³Industry has a legally protected cognizable interest to freely emit CO2.² Fossil Fuel Industry Intervenors in the Kids vs Global Warming lawsuit against the US Government to protect the atmosphere as a public trust, April
2, 2012
This is what one of the attorneys for the National Association for Manufacturers said at the hearing this week when they were allowed to join the US Government in defending their so-called ³right² to continue emitting as much CO2 as they please. Alec Loorz and the other youth plaintiffs, are challenging that right with their own right, one they share with their entire generation, to simply survive on this planet.
The judge and all attorneys agreed on one thing: this is a case of national significance. We are facing a historic moment. This lawsuit is a critical and unprecedented opportunity to break the impasse in Congress and force federal emission reduction plans.
Diplomacy is one of those jobs where you actually have to be present on scene to do it. One key point that Ms. Schake does not mention is that a principal reason military is playing a dominant role right now is that Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) are not volunteering for the hardship — such as Baghdad and Kabul — posts in adequate numbers and neither Secretary of State nor Director General of Foreign Service has invoked statutory authority for “directed assignments,” i.e., to involuntarily assign FSOs where they are needed. So, if nobody wants to go to Shitholia, nobody goes.)
Politico.com, April 5, 2012
How State Can Take Back Diplomacy
By Kori Schake
The Obama administration brandished “smart power” as crucial to U.S. foreign policy. “With smart power,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared in her confirmation hearings, “diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy.” Yet the U.S. military controls ever wider swaths of our civilian activity abroad.
Despite a U.S. Embassy in Kabul staffed with more than 1,000 people, the U.S. military is running task forces on corruption and building the justice system in Afghanistan. When the Obama administration needed a political envoy for delicate diplomatic work in Iraq, it sent the Army chief of staff.
The militarization of U.S. diplomacy is bad policy. And it doesn’t have to be this way. Our diplomats are talented, resourceful people with the vocation of representing our country. But unlike the military, the State Department makes poor use of its human capital.
So, proposed TRICARE fee increases are intended to cover costs of SECDEF's weekend trips home? Would not be surprised.
CNN
April 6, 2012
A $32,000 Trip Every Weekend
The Situation Room (CNN), 5:00 P.M.
JOE JOHNS: Imagine working in Washington Monday through Friday then flying home almost every weekend to California. That’s a weekly ritual for Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, and get this, he does it for the most part on the taxpayers’ dime.
CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr is back with that story.
Double duty for you today, Barbara.
BARBARA STARR: Indeed, Joe. Well, you know, look, here at the Pentagon it’s all about cutting the budget, trying to save billions of dollars, so why are taxpayers paying nearly $1 million for Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to fly home on the weekends?
Given Nato's political problems with Pakistan, the Brits have elected to leave Afghanistan along the so-called Northern route to the Baltic Sea (see my 27 November posting, Afghan Dunkirk for discussion of the selection). Now, as Bryan Brady and Jonathan Owen report in the Independent, the entirely predictable baksheesh game has begun.
Think of what the far larger, more logistics-intensive US forces might have pay to who ever guards our egress route. Historians will recall that egress problem is not a one new for foreign invaders of Afghanistan. Alexander the Great had to bribe a Pashtun tribe to clear guerrillas fighters( from another tribe) who were blocking his exit thru the Khyber Pass when he left Afghanistan to go to India. My guess — entirely speculative — is that they split the difference and had a good laugh after Alex departed — but we will never know.
Britain is bargaining with one of the world's most brutal dictators because we need to use his country as a transit route to bring thousands of tons of military equipment home from Afghanistan.
Senior officials admitted yesterday that Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov had the UK “over a barrel”, after his country emerged as the favoured route home when British forces are withdrawn from Afghanistan by 2014.
The PR disasters over the last three months — including pictures of American troops urinating on Afghan corpses, the burning of Qurans, and the massacre of Afghan civilians, including women and children, by at least one deranged American soldier — have morphed into a grand strategic debacle. From the perspective of the Afghan insurgency, these are gifts that will keep on giving.
Why do I use the modifier grand strategic?
Because these incidents have (1) increased the moral strength of the Afghan insurgents by handing them a coup to rally supporters and attract the uncommitted to their cause. They also widen the existing rift between the United States military and the Karzai government, which in any case is viewed by many Afghans as a corrupt, illegitimate, quisling lapdog of the US. And (2), they are visibly weakening the rapidly crumbling solidarity at home. Recent polls in America, for example, suggest the already overwhelming majority of Americans who now think it is time to exit the Afghan enterprise is growing again. Moreover, an increasing number of politicians and editorial boards are now beginning to reflect the views of the majority of American people. These incidents have magnified the already widespread perceptions among Afghans of a grotesque mismatch between the ideals we profess uphold and what we do.
The politics of fear in insecurity are now the staple of American politics. They were used habitually during the Cold War to create powerful vested interests in a permanent war economy. These interests are clearly reflected in the pattern of political practices of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) that maintains and increases the flux of money flowing through the MICC. It is this flux that gives the MICC its from and vitality.
By 1990, the MICC's political practices had been honed to the point that they became self-sustaining and the cold-war-level defense budget proved impossible to turn off when the Cold War ended and the grossly inflated Soviet threat evaporated in 1991. In the Pentagon, we sarcastically referred to the unstoppable budget steamroller as the Pentagon's self-licking ice cream cone.[1]
The self-licking ice cream cone was in place, morphed, and survived. An after some some fits and starts in alternative threat inflation options during the 90s (e.g., the wars of the Yugoslav Succession, theories of being a indispensable power and humanitarian intervention), 9-11 provided the MICC with a political cover to morph its marketing appeal into fighting what it called the long war on terror. But 9-11 was also exploited cynically as a justification to create another political cash cow, which can be though of as domestic spinoff to the MICC, since many of the same players are involved — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), thus expanding the MICC's network of vested interests and bringing them more directly into the domestic arena. The attached op-ed in the Guardian by Naomi Wolf gives a hint of where this evolution is headed — and if you think she is being alarmist, note particularly her brief description of DHS's emerging self-licking ice cream cone (highlighted in yellow near the end of her essay).
The long war in terror may be winding down, and the alleged need for a DHS is evaporating, but like the MICC, the ‘DHS self licking ice cream cone' is likely to exhibit the kind of adaptability needed live on in a pathological mutation of its supposed intent. [2]
For those readers with a synthetic bent of mind, think about the implications of Wolf's op-ed in the context of the questions I will pose at the end of the next blaster.
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[1] New readers will find detailed albeit overlapping explanations of how the MICC's self-licking ice cream cone operates here, here, here, and here.
[2] There is another, more subtle dimension to the these political-economic evolutions: Over time, the economically pathological but politically expedient practices of the MICC undermined the commercial competitiveness of the manufacturing companies involved in weapons making. The employees and owners of these companies became ever more dependent on government money flows for their survival and growth. But, as Seymour Melman correctly predicted in his 1983 book Profits Without Production, the MICC's practices also contributed materially, together with deleterious effects of financialization, deregulation, speculation, and globalization, to deindustrialize and hollow out the high-income US economy. This political-economic evolution led directly to the Wall Street Casino that crashed in 2007-8. It is now clear that the pathological transformation of the great American economic engine took off in the late 70s, and it produced the stagnation of middle class wages and the grotesque inflation of the income disparity between and poor and rich, especially the super rich that lies at or very near root of our economic problems. So, the politics of fear are now melded seamlessly with the politics of economic insecurity (reflected in dependency, anger, and scapegoating) to shape the political discourse of the lower 80% (who are struggling to make ends meet and provide a future for their children while paying off a huge debt burden) as well as the super rich who fear the masses will rise up against them to take their wealth … it is this melding that is feeding the political and legal selection pressures underpinning the kind of evolution described by Ms. Wolf.
n a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the “trespass bill”, which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.
Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to “turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks.” He said he felt humiliated: “It made me feel like less of a man.”
In surreal reasoning, justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices' decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest – that is, who are not yet convicted – haven't been introduced into a prison population.
