I got dropped from Iggy's real Christmas list last year so I was a bit surprised to get an e-card from the Igster today. It's not actually a Christmas card as such. It's a "Happy Holidays" card with all the baby Jesus stuff left out. Wouldn't want to offend anybody while folks are celebrating the birth of our Lord and Saviour. That wouldn't be right. So let's be politically correct and keep religion out of it entirely except let's toss in a dandy pair of Menorahs! Now I could be wrong. There's a little figure in there and I think it's Caspar the Friendly Ghost or a snow-covered Charlie Brown. Could that be the Baby J hisself? Nah, he'd have that little halo thing wouldn't he?
In any case I was pleased to have Michael so openly thank me for keeping the Liberal tradition strong in 2010. Well, Mike, somebody had to. Lord know there wasn't much of it to be seen up on Parliament Hill.
And a merry, merry, merry to you and yours too Mike.
Reuters has published a special report on the structural threats that beset America's economy and must be solved if the United States is to recover its place in the world. It compares America's predicament today to the years when Germany was considered the "sick man of Europe" and finds lessons in how the Germans restored their country to its place today as an economic powerhouse.
Unfortunately, what worked to salvage Germany - vision, willpower and sacrifice - are qualities that America would have to relearn, attributes at odds with America's deeply divided society and disparate wellbeing. In today's America the answers may be out of reach.
Because Canada's future is so tightly lashed to America's the Reuters report is well worth reading. We have to realize what's coming long before it arrives.
Whatever it is, I'll bet that word is on the tip of the tongue of most Irishmen today as their country staggers on the brink a financial disaster that just won't go away.
Ireland recently relented and accepted an E.U. bailout but on terms that might make the IMF look like the Sally Anns. According to Der Spiegel, the bailout is shifting the crushing burden of the rash profligacy of Ireland's banks from the speculators onto the backs of the Irish people.
The EU has failed to make the foreign bondholders take a hit on the losses from toxic real estate loans. In particular, the ECB insisted that the interests of the German, British and French banks would continue to be protected. Instead, Irish taxpayers are being asked to pay the bill: at a hefty interest rate of 5.8 percent, to ensure the foreign creditors will get their money back rather than face any losses.
That may be something German banks welcome, but it is a disaster for Ireland. And many economists now predicts that it is just a question of time before the country defaults. " This 'bailout' will sink the Republic," warns economist David McWilliams in the Belfast Telegraph. " It is the EU giving us enough rope to hang ourselves in the hope that we don't hang all of them."
If Ireland fully exhausts the EU bailout then it will double the national debt to €175 billion by 2014, he calculates, and the interest on that would come to €8.5 billion a year -- more than even the thriftiest of governments could afford.
To make sure that the state does not drown in its debts, the annual rate of growth has to be significantly higher than the interest due on the national debt, McWilliams argues. If the Irish economy does not grow by 8-10 percent, then the country will end in a debt-deflationary spiral. And even the most optimistic government projections are just below 4 percent.
Barry Eichengreen, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, makes a similar argument. It would be neither politically nor economically sustainable to force Ireland to pay 10 percent of its national income as reparations to bondholders, he wrote recently in German business daily Handelsblatt, " as anyone who remembers Germany's own experience with World War I reparations should know." It would be more sensible to have a debt restructuring and offer the bondholders 20 cents on the euro, he argues.
[Trinity College economics professor Kevin] O'Rourke's prognosis is as foreboding as that of his colleagues. " We now face a negative spiral in which austerity causes emigration, which increases the burden of the debt, which ultimately leads to more austerity," he writes. He recommends as a way out the path pursued by Iceland. In a referendum, the voters rejected a proposal to pay back their banks' international creditors. Ireland, O'Rourke argues, needs a " radical change."
And so ends the once vaunted Celtic Tiger. The average Irish household is predicted to be 7,500 Euros poorer annually by 2012 due to government austerity.The initial bailout adds another 17,000 Euros per capita to the national debt. But the bondholders, the European banks that colluded with the Irish banks in the recklessness that brought Ireland to its knees - they'll be safe.
Michael Vick says he's looking forward to some day having a pet dog. The convicted dogfighting ring operator has been prohibited by court order from ever again owning a dog. The Philadelphia Eagles quarterback also spent 18-months in prison for his crimes that included disposing of wounded dogs by hanging and electrocution.
Good news: Western military forces are making headway in Afghanistan and it's good enough that Washington can begin withdrawing its forces next July.
Headway seems to be defined as the suppression of the Taliban presence in Kandahar and Helmand provinces due to the recent military offensive.
If the Afghan report sounds good to Washington, it probably sounds even better to the Talibs. We're sticking to this notion of a military solution to Afghanistan's troubles and that's music to the ears of the Taliban. When we turn up the heat, they lay low. We've had ten years, plenty of time, to watch the rebels disappear only to return when it suits them. That's what you do when you're outnumbered and hopelessly outgunned by a foreign army, you fall back on the one decisive advantage you've got - time. You win simply by surviving with your capabilities more or less intact.
Elsewhere on the front page of today's New York Times is another Afghanistan story, this one about the spreading presence of the Taliban in northern Afghanistan. That's what they do. You press here, they go somewhere else.
The Pentagon’s year-end review will emphasize hard-won progress in the south, the heartland of the insurgency, where the military has concentrated most troops. But those advances have come at the expense of security in the north and east, with some questioning the wisdom of the focus on the south and whether the coalition can control the entire country.
The NATO command has largely defined Afghanistan's instability in terms of the Taliban insurgency, which is the most recent fight here, but hardly the only one that looms in people’s memories. For many, the period 20 years ago when mujahedeen warlords divided the country into fiefs shapes their current fears. It was the behavior of the warlords, among other factors, that drove people into the arms of the Taliban in the 1990s.
Pablo Percelsi, the director of operations in northern Afghanistan for the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has had a staff and presence here for 30 years [warns], “The Taliban are only a small part of the equation.” “You have the whole fabric of the militias,” he added. “There are groups that collect money, and they collect it from civilians and by doing kidnapping and bold actions against internationals.”
NATO’s current strategy aims to transform many of these militias into local police forces that would augment the often thin national police. However, many local Afghan officials worry that the plan legitimizes the groups, some of which are made up of little more than thugs, and amounts to putting government uniforms on gunmen whose real loyalty is to their local strongman.
Isn't that interesting. It's only taken a decade for us to realize that the Talibs aren't the only bunch that undermine the future of Afghanistan. So are the guys we're supporting, the thugs we want to equip and arm. I'm sorry but that's what happens when you perpetuate a culture of tribalism and warlordism - which is precisely what we have done in Afghanistan. We have never attempted to douse the embers that will reignite the Afghan civil war once we clear out. This is what you get for a decade of indifference and rank stupidity.
One of the things climate change has brought the United Kingdom is water - much too much of it. Always known as a rainy place, Britain is now known as a flooding place. In London the government is pursuing massive infrastructure programmes to protect British cities and towns from fresh and seawater inundation but a report warns they're leaving the country's farmland at risk:
" Land managers need to be able to defend their properties ... even when the Environment Agency has withdrawn funding from what it regards as uneconomic defences," it says in a report. " The ability to continue using land for producing food, energy, textiles, pharmaceutical and industrial products is a national asset and not the liability it is treated as in the government's cost benefit analysis." The cost of traditional "hard" sea defences is about £5m a mile.
The report, entitled The Tide is High, criticises " managed retreat" policies. " The amount of high-grade agricultural land that will be lost through erosion and flooding in Lincolnshire alone could have a significant impact on our ability to produce food in the future, at a time when it will be more needed than ever. Current projections put 39% of Lincolnshire's land area in danger of flooding from the sea and rivers."
Has nobody told these Brits that global warming is a hoax?
It took a bit of arm twisting and bags of cash but George Bush Sr., his former Secretary of State, James Baker, and Halliburton succeeded in getting Nigeria to drop corruption charges against Dick Cheney.
A spokesman for Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission says a plea bargain that saved Cheney from prosecution was reached in London last week.
A quarter-billion bucks. That's a lot of mea culpa for the Dickster. The sum is said to include $130-million "trapped" in Switzerland. That sounds like code for "misappropriated" which is a nice way of saying purloined or filched.
Apparently desertification, the degradation of arable, productive farmland into barren desert, is the "greatest environmental challenge of our time." At least that's how the UN's top drylands official, Luc Gnacadja, sees it.
Today kicks off the UN decade for the fight against desertification. Gnacadja, executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, warns, "The top 20cm of soil is all that stands between us and extinction."
Land conflicts in Somalia, dust storms in Asia and the food price crises of recent years all stem from the degradation of land, he said, due to overuse by humans and the impacts of global warming. Since the early 1980s, a quarter of the planet's land has been despoiled and 1% a year continues to be lost.
The better known issues of climate change and loss of biodiversity are both rooted in the global loss of fertile soil, said Gnacadja, as the soil harbours a huge stock of carbon and the health of creatures living in the soil underpins global food production and forest growth. The reason desertification has not been a priority is because 90% of the 2.1 billion people who live in drylands live in developing countries, he said.
" Even in their own countries, they are the poorest among the poor and live in remote areas," said Gnacadja. " The world is driven by city dwellers: political leaders are setting agendas to satisfy people who live in the cities, we therefore tend to perceive soil as just dust, or mud, or a dumping place. But if we don't preserve that first 20cm of soil, where will we get our food and water from?" Half the world's livestock are raised on drylands and a third of crops, especially wheat.
Gnacadja is pushing for carbon credits to be earned by drylands people for preserving their land. I don't know how well that's going to go over. Paying people to not harm themselves, for not destroying their own property perhaps isn't as straightforward as it sounds.
Desertification leads to starvation and that leads to wars of subsistence and other perils. It is intertwined with a gaggle of environmental challenges beginning with the big two - global warming and freshwater exhaustion - and includes deforestation, species extinction and migration, resource depletion, disease and pest migration, air/soil/water contamination, the collapse of fisheries, drought and the increasing frequency of severe storm events and, underlying them all, overpopulation and global security threats.
Here's the thing. You can't fight any one of these successfully unless you fight them all. They're all interconnected. They all share some common causes and they all require some similar solutions. Gnacadja is right. That top 20 cms. of soil is all that stands between civilization and extinction but so does that onion-skin of atmosphere that wraps our planet and so does the distribution and recycling of the earth's freshwater resources. Without them life becomes a matter of weeks, days or even minutes.
What I find frustrating in the annual climate change summits is that world leaders take global warming in isolation and then try to apply skewed mechanisms that ultimately block effective solutions. At the end of the day the only thing that can block carbon emissions is carbon rationing enforced through effective carbon pricing - the very policy that Harper and Layton used to destroy the Dion Liberals.
These challenges need responses that measure the problems and calibrate the responses according to what is required to rectify them, not a haze of negotiations, dubious "targets" and offsets. These are organic, living problems and that means they're moving targets which defy convoluted solutions based on out of date data. All you can do with the current approach is to chase your tail.
This isn't about saving the earth. The earth will be fine. It isn't about saving the trees. They'll be fine too. It is entirely about saving mankind and preserving our civilization but in a form that can live in harmony with the very finite limits of our biosphere. Even if you believe that biblical claptrap about god promising never to destroy earth again this has nothing to do with a god destroying anything. It is solely mankind that's destroying, not the planet, but man's and a lot of other animals' ability to keep living on earth. Your god has nothing to do with this. This one's on you.
I feel badly for Stephane Dion. He had the vision we need in our leaders but he utterly failed to lead the Canadian public to his vision or to defend his vision against the unscrupulous attacks of Stephen Harper and Jack Layton.
An independent team of researchers from The Royal Society of Canada reports that there's no credible evidence that Tar Sands contaminants are causing cancer in downstream communities. But the team went on to castigate Alberta and federal government authorities for being asleep at the wheel:
But when it comes to regulating the industry, governments have not kept up with its growth, especially Alberta's Environment and Resource Development ministries, the report says.
" These agencies need to seriously review whether they have and can effectively maintain the specialized technical expertise needed to regulate industrial development of this scope and sophistication," the summary says.
As well, Alberta's environmental review process is " seriously deficient" in assessing health and socio-economic impacts.
..." There has generally been inadequate overall risk assessment for technological and natural disasters, assessment of community health impacts, integrated and cumulative ecological impact assessment, and assessment of regional socio-economic impacts."
Water monitoring of the oilsands is of a lower standard than that used for forestry and the data from the program isn't made public.
" There are valid concerns about the structure of [the monitoring program] that need to be addressed regarding the appropriateness of the data collected, public access to data, independent scientific oversight and verification of results."
Not enough is known about groundwater movement in northern Alberta, says the summary, especially as the industry moves from open-pit to underground mining.
As well, the report says the province hasn't obtained enough financial guarantees to ensure oilsands mines get cleaned up — although the province has said it is negotiating with industry on the issue.
The report also scolds Ottawa for failing to enforce federal legislation over the oilsands.
" Despite many clear areas of valid federal interest, the profile of relevant federal agencies has been low."
Polar bears breeding with grizzlies, bowheads breeding with right whales, narwhals with belugas, even porpoises with seals. This is apparently going on in the Arctic.
In a commentary published in Wednesday's peer-reviewed journal Nature, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration marine biologist Brendan Kelly and his co-authors say rapidly disappearing sea ice means the barrier that once kept Arctic species apart is literally melting away.
" In addition to that, marine mammals are particularly infamous for hybridizing," says Kelly. " It turns out their genes haven't changed so much that they can't interbreed."
Co-author David Tallmon, a marine biologist with the University of Alaska, says while it's unlikely hybridization is widespread in the Arctic, no one has looked systemically at the issue. He and Kelly, along with Andrew Whiteley, a conservation geneticist at the University of Massachusetts, say the question of whether to try to stop animals from crossbreeding needs immediate attention. " It's likely to become increasingly important as the summer ice diminishes and is ultimately lost," says Tallmon. " Hybridization is essentially impossible to reverse once it has begun on a large scale. So, we want to be sure to halt any hybridization before it becomes unmanageable and unique lineages are lost forever."
DOCTORS in Berlin, working with an American patient with HIV and leukaemia, have declared in a peer-reviewed journal they believe they have cured both illnesses.
It would be the first time a HIV patient has been cured. The procedure is creating a buzz among HIV academics in the US.
Experts call the development encouraging, but warn that years of work remain before the treatment could lead to a general therapy against HIV.
'''Cured' is a strong word. But this is very encouraging,'' said Dr David Scadden, a co-director of the Harvard University Stem Cell Institute. ''From all indications, there was no residual virus.
''It's as good an outcome as one could hope for.''
Can you imagine North America reducing its carbon emissions by 74% by 2020, 95% by 2030 - from a 1990 baseline to boot? Roughly put that's what we would do if the balance of the atmosphere's safe carbon carrying capacity was divided up on a per capita basis.
A 74% reduction from 1990 levels within just 10-years. Never in our wildest dreams is that going to happen. So we're going to need help from the low-emitting nations, the poor countries. And that's going to be costly. It is going to require the transfer of an awful lot of wealth from the industrialized world to the Third World. And that's going to be an ongoing thing. We're going to have to pay them to adopt the green technologies that our locked-in carbon dependency won't allow except through a slow transition.
We've dithered so long that we're now pretty much reduced to schemes like this. Probably the worst thing about this solution is how vulnerable it is to attack by its opponents. You'll hear the usual battle cries about "world government" and devious, liberal plots to effect massive and pointless transfers of wealth to the undeserving Third World and all the other claptrap they still fling from their pants about global warming.
This does not exactly arrive at an auspicious moment. The rich people have suddenly found themselves up to their necks in government, commercial and individual debt. We don't know how to provide for our own societies so where are we going to find those extra trillions for the poor countries? Even if we found the money and the will to part with it, this won't save us from the pain of decarbonizing our economies and our societies nor will it spare us from the climate change impacts already in the pipeline.
These are policies that would be a very tough sell even to very cohesive societies in periods of general affluence. Yet the success of these policies falls to very divided societies driven by wedge politics in a period of protracted and deep financial uncertainty.
This has the makings of a political football unlike any we have ever seen. And the longer the forces of delay prevail, the more enormous that football becomes. It's the sort of thing that breeds its own inertia even as time to adopt it is running out.
Afghanistan bled the coffers of the Soviet Union in the past just as it bleeds the American treasury today. The question is why America keeps banging away after a decade of a war that could easily go on for another two decades or longer?
Where's the reward? What is America actually getting out of this? Many years ago I asked a psychiatrist about an individual who exhibited what I considered irrational and self-defeating behaviours. This person was reasonably well educated and moderately accomplished and, in most respects, quite rational. The doctor explained that rational people can indeed do seemingly irrational things against their self interest. The difficult problem was determining why. People do what they do for what they get out of it, even though that can be real or imagined.
So what does the United States hope to get out of Afghanistan? It won't defeat al Qaeda there. Those guys have gone to Pakistan and destinations beyond. If it wants to shoot al Qaeda guys it should move its army to Yemen. The Taliban? You can hold them at bay, sort of, but they're really just a tribal militia in a land packed full of tribal militias headed by warlords of incredibly flexible loyalties. We set out to build a strong, central government defended by a strong national army and a strong national police service. We did this despite the history of the place that only saw peace in a very loosely federated form. Even the Bible says you can't build a house on sand.
So what's the payoff? Who is keeping this war going and what are they getting out of it? An article in The Guardian on the death of Richard Holbrooke suggests that his former boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has bought the Pentagon's position that the military campaign will work in the end. She (and presumably her boss likewise) accepts General Petraeus' assurance that a little more banging away on the Talibs will motivate the rebels to negotiate in earnest. That is breathtakingly simplistic yet that's the only answer short of outright lunacy that is consistent with America's posture toward Afghanistan.
So there it is in a nutshell. America's strategy is "Whack a Mole." The White House believes it can achieve a desired political outcome through military force. Is it pure coincidence that our political objectives have steadily diminished even as our military force has escalated?
Remember what we went over there to accomplish? We were going to destroy al Qaeda; crush the Taliban; establish a secular, Western-democracy complete with the essential core institutions - legislature, judiciary, bureaucracy, armed and police forces. How well have we done so far? We've got a rigged executive and legislative branch, a judiciary and bureaucracy that rival each other in corruption, a relatively hapless military and a positively predatory police force. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention a narco-economy that fuels all of the institutions I just mentioned. We're setting out to build an Afghan army that the Afghan government's treasury cannot begin to afford. And we're going to force the Taliban to negotiate with whom exactly, for what, when?
So that's it. That's what America hopes to get by prolonging its war. It hopes to get out. Well maybe Washington should simply cut to the chase and get out. The only reason for staying on is if it results in a better outcome than we've achieved over the past decade. We're like Charlie Brown and the military is like Lucy holding the football.
Oh well.
Here's what I think is going to happen. Washington will drag this out for a few more years and leave a Potemkin Village of an Afghan state behind. Then the neighbours will either intervene to broker a peace deal or the country will power up their unresolved civil war and go back at it, each side with its own sponsors. One way or the other, South Asian problems won't be decided by anyone other than South Asians and certainly not by us.
We'll know soon enough when DNA recovered from a bone found on a forlorn Pacific atoll is tested against that from a descendant of the Earhart line. If it is part of the remains of Amelia Earhart we'll know she probably died of thirst and was eventually consumed by crabs.
Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court tossed George W. Bush the American presidency, courts in that country have been thundering along on a rightwing, corporatist stampede that makes a mockery of America's once vaunted system of checks and balances.
Remember Tony Scalia indulging himself on hunting trips with Dick Cheney while he had before him appeals against Cheney himself?
The Roberts court showed its true colours in the Citizens United case that granted corporations the right to spend as much as they liked to skew elections their way.
More recently, a federal court judge struck down as unconstitutional a key part of the Democrat's healthcare reform law. Now it has been disclosed that Virginia judge Henry Hudson has a financial interest in Campaign Solutions Inc., a GOP consulting firm that has backed anti healthcare reform candidates including Michelle Bachmann, John Boehner and John Mccain.
America's judicial system isn't bent, it's broken. It has now offered itself up as a annex to the rightwing of the legislative branch. This is just one more step in the advance of oligarchy, one more body blow to what once was American democracy. The merger of government and corporatism becomes stronger by the day. Mussolini would be proud that someone is keeping his dream of fascism alive.
Remember when we bombed the hell out of Serbia to shoehorn the liberation of Kosovo? So how well has that worked out? When Kosovo became independent agencies like the CIA described the place as pretty much a criminal enterprise that lived off smuggled cigarettes, gasoline and concrete. Sort of like a Mafia state.
Who knew? Now the European Union has released a report from a 2-year investigation that accuses the Kosovar P.M. of heading a human organs, drugs and arms ring. Well, at least he diversifies.
[Prime Minister] Hashim Thaçi is identified as " the boss" of a network that began operating criminal rackets in the run-up to the 1999 Kosovo war, and has held powerful sway over the country's government since.
The report of the two-year inquiry, which cites FBI and other intelligence sources, has been obtained by the Guardian. It names Thaçi as having over the last decade exerted "violent control" over the heroin trade.
Figures from Tha̤i's inner circle are accused of secretly taking captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a few Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys, which were sold on the black market. Legal proceedings began in a Pristina district court today into a case of alleged organ trafficking discovered by police in 2008. That case Рin which organs are said to have been taken from impoverished victims at a clinic known as Medicus Рis said by the report to be linked to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) organ harvesting in 2000.
Why do we even bother? This is the sort of thing that Harper & Ignatieff love - "muscular foreign policy" as Iggy puts it. Canada went to war to liberate Kuwait. We went to war to liberate Kosovo. We went to war to liberate Afghanistan. Kuwait funnels money to support the Islamists who kill us. Kosovo and Afghanistan promptly turn into drug-dealing, criminal enterprises.
Does Canada need another leader who will get us into more of this lunacy?
When will we ever learn. Consider this warning, given three years ago, from Paddy Ashdowne, the international community's High Representative to Bosnia-Herzegovina until 2006:
" The Iraq experience represents the triumph of hubris, nemesis and, above all, amnesia over common sense. We have abandoned experience in favour of a kind of 19th-century 'gunboat' diplomacy approach to peace making. And it isn't working. Getting intervention right is not rocket science and it's not new. Spend at least as much time and effort planning the peace as preparing for the war that precedes it. Base plans on a proper knowledge of the country. Leave ideologies and prejudices at home. Do not try to fashion someone else's country in your own image. Leave space for its people to reconstruct the country they want, not the one you want for them. Don't lose the 'golden hour' after the fighting is over. Dominate security from the start; then concentrate on the rule of law. Make economic regeneration a priority. Understand the importance to the international community effort of co-ordination, cohesion and speaking with one voice. And do not wait until everything is as it would be in our country. Leave when the peace is sustainable.
" At present, we intervene as though democracy was our big idea. It is not. We are not even particularly good at it ourselves. Good governance is our big idea; the rule of law is our big idea; open systems and the market-based economy - these are our big ideas. A stable democracy, fashioned to the conditions and the cultures of the country concerned, is what comes afterwards. It is the product of good governance, not its precursor.
"...we have chosen the wrong mindset to defeat al-Qaeda. We have chosen to fight an idea primarily with force. We seek to control territory; it seeks to capture minds. This is, at heart, a battle of ideas and values. Unless we realise that and can win on that agenda, no amount of force can deliver victory.
" We are not winning. In those regions of the world where this struggle is fiercest, civilisation is losing and medievalism is winning."
Gee, I wonder if Ashdowne would be interested in leading our Liberal Party?
Gee, it sounded like such a good war when it started. Saddam had overrun Kuwait. Iraqi forces were on the Saudis border and supposedly threatening them too. We had us one of those "just" wars everybody likes to much.
We bombed the living hell out of Saddam's army in Kuwait and destroyed most of his war waging infrastructure throughout Iraq and then a 48-hour land war and, voila - we win! It was about the most one-sided military victory ever and we even had video recordings taken right from our missiles' nose cones. Cool or what.
So we restored Kuwait to the Kuwaitis or at least the oligarchs who run that oil state (curious how petro-states evolve into oligarchies) and they couldn't have been more grateful, could they? Apparently not.
WikiLeak's diplo dump had a few eye-openers about how our good buds in Saudi-Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and, yes, Kuwait continue to shovel big bucks to Islamist radicals, including al Qaeda. Say what? We went halfway around the world to save their asses and they're paying guys to blow our asses off with IEDs?
Actually our Kuwaiti buddies are a pernicious bunch of little pricks. The Kuwaiti bosses have now given al-Jazeera the boot, complaining the Arabic news service defied government warnings not to cover recent political developments in their country. Recent political developments like video of police attacking opposition assembly members at a meeting to discuss their government's crackdown on freedoms.
From Egypt to Saudi Arabia to the UAE to Kuwait we're propping up a gaggle of anti-democratic thugs, a lot of whom think it's just dandy to use the West's oil money to finance Islamist radicalism. If we really can't, or won't, live without their oil maybe we should crack down and start supporting democratic reform in these countries. Radical groups like al Qaeda can't survive without the backing of the Arab Street but by supporting oppressive Arab regimes we're helping to keep the Islamists' lifelines open.
The raison d'etre that supposedly justifies the over-budget, overdue and under-performing F-35 is its stealth. The idea is that it is supposed to be invisible which, we're told, more than offsets all its other disadvantages.
If history, ancient and modern, has shown us anything it's that great military breakthroughs are fleeting. The other guy sees a problem and he finds a way to counter it often at a fraction of the cost the first guy incurred in creating it.
Now it seems the F-35s vaunted stealth advantage may be largely neutralized even before the aircraft becomes operational. The F-35 has been optimized to thwart X and S-band radars which has led the Russians to field their L-band radar.
Defence analysts say the new Russian L band radar will detect the fighter and can be fitted to Sukhoi jet fighters of the type flown by Indonesia, Malaysia, China and Vietnam.
The Liberal member for Tangney, Dr Dennis Jensen, is a former research scientist and defence analyst with the Defence Science and Technology Organisation. He says the radar system can see through the F-35's stealth protection.
" The stealth on the Joint Strike Fighter has been optimised around a certain set of frequencies and this is the problem with the radar that the Russians have developed to fit into the Sukhoi Flankers among others."
The Russians have been telling anyone who'll listen that they can defeat the latest American stealth technology. And they're backing that up with their own fifth-generation, stealth fighter, the Sukhoi T-50:
How effective is the new Russian super jet? Well the modern and highly capable Indian Air Force is going for it and they've been pretty shrewd in the aircraft they deploy.
Because stealth technology can and will be defeated we need to consider what this aircraft is giving up for the sake of stealth. Combat aircraft are an enormous assortment of compromises. You give up something to get something else. Everything comes at a cost - speed, range, maneuverability,payload, avionics, redundancy, strength and now one more cost - stealth. What does the F-35 give up to be stealthy? Quite a bit actually. Everything has to be carried inside which means fewer bombs, fewer missiles and no external fuel tanks. Mount any of that stuff outside and it's simply another airplane.
The question becomes if the F-35 was detectable, if it's stealth advantage is negated, is the rest of the airplane worth the massive cost? The answer is plainly no. Once the F-35 can be seen it's just another bomb truck that is pretty much outmatched by the latest European and Russian stuff. Once the stealth is gone this aircraft needs to be escorted by real fighters if it's to have any chance in contested airspace. Without stealth this thing won't have much chance of avoiding close-in fighting where all its weaknesses become glaring.
Hey, I've got the solution. This sort of aircraft has a lifespan of about 20-years so why don't we get a money back warranty from Lockheed that the aircraft will be stealthy to all possible threats for, say, at least ten years? Do you think for a minute Lockheed would imagine giving that sort of assurance? If Lockheed isn't willing to take a gamble on their own technology, should we?
Until she packed up her tent and stole out of town in October, Christiane Ouimet had spent the past three years collecting the big bucks as the Harper government's integrity commissioner. There's a reason she got out of Dodge in a hurry. In fact there seems to be more than one.
According to Auditor General Sheila Fraser, Madam Integrity Commissioner was decidedly deficient in, well, integrity.
Auditor General Sheila Fraser released a damning report Thursday on Christiane Ouimet, who resigned as public sector integrity commissioner in October four years before her term was set to expire amid allegations of internal strife and that she wasn't doing her job, if she did anything at all.
During her three years as commissioner, Ouimet investigated only five of the more than 200 complaints her office received and never produced any recommendations or findings of wrongdoing or reprisals against whistleblowers.
Fraser also found Ouimet berated her staff, sometimes yelling and swearing at them in front of others, and amassed binders full of personal information — 375 pages in total — on a former employee she didn't trust, and circulated some of the information to government officials and prospective employers in the private sector.
" I find this obviously very troubling and I think very disappointing," Fraser said Thursday. " We've all heard of bad bosses, but I'm troubled by the fact that there were binders of material being assembled by personnel within that office on someone who had left that office six months previously.”
So, what's the problem? Isn't this the way we've come to expect Conservatives to act?
That's how Carole James explains why she was made to walk the plank by BC NDP insiders.
James said Tuesday that behind the scenes party brokers such as Bob Williams and Bill Tieleman were actively working to remove her because she was taking the party to the right and extending an olive branch to big business -- the long-sworn enemy of the NDP, the longtime party of unions and workers.
The MLA who led the revolt, Jenny Kwan, says what sparked the coup was the belief that James simply couldn't get the NDP into power.
Kwan, leader of 13 dissident MLAs who openly opposed James's leadership, said the party had to hurry to choose a new leader for fear the B.C. Liberals will call a snap election once their own new leader is in place.
" That's why there was an urgency to get this renewal," Kwan told The Province. " W e are going to be ready when they call an election."
There remains some speculation that the James ouster may have split the party and left it weakened. I'm no Dipper but I don't see it. I think Carole James has had her 15-minutes in the spotlight and she's now yesterday's news. It's hard to understand how her departure could have a seismic impact on the NDP's fortunes, or at least a negative impact.
What if China did a complete 180 and agreed to legally binding greenhouse gas emission cuts including international monitoring and verification? Don't laugh, they might just do that at Cancun.
Are the Chinese calling our bluff? The U.S. and its faithful lapdog, a.k.a. the Harper government, have been dragging their heels on serious emissions cuts, hiding behind the argument that we need a binding agreement with the developing nations (i.e. China and India) first.
That was always a pretty rich argument coming from Canada, the world's emerging petro-state, governed by petro-pols, Tar Sanders and Fossil Fuelers. It was also a giggle coming from the Americans with their "bought and paid for" Congress securely in the arms of Big Oil and Big Coal. Yet to the willingly gullible it sounded like a plausible position - but only so long as the other side kept saying no.
Shit, oh dear, what have we done? Has our game plan counted on Chinese intransigence? Do we even have a Plan B? What if the Chinese use their concession on overall emissions to bolster their argument on per capita emissions equality? Don't understand that one? Bear with me.
The historic (and I suspect desired) standoff between North America and the emerging economic superpowers has featured two equally plausible yet irreconcilable arguments behind which both sides could shelter with their supposed moral integrity intact. Our side focused on total, overall emissions and told the Chinese that, as the newly crowned top overall emitter, we demanded they sign on for binding reductions subject to international verification. The Chinese retorted that their emissions needed to recognize that they were more than three times as populous as America and that, therefore, Americans were the real emissions swine, pumping out three times as much greenhouse gas per capita than the average Chinese guy.
The per capita argument has roughly the same moral weight as our, overall emissions argument. China's pair of aces is backed up by a king - the argument that much of their emissions results from industrial production that is destined for WalMart shelves across America. The Chinese didn't show up in the middle of the night and walk away with our manufacturing plants. They didn't steal General Motors. G.M. went over there and took those jobs with it. So there is some legitimacy to China's backup argument.
So the dilemma becomes how, if the Chinese concede to our demands, do we persist in rejecting theirs without totally losing the moral high ground? I don't think we can hope to come out of this ahead. In fact, I'm pretty sure the last thing we want to do is to honour our own, reciprocal obligations under our demand - simple binding and verifiable reductions in overall emissions.
Let's put it this way. Canadians would have some tough choices - keep Athabasca rolling and growing or walk to work. A strict, meaningful emissions reduction regime that didn't crack down on Athabasca would have to be met on the backs of other industries and the Canadian public. And those parties might want to know why in hell they had to make good Athabasca's emissions? And Harper might have to come up with an answer he doesn't have.
I think the Chinese might call our bluff and force us to admit we've been bluffing all along.
Those silly Chinese and their tempers. Outraged that the Nobel committee decided to award this year's Nobel peace prize to a Chinese activist, China has announce the creation of its own peace prize, the Confucius peace prize. This from the lovely folks who brought you the Tienanmen Square massacre.
Apparently the Confucius will be awarded each year the day prior to the Nobel award. Insiders have said the actual Confucius prize itself looks remarkably like a pirated Michael Jackson CD. The world waits with baited breath.
Income inequality might as well be called the American Disease if only because it is far more prominent there than anywhere else in the developed world.
Canadians, or at least many of us, like to think of ourselves as superior to that what with our egalitarian social safety net and all but we need to drop that smugness - now. Carol Goar sounds the alarm on income inequality taking a firm hold in Canada in the 21st century and it's a warning we must heed.
Last week, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives published a study by senior economist Armine Yalnizyan that showed the richest one per cent of the population reaped an unprecedented one-third of the gains from economic growth between 1997 and 2007. She has written about the growing gap between Canada’s corporate elite and the rest of the population before. But this time, her message got people talking.
In October, Penguin released a new book by Toronto Star columnist Linda McQuaig and Osgoode Hall tax professor Neil Brooks called The Trouble with Billionaires. It argues the excessive inequality in North America is bad for democracy, bad for the economy and bad for society. The book is getting respectful reviews in unexpected places. Here is what Jonathan Kay, managing editor of commentary at the National Post, wrote in the current issue of the Literary Review of Canada: “Given the somewhat radical left-wing bona fides of McQuaig, I was surprised how reasonable I found many of the arguments in this book.”
I have written on the bitter scourge of income inequality at length. You might wish to check out these posts: " A Must-Read for the Liberal Right"
There was a time when Liberals weren't afraid to fight income inequality, perhaps back when they respected liberalism. I don't sense that inclination in today's laughably timid and feckless, centre-right Liberals.
The House of Commons has passed by 143-138 an NDP motion to ban oil tanker traffic off British Columbia's north coast. It's a symbolic thing, important even though it's not binding on the Harper government.
For British Columbians, who overwhelmingly oppose the Enbridge tanker port proposal for Kitimat, the vote will be important to smoke out the parliamentary rapscallions who support the tanker proposal. I suspect there'll be a number of Tory MPs out here who just ran afoul of their constituents on an issue we don't take lightly.
Now if the NDP can just publish a list of the nay votes.
Caught in a massive wedgie administered today by Canada's environment commissioner, Harper's part-time EnviroMin, John "Gaping Maw" Baird wasted no time covering his tracks with green bullshit.
Commissioner Scott Vaughan blasted the Tories for not even having the basic information they would need to begin dealing with the impacts of global warming already spreading through Canada.
Lard arse Baird replied that the Harpies are working furiously to address Mr. Vaughan's concerns.
Environment Canada, Mr. Baird added, has spent more than $140-million on water-related programs and science in the past year. And the government has invested $85.9-million to better understand the impacts of climate change on our health, infrastructure and northern communities, he said.
“For example,” the minister said, “Environment Canada's climate science research program is tightly integrated with global efforts to ensure that our country has the best available climate change and climate variability information available.”
Anybody who will take John Baird on his word on this is an idiot or else simply likes the taste of bullshit. Three years ago Harper acknowledged global warming as the greatest threat facing mankind and then promptly turned his back on the issue.
The Harpies were also slammed for an utter lack of preparedness to deal with oil spills on our coasts. Baird danced around this one by claiming "when emergencies occur the National Marine Oil Spill Preparedness and Response Regime provides the capacity for an effective response to oil spills in Canadian waters." He's going to fight an oil spill with a "regime"? No, no, no, you loudmouth jerk, you fight oil spills with ready ships and pre-deployed, very expensive equipment. So where are these ships, where are their crews, where is all that equipment? Oh what was I thinking? I forgot, we've got a "regime" instead.
Meanwhile CBC News reports that Climate Action Network Europe and Germanwatch have ranked Canada as the fourth worstout of 57 nations in helping to halt climate change. The only countries worse are Saudi Arabia in dead last, Kazakhstan at 56th, Australia 55th followed by Canada with an impressive 54th place. If you need proof that Baird is just flinging green bullshit, there it is.
Google Earth has introduced a technology what will allow us to watch and measure the environmental savaging of our planet due to global warming. Yippee.
Yale Environment 360 reports Google's project uses 25-years of satellite data incorporating "trillions of scientific measurements" recorded by NASA's LANDSAT satellite system. Google plans to make available 20 million CPU hours free to developing nations and scientific organizations to access the system.
Maybe, just maybe, this will force the climate cretins who form the Harper government to face reality.
Who says Steve Harper doesn't give a dam about climate change? That would be Scott Vaughan, the government's commissioner of the environment and sustainable development. Vaughan says Harper hasn't even bothered to get the information he would need to deal with climate change. From TorStar:
Scott Vaughan, commissioner of the environment and sustainable development, says the government is failing to take charge of environmental issues because it has no plan to deal with the impacts of climate change, despite 18 years’ of promises.
Vaughan says climate change is already taking its toll, in the form of severe weather in Atlantic Canada, drought in the Prairies, the loss of boreal forests to pests and fire, and the thawing of the permafrost in the North.
Vaughan’s report today also says Ottawa is unprepared to respond to major oil spills, even though it receives reports of an average of one spill a day. “Given the findings of this audit, I am troubled that the government is not ready to respond to a major spill,” he said.
Vaughan also issues a warning about the government’s monitoring of fresh water, saying that in many cases water quality is not monitored, and Ottawa often has no idea who is supposed to be keeping tabs on which water supply.
Environment Canada “has not taken such basic steps as defining its responsibilities and responding to the threats to Canada’s water resources that it has identified,” he said.
Is it any wonder that prime ministerial dirtbag has gagged Environment Canada ever since he came to power? That's what petro-states do. Harper won't be letting something like the devastation of large parts of Canada stand in the way of his cherished Tar Sands expansion now will he? Too bad we're stuck with Harper Lite running the other party.
An interesting item today from AlterNet via the Daily Kos. It is written by an American ex pat living in Europe who had to travel abroad to see America as it really is.
...the British Guardian newspaper says that the so-called American middle class lifestyle for most people was fake and that was financed by three decades of a debt bubble which has now gone bust. The credit ride of working class folks living a middle class lifestyle is dead and gone. Is this article stating bluntly that it's over? The only remaining question is, will it ever come back? I mean, how long can people ride a wave of endless debt before the ride is over, all while pretending to be middle class? Is that what this British Guardian newspaper article is saying?
" In the midterm elections politicians have promised to " do something" for the middle class. The kindest thing they could do is tell the truth: Americans have been living a middle-class lifestyle on working-class wages – and bridging the gap with credit. And it's over.
In a free-market society the real middle class is always a minority: if your street has a gate and a security camera at the end of it then you are middle class. A real middle-class kid can afford a college education, not a web-based degree. The real middle-class family does not skip meals or find its automobiles trapped in the repair shop because of unpaid bills.
The writer then draws on this item from the International Business Times:
The nation that once gloated over its ability to feed the entire world is seeing an explosion of poverty: The number of people surviving on food stamps is rising as biting unemployment refuses to abate, personal incomes have been falling while the debt bubble is inflating with each passing day and, in a more startling representation of the grim reality, tent cities are mushrooming as more and more people are pushed out of their ‘underwater’ homes.
A record one in six American families went hungry last year because they did not have enough food, a shock survey has revealed.
Some 17.4million U.S. households - 50 million people - were classified as ‘food insecure’ which meant they regularly skipped meals even if they wanted to eat. Others went for entire days without eating and handed round smaller portion sizes to make their meagre offerings suffice.
The news comes as it is revealed that top U.S. executives saw their pay and bonuses shoot up last year in the face of the worst recession for 80 years.
This is an important article because it reveals not only the delusions so many Americans have of their own country and the world at large but also the smoldering social upheavalthat is building across the United States.
A couple of years ago a friend and I rode our motorcycles along the coast down to southern California. At one point we wound up in Monterey which is one very upscale town. As we were enjoying dinner at a fine restaurant I saw my friend gazing at the splendour of the area. I suggested that she soak it all up because she was looking at the very zenith of America for it was all built on borrowed money, debt.
The decline, some say near-extinction, of America's middle class is profoundly disturbing. Yet this is the result of outsourcing industry by the elite, rentier class in search of short-term, maximized returns at the expense of their nation's long-term health and viability.
The middle class serves so many functions without which democracy itself falters. A healthy, robust middle class spanning the range from the trades to the professions creates social cohesion, provides a buffer between the rich and poor, thwarts political extremism of all sorts and is the very ladder of merit-driven social advancement and the hope of the poor for a better life. Destroy the middle class and you tear that ladder down. Social mobility in the United States today is lower than it has been for a century or more. Radical rightwing politics have taken hold. Perverse ideologies are nurtured by a dissembling media. The gap between the rich and the poor is burgeoning. Social cohesion is dissolving as, one by one, the myths of prosperity are shattered.
With all the damage done it's very difficult to imagine a middle class restoration. How do the powerless go about dismantling the super powerful oligarchy when the organs of the state have been put in harness to service of that elite?
The British government's advisory committee on climate change has presented a proposal for the U.K. to cut its carbon emissions by a staggering 60% by 2030. From The Guardian:
Achieving the target proposed by the Committee on Climate Change requires a complete revamp of the nation's electricity market, making it virtually zero-carbon, as well as an overhaul of heat-leaking homes and the replacement of petrol-driven cars with 11m electric or plug-in hybrid models.
The CCC's 2030 target, if passed into law as previous CCC targets have been, would be the first legally binding 2030 target in the world. The target – which is a cut relative to 1990 emissions levels – is intended to lead the way to a legally binding 80% UK cut by 2050. " " We are recommending a stretching but realistic fourth carbon budget and 2030 target, achievable at a cost of less than 1% of GDP. We therefore urge the government to legislate the budget, and to develop the policies required to cut emissions," said Lord Turner, who is the CCC's chair, as well as chairman of the Financial Services Authority. "The case for action on climate change is as strong as ever: climate science remains robust and suggests that there are very significant risks if we do not cut emissions. And countries acting now will gain economic benefits in an increasingly carbon-constrained world."
If the Brits are right and they can reduce their carbon emissions by 60% in just twenty years at a cost of less than 1% of GDP, what in Hell is our excuse? Prime minister Chicken Licken uses raw fear, the first weapon of the truly unscrupulous, to claim the Canadian economy would reel from leading the Americans on climate change initiatives instead of merely following meekly behind.
I don't believe for a minute we could achieve the Brit's ambitious goal. A lot of their ideas work best in a very densely populated urban environment but they could still be applicable to the Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal regions.
Of course Canada, thanks to the Conservatives and the Liberals, has been transformed into a classic petro-state. With plans for a possible five fold expansion of the Tar Sands we pretty much kiss goodbye any hope of meaningful global warming initiatives.
American political satirist, Bill Maher, plainly struggles with the stupidity that infects so many of his own countrymen these days. He singles out the Tea Party movement whose members rebel in the mistaken belief that Obama has raised their taxes when he has, in fact, managed to reduce their tax bill. Maher shakes his head in bewilderment when this same mob rallies against government healthcare initiatives that they believe will destroy the best healthcare system in the world. They don't get that American healthcare is considered the very worst in the developed West, ranked by the U.N. as 35th overall.
Maher's fellow Americans, or a great many of them, have been conditioned to ignore the science and scorn the global warming issue as a hoax. They cover their ears and shut their eyes at the first sign of scientific evidence.
His countrymen recoil at the mention of "socialism," failing to appreciate that their country has always embraced socialist policies and outcomes - for the rich. These same types have been conditioned to blame Obama for America's debt crisis. They've been distracted well enough not to remember that the fuse on this debt bomb resulted from Republican-driven deregulation and was lit during the Bush-Cheney years. They have forgotten that the loathed TARP programme was implemented by the Bush administration.
Maher's countrymen have somehow been trained to believe that the solution to their country's debt crisis is to make permanent the crippling tax cuts for the rich introduced as a temporary measure by Bush, the man who shamelessly referred to his "base" as the "haves and the have-mores."
So, just how have the minions been so effectively enlisted as the footsoldiers of the oligarchs? How have they been manipulated to turn against their own interests, the best interests of their country? The answer is the standard one - the Big Lie.
Many years ago Pierre Berton told a television interviewer that he considered the greatest difference between Canadians and Americans to be our belief systems. Berton explained that Americans had a powerful, almost obsessive need to believe which left them more willing to submit to authority. At the time I found that hard to believe considering that we Canadians seemed to be the docile, peaceful bunch.
Now it has become clear that I was confusing cultural value differences with susceptibility to authoritarianism. The 21st century has repeatedly shown that most Americans, despite their pretensions of individualism and liberty, are a fragile bunch, easily inflamed by fear and anger, who actually hold their freedoms quite cheaply. No one today even questions the Patriot Act and that is, frankly, astonishing.
Had Canadians been enfeebled with our American cousins' susceptibility to authoritarianism, Stephen Harper would today be ruling with a massive majority. Many Harperites do seem afflicted with the powerful need to believe that serves the Canadian neo-conservatives. But the majority of us are quite reasonably skeptical of the prime minister and his agenda. That may be all that's holding an American-style oligarchic takeover at bay in the True North.
Every con man knows the rewards of a lie successfully told. The confidence man uses lies to induce his victims to act against their self-interest for his unjust benefit. We find that so egregious that we have made it a crime punishable by imprisonment. We support victims through special civil remedies that help them trace and recover their purloined property. Yet when it comes to the truly harmful deceit, the Big Lie, the crime goes unpunished even though the damage, deliberately inflicted on the entire society, may be enormous.
Imagine if the rich and powerful, the emerging oligarchs, knew they would be liable to criminal and civil punishments for hoodwinking their society. They're willing to ruin their society's welfare for their own financial gain. It is why they manipulate the gullible to fight environmental and financial regulation by inducing them to fear their liberty, their very democracy is at risk if they don't. This is fraud on the grandest scale but we will not punish it as such.
I know a lot of us would dearly like to see global warming denialists, who perpetuate unfounded, disproven falsehoods to manipulate and confuse the public, held accountable. What if the fossil fuelers were held liable in damages for the loss they have inflicted on the country through their contrivances? But they don't fear being held accountable because they know, if the lie is big enough, it always goes unpunished. Yet so long as the Big Lie is such a richly rewarding proposition it will continue to vex us and our children and grandchildren unless and until we come to our senses and force these people to stop.
Like most of us, I got mildly immersed in the WikiLeaks/New York Times - Guardian - Der Spiegel disclosure of American diplomatic missives. At first it was like peeking into the inner workings of U.S. diplomacy and foreign policy but, before long, I found it just saddening.
I guess that's how America's powers-that-be see the rest of the world - duplicitous, venal, craven, utterly unfaithful. The WikiLeaks diplo-dump was mildly interesting - at first - but as it droned on and on, the sheer weight of it became a bit oppressive, even suffocating.
On a scale of one to ten, ten being the very best, the American diplomatic communiques seem to depict a world in which other nations rank anywhere from a mid-five to a one-minus. The American vision, to the extent these memos reflect that accurately, is profoundly bleak and well beyond simply cautious or even negative.
I'm left wondering whether the Americans aren't seeing the rest of the world very much as that world has come to see them. Ever since the Bush/Cheney cancer set in and metastasized, America's standing in the world has taken a hit from which it has shown little interest in recovering. Sure we greeted Obama and prayed his election would even America's keel but the American right, political and media, heeled over even harder, further.
The tone I discerned that was relatively constant through these documents was of a country that feels itself besieged, betrayed and unappreciated.
Maybe, just maybe, America has more to learn, stands to gain more than anyone else from the WikiLeaks scandal. Maybe America badly needs to take a brutally honest look at what's wrong with the way it sees the world. It could just be that America could be the big winner.
If the United States falls off its perch, no one will be able to claim it came as a surprise. The warnings have come from all corners and they've been loud and clear. Bacevich, Zinn, Chalmers Johnson, and so many others have put a spotlight on their America and shown it on the path to the end of the Republic.
Their warnings are reinforced by Tom Friedman's latest opinion piece in the New York Times, in which he observes how the WikiLeaks docu-dump reveals how America's global influence has waned thanks to its addiction to Middle Eastern oil and Chinese credit.
Geopolitics is all about leverage. We cannot make ourselves safer abroad unless we change our behavior at home. But our politics never connects the two.
Think how different our conversations with Saudi Arabia would be if we were in the process of converting to electric cars powered by nuclear, wind, domestic natural gas and solar power? We could tell them that if we detect one more dollar of Saudi money going to the Taliban then they can protect themselves from Iran.
Think how different our conversations with China would be if we had had a different savings rate the past 30 years and China was not holding $900 billion in U.S. Treasury securities — but was still dependent on the U.S. economy and technology. We would not be begging them to revalue their currency, and maybe our request that China prevent North Korea from shipping ballistic missile parts to Iran via Beijing airport (also in the cables) wouldn’t be rebuffed so brusquely.
And in today's Asia Times Online, A.W. McCoy writes that America's decline could actually come in the form of a surprise collapse.
If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.
Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003.
Future historians are likely to identify the George W Bush administration's rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America's downfall.
...Under current projections, the United States will find itself in second place behind China (already the world's second largest economy) in economic output around 2026, and behind India by 2050. Similarly, Chinese innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America's current supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation.
By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying empire. It will launch a lethal triple canopy of advanced aerospace robotics that represents Washington's last best hope of retaining global power despite its waning economic influence.
McCoy's piece is a thoughtful examination of what lies ahead for the United States and the rest of the world, notably China and India in what was to have been the "new American century."
And, on this theme, I'll leave you with Bill Maher's appearance on yesterday's Fareed Zakaria GPS. It's well worth watching:
It seems that playing footsie with al Qaeda is okay with Washington, as long as America thirsts for your oil. Back during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, prominent and noble Saudis funneled truckloads of cash to the mujaheddin and especially their own boy, Osama bin Laden.
Then came the embassy bombings, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, and finally the 9/11 attacks - carried out by Saudi Islamists. The obvious answer to that was to invade Iraq. What? But surely the House of Saud has learned its lesson and broken with al Qaeda, right? Wrong.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tags Saudi Arabia as the major funder of outfits like al Qaeda and the Taliban. Iraq's Shiite majority government in Baghdad also considers Saudi Arabia a much greater threat to Iraq than Iran could ever be.
Runners-up in the terrorism funding game are Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. Yes, that Kuwait, the one the West liberated from Saddam.
Oddly enough there's been not a whimper out of Sarah Palin, John McCain or Newt Gingrich about leveling the Gulf oil states. Hypocrisy? Ya think?
A diplomatic memo released by WikiLeaks quotes the E.U. President, Herman van Rompuy, as claiming that European forces remain in Afghanistan solely out of deference to the United States.
“Europe is doing it and will go along out of deference to the United States but not out of deference to Afghanistan,” the memo said citing Mr. Van Rompuy.
“No one believes in Afghanistan any more.”
America's European allies contribute about 30,000 troops to the U.S.-led NATO force in Afghanistan.
Here's a dead giveaway. When you have to rely on surprise to visit a country which you've supposedly controlled for almost a decade, you're not winning anything.
Barack Obama made his own surprise visit to Afghanistan on Friday. He was flown right in, unannounced, wearing a jaunty, classic A-2 leather flight jacket.
Obama's people staged the obligatory, photo-op bull session with the troops at which the POTUS assured the soldiers, "you will succeed." Obama then told his audience they were breaking the momentum of the Taliban.
Mr. Obama's words suggest he still sees the conflict as a military war. Somehow I'd thought he was brighter than that. Guess I was wrong. Then again he merely assured the troops they would succeed - succeed at what he didn't specify. If he meant succeed in defeating the Taliban, actually getting them to surrender, those troops can expect to be in Afghanistan until Hell freezes over.
It's been called "pharmacologic waterboarding" and it may explain a number of suicides by captives held at Guantanamo.
Documents recently released by the U.S. Defense Department show that all terror prisoners at Guantanamo were required to take heavy doses of a controversial, anti-malarial drug, mefloquine. They were administered doses only considered appropriate for those with active malaria.
Such heavy doses for those without malaria may cause, "potentially severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including seizures, intense vertigo, hallucinations, paranoid delusions, aggression, panic, anxiety, severe insomnia, and thoughts of suicide" according to US Army public health physician, Major Remington Niven.
We're running out of fish and we're fast running out of new places to find fish. A joint Canada/U.S./Australia study released by the peer-reviewed science information site, PloS, concludes that global fishing has burgeoned so rapidly over the past half century that the world fleets are running out of places to fish, places that is where the historic fisheries have not already been collapsed.
Once again, man has bested nature, taking more than the earth can supply. In 1950 the global catch was 19-million tonnes. It peaked in 1980 at 90-million tonnes. Despite new technologies the global catch dropped to 87-million tonnes by 2005 and fell below 80-million tonnes in 2008. It seems we reached Peak Fish three decades ago and have been relentlessly decimating the stocks ever since.
We got away with this three ways. One was "fishing down the food chain." As one desirable species was fished to collapse, we switched to what had been a less desirable species. Another was simply deploying better technology - a more efficient fishing fleet. The third was nomadic fishing - moving from one decimated area to a fresh fishing zone. Anyway you cut it, that has to end badly.
Daniel Pauly, a co-author who serves as principal investigator of the Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre, said the global seafood catch is dropping ''because there's essentially nowhere to go''. The fact that fish catches rose for so many decades ''looks like sustainability but it is actually expansion-driven. That is frightening, because the accounting is coming now.''
The authors - including lead author and UBC doctoral student Wilf Swartz and National Geographic Society ocean fellow Enric Sala - write that this relentless pursuit for seafood has left ''only unproductive waters of high seas and relatively inaccessible waters in the Arctic and Antarctic as the last remaining 'frontiers'.''
While people have been voraciously devouring WikiLeaks disclosures this past week there's been a major UN climate change summit underway in Cancun that seems to have fallen off the radar screen.
I've been searching about for news of what the delegates have accomplished and - nothing. No word. Oh, a few speeches and a bit of grumbling here and there but no news of anything remotely substantive much less some breakthrough.
I guess there's no point in saying "back to the drawing board." After all, Cancun was supposed to be the drawing board. Greenpeace climate director Wendell Trio described the summit this way. "This is a meeting of emitters anonymous. They haven't even taken the first steps to admit there is a problem."
This is just plain weird. A document released by WikiLeaks apparently shows the U.S. military has been charging its allies a 15% 'handling fee' on hundreds of millions of dollars of support intended to help build up the Afghan National Army. Gee the American military is beginning to more closely resemble Pakistan's military every day.
