Economy – Informed Comment https://www.juancole.com Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion Mon, 26 Feb 2024 02:44:28 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.7.11 War is Bad for you — And the Economy: Biden touts the Alleged Benefits of the Arsenal of Democracy https://www.juancole.com/2024/02/alleged-benefits-democracy.html Mon, 26 Feb 2024 05:02:20 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=217286 ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Joe Biden wants you to believe that spending money on weapons is good for the economy. That tired old myth — regularly repeated by the political leaders of both parties — could help create an even more militarized economy that could threaten our peace and prosperity for decades to come. Any short-term gains from pumping in more arms spending will be more than offset by the long-term damage caused by crowding out new industries and innovations, while vacuuming up funds needed to address other urgent national priorities.

The Biden administration’s sales pitch for the purported benefits of military outlays began in earnest last October, when the president gave a rare Oval Office address to promote a $106-billion emergency allocation that included tens of billions of dollars of weaponry for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. MAGA Republicans in Congress had been blocking the funding from going forward and the White House was searching for a new argument to win them over. The president and his advisers settled on an answer that could just as easily have come out of the mouth of Donald Trump: jobs, jobs, jobs. As Joe Biden put it:

“We send Ukraine equipment sitting in our stockpiles. And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores… equipment that defends America and is made in America: Patriot missiles for air defense batteries made in Arizona; artillery shells manufactured in 12 states across the country — in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas; and so much more.”

It should be noted that two of the four states he singled out (Arizona and Pennsylvania) are swing states crucial to his reelection bid, while the other two are red states with Republican senators he’s been trying to win over to vote for another round of military aid to Ukraine.

Lest you think that Biden’s economic pitch for such aid was a one-off event, Politico reported that, in the wake of his Oval Office speech, administration officials were distributing talking points to members of Congress touting the economic benefits of such aid. Politico dubbed this approach “Bombenomics.” Lobbyists for the administration even handed out a map purporting to show how much money such assistance to Ukraine would distribute to each of the 50 states. And that, by the way, is a tactic companies like Lockheed Martin routinely use to promote the continued funding of costly, flawed weapons systems like the F-35 fighter jet. Still, it should be troubling to see the White House stooping to the same tactics.

Yes, it’s important to provide Ukraine with the necessary equipment and munitions to defend itself from Russia’s grim invasion, but the case should be made on the merits, not through exaggerated accounts about the economic impact of doing so. Otherwise, the military-industrial complex will have yet another never-ending claim on our scarce national resources.

Military Keynesianism and Cold War Fallacies

The official story about military spending and the economy starts like this: the massive buildup for World War II got America out of the Great Depression, sparked the development of key civilian technologies (from computers to the internet), and created a steady flow of well-paying manufacturing jobs that were part of the backbone of America’s industrial economy.

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There is indeed a grain of truth in each of those assertions, but they all ignore one key fact: the opportunity costs of throwing endless trillions of dollars at the military means far less is invested in other crucial American needs, ranging from housing and education to public health and environmental protection. Yes, military spending did indeed help America recover from the Great Depression but not because it was military spending. It helped because it was spending, period. Any kind of spending at the levels devoted to fighting World War II would have revived the economy. While in that era, such military spending was certainly a necessity, today similar spending is more a question of (corporate) politics and priorities than of economics.

In these years Pentagon spending has soared and the defense budget continues to head toward an annual trillion-dollar mark, while the prospects of tens of millions of Americans have plummeted. More than 140 million of us now fall into poor or low-income categories, including one out of every six children. More than 44 million of us suffer from hunger in any given year. An estimated 183,000 Americans died of poverty-related causes in 2019, more than from homicide, gun violence, diabetes, or obesity. Meanwhile, ever more Americans are living on the streets or in shelters as homeless people hit a record 650,000 in 2022.

Perhaps most shockingly, the United States now has the lowest life expectancy of any industrialized country, even as the International Institute for Strategic Studies reports that it now accounts for 40% of the world’s — yes, the whole world’s! — military spending. That’s four times more than its closest rival, China. In fact, it’s more than the next 15 countries combined, many of which are U.S. allies. It’s long past time for a reckoning about what kinds of investments truly make Americans safe and economically secure — a bloated military budget or those aimed at meeting people’s basic needs.

What will it take to get Washington to invest in addressing non-military needs at the levels routinely lavished on the Pentagon? For that, we would need presidential leadership and a new, more forward-looking Congress. That’s a tough, long-term goal to reach, but well worth pursuing. If a shift in budget priorities were to be implemented in Washington, the resulting spending could, for instance, create anywhere from 9% more jobs for wind and solar energy production to three times as many jobs in education.

As for the much-touted spinoffs from military research, investing directly in civilian activities rather than relying on a spillover from Pentagon spending would produce significantly more useful technologies far more quickly. In fact, for the past few decades, the civilian sector of the economy has been far nimbler and more innovative than Pentagon-funded initiatives, so — don’t be surprised — military spinoffs have greatly diminished. Instead, the Pentagon is desperately seeking to lure high-tech companies and talent back into its orbit, a gambit which, if successful, is likely to undermine the nation’s ability to create useful products that could push the civilian sector forward. Companies and workers who might otherwise be involved in developing vaccines, producing environmentally friendly technologies, or finding new sources of green energy will instead be put to work building a new generation of deadly weapons.

Diminishing Returns

In recent years, the Pentagon budget has approached its highest level since World War II: $886 billion and counting. That’s hundreds of billions more than was spent in the peak year of the Vietnam War or at the height of the Cold War. Nonetheless, the actual number of jobs in weapons manufacturing has plummeted dramatically from three million in the mid-1980s to 1.1 million now. Of course, a million jobs is nothing to sneeze at, but the downward trend in arms-related employment is likely to continue as automation and outsourcing grow. The process of reducing arms industry jobs will be accelerated by a greater reliance on software over hardware in the development of new weapons systems that incorporate artificial intelligence. Given the focus on emerging technologies, assembly line jobs will be reduced, while the number of scientists and engineers involved in weapons-related work will only grow.

In addition, as the journalist Taylor Barnes has pointed out, the arms industry jobs that do remain are likely to pay significantly less than in the past, as unionization rates at the major contractors continue to fall precipitously, while two-tier union contracts deny incoming workers the kind of pay and benefits their predecessors enjoyed. To cite two examples: in 1971, 69% of Lockheed Martin workers were unionized, while in 2022 that number was 19%; at Northrop Grumman today, a mere 4% of its employees are unionized. The very idea that weapons production provides high-paying manufacturing jobs with good benefits is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

More and better-paying jobs could be created by directing more spending to domestic needs, but that would require a dramatic change in the politics and composition of Congress.

The Military Is Not an “Anti-Poverty Program”

Members of Congress and the Washington elite continue to argue that the U.S. military is this country’s most effective anti-poverty program. While the pay, benefits, training, and educational funding available to members of that military have certainly helped some of them improve their lot, that’s hardly the full picture. The potential downside of military service puts the value of any financial benefits in grim perspective.

Many veterans of America’s disastrous post-9/11 wars, after all, risked their physical and mental health, not to speak of their lives, during their time in the military. After all, 40% of veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars have reported service-related disabilities. Physical and mental health problems suffered by veterans range from lost limbs to traumatic brain injuries to post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). They have also been at greater risk of homelessness than the population as a whole. Most tragically, four times as many veterans have committed suicide as the number of military personnel killed by enemy forces in any of the U.S. wars of this century.

The toll of such disastrous conflicts on veterans is one of many reasons that war should be the exception, not the rule, in U.S. foreign policy.

And in that context, there can be little doubt that the best way to fight poverty is by doing so directly, not as a side-effect of building an increasingly militarized society. If, to get a leg up in life, people need education and training, it should be provided to civilians and veterans alike.

Tradeoffs

Federal efforts to address the problems outlined above have been hamstrung by a combination of overspending on the Pentagon and the unwillingness of Congress to more seriously tax wealthy Americans to address poverty and inequality. (After all, the wealthiest 1% of us are now cumulatively worth more than the 291 million of us in the “bottom” 90%, which represents a massive redistribution of wealth in the last half-century.)

The tradeoffs are stark. The Pentagon’s annual budget is significantly more than 20 times the $37 billion the government now invests annually in reducing greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. Meanwhile, spending on weapons production and research alone is more than eight times as high. The Pentagon puts out more each year for one combat aircraft — the overpriced, underperforming F-35 — than the entire budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, one $13 billion aircraft carrier costs more to produce than the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. Similarly, in 2020, Lockheed Martin alone received $75 billion in federal contracts and that’s more than the budgets of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined. In other words, the sum total of that company’s annual contracts adds up to the equivalent of the entire U.S. budget for diplomacy.

Simply shifting funds from the Pentagon to domestic programs wouldn’t, of course, be a magical solution to all of America’s economic problems. Just to achieve such a shift in the first place would, of course, be a major political undertaking and the funds being shifted would have to be spent effectively. Furthermore, even cutting the Pentagon budget in half wouldn’t be enough to take into account all of this country’s unmet needs. That would require a comprehensive package, including not just a change in budget priorities but an increase in federal revenues and a crackdown on waste, fraud, and abuse in the outlay of government loans and grants. It would also require the kind of attention and focus now reserved for planning to fund the military.

One comprehensive plan for remaking the economy to better serve all Americans is the moral budget of the Poor People’s Campaign, a national movement of low-income people inspired by the 1968 initiative of the same name spearheaded by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., before his assassination that April 4th. Its central issues are promoting racial justice, ending poverty, opposing militarism, and supporting environmental restoration. Its moral budget proposes investing more than $1.2 trillion in domestic needs, drawn from both cuts to Pentagon spending and increases in tax revenues from wealthy individuals and corporations. Achieving such a shift in American priorities is, at best, undoubtedly a long-term undertaking, but it does offer a better path forward than continuing to neglect basic needs to feed the war machine.

If current trends continue, the military economy will only keep on growing at the expense of so much else we need as a society, exacerbating inequality, stifling innovation, and perpetuating a policy of endless war. We can’t allow the illusion — and it is an illusion! — of military-fueled prosperity to allow us to neglect the needs of tens of millions of people or to hinder our ability to envision the kind of world we want to build for future generations. The next time you hear a politician, a Pentagon bureaucrat, or a corporate functionary tell you about the economic wonders of massive military budgets, don’t buy the hype.

Copyright 2024 William D. Hartung

Via Tomdispatch.com

]]> We Need to Phase out Fossil Fuels Immediately, but Equitably https://www.juancole.com/2024/02/fossil-immediately-equitably.html Tue, 13 Feb 2024 05:06:31 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=217058 By Tom Athanasiou | –

This essay was originally published in Foreign Policy in Focus

Just before the recent climate summit in Dubai, COP28 president Sultan Al-Jaber, with some exasperation, came out with the following rather amazing statement:

“Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”

Al-Jabar was posturing when he made this quip about caves, but he can almost be forgiven. We badly need a roadmap for a “phase out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development.” By noting the lack of one, he underscored its absence. This is true even if he spoke as a flack of the fossil fuel cartel.

Speaking of COP28, it helped settle the question of the COPs, which still troubles the climate left. The COPs are easily dismissed as “blah blah blah.” But they are, in a word, necessary. We would be in far greater trouble without them, and this is true even though the COPs are condemned to make decisions by consensus, even though they engender endless greenwashing, even though, with next year’s COP29 slated for Azerbaijan, two in a row will be hosted by straight-up petrostates.

The climate negotiations are finally circling core issues. COP26 saw a decision to “phase down” coal, and COP28 opened with the Loss and Damage fund finally lurching into existence. Then came COP28’s key decision text, which called for “Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” Only a month later—with President Biden’s move to “pause” the approval of new liquified natural gas terminals, a decision the White House explicitly linked to COP28— the COP decision demonstrated real world benefits. It could have many more in the future, including outside the United States.

Meanwhile, COP29 is set to see the next big battle begin in earnest, as climate finance takes center stage. This battle could (if all goes well) culminate in 2025, where COP30 will be hosted by Lula da Sila’s Brazil, and deliver a meaningful decision on that crucial front. This is not the time to performatively insist that COP stands for “conference of polluters.”

Having said all this, I must immediately add that the climate negotiations have thus far failed, as decisively witnessed by the steadily rising atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration. COP skeptics are quite right about this. But in their failure the international negotiations are hardly alone. Domestic climate action has had many victories, but it has hardly put us on a path to deep and rapid decarbonization. Nor has the green technology revolution brought planetary emissions into a peak-and-decline pathway. Nor—and this is not easy to say—have the world’s direct action and climate justice movements filled the gaps. Politically, they may be everything, but they too have failed to stop the warming.

One key point: the COP28 text does not simply call for transitioning away from fossil fuels but rather stipulates that this transition must be “just, orderly, and equitable,” a much more challenging prospect. This led Sivan Kartha, a climate equity specialist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, to add that the “deepest fissure” in Dubai was between those who simply want a rapid fossil phase out and those who insist that, to have any hope of success, such a phase out must be fair.

Many of us agree—but what does such fairness imply? 

Embracing “Climate Emergency”

It has become fashionable, yet again, to argue that terms like “climate emergency” are dangerously demoralizing. Perhaps they are. Unfortunately, they are also accurate. We really do have to aim for net-zero emission by 2050, and that means facing political-economic challenges that are difficult to exaggerate. As are those posed by the closely related 1.5°C temperature goal. 

A graphic is appropriate here. I chose this one:

So far, the temperature spike we saw in 2023 is just temporary. For details, see here.

There are lots of voices telling us that 1.5°C is no longer achievable, but this is not quite true. Rather, 1.5°C remains achievable, but only via “overshoot and decline” pathways in which, sometime after the warming grinds past 1.5°C, we manage to claw it back down. What must we do to improve our chances? This is the real question.

We’re going to go into 1.5°C overshoot soon. As we do, even if we assume we’ll be able to draw the temperature back down, we can’t know how extreme the overshoot will be, or how long it will last. We can’t know because it depends on what happens in the future! Some people, Marxist climate hawk Andreas Malm among them, do not think we’ll be able to pull off the necessary drawdown (“I’m not an optimist about the human project”), though he agrees that it is technically possible. 

If we seriously intend to keep 1.5°C alive (as a long-term goal—think 2100), we must in the short term do everything to keep the temperature peak “well below 2°C” (the weak end of the Paris target), which is widely judged, by top scientists, to still be achievable. But there’s a hitch. Even this weaker goal demands, per the IPCC, “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” It’s not going to happen in the world as we have it today. 

If, in 2050, we are approaching true net-zero planetary emissions, we’ll have a good chance of avoiding a world in which the cascading consequences of the warming become unmanageable. Very rapidly building low- and ultra-low emissions energy systems around the world is a necessary step towards that goal—and because such systems are emerging, and rapidly dropping in cost, it’s possible to be honestly optimistic. But such systems are not going to be enough. 

Net-zero 2050 means going beyond the deployment of new, ultra-low emissions infrastructure to also eliminate existing fossil fuel infrastructure. This means that virtually all countries, be they rich or poor, developed or developing, should immediately stop investing in fossil fuel infrastructure, not least because that infrastructure will have to be decommissioned—shut down, mothballed, stranded—long before it’s worn out. All countries must also very rapidly decommission the fossil fuel infrastructure (e.g. existing oil wells, old coal plants) they already have in place—even if it’s profitable and even if people depend on it for their livelihoods. Such a decommissioning process is going to be both expensive and disruptive, in both political and economic terms, and in ways that are particularly hard on poor and insecure populations. 

In a world geared for rapid transition, these would be tractable challenges, but that would be a world in which we were speaking honestly about the depth and profundity of the necessary transformation, a world in which we were, as per Australian author and analyst David Spratt, in “emergency mode.” This, obviously, is not our world, which still tends towards greenwashing, soft-pedaling, and small-bore gradualism, if not actual denialism and climate “brightsiding.”

League of Conservation Voters Video: “A New England Case Study: Accelerating the Clean Energy Transition Through Offshore Wind”

The encouraging possibilities are real, don’t get me wrong.

The green technology revolution really does make it possible for us to save ourselves, and to build new futures. But we’re still facing almost impossible strategic challenges, and justice is at the heart of many of them. Brave choices are going to be necessary, and a political movement that tries to avoid them will not do well when push comes to shove. As it will, within the lifetimes of our children. 

A global extraction phase out

It will be very difficult to engineer a sufficiently rapid phase out of fossil fuel consumption. But the difficulties are even greater when it comes to fossil fuel extraction and production. Think mining, and drilling, and fracking.

There are rich countries like the United States and Norway, which are heavily invested in oil and gas extraction. High-poverty developing countries, like South Africa and India, are heavily invested in coal, while the Democratic Republic of Congo is highly dependent on oil revenue to provide public services. Gulf oil exporters like the United Arab Emirates, the COP28 host, was a developing country before it struck oil. Today, though the UAE may not be “developed” in the same way as, say, the United States or Germany, it is nonetheless a wealthy, high-capacity country with the money and resources to buffer the turbulence that will come with any rapid abandonment of oil.

Which countries deserve more time before they have to stop extracting and selling fossil fuels? The question haunts the climate negotiations, but it is not, in an important sense, the right question at all. The greater truth is that we must do everything to stop the fossil energy pipeline, globally and as soon as possible, and the right question is which countries need support—financial, political, and technological support—before they can hope to rapidly break their dependency on fossil fuel extraction. 

All extracting countries plead their cases. The most legitimate pleas come from poor developing countries that are highly dependent on fossil-related revenues and livelihoods. But before this can become obvious, a point of potential confusion must be clearly acknowledged – lots of countries call themselves developing, but some of them are a lot richer than others. The good news is that this confusion is dissipating, for reasons that were easy to appreciate in Dubai, the global city of the United Arab Emirate. The UAE, like Saudi Arabia, is an extremely wealthy Gulf oil exporter that, while still officially a member of the “Group of 77” developing countries, is not a developing country at all.

Why must we say this? Because we must transition away from fossil fuels in a “just, orderly, and equitable” manner, and because – as the challenge of a fossil fuel extraction phase out makes particularly clear – such a transition is going to be extremely difficult. It is also going to be expensive, which immediately raises the “who pays?” question. Those who wish to evade this question—there are many, and they tend to be rich—seek delay by any available means, and it is important to stress that in the next 10 years aggressively rosy predictions about carbon-dioxide removal—which would, if real, make a perfect case for delay—seem certain to play a leading role in their strategies. 

In this situation, with uncertainty layered upon complexity upon emergency, optimism is as much a danger as pessimism. For one thing, it is not at all obvious that we will manage to rapidly draw temperatures back down after they overshoot 1.5°C—Malm’s pessimism may, in the end, be well placed. For another, all efforts to honestly face the severity of our situation will be endlessly harried by soft-pedaling, false solutions, dangerous distractions, and lies. Politicians everywhere will want all the wiggle room they can get, and meanwhile the fossil cartel will move at every opportunity to deflect all efforts to mandate, or even discuss, the strategic demands of an actual planetary fossil-fuel phase out. 

Al-Jaber was right: we need that roadmap. 

On the ground, with war in the air

The climate negotiations are marked by endless skirmishing between global North and global South, which will not abate anytime soon. How could it, when our world – and its crises – are still strongly structured by the “uneven and combined development” of the colonial past, and the countries of the global North still host the majority of the world’s wealth?

Despite this skirmishing, which has for decades kept fossil fuels off the negotiating agenda, COP28 saw the fossil phaseout challenge finally take center stage. Activists and diplomats alike saw this challenge as a litmus test that would show if the climate negotiations were fit for purpose. Will the negotiations take up the challenge, or can they be forever derailed and distracted, while the fossil cartel just continues its relentless expansion? Perhaps we’ll know in a few years, but just now, after Dubai, a bit of guarded optimism may actually be in order. 

Not everyone in Dubai connected the brutal logic of the climate reckoning to the larger geopolitical crisis, but this crisis hung palpably in the air. COP28 took place in the Arab world, and Gaza did not seem so very far away. The atrocity of the Israeli bombing continued day by excruciating day, and it did not seem that it could be entirely separated from the discussions in the conference halls. The pain was acute within civil society circles. Demonstrations took place, and though they were marginalized by the COP’s security regime, they were noticed. Importantly, the ethos of the protests was an expansive one. The bombing, in particular, was not an isolated consequence of local hatreds. There were larger forces at work. The Palestinians had been given to champion the global South. The United States—the same United States that refused all talk of climate liability—was more than implicated. The term “settler colonialism” was heard again and again. The war, and war in general, was not a distant abstraction.

COPs are not mere climate meetings. The talk is not confined to carbon budgets and energy-system transformation. International debt relief, for example, is now front and center, as is the need for a radically new planetary finance architecture. The global military budget—now over $2 trillion a year—is a common point of comparison, and a reminder that we routinely subsidize violence on a vast scale. The problem of climate is the problem of history, and history is suddenly a very big problem. As the Financial Times noted,

The anecdotal evidence that war is surging round the world is confirmed by the numbers. A recent report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies documented 183 ongoing conflicts around the world, the highest number in more than three decades. And that figure was arrived at before the outbreak of the war in Gaza.

The fraying of the world order is, obviously, a threat to climate cooperation. Beyond this, and beyond the fading illusion that the climate challenge will yield to simple interventions, we’re still only beginning to come to terms with its implacable sprawl. There is little chance of climate stabilization without a political-economic shift that makes robust cooperation possible, but such a shift isn’t going to come cheaply and easily, and simple stories will not help trigger it. How could they when the riddle of climate stabilization is as well the riddle of development, and the riddle of peace?

The Gaza bombing is now on the agenda of the International Court of Justice, where it has joined a crowded docket that includes climate change lawsuits and all manner of other infamies. Nor can these all be laid entirely at the feet of the global North. The two million people of Gaza are currently, and justly, in the spotlight, but spare a thought for another two million people, the Rohingya of Myanmar, who have been murdered and expelled by a huge and terrifying wave of anti-Muslim violence. Southern elites are not innocent. 

And don’t forget Russia’s war in Ukraine, which, in addition to its immediate murderous consequences, is a milestone in the global right’s campaign against collective action, including climate action. It has certainly been an enormous setback to the Russian activist campaign for carbon neutrality.

Spinning the outcome

During COP28’s second week, the negotiations were roiled by the leak of a letter that Haitham al-Ghais, the OPEC secretary general, had sent to the 13 members of OPEC. The letter warned that “pressure against fossil fuels may reach a tipping point with irreversible consequences”, and argued that OPEC members must “proactively reject any text or formula that targets energy i.e. fossil fuels rather than emissions.” 

This was not an isolated move. There was also, by accounts, a great deal of arm twisting, and even a Saudi walkout. Jennifer Morgan, a long-time civil society climate strategist who is now Special Envoy at the German Foreign Ministry, went so far as to speculate that OPEC might be in “a bit of panic.” If so, the panic quickly passed. Once COP28 was over, the Saudis argued that the Dubai agreement to transition away from fossil fuels was entirely optional, just one of several “choices” on an “a la carte menu.”

There are two essential points here. The first is that the OPEC cartel, and the fossil cartel more generally, wants to prevent the “transitioning away” or “phasing out” or “phasing down” frames from taking hold, and argues that “emissions” (which can, it is said, be “captured”) are the real problem. This is the core of the greenwashing strategy, and its partisans will use all available arguments in its service, including repeated references to energy justice. Al-Ghais, for example, explains that “Our goal must be to reduce emissions, which is the core objective of the Paris Agreement, while ensuring energy security and universal access to affordable energy.” 

OPEC has no intention of scaling back fossil fuel extraction. This could change (one must hope) but there is absolutely no chance that it will do so unless the great powers of the global North have already taken the lead and begun their own fossil fuel extraction phase out. Which is why the Biden administration’s decision to scrutinize and hopefully reject a wave of new LNG export terminals, if it survives the counterattacks, could mark a decisive turning point. Talk, after all, is cheap, and just because a country’s delegation supported phase down/out at COP28 (as did the U.S. delegation) this doesn’t mean its actual decision makers are ready and able to follow through. At the COP, many of them clearly weren’t, as is crisply shown in this December 2023 graphic from Carbon Brief:

Some countries, or rather the fossil powers within those countries, are planning even greater production increases than the United States is. Some of these (India and Nigeria) are clearly developing countries, while some (Canada, Russia, and Saudi Arabia) are not. Most all fossil-rich countries, whether their history lay with the global North or the global South, are still planning on exploiting their coal, oil, and gas resources for as long as they possibly can, though do note that China is at the encouraging bottom of the chart. All told, despite its complexities, the picture is grim.

At the same time, the climate reckoning is arriving, and it finds us everywhere divided between rich and poor. In consequence, the countries of the global South can continue to make compelling appeals to basic levels of developmental justice, and these appeals cannot be easily dismissed, even when they bleed into PR cover for continued fossil investment. The energy poverty of the global South is deadly real, as is its pressing need—and its right—to a viable development path, as are the obstacles that today’s world system strews in its path.

(Note that this chart is somewhat out of date – Azerbaijan, which holds the COP29 presidency, has since COP28 announced that it is planning on raising its gas production by a third.)

Moving forward

To succeed, the fossil fuel phaseout roadmap must be reasonably detailed and properly funded. At the same time, it must sharply increase the development and build-out of low-carbon energy systems. In practice, this roadmap has to include nationally differentiated coal, oil, and gas extraction phaseout timeframes detailed enough to be useful to both government planners and political organizers, and financing strategies that can support them. 

Given the emergency, these phaseout timeframes will be extremely challenging, as befits the goal of net-zero emissions by or around 2050. We have to be realistic about this, but it’s not a traditional realism that we’re after. Traditional realism tells us that the necessary timeframes are unachievable, in large part because countries always hew to their “national interests,” which can be only slowly changed. Climate realism, on the other hand, tells us that it’s the pace of the necessary decarbonization, not the politics of the day, that is immutable, and that climate stabilization must come as a solution to a global collective action problem, in which national interests rapidly change. 

Collective action problems—commons problems—have a special relationship to justice. So, while I have no idea what the “orderly” part of “just, orderly, and equitable” is going to wind up meaning, I’m confident that justice and equity are going to be key to any successful climate transition. 

But what kind of justice? And what shape must it take? These questions bring us back to Al-Jaber’s roadmap, the one for a “phase out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development.” It’s a bear of a problem, but lots of people are working on it. For starters, look at the work of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative. Or Phaseout Pathways for Fossil Fuel Production within Paris-Compliant Carbon Budgets, the Tyndell Centre report that Dan Calverley and Kevin Anderson published in 2022. Or Economic Diversification from Oil Dependency, a report Vincent Yu, a key G77 negotiator, wrote for the Third World Network. Or the many reports of the Civil Society Equity Review, an international collaborative that, full disclosure, I work closely with. The conversation is still in its early days, but there are lots of good ideas floating around. 

Meanwhile, if we’re going to use terms like “economic diversification” and “developing countries,” let’s use them carefully. The challenges here involve “differentiation” between different kinds of countries and different kinds of circumstances, and they are anything but easy. The obvious example is the Gulf oil exporters like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. They may in some sense be developing countries, but they have the money to diversify their economies as they phase out fossil fuel extraction, in ways that other developing countries like Kenya or even India absolutely do not. Harder cases come when you consider China, a hybrid that is both developed and developing, or when you take inequality within countries into proper account. For example, Saudi Arabia is traditionally considered to be a developing country, while the United States is the richest country in the world, but both are brutally divided between rich and poor. Somehow, this has to matter. 

At the end of the day, the biggest differentiation problem remains the one between the global North and the global South. The challenges here are now widely if not routinely recognized. In Dubai, soon after the COP28 decision was gaveled through, Avinash Persaud, now Barbados’ special climate envoy, noted that “Some activists were disappointed we didn’t commit to an immediate fossil fuel phase out. Still, without the trade, investment, and finance to achieve it, it would either have hit developing countries hardest or been meaningless.”

These points will have to be addressed as the finance challenge—the need for a global financial architecture that can support rapid climate transition—takes center stage. Which brings me to a new report – An Equitable Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Extraction: Towards a reference framework for a fast and fair rapid global phase out of coal, oil and gas—the preliminary version of which was released at COP28 by the Extraction Equity Working Group of the Civil Society Equity Review. 

I can’t summarize this report here—though it does sport a fine executive summary—but I do want to explain why its subtitle includes the words “towards a reference framework.” The explanation, basically, is that a detailed climate transition roadmap is not yet possible. An Equitable Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Extraction thus proposes a framework by which to judge the steps that can be taken in the next few years, to at least indicate if they are fair and ambitious enough to have a real chance. To this end, it concentrates on calculating coal, oil, and gas phaseout dates for all major fossil fuel producing countries—here’s a scatterplot with the oil dates; scroll right or left for coal and gas—and on estimating the minimum level of annual international public finance that will be needed to support these phase outs.

This minimum is denominated in “hundreds of billions of dollars” a year. 

An Equitable Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Extraction argues that, if we would limit warming to 1.5°C, all countries must immediately cease to build new fossil fuel extraction infrastructure. Further, wealthy fossil fuel producers whose overall economies are less dependent on fossil extraction—such as the United States, UK, Australia, Norway, Germany, and Canada—must phase out all fossil fuel extraction by 2031, while also providing significant financial support to poorer countries that are economically dependent on fossil fuel revenues and employment. Such poorer countries are given until 2050, though they too must be wrapping things up much earlier. 

One key point, in all this, should never be forgotten. The “unrealistic” nature of these dates is not the result of any equity-side logic—in which we try to model a fair phase out—but rather derives from the implacable constraints imposed by the Earth’s nearly-depleted 1.5°C emissions budget. To push these deadlines out, say to 2060 or 2070, we must either weaken our temperature goal or we must assume—as the geoengineers will incessantly encourage us to do—that gigatons upon gigatons of carbon-dioxide can very soon, and affordably, and safely, be collected and concentrated and “sequestered” away. 

Back to the ground

After Dubai, much of the left’s commentary focused on criticizing the late-game negotiations in which “phase out” was replaced by “transitioning away,” as if such diplomatic wordsmithing was only a watering down, as if it revealed the compromised truth at the core of a meaningless negotiation. For the activists embedded in the negotiations, the sense was different. They generally agreed that Dubai had “sent the necessary signal”—despite everything, the world’s governments have decided the fossil economy has to go.

Bill McKibben, to my mind, had the right take on this disagreement when he argued that the “transitioning away” phrase “will hang over every discussion from now on—especially the discussions about any further expansion of fossil fuel energy.” In a nutshell, he argued that the diplomats forged a tool and it’s up to us all to wield it.

The Dubai decision is of course limited. But its real weakness has more to do with loopholes and omissions than with any fine point of diplomatic wording. And the greatest of its omissions is financial: there is no agreement on how the phaseout will be funded. Harjeet Singh, now the Global Engagement Director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, put the overall picture succinctly and well,

A long-overdue direction to move away from coal, oil, and gas has been set. Yet, the resolution is marred by loopholes that offer the fossil fuel industry numerous escape routes, relying on unproven, unsafe technologies. The hypocrisy of wealthy nations, particularly the USA, as they continue to expand fossil fuel operations massively while merely paying lip service to the green transition, stands exposed. Developing countries, still dependent on fossil fuels for energy, income, and jobs, are left without robust guarantees for adequate financial support in their urgent and equitable transition to renewables. COP28 recognised the immense financial shortfall in tackling climate impacts, but the final outcomes fall disappointingly short of compelling wealthy nations to fulfil their financial responsibilities—obligations amounting to hundreds of billions, which remain unfulfilled.

Harjeet is being diplomatic when he refers to “hundreds of billions,” a figure that echoes the one used in the Equitable Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Extraction report. It seems to be the formulation of choice these days, at least when civil society researchers and activists want to assert financial markers large enough to move the window, but small enough to be taken as realistic.

It’s important to understand that figures of this scale refer to public monies—grants and grant equivalents—and that they’ve lately been sharing the stage with references to trillions, which are typically private monies framed as “investments.” As in Dubai’s high-level Leader’s Declaration, which spoke of the opportunities that lay in “investing $5-7tn annually in greening the global economy by 2030.” 

The elites, left to their own devices, are far more likely to deliver on ambitious private finance pledges than on ambitious public ones. Investment is something they know how to do. But a future defined by “investment” and “insurance” and “loans” and “aid” is unlikely be a future that takes proper account of even deep decarbonization, let alone the challenges of development in a climate-constrained world, let alone people-centered adaptation and an ethically defensible loss and damage response and recovery system. Which is to say that, unless we win a comprehensive climate finance breakthrough, all hope for a “fair, orderly, and equitable” transition will be abandoned in favor of a short-term neoliberal expediency that is unlikely to deliver the global just transition we actually need. 

The challenge here encompasses everything from the historical responsibility of the global North to the debt crisis now wracking the global South to the inequality crisis raging in both North and South. Not to mention the crisis of democracy and the endless techno-economic complexities of the great rebuilding that’s now on the horizon. Bracket all this for now, but know that the next international battle will be fought over finance. 

It’s about time. 

Tom Athanasiou

This essay was originally published in Foreign Policy in Focus

]]> ‘Hell No!’: Trump Allies’ Plan to Privatize Medicare Draws Alarm and Outrage https://www.juancole.com/2024/02/privatize-medicare-outrage.html Sat, 10 Feb 2024 05:02:20 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=217013 ]]> Our World-Historical Turning Point – Kairos – is Now, and Everything Depends on the Youths https://www.juancole.com/2024/01/historical-turning-everything.html Fri, 19 Jan 2024 05:02:01 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=216639 ( Tomdispatch.com) – “All Americans owe them a debt for — if nothing else — releasing the idealism locked so long inside a nation that has not recently tasted the drama of a social upheaval. And for making us look on the young people of the country with a new respect.” That’s how Howard Zinn opened his book The New Abolitionists about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the 1960s. Zinn pointed out a truth from the Black freedom struggles of that era and earlier: that young people were often labeled aloof and apathetic, apolitical and uncommitted — until suddenly they were at the very forefront of justice struggles for themselves and for the larger society. Connected to that truth is the reality that, in the history of social-change movements in the United States and globally, young people almost invariably find themselves in the lead.

I remember first reading The New Abolitionists in the 1990s when I was a college student and activist. I had grown weary of hearing older people complain about the inactivity of my generation, decrying why we weren’t more involved in the social issues of the day. Of course, even then, such critiques came in the face of mass protests, often led by the young, against the first Iraq war (launched by President George H.W. Bush), the Republican Contract With America, and the right-wing “family values” movement. Such assertions about the apathy of youth were proffered even as young people were waging fights for marriage equality, the protection of abortion, and pushing back against the attack on immigrants, as well as holding mass marches like the Battle for Seattle at the World Trade Organization meeting as well as protests at the Republican National Convention of 2000, and so much more.

Another quote from Zinn remains similarly etched in my mind. “Theirs,” he wrote, “was the silent generation until they spoke, the complacent generation until they marched and sang, the money-seeking generation until they gave it up for… the fight for justice in the dank and dangerous hamlets of the Black Belt.”

And if it was true that, in the 1990s and 2000s, young people were so much less complacent than was recognized at the time, it’s even truer (to the nth degree!) in the case of the Millennials and Gen Z today. Younger generations are out there leading the way toward justice in a fashion that they seldom get credit for.

Don’t Look Up

Let me suggest, as a start, that we simply chuck out the sort of generalizations about Millennials and Gen Z that pepper the media today: that those younger generations spend too much money on avocado toast and Starbucks when they should be buying real estate or paying down their student loans. Accused of doing everything through social media, it’s an under-recognized and unappreciated reality of this century that young people have been showing up in a remarkable fashion, leading the way in on-the-ground movements to ensure that Black lives matter, dealing vividly with the onrushing horror of climate change, as well as continued conflict and war, not to speak of defending economic justice and living wages, abortion access, LGBTQ rights, and more.

Take, for instance, the greatest social upheaval of the past five years: the uprising that followed the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, with #BlackLivesMatter protests being staged in staggering numbers of communities, many of which had never hosted such an action before. Those marches and rallies, led mainly by teenagers and young adults, may have been the broadest wave of protests in American history.

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When it comes to the environmental movement, young people have been organizing campaigns for climate justice, calling for a #GreenNewDeal and #climatedefiance from Cop City to the March to End Fossil Fuels to a hunger strike in front of the White House. At the same time, they have been bird-dogging politicians on both sides of the aisle with an urgency and militancy not previously associated with climate change. Meanwhile, a surge of unionization drives, whether at Walmart, Starbucks, Amazon, or Dollar General, has largely been led by young low-wage workers of color and has increased appreciation for and recognition of workers’ rights and labor unions to a level not seen in decades. Add to that the eviction moratoriums, mutual-aid provisions, and student-debt strikes of the pandemic years, which gained ground no one had thought possible even months earlier.

And don’t forget the movement to stop gun violence that, from the March for Our Lives in Florida to the protests leading to the expulsion and subsequent reinstatement of state legislators Justin Jones and Justin Pearson in Tennessee, galvanized millions across racial and political lines. Teenagers in striking numbers are challenging this society to value their futures more than guns. And most recently, calls for a #ceasefirenow and #freepalestine have heralded the birth of a new peace movement in the wake of Hamas’s attacks on Israel and the Israeli destruction of much of Gaza. Although university presidents have been getting more media attention, Palestinian, Jewish, and Muslim students have been the ones organizing and out there, insisting that indiscriminate violence perpetrated against Palestinians, especially children, will not happen “in our name.”

From Unexpected Places

An observation Zinn made so many years ago about young people in the 1960s may have lessons for movements today: “They came out of unexpected places; they were mostly black and therefore unseen until they suddenly became the most visible people in America; they came out of Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, and Rock Hill, South Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. And they were committed. To the point of jail, which is a large commitment.”

Today’s generation of activists are similarly committed and come from places as varied as Parkland, Florida, Uvalde, Texas, Buffalo, New York, and Durham, North Carolina. Below the surface, some deep stuff is brewing that could indeed continue to compel new generations of the young into action. As we approach the first quarter mark of the twenty-first century, we’re stepping firmly into a new technological era characterized by unparalleled levels of digital power. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, as elite economists and think-tankers like to call it, promises a technological revolution that, in the words of World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab, is likely to occur on a “scale, scope, and complexity” never before experienced. That revolution will, of course, include the integration of artificial intelligence and other labor-replacing technology into many kinds of in-person as well as remote work and is likely to involve the “deskilling” of our labor force from the point of production all the way to the market.

Residents of Detroit, once the Silicon Valley of auto manufacturing, understand this viscerally. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Ford River Rouge Plant was the largest, most productive factory in the world, a private city with 100,000 workers and its own municipal services. Today, the plant employs only a fraction of that number — about 10,000 people — and yet, thanks to a surge of robotic innovation, it produces even more cars than it did in the heady days of the 1930s. Consider such a shift just the tip of the spear of the kind of change “coming to a city near you,” as one veteran auto worker and union organizer once told me. All of this is impacting everything from wages to health-care plans, pensions to how workers organize. Indeed, some pushback to such revolutionary shifts in production can be seen in the labor strikes the United Auto Workers launched late in 2023.

Overall, such developments are deeply impacting young people. After all, workers are now generally making less than their parents did, even though they may produce more for the economy. Growing parts of our workforce are increasingly non-unionized, low-wage, part-time and/or contracted out, often without benefits like health care, paid sick leave, or retirement plans. And not surprisingly, such workers struggle to afford housing, childcare, and other necessities, experiencing on the whole harsher lives than the generations that preceded them.

In addition, the last 40 years have done more than just transform work and daily life for younger generations. They have conditioned so many to lose faith in government as a site for struggle and change. Instead, Americans are increasingly dependent on private, market-based solutions that extol the wealthy for their humanitarianism (even as they reap the rewards from federal policymaking and an economy rigged in their favor).

Crises upon Crises

Consider the social, political, and economic environment that’s producing the multi-layered crises faced by today’s younger generations. When compared to other advanced countries, the United States lags perilously behind in almost every important category. In this rich land, about 45 million people regularly experience hunger and food insecurity, nearly 80 million are uninsured or underinsured, close to 10 million live without housing or on the brink of homelessness, while the education system continues to score near the bottom compared to the other 37 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. And in all of this, young people are impacted disproportionately.

Perhaps most damning, ours is a society that has become terrifyingly tolerant of unnecessary death and suffering. Deaths by poverty are an increasingly all-American reality. Low-wage jobs that have been found to shorten lives are the norm. In 2023, researchers at the University of California, Riverside, found that poverty was the fourth-leading cause of death in this country, right after heart disease, smoking, and cancer. While life expectancy continues to rise across the industrialized world, it’s stagnated in the U.S. since the 2010s and, during the first three years of the Covid pandemic, it dropped in a way that, according to experts, was unprecedented in modern world history. That marks us as unique not just among wealthy countries, but among poorer ones as well. And again, its impact was felt above all by the young. What we call “deaths of despair” are also accelerating, although the label is misleading, since so many overdoses and suicides are caused not by some amorphous social malaise but by medical neglect and lack of access to adequate care and mental-health treatment for the under- or uninsured.

Nor are low wages, crises of legitimacy, and falling life expectancy the only significant issues facing our younger generations. Just last week, the New York Times reported that 2023 was the hottest year on record (with climate chaos worsening yearly and little chance of the elimination of our reliance on fossil fuels in sight). Add to that the fact that anyone born in the last three decades can hardly remember a time when the United States was not in some fashion at war (whether declared or not) and pouring its taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon budget. In fact, according to the National Priorities Project, this country has spent a staggering $21 trillion on militarization since September 11, 2001, including increased border patrols, a rising police presence in our communities, and various aspects of the Global War on Terror that came home big-time. Add to all that, the rise of Trumpian-style authoritarianism and attacks on our democratic system more extreme than at any time since the Civil War.

What Time Is It?

Thousands of years ago, the ancient Greeks taught that there were two ways to understand time — and the times in which we live. Chronos was quantitative time, the measured chronological time of a clock. Kairos, on the other hand, was qualitative time: the special, even transformative, time of a specific moment (and possibly of a movement). Kairos is all about opportunity. In the days of antiquity, Greek archers were trained to recognize the brief kairos moment, the opening when their arrow had the best chance of reaching its target. In the Bible (and as a biblical scholar I run into this a lot), Kairos describes a moment when the eternal breaks into history.

German-American theologian Paul Tillich introduced the modern use of kairos in describing the period between the First World War and the rise of fascism. In retrospect, he recognized the existential stakes of that transitional moment and mourned the societal failure to stem the tide of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain. There was a similar kairos moment in apartheid South Africa when a group of mainly Black theologians wrote a Kairos Document noting that “for very many… in South Africa, this is the KAIROS, the moment of grace and opportunity… a challenge to decisive action. It is a dangerous time because, if this opportunity is missed, and allowed to pass by, the loss… will be immeasurable.”

2024 may well be a kairos moment for us here in the United States. There’s so much at stake, so much to lose, but if Howard Zinn were with us today, I suspect he would look at the rise of bold and visionary organizing, led by generations of young leaders, and tell us that change, on a planet in deep distress, is coming soon.

Copyright 2024 Liz Theoharis

Via Tomdispatch.com

]]> The Military-Industrial Complex Is the Winner (Not You) – Overspending on the Pentagon Is Stealing Our Future https://www.juancole.com/2024/01/military-industrial-overspending.html Wed, 17 Jan 2024 05:04:44 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=216602 ( Tomdispatch.com ) – 2023 was a year marked by devastating conflicts from Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine to Hamas’s horrific terror attacks on Israel, from that country’s indiscriminate mass slaughter in Gaza to a devastating civil war in Sudan. And there’s a distinct risk of even worse to come this year. Still, there was one clear winner in this avalanche of violence, suffering, and war: the U.S. military-industrial complex.

In December, President Biden signed a record authorization of $886 billion in “national defense” spending for 2024, including funds for the Pentagon proper and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. Add to that tens of billions of dollars more in likely emergency military aid for Ukraine and Israel, and such spending could well top $900 billion for the first time this year.

Meanwhile, the administration’s $100-billion-plus emergency military aid package that failed to pass Congress last month is likely to slip by in some form this year, while the House and Senate are almost guaranteed to add tens of billions more for “national defense” projects in specific states and districts, as happened in two of the last three years.

Of course, before the money actually starts flowing, Congress needs to pass an appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2024, clearing the way for that money to be spent. As of this writing, the House and Senate had indeed agreed to a tentative deal to sign onto the $886 billion that was authorized in December. A trillion-dollar version of such funding could be just around the corner.  (If past practice is any guide, more than half of that sum could go directly to corporations, large and small.)

A trillion dollars is a hard figure to process. In the 1960s, when the federal budget was a fraction of what it is now, Republican Senator Everett Dirksen allegedly said, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Whether he did or not, that quote neatly captures how congressional attitudes toward federal spending have changed. After all, today, a billion dollars is less than a rounding error at the Pentagon. The department’s budget is now hundreds of billions of dollars more than at the height of the Vietnam War and over twice what it was when President Eisenhower warned of the “unwarranted influence” wielded by what he called “the military-industrial complex.”

To offer just a few comparisons: annual spending on the costly, dysfunctional F-35 combat aircraft alone is greater than the entire budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2020, Lockheed Martin’s contracts with the Pentagon were worth more than the budgets of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined, and its arms-related revenues continue to rival the government’s entire investment in diplomacy. One $13 billion aircraft carrier costs more than the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. Overall, more than half of the discretionary budget Congress approves every year — basically everything the federal government spends other than on mandatory programs like Medicare and Social Security — goes to the Pentagon.

It would, I suppose, be one thing if such huge expenditures were truly needed to protect the country or make the world a safer place. However, they have more to do with pork-barrel politics and a misguided “cover the globe” military strategy than a careful consideration of what might be needed for actual “defense.”

Congressional Follies

The road to an $886-billion military budget authorization began early last year with a debt-ceiling deal negotiated by President Biden and then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. That rolled back domestic spending levels, while preserving the administration’s proposal for the Pentagon intact. McCarthy, since ousted as speaker, had been pressed by members of the right-wing “Freedom Caucus” and their fellow travelers for just such spending cuts. (He had little choice but to agree, since that group proved to be his margin of victory in a speaker’s race that ran to 15 ballots.)

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There was a brief glimmer of hope that the budget cutters in the Freedom Caucus might also go after the bloated Pentagon budget rather than inflict all the fiscal pain on domestic programs. Prominent right-wing Republicans like Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) pledged to put Pentagon spending reductions “on the table,” but then only went after the military’s alleged “woke agenda,” which boiled down to cutting a few billion dollars slated for fighting racism and sexual harassment while supporting reproductive freedom within the armed forces. Oh wait, Jordan also went after spending on the development of alternative energy sources as “woke.” In any case, he focused on just a minuscule share of the department’s overall budget.

Prominent Republicans outside Congress expressed stronger views about bringing the Pentagon to heel, but their perspectives got no traction on Capitol Hill. For instance, Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, perhaps America’s most influential conservative think tank, made the case for reining in the Pentagon at American Conservative magazine:

“In the past, Congress accepted the D.C. canard that a bigger budget alone equals a stronger military. But now, facing down a record debt to the tune of $242,000 per household, conservatives are ready to tackle an entrenched problem and confront the political establishment, unaccountable federal bureaucrats, and well-connected defense contractors all at once in order to keep the nation both solvent and secure.”

Even more surprising, former Trump Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller released a memoir in which he called for a dramatic slashing of the Pentagon budget. “We could,” he argued, “cut our defense budget in half and it would still be twice as big as China’s.”

Ultimately, however, such critiques had zero influence over the Pentagon budget debate in the House, which quickly degenerated into a fight about a series of toxic amendments attacking reproductive freedom and LGTBQ and transgender rights in the military. Representative Colin Allred (D-TX) rightly denounced such amendments as a “shameful display of extremism” and across-the-board opposition by Democrats ensured that the first iteration of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2024 would be defeated and some of the most egregious Republican proposals eliminated later in the year. 

In the meantime, virtually all mainstream press coverage and most congressional debate focused on those culture war battles rather than why this country was poised to shove so much money at the Pentagon in the first place.

Threat Inflation and the “Arsenal of Democracy”

Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the strategic rationales put forward for the flood of new Pentagon outlays don’t faintly hold up to scrutiny. First and foremost in the Pentagon’s argument for virtually unlimited access to the Treasury is the alleged military threat posed by China. But as Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight has pointed out, that country’s military strategy is “inherently defensive”:

“[T]he investments being made [by China] are not suited for foreign adventurism but are instead designed to use relatively low-cost weapons to defend against massively expensive American weapons. The nation’s primary military strategy is to keep foreign powers, and especially the United States, as far away from its shores as possible in a policy the Chinese government calls ‘active defense.’”

The greatest point of potential conflict between the U.S. and China is, of course, Taiwan. But a war over that island would come at a staggering cost for all concerned and might even escalate into a nuclear confrontation. A series of war games conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found that, while the United States could indeed “win” a war defending Taiwan from a Chinese amphibious assault, it would be a Pyrrhic victory. “The United States and its allies lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of servicemembers,” it reported. “Taiwan saw its economy devastated. Further, the high losses damaged the U.S. global position for many years.” And a nuclear confrontation between China and the United States, which CSIS didn’t include in its assessment, would be a first-class catastrophe of almost unimaginable proportions.

The best route to preventing a future Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be to revive Washington’s “One China” policy that calls for China to commit itself to a peaceful resolution of Taiwan’s status and for the U.S. to forswear support for that island’s formal independence. In other words, diplomacy, rather than increasing the Pentagon budget to “win” such a war, would be the way to go.

The second major driver of higher Pentagon budgets is allegedly the strain on this country’s arms manufacturing base caused by supplying tens of billions of dollars of weaponry to Ukraine, including artillery shells and missiles that are running short in American stockpiles. The answer, according to the Pentagon and the arms industry, is to further supersize this country’s already humongous military-industrial complex to produce enough weaponry to supply Ukraine (and now Israel, too), while acquiring sufficient weapons systems for a future war with China.

There are two problems with such arguments. First, supplying Ukraine doesn’t justify a permanent expansion of the U.S. arms industry. In fact, such aid to Kyiv needs to be accompanied by a now-missing diplomatic strategy designed to head off an even longer, ever more grinding war.

Second, the kinds of weapons needed for a war with China would, for the most part, be different from those relevant to a land war in Ukraine, so weaponry sent to Ukraine would have little relevance to readiness for a potential war with China (which Washington should, in any case, be working to prevent, not preparing for). 

The Disastrous Costs of a Militarized Foreign Policy

Before investing ever more tax dollars in building an ever-expanding garrison state, the military strategy of the United States in the current global environment should be seriously debated. Just buying ever more bombs, missiles, drones, and next-generation artificial intelligence-driven weaponry is not, in fact, a strategy, though it is a boon to the military-industrial complex and an invitation to a destabilizing new arms race.

Unfortunately, neither Congress nor the Biden administration seems inclined to seriously consider an approach that would emphasize investing in diplomatic and economic tools over force or the threat of force. Given this country’s staggeringly expensive failures in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in this century (which cost trillions of dollars), resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, and leaving staggering numbers of American veterans with physical and psychological injuries (as extensively documented by the Costs of War Project at Brown University), you might think a different approach to the use of your tax dollars was in order, but no such luck.

There are indeed a few voices in Congress advocating restraint at the Pentagon, including Representatives Mark Pocan (D-WI) and Barbara Lee (D-CA), who have proposed a $100 billion reduction in that department’s budget as a first step toward a more balanced national security policy.  Such efforts, however, must overcome an inhospitable political environment created by the endlessly exaggerated military threats facing this country and the political power of the arms industry, as well as its allies in Washington. Those allies, of course, include President Biden, who has labeled the U.S. an “arsenal of democracy” in his efforts to promote a new round of weapons aid to Ukraine.  Not unlike his predecessor, he is touting the potential benefits of arms-production investments in companies in electoral swing states.

Sadly, throwing more money at the arms industry sacrifices future needs for short-term economic gains that are modest indeed. Were that money going into producing green jobs, a more resilient infrastructure, improved scientific and technical education, and a more robust public health system, we would find ourselves in a different world. Those should be the pillars of any American economic revival rather than the all-too-modest side effects of weapons development in fueling economic growth. Despite huge increases in funding since the 1980s, actual jobs in the arms manufacturing industry have, in fact, plummeted from three million to 1.1 million — and, mind you, those figures come from the arms industry’s largest trade association. 

The United Auto Workers, one of the unions with the most members working in the arms industry, has recognized this reality and formed a Just Transition Committee. As noted by Spencer Ackerman at the Nation, it’s designed to “examine the size, scope, and impact of the U.S. military-industrial complex that employs thousands of UAW members and dominates the global arms trade.” According to Brandon Mancilla, director of the UAW’s Region 9A, which represents 50,000 active and retired workers in New York, New England, and Puerto Rico, the committee will “think about what it would mean to actually have a just transition, what used to be called a ‘peace conversion,’ of folks who work in the weapons and defense industry into something else.”

The UAW initiative parallels a sharp drop in unionization rates at major weapons makers (as documented by journalist Taylor Barnes). To cite two examples: in 1971, 69% of Lockheed Martin workers were unionized, while in 2022 that number was 19%; at Northrop Grumman today, a mere 4% of its employees are unionized, a dip that reflects a conscious strategy of the big weapons-making firms to outsource work to non-union subcontractors and states with anti-union “right to work” laws, while exporting tens of thousands of jobs overseas as part of multinational projects like the F-35 program. So much for the myth that defense industry jobs are more secure or have better pay and benefits than jobs in other parts of the economy.

A serious national conversation is needed on what a genuine defense strategy would look like, rather than one based on fantasies of global military dominance. Otherwise, the overly militarized approach to foreign and economic policy that has become the essence of Washington budget-making could be extended endlessly and disastrously into the future, something this country literally can’t afford to let happen.

Copyright 2024 William D. Hartung

Via Tomdispatch.com

]]> We Deserve Medicare for All, But What We Get Is Medicare for Wall Street https://www.juancole.com/2024/01/deserve-medicare-street.html Sat, 06 Jan 2024 05:02:46 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=216368 By Les Leopold | –

Creating a sane healthcare system will depend on building a massive common movement to free our economy from Wall Street’s wealth extraction.

( Commondreams.org ) – The United States health care system—more costly than any on earth—will become ever more so as Wall Street increasingly extracts money from it.

Private equity funds own approximately 9% of all private hospitals and 30% of all proprietary for-profit hospitals, including 34% that serve rural populations. They’ve also bought up nursing homes and doctors’ practices and are investing more year by year. The net impact? Medical costs to the government and to patients have gone up while patients have suffered more adverse medical results, according to two current studies.

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) recently published a paper which found:

Private equity acquisition was associated with increased hospital-acquired adverse events, including falls and central line–associated bloodstream infections, along with a larger but less statistically precise increase in surgical site infections.

This should not come as a surprise. Private equity firms in general operate as follows: They raise funds from investors to purchase enterprises using as much borrowed money as possible. That debt does not fall on the private equity firm or its investors, however. Instead, all of it is placed on the books of the purchased entity. If a private equity firm borrows money and buys up a nursing home or hospital chain, the debt goes on the books of these healthcare facilities in what is called a leveraged buyout.

To service the debt, the enterprise’s management, directed by their private equity ownership, must reduce costs, and increase its cash flow. The first and easiest way to reduce costs is by reducing the number of staff and by decreasing services. Of course, the quality of care then suffers. Meanwhile, the private equity firm charges the company fees in order to secure its own profits.

With so much taxpayer money sloshing around in the system, hedge funds also are cashing in.

An even larger study of private equity and health was completed this summer and published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). After reviewing 1,778 studies it concluded that after private equity firms purchased healthcare facilities, health outcomes deteriorated, costs to patients or payers increased, and overall quality declined.


Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

One former executive at a private equity firm that owns an assisted-living facility near Boulder, Colorado, candidly described why the firm was refusing to hire and retain high-quality caregivers: “Their position was: We are trying to increase our profitability. Care is an ancillary part of the conversation.”

Medicare Advantage Creates Wall Street Advantages

Congress passed the Medicare Advantage program in 2003. Its proponents claimed it would encourage competition and greater efficiency in the provision of health insurance for seniors. At the time, privatization was all the rage as the Democratic and Republican parties competed to please Wall Street donors. It was argued that Medicare, which was actually much more efficient than private insurance companies, needed the iron fist of profit-making to improve its services. These new private plans were permitted to compete with Medicare Part C (Medigap) supplemental insurance.

In 2007, 19% of Medicare recipients enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans. By 2023 enrollment had risen to 51%. These heavily marketed plans are attractive because many don’t charge additional monthly premiums, and they often include dental, vision, and hearing coverage, which Medicare does not. And in some plans, other perks get thrown in, like gym memberships and preloaded over-the-counter debit cards for use in pharmacies for health items.

How is it possible for Medical Advantage to do all this and still make a profit?

According to a report by the Physicians for a National Health Program, it’s very simple—they overcharge the government, that is we, the taxpayers, “by a minimum of $88 billion per year.” The report says it could be as much as $140 billion.

In addition to inflating their bills to the government, these HMO plans don’t pay doctors outside of their networks, deny or slow needed coverage to patients, and delay legitimate payments. As Dr. Kenneth Williams, CEO of Alliance HealthCare, said of Medicare Advantage plans, “They don’t want to reimburse for anything — deny, deny, deny. They are taking over Medicare and they are taking advantage of elderly patients.”

Enter Hedge Funds

With so much taxpayer money sloshing around in the system, hedge funds also are cashing in. They have bought large quantities of stock in the healthcare companies that are milking the government through their Medicare Advantage programs. They then insist that these healthcare companies initiate stock buybacks, inflating the price of their stock and the financial return to the hedge funds. Stock buybacks are a simple way to transfer corporate money to the largest stock-sellers.

(A stock buyback is when a corporation repurchases its own stock. The stock price invariably goes up because the company’s earnings are spread over a smaller number of shares. Until they were deregulated in 1982, stock buybacks were essentially outlawed because they were considered a form of stock price manipulation.)

United Healthcare, for example, is the largest player in the Medicare Advantage market, accounting for 29% of all enrollments in 2023. It also has handsomely rewarded its hedge fund stock-sellers to the tune of $45 billion in stock buybacks since 2007, with a third of that coming since March 2020. Cigna, another big Medicare Advantage player, just announced a $10 billion stock buyback.

These repurchases are also extremely lucrative for United Healthcare’s top executives, who receive most of their compensation through stock incentives. CEO Andrew Witty, for example, hauled in $20.9 million in 2022 compensation, of which $16.4 million came from stock and stock option awards.

Those of us fighting for Medicare for All have much in common with every worker who is losing his or her job as a result of leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks.

A look at the pharmaceutical industry shows where all this is heading. Between 2012 and 2021, fourteen of the largest publicly traded pharmaceutical companies spent $747 billion on stock buybacks and dividends, more than the $660 billion they spent on research and development, according to a report by economists William Lazonick and Öner Tulum. Little wonder that drug prices are astronomically high in the U.S.

And so, the gravy train is loaded and rolling, delivering our tax dollars via Medicare Advantage reimbursements to companies like United Healthcare and Big Pharma, which pass it on to Wall Street private equity firms and hedge funds.

It’s Not Just Healthcare

In researching my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, we found that private equity firms and hedge funds are undermining the working class through leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks. When private equity moves in, mass layoffs (just like healthcare staff cuts and shortages) almost always follow so that the companies can service their debt and private equity can extract profits. When hedge funds insist on stock repurchases, mass layoffs are used to free up cash in order to buy back their shares. As a result, between 1996 and today, we estimate that more than 30 million workers have gone through mass layoffs.

Meanwhile, stock buybacks have metastasized throughout the economy. In 1982, before deregulation, only about 2% of all corporate profits went to stock buybacks. Today, it is nearly 70%.

Those of us fighting for Medicare for All, therefore, have much in common with every worker who is losing his or her job as a result of leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks. Every fight to stop a mass layoff is a fight against the same Wall Street forces that are attacking Medicare and trying to privatize it. Creating a sane healthcare system, therefore, will depend on building a massive common movement to free our economy from Wall Street’s wealth extraction.

To take the wind out of Medicare Advantage and Wall Street’s rapacious sail through our healthcare system, we don’t need more studies. It’s time to outlaw leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
]]> Tech “Visionaries” are Actually Holding back Progress with Bloated, Predatory Corporations https://www.juancole.com/2024/01/visionaries-predatory-corporations.html Wed, 03 Jan 2024 05:02:29 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=216333 University of Essex | – Technological innovation in the last couple of decades has brought fame and huge wealth to the likes of Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Often feted as geniuses, they are the faces behind the gadgets and media that so many of us depend upon. […]]]> By Peter Bloom, >University of Essex | –

Technological innovation in the last couple of decades has brought fame and huge wealth to the likes of Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Often feted as geniuses, they are the faces behind the gadgets and media that so many of us depend upon.

Sometimes they are controversial. Sometimes the level of their influence is criticised.

But they also benefit from a common mythology which elevates their status. That myth is the belief that executive “visionaries” leading vast corporations are the engines which power essential breakthroughs too ambitious or futuristic for sluggish public institutions.

For there are many who consider the private sector to be far better equipped than the public sector to solve major challenges. We see such ideology embodied in ventures like OpenAI. This successful company was founded on the premise that while artificial intelligence is too consequential to be left to corporations alone, the public sector is simply incapable of keeping up.

The approach is linked to a political philosophy which champions the idea of pioneering entrepreneurs as figureheads who advance civilisation through sheer individual brilliance and determination.

In reality, however, most modern technological building blocks – like car batteries, space rockets, the internet, smart phones, and GPS – emerged from publicly funded research. They were not the inspired work of corporate masters of the universe.

And my work suggests a further disconnect: that the profit motive seen across Silicon Valley (and beyond) frequently impedes innovation rather than improving it.

For example, attempts to profit from the COVID vaccine had a detrimental impact on global access to the medicine. Or consider how recent ventures into space tourism seem to prioritise experiences for extremely wealthy people over less lucrative but more scientifically valuable missions.

More broadly, the thirst for profit means intellectual property restrictions tend to restrict collaboration between (and even within) companies. There is also evidence that short-term shareholder demands distort real innovation in favour of financial reward.

Allowing executives focused on profits to set technological agendas can incur public costs too. It’s expensive dealing with the hazardous low-earth orbit debris caused by space tourism, or the complex regulatory negotiations involved in protecting human rights around AI.

So there is a clear tension between the demands of profit and long-term technological progress. And this partly explains why major historical innovations emerged from public sector institutions which are relatively insulated from short-term financial pressures. Market forces alone rarely achieve transformative breakthroughs like space programs or the creation of the internet.

Excessive corporate dominance has other dimming effects. Research scientists seem to dedicate valuable time towards chasing funding influenced by business interests. They are also increasingly incentivised to go into the profitable private sector.

Here those scientists’ and engineers’ talents may be directed at helping advertisers to better keep hold of our attention. Or they may be tasked with finding ways for corporations to make more money from our personal data.

Projects which might address climate change, public health or global inequality are less likely to be the focus.

Likewise, research suggests that university laboratories are moving towards a “science for profit” model through industry partnerships.

Digital destiny

But true scientific innovation needs institutions and people guided by principles that go beyond financial incentives. And fortunately, there are places which support them.

“Open knowledge institutions” and platform cooperatives are focused on innovation for the collective good rather than individual glory. Governments could do much more to support and invest in these kinds of organisations.

If they do, the coming decades could see the development of healthier innovation ecosystems which go beyond corporations and their executive rule. They would create an environment of cooperation rather than competition, for genuine social benefit.

There will still be a place for the quirky “genius” of Musk and Zuckerberg and their fellow Silicon Valley billionaires. But relying on their bloated corporations to design and dominate technological innovation is a mistake.

For real discovery and progress cannot rely on the minds and motives of a few famous men. It involves investing in institutions which are rooted in democracy and sustainability – not just because it is more ethical, but because in the the long term, it will be much more effective.The Conversation

Peter Bloom, Professor of Management, University of Essex

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

]]> A “Delicate Matter”: Clarence Thomas’ Private Complaints About Money Sparked Fears among Rich that He Would Resign https://www.juancole.com/2023/12/delicate-clarence-complaints.html Sat, 23 Dec 2023 05:02:58 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=216104 By Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, Alex Mierjeski and Brett Murphy | –

SCOTUS Justices’ Beneficial Relationships With Billionaire Donors

( ProPublica ) – Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ decadeslong friendship with real estate tycoon Harlan Crow and Samuel Alito’s luxury travel with billionaire Paul Singer have raised questions about influence and ethics at the nation’s highest court.

In early January 2000, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was at a five-star beach resort in Sea Island, Georgia, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

After almost a decade on the court, Thomas had grown frustrated with his financial situation, according to friends. He had recently started raising his young grandnephew, and Thomas’ wife was soliciting advice on how to handle the new expenses. The month before, the justice had borrowed $267,000 from a friend to buy a high-end RV.

At the resort, Thomas gave a speech at an off-the-record conservative conference. He found himself seated next to a Republican member of Congress on the flight home. The two men talked, and the lawmaker left the conversation worried that Thomas might resign.

Congress should give Supreme Court justices a pay raise, Thomas told him. If lawmakers didn’t act, “one or more justices will leave soon” — maybe in the next year.

At the time, Thomas’ salary was $173,600, equivalent to over $300,000 today. But he was one of the least wealthy members of the court, and on multiple occasions in that period, he pushed for ways to make more money. In other private conversations, Thomas repeatedly talked about removing a ban on justices giving paid speeches.

Thomas’ efforts were described in records from the time obtained by ProPublica, including a confidential memo to Chief Justice William Rehnquist from a top judiciary official seeking guidance on what he termed a “delicate matter.”

The documents, as well as interviews, offer insight into how Thomas was talking about his finances in a crucial period in his tenure, just as he was developing his relationships with a set of wealthy benefactors.

Congress never lifted the ban on speaking fees or gave the justices a major raise. But in the years that followed, as ProPublica has reported, Thomas accepted a stream of gifts from friends and acquaintances that appears to be unparalleled in the modern history of the Supreme Court. Some defrayed living expenses large and small — private school tuition, vehicle batteries, tires. Other gifts from a coterie of ultrarich men supplemented his lifestyle, such as free international vacations on the private jet and superyacht of Dallas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow.

Precisely what led so many people to offer Thomas money and other gifts remains an open question. There’s no evidence the justice ever raised the specter of resigning with Crow or his other wealthy benefactors.

George Priest, a Yale Law School professor who has vacationed with Thomas and Crow, told ProPublica he believes Crow’s generosity was not intended to influence Thomas’ views but rather to make his life more comfortable. “He views Thomas as a Supreme Court justice as having a limited salary,” Priest said. “So he provides benefits for him.”

Thomas and Crow didn’t respond to questions for this story. Crow, a major Republican donor, has not had cases at the Supreme Court since Thomas joined it and has previously said Thomas is a dear friend. David Sokol, a conservative financier who has taken Thomas on vacation on a private jet, said in a statement that he and Thomas had never discussed the justice’s finances or when he might retire.

Thomas’ comments in 2000 were to Florida Rep. Cliff Stearns, a vocal conservative who’d been in Congress for 11 years and occasionally socialized with the justice. They set off a flurry of activity across the judiciary and Capitol Hill. “His importance as a conservative was paramount,” Stearns said in a recent interview. “We wanted to make sure he felt comfortable in his job and he was being paid properly.”

There’s an often-criticized dynamic surrounding most important jobs in the federal government: The posts pay far less than comparable jobs in the private sector, but officials can cash in once they leave. Ex-regulators sell advice to the regulated. Generals retire to join military contractors. Former senators get jobs lobbying Congress.

But there is no revolving-door payday waiting on the other side of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. Justices generally stay on the bench past their 80th birthday, if not until death. In 2000, justices were paid more than cabinet secretaries or members of Congress, and far more than the average American. Still, judges’ salaries were not keeping pace with inflation, a source of ire throughout the federal judiciary. Young associates at top law firms made more than Supreme Court justices, while partners at the firms could earn millions a year.

Some of Thomas’ colleagues were extremely wealthy — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was married to a high-paid tax lawyer and Justice Stephen Breyer to the daughter of a wealthy British lord. Thomas did not come from money. When he was appointed to the court in 1991, he was 43 years old and had spent almost all his adult life working for the government. At the time, he still had student loans from law school, Thomas has said.

MSNBC: “Jamelle Bouie: Rich conservatives aim to keep ‘Clarence Thomas satisfied'”

The full details of Thomas’ finances over the years remain unclear. He made at least two big purchases around the early ’90s: a Corvette and a house in the Virginia suburbs on 5 acres of land. When Thomas and his wife, Ginni, bought the home for $522,000 a year after he joined the court, they borrowed all but $8,000, less than 2% of the purchase price, property records show.

Public records suggest a degree of financial strain. Throughout the first decade of his tenure, the couple regularly borrowed more money, including a $100,000 credit line on their house and a consumer loan of up to $50,000. Around January 1998, Thomas’ life changed when he took in his 6-year-old grandnephew, becoming his legal guardian and raising him as a son. The Thomases sent the child to a series of private schools.

In early January 2000, Thomas took the trip to the Georgia beach resort. Thomas was there to deliver a keynote speech at Awakening, a “conservative thought weekend” featuring golf, shooting lessons and aromatherapy along with panel discussions with businessmen and elected officials. (A founder and organizer of the annual event, Ernest Taylor, told ProPublica that Thomas’ trip was paid for by the organization. Thomas reported 11 free trips that year on his annual financial disclosure, mostly to colleges and universities, but did not disclose attending the conservative conference, an apparent violation of federal disclosure law.)

On a commercial flight back from Awakening, Thomas brought up the prospect of justices resigning to Stearns, the Republican lawmaker. Worried, Stearns wrote a letter to Thomas after the flight promising “to look into a bill to raise the salaries of members of The Supreme Court.”

“As we agreed, it is worth a lot to Americans to have the constitution properly interpreted,” Stearns wrote. “We must have the proper incentives here, too.”

Stearns’ office soon sought help from a lobbying firm working on the issue, and he delivered a speech on the House floor about judges’ salaries getting eroded by inflation. Thomas’ warning about resignations was relayed at a meeting of the heads of several judges’ associations. L. Ralph Mecham, then the judiciary’s top administrative official, fired off the memo describing Thomas’ complaints to Rehnquist, his boss.

“I understand that Justice Thomas clearly told him that in his view departures would occur within the next year or so,” Mecham wrote of Thomas’ conversation with Stearns. Mecham worried that “from a tactical point of view,” congressional Democrats might oppose a raise if they sensed “the apparent purpose is to keep Justices [Antonin] Scalia and Thomas on the Court.” (Scalia had nine children and was also one of the less wealthy justices. Scalia, Mecham and Rehnquist have since died.)

It’s not clear if Rehnquist ever responded. Several months later, Rehnquist focused his annual year-end report on what he called “the most pressing issue facing the Judiciary: the need to increase judicial salaries.”

Several people close to Thomas told ProPublica they believed that it was implausible the justice would ever retire early, and that he may have exaggerated his concerns to bolster the case for a raise. But around 2000, chatter that Thomas was dissatisfied about money circulated through conservative legal circles and on Capitol Hill, according to interviews with prominent attorneys, former members of Congress and Thomas’ friends. “It was clear he was unhappy with his financial situation and his salary,” one friend said.

Former Sen. Trent Lott, then the Republican Senate majority leader, recalled in a recent interview that there were serious concerns at the time that Thomas or other justices would leave.

The public received hardly a hint that such conversations about Thomas were unfolding in Washington. Thomas did once allude to government salaries, in a 2001 speech praising the value of public service. “The job is not worth doing for what they pay. It’s not worth doing for the grief,” he said. “But it is worth doing for the principle.”

Around that time, Thomas was also pushing to allow justices to make paid speeches — a source of income that had been banned in the 1980s. On several occasions, Thomas discussed lifting the ban with appellate Judge David Hansen, who chaired the judiciary’s committee responsible for lobbying Congress on issues like pay, according to Mecham’s memo.

At Sen. Mitch McConnell’s request, a provision removing the ban for judges was quietly inserted into a spending bill in mid-2000. Why McConnell made the proposal became a subject of scrutiny in the legal press. After the Legal Times reported the measure had been dubbed the “Keep Scalia on the Court” bill, Scalia responded that the “honorarium ban makes no difference to me” and denied that he would ever leave the court for financial reasons. (The ban was never lifted. McConnell did not respond to a request for comment.)

During his second decade on the court, Thomas’ financial situation appears to have markedly improved. In 2003, he received the first payments of a $1.5 million advance for his memoir, a record-breaking sum for justices at the time. Ginni Thomas, who had been a congressional staffer, was by then working at the Heritage Foundation and was paid a salary in the low six figures.

Thomas also received dozens of expensive gifts throughout the 2000s, sometimes coming from people he’d met only shortly before. Thomas met Earl Dixon, the owner of a Florida pest control company, while getting his RV serviced outside Tampa in 2001, according to the Thomas biography “Supreme Discomfort.” The next year, Dixon gave Thomas $5,000 to put toward his grandnephew’s tuition. Thomas reported the payment in his annual disclosure filing.

Larger gifts went undisclosed. Crow paid for two years of private high school, which tuition rates indicate would’ve cost roughly $100,000. In 2008, another wealthy friend forgave “a substantial amount, or even all” of the principal on the loan Thomas had used to buy the quarter-million dollar RV, according to a recent Senate inquiry prompted by The New York Times’ reporting. Much of the Thomases’ leisure time was also paid for by a small set of billionaire businessmen, who brought the justice and his family on free vacations around the world. (Thomas has said he did not need to disclose the gifts of travel and his lawyer has disputed the Senate findings about the RV.)

By 2019, the justices’ pay hadn’t changed beyond keeping up with inflation. But Thomas’ views had apparently transformed from two decades before. That June, during a public appearance, Thomas was asked about salaries at the court. “Oh goodness, I think it’s plenty,” Thomas responded. “My wife and I are doing fine. We don’t live extravagantly, but we are fine.”

A few weeks later, Thomas boarded Crow’s private jet to head to Indonesia. He and his wife were off on vacation, an island cruise on Crow’s 162-foot yacht.

ProPublica

]]> How Turning Gaza into a Hellhole is Costing Americans Billions as Child Poverty Spikes at Home https://www.juancole.com/2023/11/hellhole-americans-billions.html Mon, 06 Nov 2023 05:02:07 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=215204 ( Tomdispatch.com ) – On September 19, 2001, eight days after 9/11, as the leaders of both parties were already pounding a frenzied drumbeat of war, a diverse group of concerned Americans released a warning about the long-term consequences of a military response. Among them were veteran civil rights activists, faith leaders, and public intellectuals, including Rosa Parks, Harry Belafonte, and Palestinian-American Edward Said. Rare public opponents of the drive to war at the time, they wrote with level-headed clarity:

“We foresee that a military response would not end the terror. Rather, it would spark a cycle of escalating violence, the loss of innocent lives, and new acts of terrorism… Our best chance for preventing such devastating acts of terror is to act decisively and cooperatively as part of a community of nations within the framework of international law… and work for justice at home and abroad.”

Twenty-three years and more than two wars later, this statement reads as a tragic footnote to America’s Global War on Terror that left an entire region of the planet immiserated. It contributed to the direct and indirect deaths of close to 4.5 million people, while costing Americans almost $9 trillion and counting.

The situation is certainly different today. Still, over the last few weeks, those prophetic words, now 22 years old, have been haunting me, as the U.S. war machine kicks into ever higher gear following the horrific Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians and the brutal intensification of the decades-long Israeli siege of civilians in Gaza. Sadly, the words and actions of our nation’s leaders have revealed a staggering, even willful, historical amnesia about the disastrous repercussions of America’s twenty-first-century war-mongering.

Case in point: recently, the United States was the only nation to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for “humanitarian pauses” to deliver life-saving aid to Palestinians in Gaza. Instead, all but a few members of Congress are lining up to support billions more in military aid for Israel and the further mobilization of our armed forces in the Middle East. These moves, experts say, may only accelerate wider regional conflict (something we are already seeing glimmers of vis-à-vis Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen) at a time of increasingly profound global instability. In the last few weeks, the U.S. Navy has “assembled one of the greatest concentrations of power in the Eastern Mediterranean in 40 years,” while the Department of Defense is readying thousands of troops for possible deployment. Meanwhile, college administrators are suggesting student-reservists be prepared in case they get called up in the coming weeks.

Amid this frenzy of American bluster and brawn, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees reports that Gaza is “fast becoming a hell hole,” riddled with death, disease, starvation, thirst, and displacement. Hundreds of scholars of international law and conflict studies have warned that the Israeli military may already have launched a “potential genocide” of Gazans. At the same time, within Israel, citizen-militias, armed by the far-right minister of national security, have escalated violent attacks on Palestinians, only worsened by the acts of armed Israeli settlers on the West Bank protected by that very military.

Finally allowing a tiny amount of aid across the Egypt-Gaza border, after shutting down all food, water, and fuel for Gaza, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant made it clear just how much power the United States wields over this unfolding humanitarian crisis. “The Americans insisted,” he reported, “and we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?”

As Gallant implied, the U.S. could use its influence not only to demand far more aid for Gazans, but to compel quite a different course of action. There should, after all, be no contradiction between condemning Hamas for its heinous slaughter in the south of Israel and denouncing Israel for its decades-old dispossession and oppression of the Palestinian people and its now-indiscriminate killing and destruction in Gaza. There need be no contradiction between decrying terrorism and demanding diplomacy over violence. In truth, the Biden administration could use every non-military tool at its disposal to pressure both Hamas and Israel to pursue an immediate ceasefire, the full release of all hostages, and whatever humanitarian assistance is now needed.

If only, rather than further militarizing the region or questioning the death toll in Gaza, the Biden administration were to focus on making this most recent and ever more ominous crisis a final turning point, not for yet more brutality, but for a long-term political solution focused on achieving real peace, human rights, and equality for everyone in the region. In this moment of grief and rage, when tensions are at a fever pitch and the wheel of history is turning around us, it’s time to demand peace above all else.

The Cruel Manipulation of the Poor

While the U.S. government refuses to use its considerable power as leverage for peace, ordinary Americans seem to know better. Unlike the days after 9/11, recent polls suggest that a majority of Americans oppose sending more weapons to Israel and support delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza, including a majority of people under the age of 44, as well as a majority of Democrats and independents and a significant minority of Republicans. While Representative Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American in Congress, was made a pariah and is in the process of being censured by some of her colleagues after her plea for a ceasefire, she actually represents the popular will of a significant portion of the public.

And that, in turn, represents a generational shift from even a decade or two ago. In the wake of this country’s disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as dozens of other military conflicts globally, many Americans, especially Millennials and Gen Zers, see the U.S. military less as a defender of democracy than as a purveyor of death and chaos. Nearly second-by-second online coverage of the Israeli bombing campaign is offering Americans an unprecedented view into the collective punishment of more than two million Gazans, half of them 18 or younger. (Now, with limited Internet and communications, it’s unclear how word of what’s happening in Gaza will continue to get out.) Add to that the slow-burning pain that has marked life in the United States over the last 15 years — the Great Recession, the Covid-19 economic shock, the climate crisis, and the modern movement for racial justice — and the reasons for such a relatively widespread urge for peace become clearer.

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Today, half of all Americans are either impoverished or one emergency away from economic ruin. As younger generations face what often feels like a dead-end future, there’s a growing sense among those I speak to (as well as older folks) that the government has abandoned them. At a moment when the Republicans (and some Democrats) argue that we can’t afford universal healthcare or genuine living wages, the military budget for 2023 is $858 billion and the Pentagon still maintains 750 military bases globally. Last week, without a touch of irony, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who claimed last year that student debt relief would hurt the economy, insisted that the U.S. can “certainly afford two wars.”  

Millions of us tuned into President Biden’s Oval Office speech on his return from Israel, only the second of his presidency. There, he asked Congress to earmark yet another $100 billion mainly for American military aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan (a boon to the war-profiteering weapons makers whose CEOs will grow even richer thanks to those new contracts). Just a year after Congress killed the Expanded Child Tax Credit, which had cut official child poverty in half, Biden’s speech represented a further pivot away from socially beneficial policymaking and toward further strengthening of the ravenous engine of our war economy. After the speech, the Nation‘s Katrina vanden Heuvel offered this compelling instant commentary: “Biden tonight rolled out a version of twenty-first-century military Keynesianism. Let’s call his policy just that. No more Bidenomics. And it consigns the U.S. to endless militarization of foreign policy.”

A decision to organize our economy yet more around war will also mean the further militarization of domestic policy, with dire consequences for poor and low-income people. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., once called such steps the “cruel manipulation of the poor,” a phrase he coined as part of his denunciation of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. King was then thinking about the American soldiers fighting and dying in Vietnam “on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.”

Today, a similar “cruel manipulation” is playing out. For years, our leaders have invoked the myth of scarcity to justify inaction when it comes to widespread poverty, growing debt, and rising inequality in the United States. Now, some of them are calling for the spending of billions of dollars to functionally fund the bombardment and occupation of impoverished Gaza and a violent Israeli clampdown in the West Bank, not to speak of the possibility of a wider set of Middle Eastern wars. However, polling numbers suggest that a surprising number of Americans have seen through the fog of war and are perhaps coming to believe that our nation’s abundance should be used not as a tool of death but as a lifeline for poor and struggling people at home and abroad.

Not in Our Name

In a time of stifling darkness, one bright light over the last weeks has been the eruption of non-violent, pro-peace protests across the world. In Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, hundreds of thousands of people have hit the streets to demand a ceasefire, including possibly half a million people in London. Here in the U.S., tens of thousands of Americans have followed suit in dozens of cities, from New York to Washington, D.C., Chicago to San Francisco. No less important, those protest marches have been both multi-racial and multi-generational, much like the 2020 uprisings for Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and the countless other Black lives lost to police brutality.

Recently, close friends and colleagues sent me photos from a march in Washington where Jewish protesters demanded a ceasefire and held up signs with heartrending slogans like “Not in My Name,” “Ceasefire Now,” and “My Grief Is Not Your Weapon.” Ultimately, close to 400 people, including numerous rabbis, were arrested as they peacefully sang and prayed in a congressional office building, while David Friedman, ambassador to Israel under President Trump, hatefully tweeted: “Any American Jew attending this rally is not a Jew — yes I said it!” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia ludicrously claimed that they were leading an insurrection.

Two days later, my organization, the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, cosponsored a pro-peace march that drew a large crowd of Palestinians and Muslim-American families. At noon, about 500 protesters, a gorgeous, multicolored sea of humanity participated in the Jumma call to prayer in front of the U.S. Capitol. The following week, folks co-organized a pray-in at New York Representative Hakeem Jeffries’s office, using the phrase “ceasefire is the moral choice.” Faith and movement leaders offered prayers from their various religious traditions and displayed the names of people killed so far.

On October 27th, as Israel expanded its ground invasion of Gaza, I joined thousands of people in Grand Central Station to call for a #CeasefireNow, one of the largest demonstrations in New York since this most recent conflict broke out. Protests continued all week. And on November 4th, there was a mass rally and march in Washington, D.C., to call for an end to war and support the rights of Palestinians, with hundreds of organizations bridging a diversity of views and voices to plead for peace.

Those marches were an inspiring indication of the broad coalition of Americans who desperately want to prevent genocide in Gaza and dream of lasting peace and freedom in Israel/Palestine. At the lead are Palestinians and Jews who refuse to be used as pawns and prop-pieces by military hawks. Alongside them are many Americans all too aware that, though they might not be directly affected by the nightmarish events now unfolding in the Middle East, they are still implicated in the growing violence there thanks to their tax dollars and the actions of our government. Together, we are collectively crying out: “Not in Our Name.”

Such marches undoubtedly represent the largest antiwar mobilization since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and are weaving together diverse communities — young and old, Black, Brown, and White, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian, poor and working-class — in a way that should prove encouraging indeed for a growing peace movement. Right now, there are new alliances and relationships being forged that will undoubtedly endure for years to come.

Yes, this remains a small victory in what’s likely to prove a terrifying global crisis, but it is a victory nonetheless.

Roses Dressed in Black

The last few weeks have resurrected traumatic memories for many Jews and Palestinians globally — of the Holocaust, the Nakba, and the long history of Islamophobia, anti-Arab hate, anti-Jewish violence, and antisemitism. For many of us who are not Palestinian or Jewish, the recent mass death and violence have also triggered our own painful reckonings with the past.

I’m a descendant of Armenian genocide survivors. When I was a child growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I heard hushed tales of death marches, hunger, lack of water, barricaded roads, and harrowing escapes. Those stories remain etched into my consciousness, a mournful inheritance my dispossessed ancestors handed down.

My great-grandfather, Charles Ozun Artinian, fled his home in what is now Turkey’s Seyhan River valley after the 1909 Adana Massacre in which Ottoman militants killed 25,000 Armenian Christians. Part of his family escaped over the Caucasus Mountains into Western Europe. They then traveled halfway across the world to Argentina, because so many other nations, including the United States, had closed their borders to Armenian refugees and would only open them years later.

As he was fleeing Adana, Charles wrote a poem, one of the few surviving long-form poems from the region at the time. It begins:

“In the Seyhan valley there rises a smoke

Roses dressed in black, month of April cried

Cries of sadness and mourning were heard everywhere

Broken hearted and sad, everybody cried…”

My family taught my siblings and me that although the genocide against our people was carried out by the Ottoman Empire, it was made possible by the complicity and indifference of the international community, including the world’s richest and most powerful nations. Right now, the smoke rising over Gaza is suffocating and every additional hour the U.S. enables more bombs to fall and tanks to rumble, more roses will be, as my great-grandfather put it, dressed in black. Not only that, but with the detonation of each new American-made bomb, the conditions for the long-term freedom and safety of both Israelis and Palestinians are blasted ever more into rubble.

Let us honor the memories of our ancestors and finally learn the lesson of their many stolen lives: “Not In Our Name!,” “Peace and Justice for All!” and the pleas from Gaza, including “Ceasefire Now!,” “End the Siege,” “Protect Medical Facilities,” and “Gaza is Home!”

Copyright 2023 Liz Theoharis

Via Tomdispatch.com

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