ACTIVIST NEWSLETTER
December 8, 2015, Issue #222
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Contact us or subscribe to Newsletter at jacdon@earthlink.net
The Hudson Valley Activist Calendar will be sent soon.
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LET US KNOW YOUR OPINION OF OUR ARTICLES
CONTENTS
1. Quotes of The
Month — Eugene V. Debs
2. Photos of The
Month —Window On
Poverty
3. The Fate of The
Earth is at Stake
4. Coalition or Cold
War With Russia?
5. Putin Excoriates
Turkey's Leader
6. Trump: America's
Marine Le Pen?
7. France Cracks
Down on Muslims & Marchers
8. The Battle to
Militarize Space has Begun
9. Lest We Forget: A
Hero's Birthday
10. NATO to Keep
12,000 Troops in Afghanistan
11. Supreme Court to Rule on Abortion
12. Richest 10% Produce 50% of Carbon Emissions
13. Big Jump in Fossil Fuel Divestment
14. System Change, Not Climate Change
15. Climate Change Weather Uproots Millions
16. Problems of the White Male Working Class
17. Capitalism is Concerned About Bernie
18. America, Refugees and Absolute Security
19. Books: The Amazing Inner Lives Of Animals
20. America's Dubious Exceptionalism
21. Germany: 'What's Happening To My Country?'
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1. QUOTES OF THE MONTH — Eugene V. Debs
(I855-1926)
In an article below (#17 ) the Wall Street Journal compares Bernie Sanders to the late union
leader and
five-time Socialist Party candidate for president Eugene V. Debs.
Sanders has expressed the highest regard for Debs, but undoubtedly recognizes
that his own politics and actions are of a quite different caliber, though he
identifies himself as a socialist. These few quotes are a reminder of what an
extraordinary American political figure Debs was.
I am opposing a social
order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is
useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of
men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a
wretched existence.
While there is a lower
class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while
there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
The Republican and
Democratic parties... represent the capitalist class in the class struggle.
They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as
arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles.
Intelligent discontent
is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is
agitation or stagnation.
They who are animated
by the unconquerable spirit of the social revolution; they who have the moral
courage to stand erect and assert their convictions; stand by them; fight for
them; go to jail or to hell for them, if need be — they are writing their
names, in this crucial hour — they are writing their names in faceless letters
in the history of mankind.
I have no country to
fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.
Foolish and vain
indeed is the workingman who makes the color of his skin the stepping-stone to
his imaginary superiority.... The man who seeks to arouse prejudice among
workingmen is not their friend. He who advises the white wage-worker to look down upon the black wage-worker is the enemy of both.
———————
2. PHOTOS OF THE MONTH —Window on Poverty
Amid the haze
of toxic fumes from burning refuse in a garbage dump in Cambodia, a young
garbage scavenger searches for scraps of recyclables in newly dumped loads of
rubbish. His picture is framed by a broken TV screen in the dump. Writes Yap Kh,
the National Geographic photographer who took this recent picture: “Covered in
filthy rags, the children in this dump were scruffy, sickly, and sad. They
earned $1 a day, if they were lucky,”
This child works in a factory in India, and may earn less than a dollar a day. Well over 300 million Indians of all ages live in deep poverty. Photographer,
Akshay Gupta, Pacific Press, Getty Images.
One billion children worldwide exist in poverty today.
According to UNICEF, "22,000 children die each day due to poverty.
Preventable diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia take the lives of 2 million
children a year who are too poor to afford proper treatment. As of 2013, 21.8
million children under 1 year of age worldwide had not received the three
recommended doses of vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. Oxfam
estimates that it would take $60 billion annually to end extreme global poverty
— that's less than 1/4 the income of the top 100 richest billionaires."
———————
3. THE FATE OF THE EARTH IS AT STAKE
By the Activist
Newsletter
This issue contains five articles about climate change and
the important UN meetings that will to a large extent define the future of life
on Earth. It's obvious that the outcome next Saturday will be inadequate, but
we cannot say much more about the meeting until the final agreement is
available.
Negotiators from 195 countries adopted a draft text Dec. 5 but
National Geographic reported "the document left so many huge questions
unanswered that the real work is only just beginning."
One of the main problems concerns the fossil fuel/greenhouse
emissions reductions nearly all the countries have already submitted. For one
thing, these estimates are not binding on the various countries and there is no
penalty for failure to attain goals. Another is that that combined promised
reductions are not sufficient to prevent a drastic temperature increase of more
than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over future decades — the goal
of the conference. It's probably closer to a calamitous increase 4 degrees
Celsius.
Ironically, the goal itself is insufficient. It should be no
more than 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to obtain the rational goal of 350 parts
per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The ppm has already
risen to 400. Twenty years ago it was 361; 100 years ago 306 ppm. By comparison, in 1950 global anthropogenic
gigatonnes of CO2 was 10. Today, 65 years later, it's 38 and growing
exponentially.
Dr. James Hansen, the former NASA climatologist says: "If
humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization
developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and
ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced... to at most
350 ppm."
Obviously climate change is already here and worsening
swiftly, judging by the storms, droughts, melting ice, rising seawater and
declining drinking water, etc. Unless there is a swift and sharp decline in the
use of fossil fuel a long-term disaster will ensue.
Reflecting the views of the U.S. plutocracy and big
corporations that fear the loss of profits and are working to to delay action,
congressional Republicans are creating obstacles to undermine any agreement that
emerges from Paris.
The New Yorker reported that on the day President Obama addressed
the conference, "The House approved two resolutions aimed at blocking
regulations to curb U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. The first would bar the
Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing rules aimed at cutting emissions
from new power plants; the second would prevent the agency from enforcing rules
targeted at existing power plants. Together, these rules are known as the Clean
Power Plan, and they are crucial to the Americans’ negotiating position in
Paris. The Plan is central to the pledge, made in advance of the summit, to cut
U.S. emissions by 26%."
Writing Dec. 6, social critic Chris Hedges surmised:
"The charade of the 21st United
Nations climate summit will end, as past climate summits have ended,
with lofty rhetoric and ineffectual cosmetic reforms. Since the first summit
more than 20 years ago, carbon dioxide emissions have soared. Placing faith in
our political and economic elites, who have mastered the arts of duplicity and
propaganda on behalf of corporate power, is the triumph of hope over
experience. There are only a few ways left to deal honestly with climate
change: sustained civil disobedience that disrupts the machinery of
exploitation; preparing for the inevitable dislocations and catastrophes that
will come from irreversible rising temperatures; and cutting our personal
carbon footprints, which means drastically reducing our consumption,
particularly of animal products."
While we await the final declaration from Paris here are
some painful statistics of interest from the website of the Bulletin of The
Atomic Scientists. There are various causes in all these situations, but
climate change is involved in just about all of them:
50% of forest bird species will go extinct in 50 years.
60% of flower species will go extinct in 50 years.
50% of mega cities will go extinct in 50 years.
90% of soil will go extinct in 50 years.
40% of humanity will not have enough water in 15 years.
99% of Rhinos gone since 1914.
97% of Tigers gone since
1914.
90% of Lions gone since 1993.
90% of Sea Turtles gone since
1980.
90% of Monarch Butterflies gone since 1995.
90% of Big Ocean Fish gone since 1950.
80% of Antarctic Krill gone since 1975.
80% of Western Gorillas gone since 1955.
60% of Forest Elephants gone since 1970.
50% of Great Barrier Reef gone since 1985.
40% of Giraffes gone since 2000.
40% of ocean phytoplankton gone since 1950.
100% - Ocean acidification doubles by 2050, triples by 2100.
30% of Marine Birds gone since 1995.
70% of Marine Birds gone since 1950.
28% of Land Animals gone since 1970.
28% of All Marine Animals gone since 1970.
97% - Humans/livestock are 97% of land-air vertebrate
biomass.
0.01%. 10,000 years ago humans/livestock were 0.01% of
land-air vertebrate biomass.
1,000,000 humans, net, are added to earth every 4½ days.
Other than that everything is fine.
———————
4. COALITION
OR COLD WAR WITH RUSSIA?
[The White House, Congress and the U.S. mass media have been
demonizing Russian President Vladimir Putin for several years, as they do to
virtually all important country leaders who do not submit to Washington's
wishes. The following article critiques this practice, particularly in relation
to the crisis in Syria. The authors are Katrina vanden Heuvel, the Editor and
Publisher of The Nation — the most influential liberal magazine in the U.S.; and Stephen F. Cohen, professor
emeritus of Russian studies, history, and politics at New York University and
Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, he has written nine books,
the most recent being Soviet Fates and
Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War.]
By Stephen F. Cohen
and Katrina vanden Heuvel
The 130 people murdered in Paris on Nov. 13 and the 224
Russians aboard a jetliner on Oct. 31 confront America’s current and would-be
policy-makers, Democratic and Republicans alike, with a fateful decision:
whether to join Moscow in a military, political, diplomatic, and economic
coalition against the Islamic State and other terrorist movements, especially
in and around Syria, or to persist in treating “Putin’s Russia” as an enemy and
unworthy partner.
If the goal is defending U.S. and international security and
human life, there is no alternative to such a coalition. The Islamic State
(IS) and its only “moderately” less extremist fellow jihadists are the most
dangerous and malignant threat in the world today, having slaughtered or
enslaved an ever-growing number of innocents from the Middle East and Africa to
Europe, Russia, and the United States (is Boston forgotten?) and now declared
war on the entire West.
Today’s international terrorists are no longer mere
“nonstate actors.” IS alone is an emerging state controlling large
territories, formidable fighting forces, an ample budget, and with an
organizing ideology, dedicated envoys of terror in more countries than are known,
and a demonstrated capacity to recruit new citizens from others. Nor is
the immediate threat limited to certain regions of the world. The refugee
crisis in Europe, to take a looming example, is eroding the foundations of the
European Union and thus of NATO, as is the fear generated by Paris since Nov.
13.
This spreading threat cannot be contained, diminished, or,
still less, eradicated without Russia. Its long
experience as a
significantly Muslim country (1), its advanced military capabilities, its special
intelligence and political ties in the Middle East, and its general resources
are essential. Having lost more lives to terrorism than any other Western
nation in recent years, Russia demands — and it deserves — a leading role in
the necessary coalition. If denied that role, Moscow, with its alliance with
Iran and China and growing political support elsewhere in the world, will
assert it, as demonstrated by Russia’s mounting air war in Syria, whose
advanced technology and efficacy against terrorist forces are being
under-reported in the U.S. media. 
France and much of Europe quickly made their decision. Following the tragic events of Nov. 13, French President François Hollande called for “a grand coalition,” specifically including Russia, against the Islamic State. Still more, on Nov. 17, his unprecedented appeal to the European Union —not US-led NATO— to activate its own “mutual assistance” provision was unanimously approved, implicitly endorsing his proposed alliance with Russia. Hollande, rising to lead Europe, then departed to meet with President Obama and Russian President Putin.
A few clear-sighted American political figures across the
spectrum have echoed Hollande’s call for a coalition with Russia, among them
former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Republican Congressman Dana
Rohrabacher, and, most importantly, Democratic presidential candidate Senator
Bernie Sanders. Overwhelmingly, however, the American political-media
establishment — crucially, the Obama Administration and Congress — has taken
the recklessly myopic editorial position of The Washington Post: “An alliance
with Russia would be a dangerous false step for the United States.” Columnists
and reporters of the policy establishment’s other two leading newspapers, The
New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, similarly, to quote Rohrabacher,
“continue to denigrate Russians as if they were still the Soviet Union and
Putin, not Islamic terrorists, our most vicious enemy.”
Our policy elite’s disregard for America’s national security
is a result of the new US-Russian Cold War under way at least since the
Ukrainian crisis erupted two years ago. We have argued repeatedly that
Washington policy-makers bear more than their reasonable share of
responsibility for this exceedingly dangerous and unnecessary
development. Now is not the time to recapitulate those arguments but
instead to rethink political attitudes toward Putin’s “pariah” Russia in order
to join Moscow in Hollande’s proposed coalition.
There are woefully few signs of such rethinking, even after
Paris. Like most of the Republican would-be presidents, Hillary Clinton
continues to speak derisively about Putin’s leadership, insisting he “is
actually making things somewhat worse.” Inexplicably, unless she wants war with
Russia, she also continues to call for an “imposed” no-fly zone over Syria,
which would mean attacking Russian war planes flying there daily. Strobe
Talbott and John Bolton, each reportedly an aspiring secretary of state in the
next Democratic or Republican administration, respectively, agree (uncontested,
as usual, in the Times) that Putin’s Russia remains “part of the
problem.” Indeed, Paris scarcely diminished the Cold War demonizing of
Russia’s president; as Clinton did months ago, a Post editorial and a Journal
columnist equated Putin with Hitler.
In addition to persistent Putinphobia (and perhaps Russophobia),
other ominous factors have been at work since Nov.13. On Nov. 22,
ultra-right Ukrainians destroyed Crimea’s source of electricity, sharply
re-escalating conflict between Moscow and Kiev. Two days later, NATO-member
Turkey shot down a Russian warplane in still murky circumstances; jihadists
waiting below machine-gunned the pilot as his parachute descended over Syria.
Whether these two events were coincidence or provocations to prevent a Western
rapprochement with Russia, both testify that the new Cold War, which has spread
from Ukraine to Europe and now to Syria and Turkey, risks actual war
between the two nuclear superpowers.
 |
| Islamic State fighters march in Raqqa, their "Capital." |
In such perilous circumstances, only the American president
can provide decisive leadership. Over the years, Obama has repeatedly
treated and spoken of Putin in ways unbefitting the White House — and
detrimental to U.S. national security. He did so again after Paris. Putin
told Hollande, “We are ready to cooperate with the coalition which is led by
the United States.” Obama, however, who endorsed Turkey’s inexplicable
shoot-down of the Russian warplane, used his press conference with the French
president to again demean Putin and Russia’s contributions: “We’ve got a global
coalition organized. Russia is the outlier,” adding condescendingly that
Moscow might be permitted to participate, but only on U.S. terms.
Those terms call for the removal of Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad as soon as possible rather than abiding by the multinational plan for
an evolutionary political transition in Damascus. Unlike Putin and many other
observers, President Obama (and then-Secretary of State Clinton) have not
learned the real lesson of Libya, which is not “Benghazi.” It is the 2011
decision to overthrow Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi and abet his assassination,
which turned Libya into a terrorist-ridden failed state and now a major base
for the Islamic State. Imposed “regime change” in Damascus may have the
same consequences, while imploding the Syrian army, currently the main “boots
on the ground” fighting the Islamic State. (As Putin candidly acknowledges,
Russian warplanes seek to protect and bolster Assad’s army, not Assad’s
questionably “moderate” enemies on the ground.)
In times of historic crisis, great leaders often have to
transcend their own political biographies, as did FDR and Lyndon Johnson and,
30 years ago, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. It’s time for President
Obama — and every candidate who wants to succeed him — to do so.
— From The Nation, Nov. 30.
— (1) ) There are 20 million Muslims in the Russian
Federation, 15% of the population of 140 million. There are 2.75 million
Muslims in the U.S. in a population of 320 million, less than 1%. Both the
Islamic State and al-Qaeda have called on Russian Muslims to launch a jihad
against the state. This is one of the reasons behind Moscow's engagement in
Syria — to help defeat both organizations before they can make more trouble in
Russia. In recent years there have been several major terrorist incidents in
Russia. Wikipedia reports: "Islamic terrorism is
considered a major threat to the security of the nation[Russia] with
most terrorist activity taking
place in Chechnya
and Dagestan. Since October
2007, the Caucasus
Emirate has withdrawn its nationalist goals of creating a sovereign
state in Chechnya.
It has since fully adopted the Islamic fundamentalist ideology of
Salafist-takfiri jihadism whose enemies not only include Russia and its
citizens, but all non-Muslims, including the local Sufi population."
———————
5. PUTIN EXCORIATES TURKEY'S LEADER
Turkey destroyed Russian jet. Pilot parachuted but ground forces shot him dead before he landed.
(Moscow, Reuters) President Vladimir Putin said Dec. 3 that
Turkey's shooting down of a Russian military jet was a war crime and that the
Kremlin would punish Ankara with additional sanctions, signaling fallout from
the incident would be long-lasting and serious.
Putin, who made the comments during his annual state of the
nation speech to his country's political elite, said Russia would not forget
the Nov. 24 incident and that he continued to regard it as a terrible betrayal.
"We are not planning to engage in military
saber-rattling (with Turkey)," said Putin, after asking for a moment's
silence for the two Russian servicemen killed in the immediate aftermath of the
incident, and for Russian victims of terrorism.
"But if anyone thinks that having committed this awful
war crime, the murder of our people, that they are going to get away with some
measures concerning their tomatoes or some limits on construction and other
sectors, they are sorely mistaken." Turkey would have cause to regret its
actions "more than once," he said, promising Russia's retaliatory
actions would be neither hysterical nor dangerous.
The rhetoric Putin used will dash hopes of any early
rapprochement and deepen a rift between the two countries. "It appears
that Allah decided to punish the ruling clique of Turkey by depriving them of
wisdom and judgment," he said.
Repeating a call for a new broad international coalition
against terrorism, Putin, in an overt reference to Turkey, called on countries
to avoid "double standards, contacts with any terrorist organizations, and
any attempts to use them for their own ends." Turkey has strongly rejected
Russian allegations it has any links with Islamic State militants. On Dec. 2
Russia made it personal, saying Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan's family was
directly profiting from Islamic State oil smuggling.
Russia has already banned some Turkish food imports,
including selected fruit and vegetables, as part of a wider retaliatory
sanctions package. Minutes after Putin had finished speaking, his energy
minister, Alexander Novak, said Russia was halting talks with Ankara on the
Turkish Stream gas pipeline, a symbolic move designed to emphasize the strength
of Kremlin anger.
Turkey insists the SU-24 fighter bomber violated its air
space and was warned repeatedly before being shot down. Russia says the plane,
which was taking part in the Kremlin's air campaign against militants in Syria,
had not strayed from Syrian air space.
Erdogan sought a meeting with Putin on the sidelines of a
climate change conference in Paris last week, but was snubbed. Nor has the
Russian leader taken his phone calls.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said Dec. 7 that most
oil smuggled by the Islamic State is being transported through Turkey and that
it must be stopped. Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran's Expediency
Discernment Council, has also accused Turkey of aiding militant smuggling
operations, saying he has images of Islamic State oil trucks in Turkey.
Agence France Presse reported Dec. 5 from Moscow: "When
U.S. officials say they don't see how the terrorists' oil is smuggled to
Turkey... it smells badly of a desire to cover up these acts," the
ministry said "The declarations of the Pentagon and the State Department
seem like a theatre of the absurd," the statement added, suggesting that
Washington "watch the videos taken by its own drones which have recently
been three times as numerous over the Turkey-Syria border and above the oil
zones."
6. TRUMP: AMERICA'S MARINE LE PEN?
Now he wants to ban all Muslims from entering the United
States because, he stated in a speech, they possess “no sense of reason
or respect for human life.” Is he crossing the line to fascism?
By John Cassidy
On Dec. 5 Donald Trump took his rabble-rousing Presidential
campaign to Davenport, Iowa, and, naturally enough, he addressed the attack
that took place in San Bernardino on Wednesday, and the fact that the two
perpetrators appear to have been inspired by the Islamic State. “That shit
is not going to happen any more,” Trump told a
cheering crowd. “We’re going to be so vigilant. We’re going to
be so careful. We’re going to be so tough and so mean and so nasty.”
Just how mean and nasty? Trump didn’t say. He did, though,
point out that his support has grown since last month’s terror attack in Paris —
a fact confirmed by a new poll,
released on Dec. 5, by CNN, that shows him more than 20 points ahead of his
nearest Republican rival, Ben Carson. “Every time things get worse, I do
better,” Trump said. “People want strength.”
That might be true, but the number of people who respond
positively to the windy brand of toughness that Trump is offering shouldn’t be
overestimated. About 40% of voting-age Americans identify themselves as
Republicans or leaning Republican, and the latest polls show him garnering
about 30% of their support. This suggests that perhaps 12% of the American
electorate can be counted as members of the
round-’em-up/put-’em-on-a-watch-list/send-’em-back brigade. (It should be
noted, however, that the poll was carried out before the attack in San
Bernardino.)
Meanwhile, France has supplied a disturbing example of how
terror attacks can generate support for an authoritarian backlash against
immigrants and Muslims. On Dec.6, the ultra-right-wing National Front
made big gains in
the country’s regional elections. Exit polls suggested that the
party, which is led by Marine Le Pen, had won about 30% of the vote, well ahead
of Nicolas Sarkozy’s center-right Republican Party and President François
Hollande’s center-left Socialist Party. Depending on what happens in the
run-off elections, next month, the National Front could end up controlling
local governments in vast swaths of France.
While rising support for the National Front predates the two
major terrorist strikes that took place this year in Paris, concerns about
Islamic radicalism and rising antagonism toward immigrants undoubtedly helped
Le Pen and her colleagues. In the wake of last month’s coordinated attacks on
the Bataclan theatre and other sites, Le Pen restated her earlier call for
an end to all immigration into France, legal and illegal. She said that the
mainstream parties had failed to protect the French people and demanded an
immediate police crackdown. “Islamist fundamentalism must be
annihilated,” she said.
“France must ban Islamist organizations, close radical mosques, and expel
foreigners who preach hatred in our country as well as illegal migrants who
have nothing to do here.”
 |
| Is he waving, or saluting? |
In some ways, Trump hasn’t gone as far as Le Pen. He still
favors legal immigration, for example. But, in other ways, his message is
uncannily similar to Le Pen’s; on one issue, he’s even outdone her. On Dec. 6,
he issued a statement calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims
entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out
what is going on.” In typical fashion, Trump didn’t provide any details or
background material to support his proposal, which came hours after polls
showed Sen. Ted Cruz leading him in Iowa. “Until we are able to determine and
understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot
be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and
have no sense of reason or respect for human life,” Trump said in the
statement. “If I win the election for President, we are going to Make America
Great Again.”
Appearing on CBS’s
“Face the Nation” on Sunday, Trump stepped up his attacks
on President Obama for failing to use the term “radical Islamic terrorism,” and
said that the United States wouldn’t defeat the Islamic State until Obama “gets
the hell out” of the White House. Trump also called for stepped-up surveillance
of Muslim communities and institutions, such as mosques, and he endorsed police
profiling of Muslim individuals.
“I think there can be profiling,” Trump said.
And, he went on, “A lot of people are dead right now. So everybody wants to be
politically correct, and that’s part of the problem that we have with our
country.” He later added, “You have people that have to be tracked. If
they’re Muslims, they’re Muslims.”
For now, at least, some of the other Republican candidates
are distancing themselves from Trump’s most incendiary statements. “The
fact is, we don’t need to be profiling in order to be able to get the job done
here,” Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, said, also on “Face the
Nation.” He cited what happened after 9/11 in New Jersey and other states,
where the authorities created closer relationships with Muslim communities and
mosques but didn’t engage in overt profiling. “What you need is a
President who’s had the experience and the know-how to do
this,” Christie said,
“and not someone who’s just going to talk off the top of their head.”
On ABC News’s “This Week,” Jeb Bush, the former governor of
Florida, expressed
similar sentiments. “We don’t have to target the religion,”
Bush said. “We just have to target those that have coopted the religion and
make sure that we’re fully aware of the radicalizations taking place, not just
here but all around the world.” On the evening of Dec. 7, in response to
Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, Christie and Bush
criticized him again. “This is the kind of thing that people say when they have
no experience and don’t know what they are talking about,” Christie said on a
radio show. “We do not need to resort to that type of activity, nor should we.”
Bush tweeted, “Donald Trump is unhinged. His ‘policy’ proposals are not
serious.”
It remains to be seen whether this measured attitude will survive
contact with the GOP’s base. As I write this, the Real Clear Politics poll average shows
Christie and Bush garnering the backing of 6.8% of potential Republican voters,
between them. Trump has 29.5%With the American public increasingly alarmed
about the possibility of future terrorist attacks, and with conservative
commentators baying for blood, it is far from clear that reason and restraint
will be rewarded.
Trump, on the other hand, is in his element. During and
after Obama’s address to the nation Dec.6, he kept up a derisive commentary on Twitter: “Is
that all there is? We need a new President — FAST!” “Well, Obama refused to say
(he just can’t say it), that we are at WAR with RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISTS.”
“Obama said in his speech that Muslims are our sports heroes. What sport is he
talking about, and who? Is Obama profiling?”
The mocking tone is one of Trump’s defining characteristics.
Another — as the New York Times pointed out last weekend, in an analysis
of his public comments — is a relentless focus on the threat to
America, and to American values, presented by outsiders of various kinds:
Mexican immigrants, Syrian refugees, radical Muslims. A third trait of his
campaign is the constant refrain that he will restore American greatness.
Mockery of the political establishment, an “us versus them”
attitude, the myth of national regeneration: all of these things have long been
associated with political movements of the far right, course, and among the
commentariat there is now a lively
debate about whether or not Trump can be regarded as fascist or proto-fascist.
Since there is no generally agreed-upon definition of fascism, this discussion
is unlikely to be resolved. What can be said without fear of contradiction is
that Trump represents a long-standing and deep-rooted strain of American
nativism and parochialism, which, in earlier eras, was exploited by such
figures as Father Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace.
How far can Trump push it? To repeat, the polls suggest that
his support is limited, however vocal it may be. And unlike Marine Le Pen, he
doesn’t have a separate political party behind him. Le Pen’s father,
Jean-Marie, formed the National Front in 1972, and it has spent more than four
decades agitating and building up its presence at the local level. But it
wasn’t until the telegenic Marine took over as the Party’s leader, in 2011, and
set out to “de-demonize” its public image that the National Front became a
serious threat to the mainstream parties.
For now, Trump is trying to coopt the Republican Party, some
elements of which regard him as a cancer. If, as remains the most likely
outcome, the Party unites around somebody to defeat him in the upcoming
primary, he could still end up running in the general election as an
independent or third-party candidate. (Just last week, he repeated that his
earlier pledge to support the Republican ticket even if he doesn’t win the
nomination depended upon him being treated “fairly.”) But given Trump’s
self-centeredness and lack of interest in organizational details, it seems
unlikely that he will bequeath to
America a new right-wing party.
In any case, though, he is successfully demonstrating how
far celebrity, riches, demagoguery, and favorable circumstances can take an
ambitious and unscrupulous individual. Even a couple of months ago, it was
clear that his campaign was tapping into deep veins of economic disappointment,
ethnic resentment, and political disaffection. To that febrile mix, the fear of
domestic terrorism has now been added. Hopefully, the President is right, and
the country will overcome the threat of ISIS without ditching the
values and liberties it claims to represent. Like France, though, America
stands at a perilous political moment.
— From the New Yorker blog, Dec. 7, 2015. John Cassidy is a staff writer at The
New Yorker.
———————
7. FRANCE CRACKS DOWN ON MUSLIMS & MARCHERS
 |
| French police plow into crowd of demonstrators to end banned climate march in Paris Nov. 29. |
The French government trampled on civil rights in the
aftermath of the Nov. 13 terror attack in Paris that killed 130 people. The
main victims were Muslim individuals and families and activists who planned to
demonstrate against climate change in Paris and the nearby site of the UN COP21
talks seeking an international agreement on cutting the use of fossil fuels.
Al Jazeera reports: "A surge in arrests, house arrests
and raids on homes and private property in the wake of the Paris attacks —
including at mosques and Muslim-owned businesses — has raised alarm among
rights organizations that France's extended state of emergency could curb civil
liberties.
"The general prohibition put in place in the wake of
the attacks came to an end on Nov. 22 but the ban was extended until Dec. 13
around the Champs-Elysees in central Paris and in Le Bourget, where the COP21
meeting is taking place." The gathering is due to end on the 13th.
Democracy Now noted Dec. 3: "French Interior Minister
Bernard Cazeneuve announced that authorities had carried out more than 2,200
raids since a state of emergency was declared following the Paris attacks.
Under the state of emergency, French police can raid any home without judicial
oversight. In addition, police have held 263 people for questioning — nearly
all have been detained. Another 330 people are under house arrest, and three
mosques have also been shut down."
There are numerous report of excessive use of police force.
French Police breaking into apartments in order to question Muslim residents.
The drastic State of Emergency has also been used to ban
peaceful protests that were planned for months to begin in Le Bourget at the
beginning of the UN climate conference, followed by smaller actions throughout
the conference.
Hundreds of thousands of climate protesters from France and
around the world were planning to take part in a historic march demanding
significant changes in restricting greenhouse gas emissions that probably will
not be part of the final agreement.
On Sunday Nov. 29, police arrested 317 protesters out of
thousands who defied the ban on marches after they were forcefully dispersed by
police at the Place de la Republique — a main location for commemorations
following the terrorist shootings.
There was nothing about the planned demonstrations that
justified the ban. They would have had a positive impact on the climate
deliberations, providing public backing for a more extensive final agreement.
This was obviously not welcomed by certain countries.
Worldwide, the Guardian reported that just before COP21
began "More than 600,000 people have taken to the streets in 175 countries
of the world to call for a strong deal in Paris that will see a swift
transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Melbourne and London led the
way, with 60,000 people and 50,000 people, respectively, joining marches.
Commenting on the global demonstrations, May Boeve,
executive director of 350.org, said: “The scale and diversity of today’s events
are astounding. Worldwide people are ready for the end of fossil fuels and the
dawn of renewables. World leaders can no longer ignore this urgent call for
action as the climate crisis continues to unfold. It is time for them to stand
on the right side of history.”
———————
8. THE BATTLE TO MILITARIZE SPACE HAS BEGUN
By Stratfor, 11-11, 2015
In the same way that control of the skies added a new dimension to combat in the great wars of the 20th century, the military exploitation of space will be a defining characteristic of the 21st century. German rocket technology propelled the first unmanned systems into space during the latter stages of World War II. These systems traveled beyond the Karman line — the commonly accepted boundary between Earth and space, at around 100 kilometers altitude (62 miles). From the late 1950s onward, the ability to routinely launch manned and unmanned systems into orbit heralded a new era of competition between the Soviet bloc and the West, led by the United States. As the Cold War progressed, the utilization of the near-Earth environment shaped a new strategic aspect to the conflict and added another battlefield in which the world's superpowers could compete.
In the standoff between the post-war powers,
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were the only weapons to enter
space. They were projected on an arc that took them beyond the Earth's
atmosphere before deploying warheads carried by re-entry vehicles to their
targets. There were no existing defensive systems that could be stationed in
space or close enough to ensure the destruction of the ballistic missiles
themselves or of their deadly payloads. The development, staging and
maintenance of space-based weapons and bases was untenable at the time, so
treaties limiting what could be done in Earth's immediate vicinity were
relatively uncontroversial and easy to pass.
These pacts also hoped to address some of the prevalent fears of the time, including concerns about nuclear explosions in space and about debris descending back to Earth. UN.-brokered regulations were based on existing Cold War technologies, capabilities and expectations, influenced by the fact that emerging space law was particularly ambiguous. Therefore, existing international law considers the lowest perigee attainable by an orbiting craft: Anything in orbit is taken to be in international space, and anything not orbiting is accepted to be in national airspace. The problem with legal ambiguity, however, is the extent to which gray areas can be exploited for gain.
 |
| Model of military space rocket fired from Earth. |
Yet, as technology improved and countries' strategic
imperatives evolved, so did the consideration given to the domination of space.
The announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) by former U.S.
President Ronald Reagan in 1983 was heavily criticized, but it proved that the
logical evolution of missile defense involved orbital platforms as well as
ground-based systems. Although the initiative — known by its more popular
moniker Star Wars — did not reach fruition, the United States still achieved
global military superiority in the years following the collapse of the Soviet
Union.
In achieving military dominance, the United States came to
increasingly rely on space-based infrastructure to wage war. While Washington
adhered to the prohibition on placing offensive weapons — including kinetic
kill systems, directed energy weapons platforms and missile-carrying satellites
— in space permanently, the United States installed a huge portion of its
electronic networking capability in orbit, enabling it to intervene in
conflicts around the globe. Military satellites were the lynchpin of a
network-centric approach to operations, comprising command, control,
communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance
structures, better known as C4ISR. The evolution of C4ISR coincided with the
advent of precision-guided munitions and the drone revolution, enabling the
free movement of near real-time data. Everything from GPS, early warning
monitoring, weather tracking, tactical and strategic communications, and
full-spectrum intelligence gathering is facilitated through the United States'
expansive network of military satellites.
However, the U.S. military is not the sole operator of
space-based infrastructure. Countries with advanced space programs, such as
China, Russia, Israel, Japan and some NATO alliance members, all rely on some
military space-based capability. And the trend is only increasing. As much as
the United States leads the field, however, it is increasingly reliant on its
space-based systems — of which a significant percentage are
highly vulnerable and largely indefensible. This vulnerability has not escaped
the notice of the United States' biggest competitors. By finding a way to
disable space-based systems, a potential antagonist could disconnect the
multiple interlocking U.S. military systems, plunging it into information
darkness and delivering a critical blow ahead of any physical strike — and to
do so would not violate any existing space treaty.
Artists depiction of space war.
Most other countries do not have the same vulnerabilities as
the United States, which makes it difficult for Washington to impose the kind
of retaliatory deterrence structure that worked so well during the nuclear arms
race. In other words, the United States cannot use the threat of disabling
other countries' space-based communications infrastructure to prevent attacks
because other countries do not rely as heavily on the technology. So U.S. Space
Command faces a conundrum: How does it cover what is a largely exposed and
defenseless flank?
Perhaps partly because of concerns over Chinese
anti-satellite tests — the most recent of which was conducted Oct. 30 — the
Pentagon has recently started to talk about "space control." And the
shift in language could indicate a change to the U.S. defense approach.
Washington knows that to be proactive may mean stepping beyond the boundaries
of the Outer Space Treaty, and the move would not be without precedent: Reagan
showed a willingness to overstep the treaty with his Star Wars program, though
he was ultimately stalled because of a lack of political will and technological
capability.
As Washington works to secure its orbital technology, it
also realizes that competitors are catching up. This is not to say that the
U.S. military has been negligent in developing and expanding its capabilities.
The United States leads the field in ballistic missile defense (BMD), and many of
its maturing systems are designed to operate outside of the Earth's atmosphere.
The United States also dominates space-tracking infrastructure: Being able
to see other countries' space-based systems is beneficial from both a defensive
and offensive perspective.
The U.S. Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system
has the ability to reach into space and to attack ICBMs in the middle of their
flight trajectory. A key component of GMD is something known as an
exoatmospheric kill vehicle, which separates from its boost vehicle in space
and collides with an incoming projectile. This technology does not violate
existing space treaties but is revealing of the way military planners — and the
defense industries that serve them — are thinking.
Regulation and enforcement is not clear, but the trend is.
As militaries around the globe expand their capabilities, so will they increase
their reliance on space-based systems. Thus space will become increasingly
militarized. The push to expand, occupy and dominate space will eventually
erode the efficacy of the current treaty structures set in place decades ago.
Currently, all space-based military infrastructure supports terrestrial
operations. But long-term considerations about the eventual exploitation of
resources in the broader solar system factor into current debates. When space
exploration and the collection and refinement of resources become economically
feasible, competition will inevitably ensue.
History tells us that such opportunities for resources
rarely go smoothly or unchallenged, though deep-sea mining shows us that
peaceful competition is possible. Still, generally, competition on Earth has
led to perpetual conflict and military posturing, so it is logical that
competition for resources elsewhere could inevitably lead to more conflict and
could necessitate the ability to project military power there in one form or
another. Closer to home, we can look to the opening of the Arctic for
comparison: There is no clear precedent for ownership, there are mineral resources
present, and only certain countries have the technological know-how to explore
and exploit such an inhospitable environment. Countries have already staked
their claims and military posturing has begun. As the ability to capture the
riches of the solar system becomes more viable, it is highly likely that
similar disputes will emerge in the more forbidding environment of space.
———————
9. LEST WE FORGET: A HERO'S BIRTHDAY
By the Activist Newsletter
This is written on Dec. 7 to commemorate the day in 1941 the
U.S entered the war against fascism and imperialism. We selected one person, a
European woman, as our focus:
Lepa Svetozara Radić, a young Serbian woman resident in
Yugoslavia, would have been 90 years old this Dec. 17. But she was 17 years old when
executed by the Nazis in 1943. Lepa was a partisan fighter against the
occupying German army. Her crime was shooting at German soldiers during World War
II.
Lepa was born in the village of Gašnici. After finishing middle
school she became an activist with the Communist Youth League, and a year later
became a member of the Yugoslavian Communist Party, the principal organization
fighting the Nazis in that country.
As the noose was about to be put around her neck she cried
out, "Long live the Communist Party and the partisans!" As her
captors then tightened the noose, they offered her a last minute way out of the
gallows by revealing her comrades and leaders identities. She responded that
she was not a traitor to her people and they would reveal themselves when they
avenged her death. She was the youngest winner of the Order of the People’s
Hero of Yugoslavia, awarded posthumistly in 1951.
We will take a private moment to salute her on her birthday
— a gesture to all those who participated, or suffered or died in the battles against fascism and
imperialism. Long may they be remembered.
———————
 |
| A Taliban soldier undefeated after all these years. |
12,000 TROOPS IN AFGHANISTAN
By Agence France-Presse, 12-1-15
The U.S. and NATO will keep some 12,000 troops in
Afghanistan for an extra year through 2016 to prevent the country again
becoming a terrorist safe haven, alliance head Jens Stoltenberg said.
NATO's mission was supposed to end this year but Taliban
battlefield successes, especially their recent brief capture of the northern
city of Kunduz, prompted a radical re-think. President Obama announced in
October after the Kunduz attack that he would keep the bulk of the some 10,000
US troops in Afghanistan for another year because Afghan forces "are still
not as strong as they need to be."
U.S.-led NATO invaded Afghanistan in 2001 shortly after the
9/11 terror attacks to oust the Taliban from Kabul, the capital. U.S. troop
numbers peaked at around 90,000. Taliban militants are still mounting attacks
while the Islamic State is gaining a foothold in the country.
At the moment the 28 NATO allies were also reviewing how to
provide fresh funding for the Afghan armed forces for the period 2017-20, after
they put up $4 billion previously.
[Activist Newsletter: After lasting 14 years it is evident the war
will continue indefinitely. Washington has spent a trillion dollars in efforts
to dominate the country but has failed, as it did in Iraq. In all probability
American troops will still be fighting in Afghanistan for years to come, and
the White House will continue paying billions annually to sustain the Afghan
army and police. The American people, including the peace movement, have
basically forgotten the war.
———————
11. SUPREME COURT TO
RULE ON ABORTION
From Reuters and Democracy Now
The U.S. Supreme Court's decision Nov. 13 to hear a
challenge to tough abortion restrictions in Texas raises questions about the
legal fate of similar laws in more than a dozen other states.
The court's ruling, due by June, could spell out the extent
to which states can impose clinic regulations likely to restrict access to
abortion as an outpatient procedure. If the court upholds the Texas law,
similar laws would also fall. But if the court rules in favor of the state,
then more states would be able to follow suit.
"Broadly speaking, the rule the Supreme Court crafts
will impact all different types of regulation," said Steven Aden, a lawyer
with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group that supports
abortion restrictions. A number of conservative-leaning states have passed laws
in recent years governing abortion providers and clinics — all of which
restricted abortion rights.
Democracy Now reported Nov. 18: "A new report reveals
at least 100,000 women in the state of Texas have attempted to self-induce an
abortion. The groundbreaking study by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project comes
as the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a challenge to a sweeping Texas
anti-choice law. Since the law passed in
2013, about half of the state’s 41 abortion clinics have closed. The study
found as many as 240,000 Texas women have tried to end a pregnancy without
medical assistance, citing restrictions including a lack of funds to travel to
a clinic or the fact their local clinic had shut down.
"In Kentucky, the state’s last remaining full-time
abortion clinic has been vandalized for the second time in less than a month.
Last week, a man threw a rock through the glass door of EMW Women’s Surgical
Center in Louisville, just two weeks after another man hurled himself into the
clinic’s window, shattering it. The clinic’s executive director told Insider
Louisville: "We’re not angry, we’re not afraid, we’re just really sad that
the mentality out there isn’t more understanding and compassionate for women."
The case before the Supreme Court focuses on two provisions
of a 2013 Texas law. One requires clinics providing abortions to have costly
hospital-grade facilities and the other requires abortion clinic physicians to
have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles (50 km).
Ten of the 50 U.S. states have imposed admitting-privilege
requirements similar to those in Texas, while six have enacted laws requiring
hospital-grade facilities that mirror the Texas law, according to the Center
for Reproductive Rights, which represents abortion providers in the case before
the Supreme Court.
In total, 22 states have specific licensing standards for
abortion clinics, although not all are as strict as Texas', according to the
Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports the right to an abortion,
but whose research is cited by both sides in the debate.
Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive
Rights, said that if the Texas law is upheld, "copy cat laws around the
nation will proliferate, creating disparities in access to care."
Courts have blocked six of the Texas-like admitting
privileges laws, including measures in Wisconsin and Alabama.
A Mississippi law mandating admitting privileges, which
would have led to the only abortion clinic in the state closing down, was put
on hold by a lower court in 2012. That case is pending at the high court and
will likely be put on hold until the justices rule in the Texas case.
Courts have been more favorable toward tightened rules for
clinics providing abortions. Four of the six laws similar to Texas', including
measures in Missouri and Virginia, have been allowed, at least in part, to go
into effect. 12 other states including Florida, South Carolina and Arkansas,
have this year considered enacting similar laws but the bills did not pass,
according the Guttmacher Institute.
——————
12. RICHEST 10% PRODUCE HALF CARBON EMISSIONS
12. RICHEST 10% PRODUCE HALF CARBON EMISSIONS
By Reuters news agency
The richest 10th of the world's people produce half of all
carbon emissions, while the poorest half — most threatened by droughts and
super storms linked to climate change — produce only 10%, Oxfam reported Dec.
2.
The richest 10% have, on average, carbon footprints 11 times
that of the poorest 3.5 billion people on the planet, the campaign group said
in a report to coincide with talks in Paris this month on a global deal to slow
climate change.
"Climate change and economic inequality are
inextricably linked and together pose one of the greatest challenges of the
21st century," Tim Gore, Oxfam's head of food and climate policy, said in
a statement.
"Paris must be the start of building a more human
economy for all — not just for the 'haves,' the richest and highest emitters,
but also the 'have-nots', the poorest people who are the least responsible for
and most vulnerable to climate change.... Rich, high emitters should be held
accountable for their emissions, no matter where they live..
Oxfam said a select group of billionaires, who had made many
of their fortunes in fossil fuels, were the only people to stand to gain from a
weak deal in Paris.
Experts say the world's poorest, regardless of the country
they are living in, are often the least prepared in terms of coping with the
effects of climate change, and women, especially in rural areas, are the most
vulnerable.
— There's a good video interview of Tim Gore Dec 2 on
Democracy Now: http://www.democracynow.org/2015/12/2/the_global_poor_vs_the_10?utm_source=Democracy+Now%21&utm_campaign=ad947fb186-Daily_Digest&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-ad947fb186-190207537
———————
13.
BIG JUMP IN FOSSIL FUEL DIVESTMENT
New York City activists protesting outside bank rrecently demanding divestment from fossil fuels.
By Wendy Koch, National Geographic, 12-2-15
An increasing number of cities across the globe, including
Norway’s capital Oslo, are pledging to divest from fossil fuels. Some are going
even further by cutting their use of oil, coal, or natural gas.
They're boosting a divestment campaign that began as a
millennial crusade on college campuses three years ago but has quickly spread
to churches and foundations, including one created with the fortune of oil
magnate John D. Rockefeller.
The divestment campaign now includes more than 500
institutions representing at least $3.4 trillion in assets, up from $50 billion
just 14 months ago, according to 350.org. Only a small fraction of those assets
are likely invested directly in fossil-fuel stocks, but participants are
noteworthy: Dutch pension fund PFZW is divesting from coal companies, the
London School of Economics from coal and tar sands, and Germany’s Protestant Church
in Hesse and Nassau from all fossil fuels.
The campaign is the fastest growing divestment movement in
history and could damage coal, gas and oil companies, says a 2013 study
by the University of Oxford. It follows prior U.S.-originated
efforts against tobacco, violence in Sudan's Darfur, and apartheid in South
Africa. Desmond Tutu, who fought apartheid, also opposes fossil fuels: “People
of conscience need to break their ties with corporations financing the
injustice of climate change.
In late November at UN climate talks in Paris, campaign activists announced that
Paris and 18 other French municipalities have approved steps to divest from
companies that produce fossil fuels. The cities, encouraged to divest by a
recent French Parliament resolution, include Bordeaux, Dijon, Lille, and
Saint-Denis.
“Cities are moving to
the forefront in the fight against climate change,” says Jamie Henn, co-founder
and spokesperson of 350.org, the grassroots
group coordinating the divestment campaign along with the Divest-Invest coalition. “They know
firsthand the problems brought about by fossil fuels, from urban air pollution
to rising seas,” he says, adding they’re setting an example for state and
national governments.
Some cities are shifting not only their investments but also
their power mix. The California cities of San Francisco and Santa Monica, which
have pledged divestment, have set targets of getting all their electricity from
renewable energy. Two others, Oslo and Seattle, now get 98 percent from
non-fossil fuel sources, primarily hydropower, according to a survey this
year by CDP, a not-for-profit group formerly known as Carbon
Disclosure Project.
Even capitals not divesting are nixing fossil fuel.
Australia's Canberra has committed to getting 90 percent of its electricity
from renewables by 2020 and Sweden's Stockholm aims to use zero fossil fuels by
2040, reports CDP.
———————
14. SYSTEM CHANGE,
NOT CLIMATE CHANGE
As we approach the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in
Paris, much of the world is hopeful that some meaningful binding resolution
will come out of the talks. All scientific evidence supports that climate
change is here, it is caused by human behavior and if we don’t take measures
immediately to drastically curb greenhouse house gas (GHG) emissions and
consumption levels, we will face catastrophic climate change.
While the EU is pushing for a legally binding climate deal
to come from the Paris talks, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry stated, there
is
“definitively not going to be a treaty” and there are “not going to be legally
binding reduction targets like Kyoto.”
This means more empty promises and little action coming from
the biggest per
capita polluter — the United States—with over two times that of
China per capita.
Of course even if a legally binding agreement comes out, who
will enforce it? The United States has a long history of defying international
law and acting unilaterally in imperialist wars and interventions around the
globe.
The U.S. in past climate talks has pointed the finger at
China in particular and other developing countries as guilty of polluting and
not matching the commitments of the developed world. But this June, China
committed to cut emissions by 65% of 2005 levels and pledged $3.1 billion in
aid to developing countries to combat climate change. Compare this to the
United States’ comparatively weak pledge
to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 32% of 2005 levels by
the year 2030. With power plants accounting for only one third of overall U.S.
emissions, this pledge falls short of any sincere effort.
Last year, China spent $83.3 billion on renewable energy
development with the U.S. in a distant second place at $38.3 billion. China is
leader in hydro and wind capacity and comes in second after Germany’s solar
program. Despite the demonization of China for coal use, China reduced
coal use by 2.9% last year on top of a 7.4% growth in the economy.
Jason Kowalski, policy director of 350.org stated, “The TPP
is an act of climate denial. While the text is
full of handouts to the fossil fuel industry, it doesn’t mention the words
climate change once.” It gives “fossil fuel companies the extraordinary
ability to sue local governments that try and keep fossil fuels in the ground....
If a province puts a moratorium on fracking, corporations can sue; if a
community tries to stop a coal mine, corporations can overrule them. In short,
these rules undermine countries’ ability to do what scientists say is the
single most important thing we can do to combat the climate crisis: keep fossil
fuels in the ground.”
Under the free trade model that exploded in the 1990s,
emissions from trade have increased by 400% along with shipping of materials
and goods, part and parcel of outsourcing production from the developed world
to the developing world. (“This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the
Climate,” Naomi Klein)
These same agreements allow corporations to violate local
environmental regulations and labor laws going so far as to sue governments if
they in any way impede their ability to make profits. This model is at its core
irreconcilable with the path to a sustainable world.
The latest Greenhouse
Gas Bulletin states that atmospheric
concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) reached 397.7ppm in 2014 with carbon
levels increasing by 143%, nitrous oxide by 121%, and methane by 254 percent
since 1750.
2015 is on
the path to being the hottest year on record as we reach the
threshold of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) of warming since the industrial
era began.
Scientists warn that in order to stay below 2 degrees
Centigrade of warming (3.6 F) total emissions must leave more than 80% of known
fossil fuel reserves in the ground. Going beyond
a 2 degree C increase is predicted to be catastrophic for life on Earth.
But capitalism marches on. For fossil fuel companies it is
business as usual. “In 2013, fossil fuel companies spent some $670 billion on
exploring for new oil and gas resources. One might ask
why they are doing this when there is more in the ground than we can afford to
burn,” says University College London Professor Paul Ekins, who
conducted a study on current corporate and government investments.
California
has the most aggressive GHG reduction plan in the nation. Initiated
with Assembly Bill 32, California is required to reduce GHG’s to 1990 levels by
2020, but California is one state in one country trying to address a global
problem. These measures, while they hope to inspire other regions to change,
are powerless to implement the immediate widespread measures that are necessary
to avert climate catastrophe.
A 2010
Stanford study by Mark Jacobson shows that with current technology
we can provide all the energy needs of the planet using wind, water and solar
power. The report states, “We suggest producing all new energy with WWS by 2030
and replacing the pre-existing energy by 2050. Barriers to the plan are
primarily social and political, not technological or economic.”
The opening for incremental changes and modest regulations
ended decades ago. Over those decades, the corporations which mine and burn
coal and oil, and which dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere have been
unresponsive to calls to transform, to do anything significant that could
damage their “competitive edge.” We cannot wait for the corporations — that in
reality hold power over the government — to give up their massive profits from
fossil fuels and the over production of unnecessary goods, to decide that the
planet and people are more important.
Regulatory agencies are weak in the face of Big Oil, gas and
coal with their fleets of lawyers and lobbyists that all the environmental
groups combined can never match. Additionally, regulation takes a piecemeal
approach combined with a lack of coordination and political will between
various agencies and the private sector. For example, government agencies that
regulate air pollution have no control over how many cars are on the road,
which is the main source of GHG emissions. They have no control over
accessibility to public transit, smart growth, all things that play into the
need for individuals to drive cars. They have no control over the auto
manufacturing companies and the affordability of zero emission vehicles.
How can we globally resolve the issue of climate change
before it becomes a catastrophe? Can we completely change our system from one
of competition and consumption to one of cooperation, sustainability and
adaptation? The scientists and engineers of the world have the solutions and
are showing that incremental changes and voluntary incentives are now too
little and too late. How can we foment the political will of our governments to
implement the necessary changes?
We need a globally coordinated effort between the world’s
leading scientists and engineers working with global leaders and communities to
make the best use of technologies and resources. We need a system of planned
economy and production to reduce waste and curb over-consumption and to funnel
resources toward global change adaptation and renewable technologies.
We need to take control from the corporations who only seek
to maximize profits at the expense of the planet. We cannot solve this crisis
through the corporate model and the capitalist system that relies on the whim
of the market to determine what is produced and in what quantity; where
corporations compete for cutting edge technologies and undermine each other’s
research and patent new discovers as private property to be profited from.
In socialist Cuba, there is cooperation and a pooling of
knowledge and resources within all sectors of society and with the outside
world. Through this model, Cuba has
repeatedly been the only nation to achieve sustainable development
despite the 53-year-long devastating economic blockade imposed by the U.S. that
severely restricts Cuba’s ability to trade. Sustainable development is
determined by ecological
footprint combined with a country’s Human Development Index (HDI) which
rates nation on life expectancy, literacy and education.
 |
| Urban organic vegetable garden adjacent to Havana apartment house. |
Cuba has implemented extensive polyculture organic agriculture and urban gardens that eliminate the emissions from transport of food from rural to urban centers. Organic urban farms provide100% of Havana’s consumption needs for produce along with 60,000 urban patios.
Cuba has the largest and best preserved wetland area in the
Caribbean and reforestation programs as well as reclamation of discarded
industrial areas in Havana. (http://www.treehugger.com/environmental-policy/why-cuba-sustainability-not-accident.html.)
An area once
a garbage dump in the neighborhood of Poglotti is now a woodland area.
“The reforestation project was an initiative of the community itself, and was
supported from the outset by local authorities and the Metropolitan Park of
Havana, the institution in charge of environmental management of part of the
city’s “green belt.”
Cuba demonstrates another way. Their grassroots
participatory democracy along with centralized planning and distribution of
resources is an efficient means to address the needs of society. In 2006, the government implemented
the Year of Energy Revolution and distributed 10 million energy
efficient light bulbs and over 6 million rice cookers and pressure cookers free
of charge to the population along with other energy efficient appliances. Under
capitalism, this would not be possible, and the corporations would likely sue
the government for inhibiting their profits.
There is a living model for how sustainability can be
achieved. If the world is serious about taking action on climate change, world
leaders should be studying the Cuban system and adopting it.
We cannot rely on our politicians to save us from climate
change or wait for the richest 1% to stop destroying the planet out of greed. Only
the masses of people have the collective power and the skills to reorganize
society in a sustainable way. We need a system that utilizes the world’s resources to sustain
and improve life for everyone on the planet; that puts life over profit. We
need to continue to build and strengthen the global people’s movement to demand
“System Change, Not Climate Change!”
— Liberation Newspaper is at http://www.liberationnews.org.
———————
15. CLIMATE CHANGE
WEATHER UPROOTS MILLIONS
By Democracy Now
The historic flooding in India this week comes as new
figures show that worldwide, an average of one person is displaced by
climate-related weather events every single second.
The data revealed by the United Nations refugee agency shows
that since 2008, 22.5 million people have been displaced by floods, storms and
other climate-related weather events – the equivalent of a person per second
over the last eight years.
Speaking at the United Nations climate summit Dec. 2, Marine
Franck of the UN refugee agency said the climate talks must help solve the
problem of massive climate displacement:
"The Paris agreement must address human mobility. In
the current draft of the negotiations the issue is addressed under 'loss and
damage,' but it’s also important to address this issue under adaptation.
Preventing and minimizing displacement must be a priority. Enabling people to
migrate in dignity, to seek alternative opportunities when living conditions
deteriorate and crisis comes knocking at their door is also an important
measure."
———————
16. PROBLEMS OF THE
WHITE MALE WORKING CLASS
 |
The white working class in large number turns out at Trump's big rallies (above). In the 2014 mid-term elections, 61% of these voters backed republicans; about 26% voted Democratic. |
The white working class, which usually inspires liberal
concern only for its paradoxical, Republican-leaning voting habits, has
recently become newsworthy for something else: according to economist
Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the winner of the latest Nobel Prize in economics,
its members in the 45- to 54-year-old age group are dying at an immoderate
rate. While the lifespan of affluent whites continues to lengthen, the lifespan
of poor whites has been shrinking. As a result, in just the last four years,
the gap between poor white men and wealthier ones has widened by up to four
years. The New York Times summed up the Deaton and Case study with
this headline: “Income Gap,
Meet the Longevity Gap.”
This was not supposed to happen. For almost a century, the
comforting American narrative was that better nutrition and medical care would
guarantee longer lives for all. So the great blue-collar die-off has come out
of the blue and is, as the Wall Street Journal says, startling.”
It was especially not supposed to happen to whites who, in
relation to people of color, have long had the advantage of higher earnings,
better access to health care, safer neighborhoods, and of course freedom from
the daily insults and harms inflicted on the darker-skinned. There has also
been a major racial gap in longevity — 5.3 years between white and black men
and 3.8 years between white and black women — though, hardly noticed, it has
been narrowing for
the last two decades. Only whites, however, are now dying off in unexpectedly
large numbers in middle age, their excess deaths accounted for by suicide,
alcoholism, and drug (usually opiate) addiction.
There are some practical reasons why whites are likely to be
more efficient than blacks at killing themselves. For one thing, they are more
likely to be gun-owners, and white men favor gunshots as a means of suicide.
For another, doctors, undoubtedly acting in part on stereotypes of non-whites
as drug addicts, are more likely to prescribe powerful opiate painkillers to
whites than to people of color. (I’ve been offered enough oxycodone
prescriptions over the years to stock a small illegal business.)
Manual labor — from waitressing to construction work — tends
to wear the body down quickly, from knees to back and rotator cuffs, and when
Tylenol fails, the doctor may opt for an opiate just to get you through the
day.
But something more profound is going on here, too.
As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman puts it,
the “diseases” leading to excess white working class deaths are those of
“despair,” and some of the obvious causes are economic. In the last few
decades, things have not been going well for working class people of any color.
I grew up in an America where a man with a strong back — and
better yet, a strong union — could reasonably expect to support a family on his
own without a college degree. In 2015, those jobs are long gone, leaving only
the kind of work once relegated to women and people of color available in areas
like retail, landscaping, and delivery-truck driving. This means that those in
the bottom 20% of white income distribution face material circumstances like
those long familiar to poor blacks, including erratic employment and crowded,
hazardous living spaces.
White privilege was never, however, simply a matter of
economic advantage. As the great African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote
in 1935, “It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they
received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and
psychological wage.”
Some of the elements of this invisible wage sound almost
quaint today, like Du Bois’s assertion that white working class people were
“admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public
parks, and the best schools.” Today, there are few public spaces that are not
open, at least legally speaking, to blacks, while the “best” schools are
reserved for the affluent -- mostly white and Asian American along with a
sprinkling of other people of color to provide the fairy dust of “diversity.”
While whites have lost ground economically, blacks have made gains, at least in
the de jure sense. As a result, the “psychological wage” awarded to
white people has been shrinking.
For most of American history, government could be counted on to maintain white power and privilege by enforcing slavery and later segregation. When the federal government finally weighed in on the side of desegregation, working class whites were left to defend their own diminishing privilege by moving rightward toward the likes of Alabama Governor (and later presidential candidate) George Wallace and his many white pseudo-populist successors down to Donald Trump.
At the same time, the day-to-day task of upholding white
power devolved from the federal government to the state and then local level, specifically to local police forces, which, as we know, have taken it up with such enthusiasm as to become both a national and international scandal. The Guardian, for instance, now keeps a running tally of the number of Americans (mostly black) killed by cops (as of this moment, 1,209
for 2015), while black protest, in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement
and a wave of on-campus demonstrations, has largely recaptured the moral high
ground formerly occupied by the civil rights movement.
The culture, too, has been inching bit by bit toward racial
equality, if not, in some limited areas, black ascendency. If the stock image
of the early twentieth century “Negro” was the minstrel, the role of rural
simpleton in popular culture has been taken over in this century by the
characters in Duck Dynasty and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. At
least in the entertainment world, working class whites are now regularly
portrayed as moronic, while blacks are often hyper-articulate, street-smart,
and sometimes as wealthy as Kanye West. It’s not easy to maintain the usual
sense of white superiority when parts of the media are squeezing laughs from
the contrast between savvy blacks and rural white bumpkins, as in the Tina Fey
comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. White, presumably upper-middle
class people generally conceive of these characters and plot lines, which, to a
child of white working class parents like myself, sting with condescension.
Of course, there was also the election of the first black
president. White, native-born Americans began to talk of “taking our country
back.” The more affluent ones formed the Tea Party; less affluent ones often
contented themselves with affixing Confederate flag decals to their trucks.
All of this means that the maintenance of white privilege,
especially among the least privileged whites, has become more difficult and so,
for some, more urgent than ever. Poor whites always had the comfort of knowing
that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation
was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own
situation was deteriorating.
If the government, especially at the federal level, is no
longer as reliable an enforcer of white privilege, then it’s grassroots
initiatives by individuals and small groups that are helping to fill the gap --
perpetrating the micro-aggressions that roil college campuses, the racial slurs
[10] yelled from pickup trucks, or, at a deadly extreme, the shooting up of a
black church renowned for its efforts in the Civil Rights era. Dylan Roof, the
Charleston killer who did just that, was a jobless high school dropout and
reportedly a heavy user of alcohol and opiates. Even without a death sentence
hanging over him, Roof was surely headed toward an early demise.
Acts of racial aggression may provide their white
perpetrators with a fleeting sense of triumph, but they also take a special
kind of effort. It takes effort, for instance, to target a black runner and
swerve over to insult her from your truck; it takes such effort — and a strong
stomach — to paint a
racial slur in excrement on a dormitory bathroom wall. College students may do
such things in part out of a sense of economic vulnerability, the knowledge
that as soon as school is over their college-debt payments will come due. No
matter the effort expended, however, it is especially hard to maintain a
feeling of racial superiority while struggling to hold onto one’s own place
near the bottom of an undependable economy.
While there is no medical evidence that racism is toxic to
those who express it -- after all, generations of wealthy slave owners survived
quite nicely -- the combination of downward mobility and racial resentment may
be a potent invitation to the kind of despair that leads to suicide in one form
or another, whether by gunshots or drugs. You can’t break a glass ceiling if
you’re standing on ice.
It’s easy for the liberal intelligentsia to feel righteous
in their disgust for lower-class white racism, but the college-educated elite
that produces the intelligentsia is in trouble, too, with diminishing prospects
and an ever-slipperier slope for the young. Whole professions have fallen on
hard times, from college teaching to journalism and the law. One of the worst
mistakes this relative elite could make is to try to pump up its own pride by
hating on those — of any color or ethnicity — who are falling even faster.
— From TomDispatch, Dec. 1, http://www.tomdispatch.com 2015.
Socialist, feminist and activist Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of 13books,
including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed.
———————
17. CAPITALISM IS
CONCERNED ABOUT BERNIE
 |
| Most union unions will support Clinton but the National Nurses UInited backs Sanders. |
[The Wall Street Journal is watching Bernie Sanders'
campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination very carefully. The daily
news organ of the U.S. capitalist system does not believe he will gain the candidacy,
much less the presidency. But his popularity is obviously a product of mass
misgivings about the raw deal workers are getting from capitalism. In this
article the WSJ compares Sanders with two famous socialist leaders of early in
the last century. The comparison is superficial — they were to Bernie's left
and dedicated their entire lives to the cause, not to a single essentially
liberal primary campaign. But what concerns the Journal is a self-described
socialist getting the support of multitudes of American despite 100 years of
continuous government propaganda against socialism and communism.]
By Emma Court, Nov. 27
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s upstart presidential candidacy
is being fueled by voter sentiment that hasn’t been so prominent for nearly a
century: a fight between the economic haves and have-nots.
It’s a stewing sense of unfairness last tapped to broad
affect by a couple of his political heroes: socialist presidential candidates
Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, each of whom lost five times in the early part
of the 20th century. [Activist Newsletter: In 1920 Debs received nearly a
million votes despite the fact that he was in prison serving a 10-year sentence
for opposing the military draft.]
While they faltered on Election Day, they did succeed in
pushing the Democratic Party to the left, and some of their policy proposals
found their way into President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
History might repeat itself as Mr. Sanders’s passionate
attacks on big corporations and the wealthy could influence the policies of
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton on trade and regulating Wall Street
investors.
“Only once in a great while does a figure like Bernie
Sanders come along,” said Paul Buhle, a retired Brown University American
studies professor and Sanders supporter. “Whether he wins or loses, he still
has made a great impression.”
Candidates aligned with the socialist movement tend to gain
the most attention during times of increased income inequality, and
particularly on the heels of a stock-market crash, historians said....
Mr. Sanders harkened back to the New Deal in a recent speech
dedicated to explaining what it means to him to be a self-described Democratic
socialist today. He highlighted some of the key elements of the New Deal legislative
package — including the passage of Social Security, housing assistance and a
jobs program — and drew parallels between that era and the present. In a
reference to Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Sanders noted: “By the way, almost everything
he proposed was called ‘socialist.’ ”
Mr. Debs is a legendary figure in the U.S. socialist
movement. He led a railroad workers union strike, dubbed the Pullman Strike,
and traveled the country during one election cycle campaigning on a train
called “the Red Special.” Mr. Sanders called him “the greatest leader in the
history of the American working class” in an admiring 1979 documentary that Mr.
Sanders directed about Mr. Debs’s life.
Like Mr. Sanders, audiences came out in the thousands to hear Debs
speak.
“Sanders is picking up some of that anti-corporate spirit,”
said James Green, emeritus history professor at University of Massachusetts at
Boston. “What ties him to Debs is a sense that corporate America, big-time
capitalism, is inherently corrupt and destructive to American democracy and the
American people.”
Of course, workforce trends have changed since the early and
mid-20th century. Both Mr. Debs and Mr. Thomas rose to prominence during a
time of union ascendancy, while now the labor movement’s hold on the workforce
has been in decline for decades. Meanwhile, corporations have grown
exponentially in size and scale since Mr. Debs’s day.
That means socialism today has a different meaning, said
Nick Salvatore, an American history professor at Cornell University and author
of a book about the labor leader. “Debs’ generation actually remembered a time
before corporate capitalism was deeply embedded in the culture,” he said.
“Nobody today has any remembrance.”
Rather than talk of national ownership of corporations, Mr.
Sanders’s proposals are for Social Security increases, free college tuition and
breaking up big banks, or what Mr. Green called “21st century socialism.”
He has also railed against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal negotiated
by President Barack Obama.
That Mr. Sanders’s campaign, even if it fails, could play an
important role long after the 2016 election has been acknowledged by the
candidate himself. “This campaign really is not about Bernie Sanders,” the
candidate often says on the campaign trail. “It’s about transforming America.”
———————
18. AMERICA, REFUGEES
AND ABSOLUTE SECURITY
By Gideon Rachman, Financial Times, Nov. 20
Watching the debate on terrorism from the U.S. has been a
bizarre experience. The attacks took place in France — but it seems to be the
U.S. where the political demands for ever-tougher border controls are taking
hold.
On Nov.19 the House of Representatives passed the
American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act (SAFE – get it!) which
would stop resettlement of Syrian and Iraqi refugees in the U.S. indefinitely.
By contrast, President Hollande has just reaffirmed that France will
take 30,000 Syrian refugees over the next two years.
You might say that, in the current fearful climate,
reasonable people can disagree about the right approach to Syrian refugees. But
the current U.S. debate is framed by some distinctly unreasonable rhetoric
particularly on the campaign trail. On the same day that the House passed SAFE,
Donald Trump — still comfortably the front-runner in the race to be the
Republican nominee — came out in favor of a database to
track all Muslims in America. Meanwhile Ben Carson, who is running
second to Trump, likened management of Syrian refugees to the handling of a
rabid dog.
It was in this climate that the House passed SAFE. The
Senate will debate the bill in a couple of weeks time. President Obama has said
he will veto the measure, if it lands on his desk.
In reality, the numbers of Syrian refugees, arriving in the
U.S. are minuscule. America has accepted 1,200 Syrian refugees this year,
three-quarters of which are women and children. Vetting is already so extensive
that it takes an average of two years for a refugee to be accepted.
The current argument reflects deeper trends in American
thought and politics. Protected by two vast oceans, Americans can and do still aspire to absolute security.
The idea that the troubles of the world can simply be excluded, is still attractive
and popular. That is the more comforting explanation of what is going on. But
there is also no avoiding the ugliness of much of the current debate — in which
distortions and untruths peddled on talk radio are pandered to, by unscrupulous
politicians such as Trump.
— Gideon Rachman is the chief foreign affairs columnist for
the Financial Times.
———————
19. Books: THE
AMAZING INNER LIVES OF ANIMALS
 |
| "The similarities between wolves and humans are arguably more extensive than those between humans and any other." |
By Tim Flannery
Beyond Words: What
Animals Think and Feel
by Carl Safina, Henry Holt, 461 pp.,
$32.
The Cultural Lives of
Whales and Dolphins
by Hal Whitehead and
Luke Rendell
University of Chicago
Press, 417 pp., $35.
The free-living dolphins of the Bahamas had come to know
researcher Denise Herzing and her team very well. For decades, at the start of
each four-month-long field season, the dolphins would give the returning humans
a joyous reception: “a reunion of friends,” as Herzing described it. But one
year the creatures behaved differently. They would not approach the research
vessel, refusing even invitations to bow-ride. When the boat’s captain slipped
into the water to size up the situation, the dolphins remained aloof. Meanwhile
on board it was discovered that an expeditioner had died while napping in his
bunk. As the vessel headed to port, Herzing said, “the dolphins came to the
side of our boat, not riding the bow as usual but instead flanking us fifty
feet away in an aquatic escort” that paralleled the boat in an organized
manner.
The remarkable incident raises questions that lie at the
heart of Carl Safina’s astonishing new book, Beyond Words: What Animals Think
and Feel. Can dolphin sonar penetrate the steel hull of a boat — and pinpoint a
stilled heart? Can dolphins empathize with human bereavement? Is dolphin
society organized enough to permit the formation of a funeral cavalcade? If the
answer to these questions is yes, then Beyond Words has profound implications for
humans and our worldview.
Beyond Words is gloriously written. Consider this
description of elephants:
"Their great breaths, rushing in and out, resonant in the
halls of their lungs. The skin as they moved, wrinkled with time and wear,
batiked with the walk of ages, as if they lived within the creased maps of the
lives they’d traveled."
Not since Barry Lopez or Peter Matthiessen were at the
height of their powers has the world been treated to such sumptuous
descriptions of nature.
Safina would be the first to agree that anecdotes such as
Herzing’s lack the rigor of scientific experiments. He tells us that he is
“most skeptical of those things I’d most like to believe, precisely because I’d
like to believe them. Wanting to believe something can bias one’s view.” Beyond
Words is a rigorously scientific work. Yet impeccably documented anecdotes such
as Herzing’s have a place in it, because they are the only means we have of
comprehending the reactions of intelligent creatures like dolphins to rare and
unusual circumstances. The alternative — to capture dolphins or chimpanzees and
subject them to an array of human-devised tests in artificial circumstances —
often results in nonsense. Take, for example, the oft-cited research
demonstrating that wolves cannot follow a human pointing at something, while
dogs can. It turns out that the wolves tested were caged: when outside a cage,
wolves readily follow human pointing, without any training.
Safina explains how an evolutionary understanding of the
emotions helps us to see even humble creatures as individuals. The chemical
oxytocin creates feelings of pleasure and a craving for sociality. So
widespread is it that it must have originated 700 million or more years ago.
Serotonin, a chemical associated with anxiety, is probably equally ancient:
crayfish subjected to mild electrical shocks have elevated serotonin levels,
and act anxiously. If treated with chlordiazepoxide (a common treatment for
humans suffering from anxiety) they resume normal behavior.
The basic repertory of emotions evolved so long ago that
even worms exhibit great behavioral sophistication. After a lifetime studying
earthworms, Charles Darwin declared that they “deserve to be called
intelligent,” for when evaluating materials for plugging their burrows, they
“act in nearly the same manner as a man under similar circumstances.” Emotions
are the foundation blocks of relationships and personalities. Driven by the
same complex mix of emotion-inducing chemicals as ourselves, every worm,
crayfish, and other invertebrate has its own unique response to its fellows and
the world at large.
Worms and crayfish may have distinct personalities and
emotional responses, but their brains are far simpler than ours. Humans fall
within a small group of mammals with exceptionally large brains. All are highly
social, and it is upon this group—and specifically the elephants, killer
whales, bottlenosed dolphins, and wolves—that Safina concentrates. The last
common ancestor of these creatures was a primitive, small-brained, nocturnal,
shrew-sized mammal that lived around 100 million years ago. The brains, bodies,
and societies of these “animal intelligentsia,” as we might call them, are each
very different, making it hard to understand their lives.
Safina sees and describes the behaviors of the animals he’s
interested in through the eyes of researchers who have dedicated their lives to
the study of their subjects. What is it like to be an elephant? Cynthia Moss,
who has lived with the elephants of Amboseli National Park in Kenya for four
decades, sums them up as “intelligent, social, emotional, personable,
imitative, respectful of ancestors, playful, self-aware, compassionate.” It all
sounds impressively human, but elephant societies are very different from our
own. Female elephants and their young live separately from males, for example,
so they have no conception of romantic love or marriage (though the females can
be very interested in sex, enough to fake estrus in order to attract male
attention).
Much published behavioral science, incidentally, is phrased in a neutral language that distances us from animals. Safina argues that we should use a common language of grief, joy, friendship, and empathy to describe the equivalent responses of both human and other animals. To this I would add the language of ceremony: What other word but “marriage” should be used to describe the ritual bonding, followed by lifelong commitment to their partners, of creatures like the albatross?
Sometimes it is the small things that best reveal shared life
experience. When baby elephants are weaned they throw tantrums that rival those
of the wildest two-year-old humans. One youngster became so upset with his
mother that he screamed and trumpeted as he poked her with his tiny tusks.
Finally, in frustration, he stuck his trunk into her anus, then turned around
and kicked her. “You little horror!” thought Cynthia Moss as she watched the
tantrum unfold.
Clans of female elephants, led by matriarchs, periodically
associate in larger groups. As a result, elephants have excellent memories, and
are able to recognize up to one thousand individuals. So strong is elephant
empathy that they sometimes bury their dead, and will return repeatedly to the
skeleton of a deceased matriarch to fondle her tusks and bones. Indeed, an
elephant’s response to death has been called “probably the strangest thing
about them.” When the Amboseli matriarch Eleanor was dying, the matriarch Grace
approached her, her facial glands streaming with emotion, and tried to lift her
to her feet. Grace stayed with the stricken Eleanor through the night of her
death, and on the third day Eleanor’s family and closest friend Maya visited
the corpse. A week after the death the family returned again to express what
can only be called their grief. A researcher once played the recording of a
deceased elephant’s voice to its family. The creatures went wild searching for
their lost relative, and the dead elephant’s daughter called for days after.
Elephants have been known to extract spears from wounded
friends, and to stay with infants born with disabilities. In 1990, the Amboseli
female Echo gave birth to a baby who could not straighten his forelegs, and so
could hardly nurse. For three days Echo and her eight-year-old daughter Enid
stayed with him as he hobbled along on his wrists. On the third day he finally
managed to straighten his forelegs and, despite several falls, he was soon
walking well. As Safina says, “His family’s persistence—which in humans facing
a similar situation we might call faith—had saved him.”
Most of us will never see a wild elephant, much less spend
the time observing them that is required to understand them as individuals. But
there are animals that share our lives, and whose societies, emotional depth,
and intelligence are readily accessible. Dogs are often family to us. And it is
astonishing how much of a dog’s behavior is pure wolf.
The Canidae—the family to which wolves and dogs belong—is a
uniquely American production, originating and evolving over tens of millions of
years in North America before spreading to other continents around five million
years ago. The American origins of the wolf family did not save them from
frontier violence. By the 1920s they had been all but exterminated from the
contiguous forty-eight states of the U.S. Their reintroduction into Yellowstone
National Park in January 1995 offered a unique opportunity to follow the
fortunes of wolf families as they made their way in a new world. Yellowstone’s
wolf research leader Doug Smith says that wolves do three things: “They travel,
they kill, and they are social—very social.” But wolves are also astonishingly
like us. They can be ruthless in their pursuit of power, to the extent that
some will kill their sister’s cubs if it serves their ends. But they will also
at times adopt the litters of rivals.
The best wolves are brilliant leaders that pursue lifelong
strategies in order to lead their families to success. According to wolf
watchers, the greatest wolf Yellowstone has ever known was Twenty-one (wolf
researchers use numbers rather than names for individuals). He was big and
brave, once taking on six attacking wolves and routing them all. He never lost
a fight, but he was also magnanimous, for he never killed a vanquished enemy.
And that made him as unusual among wolves as did his size and strength. He was
born into the first litter of Yellowstone pups following the reintroduction of
wolves in the park. Twenty-one’s big break came at age two and a half when he
left his family and joined a pack whose alpha male had been shot just two days
earlier. He adopted the dead wolf’s pups and helped to feed them.
A telling characteristic of Twenty-one was the way he loved
to wrestle with the little ones and pretend to lose. The wolf expert Rick
McIntyre said, “He’d just fall on his back with his paws in the air. And the
triumphant-looking little one would be standing over him with his tail
wagging.” “The ability to pretend,” McIntyre said, “shows that you understand
how your actions are perceived by others. It indicates high intelligence.” That
many humans recognize this in dogs, but have failed to see it in wolves, speaks
strongly of the need for Safina’s book. For dogs are wolves that came to live
with us.
The similarities between wolves and humans are arguably more
extensive than those between humans and any other animal. Tough, flexible in
social structure, capable of forming pair bonds and fitting into ever-shifting
hierarchies, we were made for each other. And when we out-of-Africa apes met up
with the arch-typical American canids a few tens of thousands of years ago, a
bond was created that has endured ever since. Just who initiated the
interspecies relationship is hotly debated. The traditional view is that humans
domesticated dogs, but Safina makes a convincing case that the process was
driven as much by the wolves as by the humans. The wolves that were better able
to read human tendencies and reactions, and were less skittish of human
contact, would have gotten access to more food scraps from human camps. And
human clans willing to tolerate the wolves would have obtained valuable
warnings of the presence of danger from other animals (and other humans).
Eventually, Safina says, “we became like each other.” The partnership, however,
has had some puzzling effects. The brains of dogs, as well as humans, have
shrunk since we began living together, perhaps because we came to rely on each
other rather than solely on our own wits.
Bottle nose Dolphins. All together now — jump.
Sperm whales have the largest brains on earth—around six times larger on average than our own—while bottlenosed dolphins have the largest brains relative to body size, with the exception of humans. Along with killer whales, these species have a place beside the elephants, dogs, and great apes in the animal intelligentsia. The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins is a comprehensive academic work by researchers who have devoted their careers to studying sperm and killer whales. Ocean-going and deep diving, sperm whales are difficult to study, and researchers can as yet offer only a bare sketch of their societies. But it’s already clear that their social organization has remarkable parallels with that of elephants. Like elephants, sperm whale females and young often live in “clans” of up to thirty individuals, while adult males, except when mating, live separate lives.
Sperm whale clans possess distinctive “dialects” of sonar
clicks. These are passed on by learning, and act as markers of clan identity.
They are an important part of the whale’s communication system, which enables
the creatures to synchronize their diving, feeding, and other activities. So
social are sperm whales that females share the care of the young of their clan,
for example by staying at the surface with a young whale while its mother dives
for food. Clan members are so closely bonded that they spend extended periods
at the surface, nuzzling one another or staying in close body contact. As with
elephants, clans can gather in large congregations, so it seems reasonable to
assume that sperm whales have the capacity to memorize large social networks.
Killer whales (otherwise known as orcas) have a very
different social organization. Without doubt their most unusual characteristic
is that all male killer whales are deeply involved with their mother. They
never leave their mother’s clan, and despite their enormous size (growing to
twice the weight of females), their fates remain deeply intertwined with those
of their mothers. If their mothers should die, even fully adult males over
thirty years old (they can live to over sixty) face an eight-fold increase in
their risk of death. Just how and why the orphaned adult males die remains
unclear.
Another striking feature of killer whales and near relatives
is the extraordinary length of lactation. Short-finned pilot whales lactate for
at least fifteen years after birth, even though puberty occurs at between eight
and seventeen years. Sperm whales reach sexual maturity at nine to ten years of
age, but traces of milk have been found in the stomachs of thirteen-year-olds.
Killer whales and humans are unique in that they experience menopause (for the
whales typically at around age forty). Because female killer whales can live up
to eighty years, around a quarter of females in any group are post reproductive.
Yet they remain sexually active. Grandmothers are evidently very important in
killer whale societies, almost certainly because of the wisdom they have
gathered over a lifetime.
An equally odd aspect of killer whale culture concerns food
taboos and ways that whales observe them. In this they offer an extraordinary
parallel with some human cultures. One clan of killer whales eats only a single
species of salmon. Another kills only one species of seal. When members of a
mammal-eating clan were captured for the aquarium trade in the 1970s, they
starved themselves for seventy-eight days before eating the salmon being
proffered, and then they ate the fish only after they had performed a strange
ceremony. The two whales held gently onto either end of a dead salmon, and swam
a single lap around their pool with it in their mouths, before dividing the
fish between themselves and consuming it.
Killer whales are strongly xenophobic. Clans of salmon
eaters never mix with mammal eaters, for example. Genetic studies show that
clans with different food taboos don’t interbreed, leading to slightly
different appearances and genetic makeup. Each clan has a distinctive dialect
of vocalizations (perhaps we should call them languages), which facilitates
coordination of their work, division of their labor, and care of one another.
At times, killer whales have developed special relationships
with people. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at Twofold
Bay south of Sydney, Australia, killer whales and humans set up a mutually
profitable whaling enterprise. The killer whales would notify the whalers of
the presence of humpback whales by performing a ritual in the waters of the bay
fronting the whaler’s cottagers. The men would harpoon the humpbacks, and the
killer whales would hold on to the harpoon ropes to tire the prey.
 |
| Comparative size — sperm whale and human, |
With the exception of our species, killer whales are earth’s
most capable predators. When they evolved ten million years ago, half of
earth’s whales, seals, and dugong species became extinct. Because they
specialize in a particular food type and are so intelligent, killer whales
continue to have a huge impact on their prey. As a result of global warming,
killer whales have appeared in Arctic waters. Horrified Inuit describe them as
voracious and wasteful killers that have reduced populations of some Arctic
mammals by a third.
Safina comes to an unfamiliar but empirically based
conclusion: prior to the domestication of plants and the invention of writing,
the differences between human societies and those of elephants, dogs, killer
whales, and dolphins was a matter of degree, not kind. Why, he asks, has it
taken us so long to understand this? Are our egos “threatened by the thought
that other animals think and feel? Is it because acknowledging the mind of
another makes it harder to abuse them?”
The discovery of nonhuman societies composed of highly intelligent,
social, empathetic individuals possessing sophisticated communication systems
will force us to reformulate many questions. We have long asked whether we are
alone in the universe. But clearly we are not alone on earth. The evolution of
intelligence, of empathy and complex societies, is surely more likely than we
have hitherto considered. And what is it, exactly, that sets our species apart?
We clearly are different, but in light of Beyond Words we need to reevaluate
how, and why.
Beyond Words will have a deep impact on many readers, for it
elevates our relationships with animals to a higher plane. When your dog looks
at you adoringly, even though he or she cannot say it, you can be as sure that
love is being expressed as you can when hearing any human declaration of
eternal devotion. Most of us already knew that, but have withheld ourselves
from a full surrender to its implications. Along with Darwin’s Origin and
Richard Dawkins’s Selfish Gene, Beyond Words marks a major milestone in our
evolving understanding of our place in nature. Indeed it has the potential to
change our relationship with the natural world.
— From The New York Review of Books, Oct. 6. Reviewer Tim Flannery new book, Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions
to the Climate Crisis, was published in October 2015.
—————————
20. AMERICA'S DUBIOUS
EXCEPTIONALISM
By Vaclav Smil
Belief in
"American exceptionalism" — that unique blend of ideals,
ideas, and love of liberty made so powerful by great technical and economic
accomplishments — is alive and well. Even President Obama, a reluctant endorser
to begin with, announced last year: I believe in American exceptionalism with
every fiber of my being.”
But such proclamations mean nothing if they cannot stand up
to the facts. And here what really matters is not the size of a country’s gross
domestic product or the number of warheads or patents it may possess but the variables
that truly capture its physical well-being and educational standard.
These variables are simply life, death, and knowledge.
Infant mortality rate,
2010. Sources: CDC/NCHS, linked birth/infant death data set (U.S. data); OECD
2014 (all other data). Infographic: Erik Vrielink
Infant mortality is an excellent proxy for
a wide range of conditions including income, quality of housing, nutrition,
education, and investment in health care. Very few babies die in those affluent
countries where people live in good housing and well-educated parents
(themselves well nourished) feed them properly and have access to medical care.
How does the United States rank among the world’s roughly 200 nations? The
latest available comparison (for 2010) shows that with 6.1 of every 1,000
live-born babies dying in the first year of life, the United States does not
figure among the top 25 nations. Its infant mortality is far higher than in
France (3.6), Germany (3.4), and Japan (2.3). And the U.S. rate was 60% higher
than in Greece, a country portrayed in the press as an utter basket case.
Life expectancy
gives an almost identically poor result: In 2013, U.S. life expectancy ranked
34th worldwide, an average of 79 years for both sexes, which is, behind Greece
(81), as well as Portugal (81) and South Korea (82). Canadians live three years
longer on average, Italian men four, and Japanese women (at 87) six years
longer compared to their U.S. counterparts.
Educational
achievements of U.S. students (or a lack thereof) are scrutinized with
every new edition of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development’s Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. The latest
results for 15-year-olds show that in math, the United States ranks
just below Russia, Slovakia, and Spain, but far lower than Canada, Germany, and
Japan. In science, U.S. schoolchildren place just below the mean PISA score
(497 versus 501); in reading, they are barely above it (498 versus 496) — and
they are far behind all the populous, affluent Western nations. PISA, like any
such study, has its weaknesses, but large differences in relative rankings are
clear: There is not even a remote indication of any exceptional U.S.
educational achievements.
— From IEEE Spectrum, Oct. 27, 2015
——————
21. GERMANY: "WHAT HAPPENED TO MY
An anti-immigrant demonstration in Germany. PEGIDA stands for (in English)
Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident.
By Markus Feldenkirchen
Recently, I just returned to Germany after spending a couple
of years in the United States as a foreign correspondent. In that time that
I've been back, I've become concerned, wrought with worry that my own country
is losing its civility.
In America, I was often appalled by the brutality of a
society where the majority support the death penalty and police are allowed to
shoot people in the back even if they don't present an immediate threat. I can't
change the fact that I am German, but for some time, I was pleased with that
destiny. I was proud -- not proud of Germany, but proud to be from a country
that had apparently succeeded in becoming more empathetic and civil.
But the country I have returned to is a different one.
It's a country in which the state chairman of the right-wing populist
Alternative for Germany (AFD) party in North Rhine-Westphalia has declared
that, if need be, Germany's borders must be "protected using the force of
arms," which would mean no less than allowing refugees to be shot at.
It's a country in which journalist Helmut Schümann could be
clobbered from behind and disparaged as a "filthy leftist pig"
because, a few days earlier, he had written a critical column in the Berlin
daily Tagesspiegel entitled "Is this still our country?"
It's a country in which the candidate for mayor in Cologne,
Germany's fourth largest city, could be seriously wounded with a knife because
her assailant didn't like her refugee policies.
It's a country in which 30 Germans hunted down and beat up
Syrian refugees using baseball bats in the eastern city of Magdeburg.
It's a country where the language used to foment against
foreigners -- both on the ground and online -- makes even Donald Trump's
tirades against immigrants seem harmless.
I suspect that one of the first reader comments after this
gets posted will be, "Get lost you traitor."
 |
| A protester against the weekly gathering of the anti-immigration rightwing movement PEGIDA in Dresden waves flag that reads: "Nazis no, thanks." |
On a recent Sunday, a group of taxi drivers was waiting in
the military area of Berlin's Tegel airport, the terminal used for flights by
high-ranking government officials. The German defense minister had just arrived
from Bahrain in an official government jet, but the taxi drivers apparently
thought the plane was carrying Chancellor Angela Merkel. One proudly told me
that he and his colleagues had half-joked that if one of them received Merkel
as a passenger, that he would drive her to a nearby lake, tie stones to her
feet and let her sink to the bottom. Because of her refugee policies.
What has happened to Germany? Does the sudden influx
of hundreds of thousands of refugees justify forgetting almost
everything that used to be important to us? The refugee crisis is, of course, a
challenge. Solving it will take time, money and energy. But Germany has all the
resources it needs to manage this crisis without surrendering its civility.
Instead the mood in the country is akin to a drunken rage of the kind last seen
in the beer halls of the 1920s Weimar Republic -- that period of crude,
uncivilized behavior that paved the way for Hitler's rise and the most brutal
decade in world history.
Then, too, criticism and anxiety wasn't put forth in the
form of discourse. It was expressed in the form of fist fights on the streets.
We know today that this culture of brutality played a considerable role in the
failure of Germany's first attempt at democracy. Ultimately, the loud and the
brutal severed society's vulnerable ties. We are obviously not anywhere close
to that point today. Those threatening our society today are not in the
majority, but there is still a large number of them. The Federal Republic of
Germany established a functioning democracy in the decades after Hitler and its
people had good reasons to be proud of the country's political culture. But no
one should take it as a certainty that this achievement is safe forever.
It's also, incidentally, highly paradoxical that many of the
people who are expressing this anti-social behavior today have adopted terms
like "the cultural nation Germany" or "the land of poets and
thinkers" to justify their actions, because nothing would be more shameful
to the dead poets and thinkers than the gentlemen who are fueling xenophobic
sentiment, issuing orders to fire at refugees or calling for Angela Merkel to
be drowned or hanged.
In his "Winter Tale," the great German poet and
thinker Heinrich Heine once wrote: "O how I detest the trumpery set, Who,
to stir men's passion heated, Of patriotism make a show, With all its ulcers
fetid."
— From Spiegel online. Markus Feldenkirchen is a political reporter for Der Spiegel in Berlin and heads the Opinion Desk.
