top executives at 23 companies under government investigation for their accounting practices had earned far more during the preceding three years than average CEOs. CEOs at the firms under investigation had earned an average of $60.1 million during 1999-2001, 65 percent more than the average of $36.5 million for all leading executives for that period.9
Tax dodging, mass layoffs, reckless financial deals, offshoring jobs, “creative accounting”—all of these appear to boost CEO pay. But they have dealt one body blow after another to the American middle class, leaving a deeply skewed distribution of income and wealth.
2. Extreme CEO-worker pay gaps undermine business enterprise effectiveness
Our nation’s long-term economic health depends to a great extent on the effectiveness of our U.S. enterprises. A growing body of research indicates that extreme inequality within firms leaves enterprises less productive and effective. A Stanford University review of several studies found that organizations with highly differentiated pay between top and bottom earners tended to experience a decline in employee morale and job satisfaction.10 Another study showed that in corporations with relatively narrow pay gaps, employees tended to produce higher quality products.11 Additional research indicates that wide pay gaps lead to higher employee turnover rates.12
John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, limits his cash compensation to no more than 19 times the average for workers at his firm. In the Harvard Business Review, he wrote “Because of the yawning gap between the leaders and the led, employee morale is suffering, talented performers’ loyalty is evaporating, and strategy and execution is suffering at American companies.”13
Peter Drucker, the father of modern management theory, pointed out in the early 1980s that in any hierarchy, every level of bureaucracy must be compensated at a higher rate than the level below. The more levels, the higher the pay at the top. This gives CEOs a personal interest in maintaining rigid hierarchies that are disempowering for workers. Drucker’s solution was to limit executive pay to no more than 20 times the compensation of their employees.14 A landmark Brookings Institution report by David Levine supported this general view, stating “large differences in status can inhibit participation.”15
Jim Collins, the author of several best-selling books on management science, spent five years trying to determine “what it takes” to turn an average company into a “great” one. He eventually identified 11 firms that had successfully generated off-the-charts stock returns over 15 years. Not a single one had a high-paid CEO. A celebrity CEO, Collins wrote, turns a company into “one genius with 1,000 helpers.”16
Recent reforms to address excessive executive compensation
Executive pay is not just an issue for shareholders. As the Wall Street meltdown made vividly clear, excessive pay packages contribute to a reckless corporate culture that endangers the well-being of the broader public. Responsible action is needed to encourage more rational pay practices.
Dodd-Frank Pay Reforms: In the wake of the 2008 crash, Congress did include a number of modest executive compensation provisions in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. One of the most innovative of these provisions, Section 953b, requires all U.S. corporations to compute and report the ratio between CEO and median employee pay. This disclosure requirement will improve information available for shareholders and the public on a metric fundamental to enterprise success. Hopefully, it will also encourage corporate boards to narrow this gap by raising median worker pay and/or reducing pay at the top.17
However, in the face of an intense backlash from corporate lobby groups, the SEC has delayed implementation of this new law. Regulators are facing strong pressure to water down several additional Dodd-Frank pay provisions, including Section 956, which would give regulators the power to prohibit pay packages for financial executives that encourage inappropriate risks.
Limits on the Tax Deductibility of Executive Pay: Congress also set an important precedent in the Troubled Asset Relief Program by establishing a $500,000 cap on the tax deductibility of executive compensation at bailout firms. A similar provision was included in the 2010 health care reform legislation with regard to health insurance companies. These provisions took an important step towards filling a loophole in the tax code that encourages excessive pay.
Currently, there are no meaningful limits on how much corporations can deduct from their taxes for the expense of executive compensation. The more they pay their CEO, the more they can deduct from their taxes. Other taxpayers bear the brunt of this loophole, either through the increased taxes needed to fill the revenue gaps or through cutbacks in public spending. A tax deductibility cap on executive compensation should be established for all corporations. Ideally, it would deny all firms tax deductions on any executive pay that runs over 25 times the pay of a firm’s lowest-paid employee or $500,000, whichever is higher.
A broader agenda to reverse extreme inequality
While Congress has made some small steps forward in recent years, much more needs to be done to rein in executive pay, as part of a broader effort to reverse extreme inequality. This broad agenda will need to include initiatives to lift up the bottom through living wages and more accessible high-quality health care and education, as well as efforts to address corporate concentration, campaign finance laws, and other obstacles to shared prosperity. But a look back at the previous era’s efforts to tackle inequality reveals that one of those reformers most important tools was progressive taxation.
In the middle of the last century, the U.S. tax system did a great deal to offset maldistributions of income and wealth. A major reason corporate boards did not compensate executives at such exorbitant levels during that period was that the bulk of that excessive pay would have simply been taxed away.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, the top marginal tax rate on income over $400,000 a year (the equivalent of less than $3 million today) faced a tax rate just over 90 percent. During that time, the share of the nation’s total pre-tax income going to the top 1% hovered around 10 percent, according to one academic study.18 As taxes on the wealthy have declined over the past 50 years, we’ve seen a steady increase in wealth and income concentration at the top. Today, with a top marginal rate of only 35 percent, the top 1% enjoy more than 20 percent of the nation’s income.19 Not only did the “high-tax” decades coincide with lower inequality rates, they were also marked by relatively high GDP growth rates.
A recent report by the Congressional Budget Office found similar trends towards rising inequality in after-tax income during the period 1979-2007. According to their calculations, the top 1 percent of the population with the highest income saw an increase in their average real after-tax household income of 275 percent during this period, compared to only 65 percent for the rest of the highest quintile (the 81st through 99th percentiles); 37 percent for the population in the middle of the income scale (the 21st through 80th percentiles); and 18 percent for the lowest quintile.20
Preferential treatment and loopholes have allowed the richest Americans to pay far less than the statutory tax rates. The richest 400 U.S. taxpayers have seen their effective tax rate decline from over 40 percent of their income in 1961 to just 18.1 percent in 2010.21 In 2009, the most recent data available, 1,500 millionaires paid no income taxes, largely because they made use of off-shore tax schemes, according to the Internal Revenue Service.22
Key elements of tax reform to reverse extreme inequality
This section draws heavily from the forthcoming book by my Institute for Policy Studies colleague Chuck Collins, 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It (Berrett-Koehler, March 2012).
New income tax brackets for the 1 percent. Under our current tax rate structure, households with incomes over $350,000 pay the same top income tax rate as households with incomes over $10 million. In the 1950s, there were 16 additional tax rates over the highest rate (35 percent) that we have today.
A tax on financial speculation. The richest 1 percent of Americans contributed to the 2008 economic meltdown by moving vast amounts of wealth into the speculative shadow banking system. Our society is still paying the mammoth social costs of this meltdown — through home foreclosures, unemployment, and the destruction of personal savings. A modest federal tax on every transaction that involves the buying and selling of stocks and other financial products would both generate substantial revenue and dampen short-term speculation. For ordinary investors, the cost would be negligible. A financial speculation tax would amount to a tiny insurance fee to protect against financial instability.
A higher tax rate on income from wealth. Giving tax advantages to income from wealth also encourages short-term speculation. With carefully structured rate reform, we can end this preferential treatment for capital gains and dividends and, as Warren Buffett and other analysts have noted, encourage long-term investing.
A progressive estate tax on the fortunes of the 1 percent. The wealthiest Americans have all benefited from generations of investments in pubic goods that have left the United States with an infrastructure — in everything from education and roads to dispute resolution — that enables wealth creation. Our wealthy have a responsibility to give back to the society that has given them so much. The current estate tax on inherited wealth stands at 35 percent and only applies to estates over $5 million ($10 million for a couple). Congress could raise additional revenue from those with the greatest capacity to pay by establishing a progressive estate tax with graduated rates and a 10 percent surtax on the value of an estate above $500 million, or $1 billion for a couple.
An end to tax haven abuse. By one estimate, the use of tax havens by corporations and wealthy individuals costs the federal treasury $100 billion a year.23 These havens are transferring wealth out of local communities into the foreign bank accounts of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful.24 Tax havens, or more accurately “secrecy jurisdictions,” can also facilitate criminal activity, from drug money laundering to the financing of terrorist networks.
A wealth tax on the top 1 percent. A “net worth tax” could be levied on household assets, including real estate, cash, investment funds, savings in insurance and pension plans, and personal trusts. Such a tax could be calibrated to tax wealth only above a certain threshold. For example, France’s solidarity tax on wealth only kicks in on asset value in excess of $1.1 million.
The elimination on the cap on social security withholding taxes. Extending the payroll tax to cover all wages, not just wage income up to $110,100, would be an important step. Some of our richest Americans are done paying withholding taxes in January, while ordinary working people pay all year.
Conclusion
Our current levels of extreme inequality did not suddenly appear. They have grown steadily over the past 30 years. Reversing this inequality trend will be a long-term challenge. But we have transformed a highly divided nation into a more stable and equitable society before. We can certainly do it again.
Sarah Anderson is director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ Global Economy Project.
NOTES
1 Figures from 1980 and 1990 are from BusinessWeek, April 26, 1993. Figure for 2010 is from Sarah Anderson, Chuck Collins, Scott Klinger, Sam Pizzigati, “Executive Excess 2011: The Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging,” Institute for Policy
2 Ibid.
3 The share of national income (excluding capital gains) received by the top 0.1 percent increased from 2.83 percent in 1979 to 7.34 percent in 2005. Source: Jon Bakija, Adam Cole, and Bradley T. Heim, “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data,” National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2010. Available at: http://www.nber.org/public_html/confer/2010/PEf10/Bakija_Heim_Cole.pdf
4 Lucian A. Bebchuk and Yaniv Grinstein, “The Growth of Executive Pay,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Summer 2005. Available at: http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/bebchuk/pdfs/Bebchuk-Grinstein.Growth-of-Pay.pdf
5 Sarah Anderson, Chuck Collins, Scott Klinger, and Sam Pizzigati, “Executive Excess 2011: The Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging,” Institute for Policy Studies, August 31, 2011. Available at: http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive_excess_2011_the_massive_ceo_rewards_for_tax_dodging/
6 Sarah Anderson, Chuck Collins, Sam Pizzigati, and Kevin Shih, “Executive Excess 2010: CEO Pay and the Great Recession,” Institute for Policy Studies, September 1, 2010. Available at: http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive_excess_2010
7 Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, Chuck Collins, and Sam Pizzigati, “Executive Excess 2009: America’s Bailout Barons,” Institute for Policy Studies, September 2, 2009. Available at: http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive_excess_2009
8 Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, Chris Hartman, and Scott Klinger, “Executive Excess 2004: Campaign Contributions, Outsourcing, Unexpensed Stock Options and Rising CEO Pay,” Institute for Policy Studies, August 31, 2004. Available at: http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive_excess_2004
9 Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, Chris Hartman, Scott Klinger, and Holly Sklar, “Executive Excess 2002: CEOs Cook the Books, Skewer the Rest of Us,” Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, August 26, 2002. Available at: http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive_excess_2002_ceos_cook_the_books_skewer_the_rest_of_us
10 Jeffrey Pfeffer, “Human Resources from an Organizational Behavior Perspective: Some Paradoxes Explained,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 21, 2007. Available at: http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.21.4.115
11 Douglas Cowherd and David Levine, “Product Quality and Pay Equity Between Lower-Level Employees and Top Management,” Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 37, 1992. Available at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4035/is_n2_v37/ai_12729185/
12 Matt Bloom and John Michel, “The Relationships Among Organizational Context, Pay Dispersion, and Managerial Turnover,” Academy of Management Journal, 2002. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/pss/3069283 See also James Wade, Charles O’Reilly III and Timothy Pollock, “Overpaid CEOs and Underpaid Managers: Fairness and Executive Compensation,” Organization Science, 2006. Available at: http://test.scripts.psu.edu/users/t/x/txp14/pdfs/os06.pdf
13 John Mackey, “Why Sky-High CEO Pay Is Bad Business,” Harvard Business Review, June 17, 2009. Available at: http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/how-to-fix-executive-pay/2009/06/why-high-ceo-pay-is-bad-business.html
14 Peter F. Drucker, The Changing World of the Executive. New York: Times Books, 1982, p. 22.
15 David I. Levine, Reinventing the workplace: how business and employees can both win. Brookings Institution Press, April 1, 1995, p. 53.
16 Jim Collins, “Good to Great,” Fast Company, October 2001. Available at: http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-great.html
17 See: Institute for Policy Studies Comments to the SEC on Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, March 16, 2011. Available at: http://www.sec.gov/comments/df-title-ix/executive-compensation/executivecompensation-62.pdf
18 Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(1), 2003. Updated at http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/saez.
19 Ibid.
20 Congressional Budget Office, “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007,” October 2011. Available at: http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/124xx/doc12485/10-25-HouseholdIncome.pdf
21 Sam Pizzigati, “The New Forbes 400— and Their $1.5 Trillion,” Institute for Policy Studies, September 25, 2011. Available at: http://inequality.org/forbes-400-15-trillion.
22 Amy Bingham, “Almost 1,500 millionaires Do Not Pay Income Tax,” ABC News, August 6, 2011. Available at: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/1500-millionaires-pay-income-tax/story?id=14242254#.TrwQYWDdLwN
23 U.S. Senate, “Tax Haven Banks and U.S. Tax Compliance,” Staff report, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, July 17, 2008. See: http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/_files/071708PSIReport.pdf
24 Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens, 2010. See: http://treasureislands.org/
This article is adapted from Sarah Anderson’s testimony to the Senate Budget Committee on Inequality, Mobility, and Opportunity, from Sarah Anderson, Global Economy Program Director
February 9, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Economics, Timeless or most popular | Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Executive pay |
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Congress is poised to give final passage to legislation that would give a big boost to domestic unmanned aerial surveillance — aka “drones.”
As we explained in our recent report, drone technology is advancing by leaps and bounds, and there is a lot of pent-up demand for them within the law enforcement community. But, domestic deployment of unmanned aircraft for surveillance purposes has largely been blocked so far by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is rightly concerned about the safety effects of filling our skies with flying robots (which crash significantly more often than manned aircraft).
As we also explained in our report, the FAA is under pressure to loosen the reins and permit broader deployment of drones by government agencies.
One result of that pressure is this legislation (H.R. 658 — see conference report for more details), which authorizes appropriations for the FAA through fiscal 2014. Unfortunately, nothing in the bill would address the very serious privacy issues raised by drone aircraft. This bill would push the nation willy-nilly toward an era of aerial surveillance without any steps to protect the traditional privacy that Americans have always enjoyed and expected.
Congress — and to the extent possible, the FAA — need to impose some rules (such as those we proposed in our report) to protect Americans’ privacy from the inevitable invasions that this technology will otherwise lead to. We don’t want to wonder, every time we step out our front door, whether some eye in the sky is watching our every move.
On Friday, the House gave final passage to the legislation. House approval came on a quite partisan vote, with most Republicans in favor and most Democrats opposing. The Senate is scheduled to take up the bill later today.
Here are details on what the bill would do in terms of drones:
- Require the FAA to simplify and speed up the process by which it issues permission to government agencies to operate drones. It must do this within 90 days. The FAA has already been working on a set of proposed regulations to loosen the rules around drones, reportedly set for release in the spring of 2012.
- Require the FAA to allow “a government public safety agency” to operate any drone weighing 4.4 pounds or less as long as certain conditions are met (within line of sight, during the day, below 400 feet in altitude, and only in safe categories of airspace).
- Require the FAA to establish a pilot project within six months to create six test zones for integrating drones “into the national airspace system.”
- Require the FAA to create a comprehensive plan “to safely accelerate the integration of civil unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system.” “Civil” drones means those operated by the private sector; currently it is all but impossible for any non-government entity, except for hobbyists, to get permission to fly drones (for-profit use of drones is banned). Industry groups and their congressional supporters see this as a potential area for growth. Congress specifies that the plan must provide for the integration of drones into the national airspace system “as soon as practicable, but not later than September 30, 2015.” The FAA has nine months to create the plan. The FAA is also required to create a “5-year roadmap for the introduction” of civil drones into the national airspace.
- Require the FAA to publish a final rule within 18 months after the comprehensive plan is submitted, “that will allow” civil operation of small (under 55 pounds) drones in the national airspace, and a proposed rule for carrying out the comprehensive plan.
The bottom line is: domestic drones are potentially extremely powerful surveillance tools, and that power — like all government power — needs to be subject to checks and balances. We hope that Congress will carefully consider the privacy implications that this technology can lead to.
February 9, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | FAA, Privacy, United States Congress, Unmanned aerial vehicle |
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Why Geo-Engineering Is Like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter
By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY | February 9, 2012
A February 6 report in the Guardian describes budding efforts to displace decarbonizing with geo-engineering as the goal for reducing the predicted catastrophic effects of global warming. At present, these efforts are being funded by mega-wealthy private citizens like Bill Gates, but some traditional environmentalists as well as some decarbonizers are becoming worried that climate theory is setting off in a new direction. Perhaps that is why the story appeared in the Guardian of all places. Instead of its usual uncritical climate gushiness, the Guardian delves into the smarmier side of climate science — its dependence on money.
Their dependence on money is a subject proponents of anthropogenic global warming avoid like the plague, even though they are wont to accuse anyone who disagrees with them as being in the pay of the fossil fuel companies. The Guardian report is important, because it inadvertently shines a light on how the intersection of money and groupthink among insular cohesive groups sharing a common interest is discrediting climate science in particular, but also science in general. (I am not introducing groupthink as a casual buzz word but in the context the distinguished psychologist Irving Janis used in his classic book Groupthink. Anyone who believes groupthink is not a problem in the insular self-righteous climate science community, should read the Hockey Stick Illusion or wade through just a few of the infamous emails hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.)
Obviously, geo-engineering the earth’s climate would be a big deal, culturally as well as scientifically. It would make the pyramids, the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program look puny and intellectually trivial in comparison. By necessity, indeed by definition, geo-engineering would be forever dependent on analyses of the outputs of computerized global climate models (GCMs), because we can not put anything as complex as the world’s atmosphere on a lab bench or in a wind tunnel for testing. Computer models, like all scientific theories, are mental constructs of reality — really analogies — to represent and cope with that reality. The first point to note is that no model can be perfect or exact in its representation of reality. All models are imperfect and therefore mutable, as the historian Thomas Kuhn, among others, explained in his classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. All scientific models must be continually tested to ensure their predictions match up to external conditions, and as the precision of observations increases, sooner of later, all scientific models become creaky and eventually need to be replaced with a newer construction to better explain a reality that is always receding as one seems to get closer to it by making more precise observations.
The second point to note is that GCMs are complex mathematical constructs made by like-minded or group-thinking minds. They are not the products of individuals. This requires a consensus-based mentality and the intense communal effort required to build these models reinforces that mentality. The need to raise money to pay for these models further intensifies the communal outlook. Consensus building, and especially the invocation of consensual authority, shapes the mentality of contemporary climate scientists in a very different way from the conceptions of physics that shaped the individual mental outlooks during the experiments that produced the models of the atom that competed for acceptance during the first half of the twentieth century. The great physicist who invented the first model of the atom, Niels Bohr, for example, used to introduce his lectures by saying everything he was about to say was wrong. By that he meant no theory is eternal.
You will not hear Bohr’s kind of humility, tolerance, or encouragement of dissent and debate from dogmatic proponents of global warming like Michael Mann or James Hansen, ironically, both physicists, even though the GCMs they are basing their sense of authority on have not been validated with empirical data (or in the case of Mann’s infamous Hockey Stick, have been shown to be statistically flawed). The dogmatic sense of certainty exhibited by goupthinking climate scientists exists despite the fact that the comprehensive data needed to test the GCM models for matchups to the environment simply do not exist. Yet, this uncertainty is not at all unlike that which created the far more open-minded debate among the advocates of different atomic models, like Bohr, Schrödinger, or Heisenberg in the early Twentieth Century. So, the authority of the GCMs needed to justify geo-engineering must be based on unvalidated assumptions about reality — really conjectures which are now stated as dogma, like, for example, the crucial quantification of the sensitivity of the warming response to changes in CO2 levels.
But there is more to the speculative analytical pathway leading climate science into the geo-engineering cul de sac, which brings me to my third point. To justify the huge public expenditures and diversion of resources needed to geo-engineer the world, it will be necessary to perform cost-effectiveness analyses of the predicted benefits in a political context to convince policy makers of the need to undertake such a drastic and costly course of action. Although the Guardian does not mention it, I have met some global warming alarmists (all card-carrying decarbonizers) who are already advocating that we combine the output of the GCMs with econometric models of the global economy to predict the global relationship between the monetary inputs to the economic benefits of global temperature reduction via solutions like carbon sequestration, etc. If you want to know how accurate econometric models are, just ask Alan Greenspan. This kind of operation, clearly, would be like piling a house of cards on top of a house of cards.
Yet, the econometric-GCM mansion of cards is probably inevitable. It is a tiny logical step for advocates of geo-engineering to link their theoretical GCMs to econometric models, and given the money needed (and the sacrifices that would be made elsewhere), cost-benefit analyses will eventually become necessary. A policy decision to launch a “Manhattan Plus” project to geo-engineer the earth’s climate based on analyses of the output of such poorly understood computer models (GCMs and econometric) would go beyond madness and descend into megalomania. The Guardian report inadvertently makes the madness quite clear: some climate scientists are calling for a political consensus to geo-engineer the globe, because the world cannot reach a political agreement on the vastly simpler problem of simply reducing carbon emissions. Such an argument is at once illogical and bizarre. Perhaps this yawning disconnect is why this report appeared in the Guardian, usually the most rabid pro global-warming mainstream newspaper in the world.
But of course, the megalomania implicit in geo-engineering has nothing to do with madness; it is about a group of like-minded intelligent people trying to feather their nest by creating a cash cow to do what they think is right and good. This is something I saw every day in the Pentagon.
Indeed, creating cash cows in the name of the greater good is the essence of the Pentagon’s game. My 28 years experience in the Pentagon made me quite familiar with the steps needed to create the financial equivalent of a self-licking ice cream cone: (1) Inflate a threat to scare the bejeezus out of the people and induce politicians to unleash a torrent of publicly-funded money; (2) then, front-load a solution to neutralize that threat by overstating its benefits, understating its costs, and downplaying the uncertainties surrounding what is at best a poorly understood course of action; and then, (3) politically engineer a social safety net by spreading the money (grants and contracts) around the polity to lock in the constituent dependencies needed to keep the money flowing after the inevitable problems begin to surface.
Incidentally, the geo-engineering game, if publicly funded, will be manna from heaven for the US hi-tech weapons industry, which cannot compete commercially, but is in need of diversification, because of marginal cutbacks in the rate of future growth in the Pentagon’s budget. You can bet what little is left of your IRA that defense mega-giants like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman will be attracted to the cash flow potential of geo-engineering like flies to honey, should a serious geo-engineering effort begin to materialize.
Speaking of the similarities between the advocates of geo-engineering to the inhabitants of the Pentagon and the defense industry — consider, as an example, the resemblance of using computer simulations to cope with the uncertainties of geo-engineering to the use of computer simulations in the now deeply troubled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. Bear in mind, the Pentagon wrote the script for basing high-cost decisions with long term consequences on highly complex, poorly-understood computer driven simulations, while short-shrifting testing. It has more experience in modeling than just about any organization in the world. It began cost-effectiveness modeling on computers in the mid 1960s and has continued with increasing intensity ever since. Nevertheless, the unfolding debacle of the F-35 has taken these kinds of simulations to a new level of disaster: No less an authority that Frank Kendall, the acting Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition said recently that the F-35 program was started with the idea of putting it into production before it was fully tested under ”the optimistic prediction that we were good enough at modeling and simulation that we would not find problems in flight test.” … He characterized this decision as “acquisition malpractice” … that … “was wrong, and now we are paying for that.” Of course, Kendall’s use of “we” is a wee bit disingenuous, because it is the taxpayer not the Pentagon who is footing the malpractice bill.
It goes without saying that the uncertainties limiting our understanding of our ability to model the future consequences of a decision to design and produce the F-35 are trivial compared to those of geo-engineering the entire climate system. But humility is not in order, because geo-engineers, like milcrats and defense contractors, will be spending other people’s money.
FRANKLIN “CHUCK” SPINNEY is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com
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February 9, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Environmentalism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Geoengineering, Global climate model, Global warming, Hockey Stick Illusion, Niels Bohr, University of East Anglia |
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