Showing posts with label John McCain. Show all posts

Saturday, January 8, 2011

How Many Dead Arizonians?

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer meeting with Presi...

Published on Saturday, January 8, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

How Many Dead Arizonians?

by Donna Smith

The budget crisis in Arizona means the Republican Governor Jan Brewer and her Republican legislature have decided some death is preferable to more debt. Human life has a very measureable price in Arizona, and those who look the other way as folks who might be saved die in Arizona can expect the same to come to their states sometime soon.
Many Republicans like to frame themselves as the party that protects human life from the moment of conception, no matter what. Many Democrats like to frame themselves as the party that protects the downtrodden and the working class folks.
So, where are any of these people when the sick in Arizona are preparing to die?
Here's one take on the news stories of recent days:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/News/arizona-transplant-deaths/story?id=12559369
From that report:

On Oct. 1, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System stopped paying for seven types of transplants that the state's GOP governor, Jan Brewer, and GOP-led legislature said they could no longer afford. The state faces a projected $1 billion program deficit by July 2011.
They eliminated heart transplants for non-ischemic cardiomyopathy, lung transplants, pancreatic transplants, some bone marrow transplants, and liver transplants for patients infected with hepatitis C. Arizona also restricted coverage of prosthetics, eliminated podiatric services, preventive dental services, and wellness and physical exams for adult Medicaid enrollees"

So, we've decided in Arizona that the expendables are to be defined as adult Medicaid enrollees. The poor, often the working poor, are our expendables.
I didn't hear anyone cry for them. I didn't hear anyone cry out for them. Two are dead already as they were denied transplants and 96 more are in the queue. And it does not lead the news even among those who advocate for universal healthcare or the public option or the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or repeal or replace or whatever. The dead are expendable to all of us.
We fought immigration discrimination in Arizona, but dead poor people are acceptable? Where are the protests? There are no protests today in Arizona because no one we care about is dead yet.
If your liver stops working tomorrow, God forbid, do you think your own life is worth saving? Your child's? Your neighbor's? How about a little cancer that needs bone marrow treatment?
If we had a progressively financed, single standard of care for all in this nation -- the kind of government protected care that, say, Senator John McCain of Arizona has enjoyed for all but four years of his life, it isn't that every treatment would automatically be covered and appropriate. But those kinds of choices would be determined based on medical necessity and effectiveness rather than being automatically not available to one group of adults -- like these adult Medicaid enrollees in Arizona.
This is a travesty and a horror all at once playing out in Arizona. The only question we need ask ourselves is how many dead poor people are acceptable to us? We've finally gotten to the point of watching a bi-partisan killing field played out in full public view, and I don't know if we care enough to act. How many activists have booked their travel for Arizona to hold rallies and chain themselves to the governor's mansion gates or the hospital entrances where the dying have been given their death sentences? How many of Arizona's leaders will step up? Any national leaders?
This doesn't bode well for our future ability to transform our healthcare system from one that values money over human life. If we cannot even gather our collective voice and courage to this trauma, we are more desperately selfish and greedy than we have accused those on Wall Street of so boldly displaying. We're just playing at healthcare justice.

Donna Smith is a community organizer for National Nurses United (the new national arm of the California Nurses Association) and National Co-Chair for the Progressive Democrats of America Healthcare Not Warfare campaign.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Rich Media, Poor Democracy

Published on Thursday, November 4, 2010 by TruthDig.com

Rich Media, Poor Democracy

by Amy Goodman

As the 2010 elections come to a close, the biggest winner of all remains undeclared: the broadcasters. The biggest loser: democracy. These were the most expensive midterm elections in U.S. history, costing close to $4 billion, $3 billion of which went to advertising. What if ad time were free? We hear no debate about this, because the media corporations are making such a killing by selling campaign ads. Yet the broadcasters are using public airwaves.

I am reminded of the 1999 book by media scholar Robert McChesney, "Rich Media, Poor Democracy." In it, he writes, "Broadcasters have little incentive to cover candidates, because it is in their interest to force them to publicize their campaigns."
The Wesleyan Media Project, at Wesleyan University, tracks political advertising. Following the recent Supreme Court ruling, Citizens United v. FEC, the project notes, "The airwaves are being saturated with more House and Senate advertising, up 20 percent and 79 percent respectively in total airings." Evan Tracey, the founder and president of Campaign Media Analysis Group, predicted in USA Today in July, "There is going to be more money than there is airtime to buy." John Nichols of The Nation commented that in the genteel, earlier days of television political advertising, the broadcasters would never juxtapose an ad for a candidate with an ad opposed to that candidate. But they are running out of broadcast real estate. Welcome to the brave, new world of the multibillion dollar campaigns.
There have been efforts in the past to regulate the airwaves to better serve the public during elections. The most ambitious in recent years was what became known as McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform. During the debate on that landmark legislation, the problem of exorbitant television advertising rates was brought up, by Democrats and Republicans alike. Nevada Sen. John Ensign, a Republican, lamented: "The broadcasters used to dread campaigns because that was the time of year they made the least amount of money because of this lowest unit rate. Now it is one of their favorite times of the year because it is actually one of their highest profit-margin times of the year." Ultimately, to get the bill passed, the public airtime provisions were dropped.
The Citizens United ruling effectively neutralizes McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform. One can only imagine what the cost of the 2012 presidential election will be. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., lost his re-election bid to the largely self-financed multimillionaire Ron Johnson. The Wall Street Journal editorial page celebrated Feingold's expected loss. The Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which also owns the Fox television network and which gave close to $2 million to Republican campaign efforts.

"The elections have become a commodity, a profit center for these radio and TV stations," Ralph Nader, consumer advocate and former presidential candidate, told me on Election Day. He went on: "The public airwaves, as we know, belong to the people, and they're the landlords, and the radio and TV stations are the licensees. They're the tenants, so to speak. They pay no money to the FCC for their annual license. And therefore, it's really quite persuasive, were we to have a public policy to condition modestly the license to this enormously lucrative control of the public airwaves 24 hours a day by these TV and radio stations and say, as part of the reciprocity for controlling this commons, so to speak, you have to allow a certain amount of time, free time, on radio and TV for ballot-qualified candidates."
The place where we should debate this is in the major media, where most Americans get their news. But the television and radio broadcasters have a profound conflict of interest. Their profits take precedence over our democratic process. You very likely won't hear this discussed on the Sunday-morning talk shows.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 800 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

The Party of No

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Published on Tuesday, July 6, 2010 by The Guardian/UK

Republicans: A Party of Unemployment

by Dean Baker

From now until 2 November, the Republican party will be the party of unemployment. The logic is straightforward: the more people who are unemployed on election day, the better the prospects for Republicans in the fall election. They expect, with good cause, that voters will hold the Democrats responsible for the state of the economy. Therefore, anything that the Republicans can do to make the economy worse between now and then will help their election prospects.
While it may be bad taste to accuse a major national political party of deliberately wanting to throw people out of jobs, there is no other plausible explanation for the Republicans' behaviour. They have balked at supporting nearly every bill that had any serious hope of creating or keeping jobs, most recently filibustering on bills that provided aid to state and local governments and extending unemployment benefits. The result of the Republicans' actions, unless they are reversed quickly, is that hundreds of thousands more workers will be thrown out of work by the mid-terms.
The story is straightforward. Nearly every state and local government across the country is looking at large budget shortfalls for their 2011 fiscal years, most of which begin on 1 July 2010. Since they are generally required by state constitutions or local charters to balance their budgets, they will have no choice except to raise taxes and/or make large cutbacks and lay off workers to bring spending and revenue into line.
State and local governments have cut their workforce by an average of 65,000 a month over the last three months. Without substantial aid from the federal government, this pace is likely to accelerate. The Republican agenda in blocking aid to the states may add another 300,000 people to the unemployment rolls by early November.
The blocking of extended unemployment benefits promises similar dividends. As Paul Krugman rightly notes this week, unemployment benefits are not just about providing income support to those who are out of work, they also provide a boost to the economy. Since unemployed workers generally have little other than their benefits to support themselves, this is money that will almost immediately be spent. The benefits paid to workers are income to food stores and other retail outlets.
Unemployment insurance provides the sort of boost to demand that the economy desperately needs. That is why neutral parties such as the congressional budget office or economist Mark Zandi, a top adviser to John McCain's presidential bid, always list unemployment benefits as one of the best forms of stimulus.
Republicans give two reasons for opposing benefits. First, they claim that benefits discourage people from working. Second, they object that the Democrats' proposal will add to the national debt.
On the first point there is a considerable amount of economic research. Most indicates that in periods when the economy is operating near its capacity, more generous benefits may modestly increase the unemployment rate. However, they are less likely to have that effect now. The reason is simple: the economy does not have enough jobs. The latest data from the labour department shows that there are five unemployed workers for every job opening.
In this context, unemployment benefits may give some workers the option to remain unemployed longer to find a job that better fits their skills, but they are unlikely to affect the total number of unemployed. In other words, a $300 weekly unemployment cheque may allow an experienced teacher the luxury of looking for another teaching job, rather than being forced to grab a job at Wal-Mart.
However, if the teacher took the job at Wal-Mart, then this would simply displace a recent high-school graduate who has no other job opportunities. That might be a great turn of events in Republican-econ land, but it does not reduce the overall unemployment rate, nor does it benefit the overall economy in any obvious way.
The other argument the Republicans give is that these bills would add to the national debt. For example, the latest extension of unemployment benefits would have added $22bn to the debt by the end of 2011. This means that the debt would be $9,807,000,000 instead of $9,785,000,000 at the end of fiscal 2011, an increase of the debt-to-GDP ratio from 65.3% to 65.4%.
It is possible that Congressional Republicans, who were willing to vote for hundreds of billions of dollars of war expenditures without paying for them, or trillions of dollars of tax cuts without paying for them, are actually concerned about this sort of increase in the national debt. It is possible that this is true, but not very plausible.
The more likely explanation is that the Republicans want to block anything that can boost the economy and create jobs. Throwing people out of work may not be pretty, but politics was never pretty, and it is getting less so by the day.

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer ( www.conservativenannystate.org) and the more recently published Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.

Friday, July 2, 2010

Internet Neutrality Under Assault

Published on Friday, July 2, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

How the TeleCom Industry Plans to Take Over the Internet in Four Easy Steps

by Timothy Karr

Have you heard about the battle over the Internet?

It's a power grab that involves lawyers, lobbyists, unscrupulous legislators, phony front groups and the most powerful telecommunications companies in the world.
They've aligned themselves against the rest of us -- the millions of Americans who use the Internet every day, in increasingly inventive ways.
They've opened their wallets to Washington. It's an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars and it's being made right now by AT&T, Comcast and Verizon -- the companies that provide broadband access to the vast majority of Americans.
These companies are chasing the ultimate payout: control, not just of the Internet wires that snake into our homes, but over the information that flows across those wires..
While this fight has been brewing for years, it's come to a head at a time when more and more broadband users are taking to YouTube, Twitter, Mashable and other innovations.
Right now, the FCC and Congress are weighing a series of decisions that could determine whether this decade-long explosion of Internet creativity was a short-lived experiment in people-powered media, or the beginning of an era of more decentralized, participatory and democratic communications.
20th-century media colossi prefer a return to the old ways, where a handful of gatekeeper firms operated the turn-on valve to all popular information. It was a profitable model that worked well for one-way communications like newspapers, radio, and television. If only it can be applied in age of flash mobs and FourSquare, too.
These media giants are spending a fortune to convince lawmakers and regulators to dismantle consumer protections on the Internet and give industry absolute power over the most important communications medium of our time.
Here's how they plan to do it, in four easy steps:
ONE: Buy Congress
The New York Times reported yesterday that AT&T, Comcast and Verizon executives and political action committees are among the top campaign contributors to lawmakers responsible for communications policy on the Hill.
"Political contributions from AT&T in the current election cycle reached $2.6 million by May 16, on the way to exceeding the total in each of the last three elections," according to the Times. AT&T has been especially generous to the campaigns of every Republican (most notably, John McCain), and all but three Democrats on the subcommittee that deals with the Internet in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. From 1998 through 2009, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable contributed more than $96 million to candidates for federal office, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics (and compiled here). In 2010 they're set to break all records for annual spending.
TWO: Mobilize an Army of Lobbyists
The phone and cable industry controls Internet access for more than 96 percent of Americans. Now, with the help of an army of lobbyists, they're planning to expand that control even further. In 2009, they spent more than $70 million on nearly 500 "K" Street lobbyists.
These agents for hire swarmed the FCC and Capitol Hill in a push to consolidate industry control over the Internet and kill Net Neutrality, the principle that preserves the free and open Internet, before the public (and public interest advocates like Free Press) gets a seat at the table.
Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation recently revealed that cable and phone companies hired 276 former government officials to lobby for them in the first quarter of 2010. Included in this figure are 18 former members of Congress and 48 former staffers of current members of Congress on committees with jurisdiction over the Internet.
THREE: Spread Astroturf
Astroturf (or fake grassroots) groups surface wherever and whenever public policies threaten the corporate status quo. In Washington, they've spread like kudzu to envelope civic discourse over global warming, health care and financial reform in a tangle of corporate talking points.
The phone and cable lobby has been busily seeding Astroturf to kill Internet consumer protections. Notably they've funded FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity and Arts + Labs to paint Net Neutrality as a "government takeover of the Internet" and to dismiss as "extremists" the nearly 2 million people who have called on Washington to enact lasting Net Neutrality protections.
Their dirty little secret? Most of these fake grassroots groups routinely fail to disclose that their operations are fully funded by corporate special interests.
FOUR: Demonize the Public Interest
Behind every corporate lobbying juggernaut lies a smear campaign targeting public interest advocates.
For these smear-mongers, Net Neutrality is better known as "Internet socialism," "the Fairness Doctrine for the Internet," or simply the cornerstone of the Obama administration's frightening "vision of government ownership and control" over all communications and aspects of our lives. Net Neutrality supporters occupy the radical "fringe" of society, they say.
For Glenn Beck, Net Neutrality is a slowly creeping Maoism designed so that the FCC can "turn the Internet into a public utility, which means they have the power to control and regulate every bit of it."
If the uptick in scorn for an open Internet from the shill and talk radio echo chamber seems a little suspicious, look no further than the companies that still advertise with and support these merchants of disdain. You'll find many familiar names.
Everyone has a stake in the outcome of this fight, whether you're a YouTube "celebrity" or a chili pepper salesman, or someone in between. If you want to control your own Internet experience, you'll need to burst the industry spin, learn the facts about Net Neutrality, and get involved in the fight for open communications.
Now is one of those times that Washington needs to be reminded whom they really work for. And it's not AT&T and Glenn Beck.
As the Campaign Director for Free Press and SavetheInternet.com, Karr oversees campaigns on public broadcasting and noncommercial media, fake news and propaganda, journalism in crisis, and the future of the Internet. Before joining Free Press, Tim served as executive director of MediaChannel.org and vice president of Globalvision New Media and the Globalvision News Network.

Monday, June 28, 2010

The Land Where Theories of Warfare Go to Die.

Official photo of General David Howell Petraeu...

Image via Wikipedia

Published on Monday, June 28, 2010 by TomDispatch.com

The Land Where Theories of Warfare Go to Die Obama, Petraeus, and the Cult of COIN in Afghanistan

by Robert Dreyfuss

Less than a year ago, General David Petraeus saluted smartly and pledged his loyal support for President Obama's decision to start withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan in July 2011. In December, when Obama decided (for the second time in 2009) to add tens of thousands of additional American forces to the war, he also slapped an 18-month deadline on the military to turn the situation around and begin handing security over to the bedraggled Afghan National Army and police. Speaking to the nation from West Point, Obama said that he'd ordered American forces to start withdrawing from Afghanistan at that time.
Here's the exchange, between Obama, Petraeus, and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as reported by Jonathan Alter in his new book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One: OBAMA: "I want you to be honest with me. You can do this in 18 months?"
PETRAEUS: "Sir, I'm confident we can train and hand over to the ANA [Afghan National Army] in that time frame."
OBAMA: "If you can't do the things you say you can in 18 months, then no one is going to suggest we stay, right?"
PETRAEUS: "Yes, sir, in agreement."
MULLEN: "Yes, sir."
That seems unequivocal, doesn't it? Vice President Joe Biden, famously dissed as Joe Bite-Me by one of the now-disgraced aides of General Stanley McChrystal in the Rolling Stone profile that got him fired, seems to think so. Said Biden, again according to Alter: "In July of 2011 you're going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it."
In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the U.S. military, however, things are rarely what they seem. Petraeus, the Centcom commander "demoted" in order to replace McChrystal as U.S. war commander in Afghanistan, seems to be having second thoughts about what will happen next July -- and those second thoughts are being echoed and amplified by a phalanx of hawks, neoconservatives, and spokesmen for the counterinsurgency (COIN) cult, including Henry Kissinger, the Heritage Foundation, and the editorial pages of the Washington Post. Chiming in, too, are the lock-step members of the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, led by Senator John McCain.
In testimony before Congress just last week, Petraeus chose his words carefully, but clearly wasn't buying the notion that the July deadline means much, nor did he put significant stock in the fact that President Obama has ordered a top-to-bottom review of Afghan policy in December. According to the White House, that review will be a make-or-break assessment of whether the Pentagon is making any progress in the nine-year-long conflict against the Taliban.
In his recent Senate testimony -- before he fainted, and afterwards -- Petraeus minimized the significance of the December review and cavalierly declared that he "would not make too much of it." Pressed by McCain, the general flouted Biden's view by claiming that the deadline is a date "when a process begins [and] not the date when the U.S. heads for the exits."
The Right's Marching Orders for the President
Petraeus's defiant declaration that he wasn't putting much stock in the president's intending to hold the military command accountable for its failure in Afghanistan next December earned him an instant rebuke from the White House. Now, that same Petraeus is in charge.
The dispute over the meaning of July 2011 is, and will remain, at the very heart of the divisions within the Obama administration over Afghan policy.
Last December, in that West Point speech, Obama tried to split the difference, giving the generals what they wanted -- a lot more troops -- but fixing a date for the start of a withdrawal. It was hardly a courageous decision. Under intense pressure from Petraeus, McChrystal, and the GOP, Obama assented to the addition of 30,000 U.S. troops, ignoring the fact that McChrystal's unseemly lobbying for the escalation amounted to a Douglas MacArthur-like defiance of the primacy of civilian control of the military. (Indeed, after a speech McChrystal gave in London insouciantly rejecting Biden's scaled-down approach to the war, Obama summoned the runaway general to a tarmac outside Copenhagen and read him the riot act in Air Force One.)
If Obama's Afghan decision was a cave-in to the brass and a potential generals' revolt, the president also added that kicker of a deadline to the mix, not only placating his political base and minimizing Democratic unhappiness in Congress, but creating a trap of sorts for Petraeus and McChrystal. The message was clear enough: deliver the goods, and fast, or we're heading out, whether the job is finished or not.
Since then, Petraeus and McChrystal -- backed by their chief enabler, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a Republican holdover appointed to his position by George W. Bush -- took every chance they could to downplay and scoff at the deadline.
By appointing Petraeus last Wednesday, Obama took the easy way out of the crisis created by McChrystal's shocking comments in Rolling Stone. It might not be inappropriate to quote that prescient British expert on Afghan policy, Peter Townsend, who said of the appointment: "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."
On the other hand, Petraeus is not simply another McChrystal. While McChrystal implemented COIN doctrine, mixing in his obsession with "kinetic operations" by U.S. Special Forces, Petraeus literally wrote the book -- namely, The U.S Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.
If the COIN cult has a guru (whom all obey unquestioningly), it's Petraeus. The aura that surrounds him, especially among the chattering classes of the Washington punditocracy, is palpable, and he has a vast well of support among Republicans and assorted right-wingers on Capitol Hill, including the Holy Trinity: John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Joe Lieberman. Not surprisingly, there have been frequent mentions of Petraeus as a candidate for the GOP nomination for president in 2012, although Obama's deft selection of Petraeus seems, once and for all, to have ruled out that option, since the general will be very busy on the other side of the globe for quite a while.
Even before the announcement that Petraeus had the job, the right's mighty Wurlitzer had begun to blast out its critique of the supposedly pernicious effects of the July deadline. The Heritage Foundation, in an official statement, proclaimed: "The artificial Afghanistan withdrawal deadline has obviously caused some of our military leaders to question our strategy in Afghanistan... We don't need an artificial timeline for withdrawal. We need a strategy for victory."
Writing in the Washington Post on June 24, Henry Kissinger cleared his throat and harrumphed: "The central premise [of Obama's strategy] is that, at some early point, the United States will be able to turn over security responsibilities to an Afghan government and national army whose writ is running across the entire country. This turnover is to begin next summer. Neither the premise nor the deadline is realistic... Artificial deadlines should be abandoned."
And the Post itself, in the latest of a long-running series of post-9/11 hawkish editorials, gave Obama his marching orders: "He... should clarify what his July 2011 deadline means. Is it the moment when ‘you are going to see a whole lot of people moving out,' as Vice President Biden has said, or ‘the point at which a process begins... at a rate to be determined by conditions at the time,' as General Petraeus testified? We hope that the appointment of General Petraeus means the president's acceptance of the general's standard."
Is the COIN Cult Ascendant?
It's too early to say whether Obama's decision to name Petraeus to replace his protégé McChrystal carries any real significance when it comes to the evolution of his Afghan war policy. The McChrystal crisis erupted so quickly that Obama had no time to carefully consider who might replace him and Petraeus undoubtedly seemed like the obvious choice, if the point was to minimize the domestic political risks involved.
Still, it's worrying. Petraeus's COIN policy logically demands a decade-long war, involving labor-intensive (and military-centric) nation-building, waged village by village and valley by valley, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and countless U.S., NATO, and Afghan casualties, including civilians. That idea doesn't in the least square with the idea that significant numbers of troops will start leaving Afghanistan next summer. Indeed, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer with long experience in the Middle East and South Asia, who headed Obama's first Afghan policy review in February 2009, told me (for an article in Rolling Stone last month) that it's not inconceivable the military will ask for even more troops, not agree to fewer, next year.
The Post is right, however, that Obama needs to grapple seriously with the deep divisions in his administration. Having ousted one rebellious general, the president now has little choice but to confront -- or cave in to -- the entire COIN cult, including its guru.
If Obama decides to take them on, he'll have the support of many traditionalists in the U.S. armed forces who reject the cult's preaching. Above all, his key ally is bound to be those pesky facts on the ground.
Afghanistan is the place where theories of warfare go to die, and if the COIN theory isn't dead yet, it's utterly failed so far to prove itself. The vaunted February offensive into the dusty hamlet of Marja in Helmand province has unraveled. The offensive into Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban and a seething tangle of tribal and religious factions, once touted as the potential turning point of the entire war, has been postponed indefinitely. After nine years, the Pentagon has little to show for its efforts, except ever-rising casualties and money spent.
Perhaps Obama is still counting on U.S. soldiers to reverse the Taliban's momentum and win the war, even though administration officials have repeatedly rejected the notion that Afghanistan can be won militarily. David Petraeus or no, the reality is that the war will end with a political settlement involving President Karzai's government, various Afghan warlords and power brokers, the remnants of the old Northern Alliance, the Taliban, and the Taliban's sponsors in Pakistan.
Making all that work and winning the support of Afghanistan's neighbors -- including India, Iran, and Russia -- will be exceedingly hard. If Obama's diplomats managed to pull it off, the Afghanistan that America left behind might be modestly stable. On the other hand, it won't be pretty to look at it. It will be a decentralized mess, an uneasy balance between enlightened Afghans and benighted, Islamic fundamentalist ones, and no doubt many future political disagreements will be settled not in conference rooms but in gun battles. Three things it won't be: It won't be Switzerland. It won't be a base for Al Qaeda. And it won't be host to tens of thousands of U.S. and NATO troops.
The only silver lining in the Petraeus cloud is that the general has close ties to the military in Pakistan who slyly accept U.S. aid while funneling support to the insurgency in Afghanistan. If Obama decides to pursue a political and diplomatic solution between now and next July, Petraeus's Pakistan connection would be useful indeed. Time, however, is running out.

Robert Dreyfuss is an independent journalist in the Washington, D.C., area. He is a contributing editor at the Nation magazine, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone and Mother Jones. His blog, The Dreyfuss Report, appears at the Nation's website. His book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, was published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books in 2005. Listen to Dreyfuss in the latest TomCast audio interview discussing Obama's war with the military by clicking here, or to download to your iPod, here.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Pentagon Costs Strangle Budget

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Tomgram: William Astore, You Have No Say About Your Military
Posted by William Astore at 10:50am, March 18, 2010.

When was the last time you saw the headline, “Cost of [Pentagon-weapons-system-of-your-choice] halved”? Probably never. Still, the thought came to mind when this recent Associated Press headline caught my eye: “Pentagon: F-35 fighter jet cost doubles.”

Here’s the story behind it: Since 2001, when an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was expected to cost an already hefty $50 million, the plane’s cost has soared into the stratosphere (despite the fact that the aircraft itself has barely left the ground). The estimated cost today is $113 million per plane. Yes, that’s per plane. This supposed future workhorse of the U.S. military is now priced like the planet’s most precious gem. It’s also 2 ½ years behind schedule. Keep in mind that the Marines, the Air Force, and the Navy are planning to buy a combined 2,450 of them for what’s now an eye-popping $323 billion. And if you think the costs are likely to stay in the $113 million range, given the history of Pentagon cost overruns, then I have a nice little national security bridge to Brooklyn I think the U.S. public might love.

In other words, if all goes well from here (an unlikely possibility), a single future weapons system is now estimated to cost the American taxpayer almost one-third of what the Obama administration’s health-care plan is expected to cost over a decade. You could even think of the Pentagon’s weapons procurement process as the health-care system of the national security state. Its costs just never stop rising. In fact, the Government Accountability Office pegs major weapons systems cost overruns since 2001 at $295 billion, another near third of the cost of the health-care bill supposedly coming to a vote this week.

And here’s what’s remarkable: You barely hear about such overruns. They’re almost never front-page headline news, even though the money’s being taken from not-so-deep taxpayer pockets. And when truly terrible news, as with the F-35, comes in, all that happens in Washington is that a few politicians mutter a little. John McCain, for example, offered this less than stirring quote on the F-35: “The taxpayers are a little tired of this. I can’t say that I can blame them”; and an irritated Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said: “We cannot sacrifice other important acquisitions in the DOD [Department of Defense] investment portfolio to pay for this capability.” (Bet you didn’t even know that future weapons were part of a Pentagon “investment portfolio.”) In the case of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, he’s planning to hold back $614 million in “performance bonuses” from the plane’s lead contractor Lockheed Martin. (And you thought only bankers and financial wheeler-dealers got performance bonuses!) But it’s striking that there are no tea party movements out in the streets of America demanding our money back or claiming that we’re going to be broken by this.

Here’s an American reality: the Pentagon is our true welfare state, the weapons makers our real “welfare queens,” and we never stop shoveling money their way. Somebody should raise a few tough questions about the Pentagonization of our country and its finances. Fortunately, TomDispatch has retired Lt. Col. William Astore, historian and regular contributor to this site, to take on the task. Tom

The Pentagon Church Militant and Us
The Top Five Questions We Should Ask the Pentagon
By William J. Astore

When it comes to our nation’s military affairs, ignorance is not bliss. What’s remarkable then, given the permanent state of war in which we find ourselves, is how many Americans seem content not to know.

There are many reasons for this state of affairs. Our civilian leaders encourage us to be deferential toward our latest commander/savior, whether Tommy Franks in 2003, David Petraeus in 2007, or Stanley McChrystal in 2010. Our media employs retired officers, most of them multi-starred generals, in a search for expertise that ends in an unconditional surrender to military agendas. A cloud of secrecy and “black budgets” combine to obscure military matters, ranging from global strategy to war goals to weapons procurement. The taxpayer, forced to pony up about one trillion dollars yearly to fund our military, national security infrastructure, and wars, is sent a simple message: stay clear and leave it to the experts in uniform.

The powerlessness of ordinary Americans in military matters is no accident. Recall the one-word reply -- “So?” -- Dick Cheney offered in March 2008, when asked to comment on popular opposition to the war in Iraq. The former vice president was certainly far blunter than Washington usually is, and for that we may owe him a measure of thanks. By highlighting the arrogant dismissiveness of Washington’s warrior-elite when it comes to American public opinion, he revealed more than he intended.

Time for Vatican II at the Pentagon

If military power is the church at which we worship and the Pentagon is our American Vatican, then it is desperately in need of the equivalent of Vatican II which, in the early 1960s, opened the Catholic Church to greater participation by the laity, a vitally important change in ethos. Instead of continuing to pray at the altar of their particular services, we need our Pentagon “priests” to turn to the laity -- us -- and seek our input and sanction. Instead of preaching in unintelligible Pentagonese, with its indecipherable acronyms, secret doctrines, and spidery codenames, it’s long past time for them to talk to us in a language that reasonably informed adults can understand.

Think about this: last year, our country held innumerable public hearings on health-care reform. Congress continues to fight about it. It’s constant news. There’s a debate alive in the land. All this for a program that, in ten years, will cost the American people as much as defense and homeland security cost in a single year.

Yet runaway defense budgets get passed each year without a single “town hall” meeting, next to no media coverage, and virtually no debate in Congress. Indeed, you’d think each Pentagon budget was an ex cathedra pronouncement, given the way Congress genuflects before them and Americans accept them without so much as a peep of protest.

Those “Crazy” Kiwis

Imagine, for a moment, if Pentagon officials, supposedly toiling in our name, actually condescended to ask us for our thoughts. What do we think about global military strategy, garrisoning the planet, the ways in which our forces are structured, and how, where, and for what they should be deployed abroad?

Sound crazy? Here in the U.S.A. it most distinctly does, but not to the citizens of New Zealand. A Kiwi friend of mine recently sent me “Defence Review 2009,” a publication of New Zealand’s Ministry of Defence (MoD). And catch this: it includes a survey soliciting the advice of ordinary New Zealanders with respect to military affairs. It actually asks for the counsel of civilians on a “top ten” list of questions whose topics are remarkably comprehensive, including what the priorities of the country’s Defence Force should be, both now and in the future. Citizens can even present their views on military matters at a public hearing attended by MoD representatives, all in the name of public consultation. And the Defence Minister responds to the people in clear English sans the cobwebs of jargon that typically entangle our military pronouncements.

In case you haven’t noticed, here in the U.S.A., requests from the Pentagon for citizen feedback aren’t flooding our email boxes. So I thought -- since no one in that five-sided fortress on the Potomac has asked a thing of me -- the least I could do was ask a few questions on my own. Here, then, is my own top-five list of questions that we, the American people, should ask the Pentagon, even if none of its officials want to hear from us. Maybe they’re a tad more pointed than those in the Kiwi survey, but that shouldn’t be surprising. After all, they’ve been a long time in coming.

1. Our military is supposed to be a means to an end: national security. Due to its immense size and colossal budget, has our military not become an end as well as means?

2. In World War II, Americans could explain “Why We Fight” in part because the government provided a clear and compelling rationale for war. Why are the goals of today’s wars so opaque to most Americans?

3. If our military provides us with our way of “nation building” abroad, won’t countries and peoples be more likely to copy our military ways and weaponry than our democratic teachings?

4. America is facing painful budgetary belt tightening. Why is the military immune?

5. Why does “support our troops” seemingly end when they leave the service, leading us to tolerate such inequities as an unemployment rate of 21% for young veterans?

Keep in mind that there are 10, 20, 30 more questions where those five came from -- and our military badly needs to hear and respond to them all.

Every recruit is taught to stretch, to go the extra mile, to push until you can go no further. Our military needs some stretching and push-back: this time, from us. Unfortunately, most of us don’t think our opinions matter when it comes to our military -- unless, that is, they consist solely of slavish adoration. The fact is most of us are detached from military affairs precisely because we know in our hearts that the Pentagon serves its own needs, that it may be interested in listening in on us, but certainly not in listening to us.

Challenge the Pentagon Church Militant

Kiwis have the reputation of being practical types with an admirable dash of humility, and I like to think that their Ministry of Defence solicits the views of its citizenry not just because it’s required by statute, but because their officials don’t believe they have a monopoly on good ideas.

Perhaps the MoD recognizes as well the difficulty military professionals have in thinking outside the box. Despite its gargantuan size and its endless advisory committees and boards, our Department of Defense is, in essence, a well-insulated church of likeminded believers, administered by tightly-wound power-brokers. It sees the world only as an arena of, and for, conflict. Wherever it looks, even within its own ranks, it sees rivals and enemies. It cannot help dividing the world into believers and heretics, friends and foes.

And it’s true that the world is a dangerous place. The problem is: the Pentagon is part of that danger. Our military has grown so strong and so dominates our government, including its foreign policy and even aspects of our culture, that there’s no effective counterweight to its closeted, conflict-centered style of thinking.

In fact, the Pentagon’s heft gives new meaning to the term “full spectrum dominance” and helps explain the lack of change in war policy since the 2008 elections. A vote that constituted an unmistakable call to end our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and so lessen the military’s influence -- has led only to fresh war “surges” and mushrooming Pentagon budgets. And yet, as the Pentagon charges forward, debate is nearly nonexistent and Congress can muster just 65 votes for a resolution to curtail the endless conflict in Afghanistan.

It’s shameful that only a so-called far left congressman like Dennis Kucinich has enough sense (and guts) to insist on Congressional debate about our forever-war in Afghanistan. Equally shameful: that Congress allotted only three hours to that debate on matters of life, death, and even financial well-being. Do we really need reminding that debate makes democracy stronger? Evidently so. Take it from me as a retired Air Force officer: our troops won’t be demoralized by more debate and greater citizen participation.

Let’s face it, all of this represents a long-term sea change in American consciousness. Sadly, the old idea of the citizen army is dead, and because of this, most of us lack any direct connection to the military (and seemingly could care less). In the name of safety, security, and solidarity, we’ve buttoned our lips. We worship, but don’t partake.

Centuries from now, historians will look back on American history and wonder how so many gave away so much to so few. It should be our right to have a say in what defines the “defense” of our country. That right has been surrendered to the few. Our future may depend on genuine input from the many.

How about it? Are you ready to challenge the Pentagon church militant? Or are you content to mouth the usual catechism, while continuing to dump billions each week into the collection basket?

Citizens of courage will surely choose the path of challenge.

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and TomDispatch regular. He currently teaches history at the Pennsylvania College of Technology and may be reached at wastore@pct.edu.

Copyright 2010 William J. Astore

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Aging Nuke Plants Never Die

Seal of the United States :en:Nuclear Regulato...

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Published on Sunday, November 22, 2009 by The Nation

Zombie Nuke Plants

by Christian Parenti

Oyster Creek Generating Station, in suburban Lacey Township, New Jersey, opened the same month Richard Nixon took office vowing to bring "an honorable peace" to Vietnam. This nuke plant, the oldest in the country, was slated to close in 2009 when its original forty-year license was ending. It had seen four decades of service, using radioactively produced heat to boil water into high-pressure steam that ran continuously through hundreds of miles of increasingly brittle and stressed piping.
If constructed today, Oyster Creek would not be licensed, because it does not meet current safety standards. Yet on April 8 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)--the government agency overseeing the industry--relicensed Oyster Creek, extending its life span twenty years beyond what was originally intended.Seven days later workers at the plant found an ongoing radioactive leak of tritium-polluted water. Tritium is a form of hydrogen. In August workers found another tritium leak coming from a pipe buried in a concrete wall. Radiation makes metal brittle, so old pipes must be routinely switched out for new ones. The second leak was spilling about 7,200 gallons a day and contained 500 times the acceptable level of radiation for drinking water.
That leaking pipe had erroneously--or perhaps fraudulently--been listed in paperwork as replaced. How this error occurred remains unclear. What seems likely is that the plant's previous owner, GPU Nuclear, was deliberately skimping on maintenance as it approached the end of the plant's license. Then Oyster Creek was sold to Exelon and won relicensing. How many other mislabeled, brittle, old components remain in the plant's guts is impossible to determine without a massive audit and investigation. Unfortunately, stories like this are all too common: crumbling, leaky, accident-prone old nuclear plants, shrouded in secrecy and subject to lax maintenance, are getting relicensed all over the country.
In the face of climate change, many people who are desperate for alternatives to fossil fuels are considering the potential of nuclear power. The government has put up $18.5 billion in subsidies to build atomic plants. As a candidate for president, John McCain called for forty-five new nuke plants.
Environmentalists have rightly pointed out the dangers this would entail. But new nukes are not the issue. As laid out in these pages last year [see Parenti, "What Nuclear Renaissance?" May 12, 2008], new atomic plants are prohibitively expensive. If enough public subsidies are thrown at the industry, one or two gold-plated, state-of-the-art, extremely expensive nuclear power stations may eventually be built, at most.
The real issue is what happens to old nukes. The atomic power industry has a plan: it wants to make as much money as possible from the existing fleet of 104 old, often decrepit, reactors by getting the government to extend their licenses. The oldest plants, most of which opened in the early 1970s and were designed to operate for only forty years, should be dead by now. Yet, zombielike, they march on, thanks to the indulgence of the NRC.
More than half of America's nuclear plants have received new twenty-year operating licenses. In fact, the NRC has not rejected a single license-renewal application. Many of these plants have also received "power up-rates" that allow them to run at up to 120 percent of their originally intended capacity. That means their systems are subjected to unprecedented amounts of heat, pressure, corrosion, stress and embrittling radiation.
These undead nukes are highly dangerous. But constant, careful (and expensive) inspection and maintenance would mitigate the risks. Unfortunately, the NRC does not require anything like that. And the industry often operates in a cavalier profit-before-safety style.
At the heart of the matter is the culture of the NRC. During his campaign Obama called the NRC "a moribund agency...captive of the industry that it regulates." Unfortunately, since then Obama's position has softened considerably.
The NRC is run by a five-member commission. When Obama came to office he inherited one open seat; another opened soon after. Filling those seats with safety-conscious experts not in thrall to the industry would have done much to change the culture of the NRC.
The president's first move was a good one: he made commissioner Gregory Jaczko chair of the commission. Jaczko has openly questioned the safety culture of both the NRC and the industry and is respected among environmentalists as a serious and safety-oriented regulator.
But in October Obama nominated two people for the open seats. In classic fashion, he cut it down the middle. The relatively decent appointment, in the view of environmentalists, is George Apostolakis, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT. He sits on a safety oversight board within the NRC. His academic specialty is probabilistic risk assessment of complex technological systems, risk management and decision analysis.
"He is safety-minded," says Ed Lyman, senior staff scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "But I worry that his approach might be a little too theoretical, too academic. He might not be ready to really regulate the industry."
The other nominee, William Magwood, is described by environmentalists as a disaster. Magwood worked at the Department of Energy as the director of its nuclear energy program. In that capacity, he acted as a booster for the industry. He's made numerous public speeches promoting atomic energy. And most recently he worked as a consultant for the nuclear industry.
Because the NRC is an independent regulatory agency, the president's nominees must be confirmed by the Senate. A key player there--notorious climate-science denier Senator James Inhofe, ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee--greeted the appointments with a backhanded compliment to the president: "At the very least, the selection of these individuals indicates President Obama understands the importance of the NRC in rebuilding our nation's nuclear capabilities." Given the source, this was damning praise indeed.
Lax safety culture at the NRC is at least in part a result of the revolving door between the atomic power business and the commission, including both middle- and upper-level staff. The most prominent example of this involved commissioner Jeffrey Merrifield, who championed accelerated licensing and other major policy initiatives that directly benefited the Shaw Group, the self-described "largest provider of commercial nuclear power plant maintenance and modifications services in the United States." Twelve days after Merrifield left the NRC, in 2007, he became a top executive at--yes--the Shaw Group. Then, in late October of this year, after pressure from public interest groups, the NRC's Office of the Inspector General found that Merrifield had violated government ethics rules by courting industry while still at the NRC.
This corrupt symbiosis between the industry and NRC is even found at the level of language. Critics say the staff habitually defers to the industry, rarely double-checking corporate assertions about safety. During relicensing, the NRC has used industry language verbatim in its reports. A recent random sampling of NRC relicensing reports conducted by its Office of the Inspector General found that almost half the language in the documents had been lifted verbatim or nearly so from industry applications. In other words, not only is the NRC failing to conduct its own research; it can't even rewrite the nuke industry's boilerplate self-justifications when issuing new licenses.
"Politically, the nuclear industry is very effective," says Richard Webster, legal director of the Eastern Environmental Law Center, which represents five citizens' groups fighting Oyster Creek. "If only they ran nuclear plants as well as they lobby."
This cozy relationship is helped by the fact that the nuclear power industry's drive for profit coincides with the NRC's bureaucratic will to survive. If all the old plants were mothballed, the raison d'être of the NRC (and maybe much of the bureaucracy itself) would disappear.
Environmentalists describe the relicensing and up-rate process as highly opaque, rigged in the industry's favor, designed to exclude public participation and marginalize opposition. They say safety is closely linked to transparency--which is in short supply.
Over the past two decades the NRC has also promulgated rules that effectively exclude from consideration many of the grounds on which the public could intervene to oppose relicensing. For example, the public cannot raise the issue of terrorism. Nor can it question maintenance plans, or waste storage plans, or even evacuation procedures.
The NRC's Office of the Inspector General found that its own agency had "established an unreasonably high burden of requiring absolute proof of a safety problem, versus lack of reasonable assurance of maintaining public health and safety, before it will act to shut down a power plant."
The parameters for relicensing are sometimes shockingly permissive. For example, Oyster Creek, only fifty miles from Philadelphia, lacks a reactor containment shell strong enough to withstand a jet crash. And the geography around the plant isn't possible to evacuate: originally built in a rural area, the plant is now surrounded by sprawl. But the NRC takes none of that into account.
Even more amazing, Oyster Creek's relicensing process did not require testing metals in the plant's core for embrittlement. The containment shell, such as it is, was found to have been corroded down to half its intended thickness. Citizens' groups had to file a lawsuit just to get the NRC to hold a public hearing that would yield a ruling. And that was the first one the NRC had held during more than forty-five relicensing processes.
Indian Point, forty miles north of Times Square, is also applying for a new license. It too leaks radioactive water like a sieve: tens of thousands of gallons of radioactive, tritium- and strontium 90-laced water from one of its spent fuel pools have polluted groundwater and the Hudson River. The first of several leaks was discovered in 2005, but the plant's owner, Entergy, failed to report the problem for almost a month.
Vermont Yankee, also owned by Entergy, has one of the worst operating records in the country, runs at 120 percent capacity because of a 2006 power up-rate, and is well on its way to being relicensed. As detailed in these pages last year, Vermont Yankee has recently suffered a number of almost comical problems: a fire set off emergency mobilizations in three states; a cooling tower collapsed; a crane dropped a cask of atomic waste; parts of a fuel rod even went missing. To save money Entergy has been caught skipping routine maintenance and not hiring needed staff. This year the plant has been battling what seem to be unending leaks: in February the water cleanup system leaked, in May a condenser tube leak was identified but not repaired, in June there was a leak in a service water pipe. Then a recirculation pump unexpectedly reduced power and locked up, preventing the operators from changing its speed. And in August Entergy announced that it was not doing all of the required monthly radiological monitoring of its spent fuel.
FirstEnergy's Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Ohio also wants a new twenty-year license. In 2002 that plant came very close to calamity. Largely by chance, staff discovered a six-inch-deep hole in the reactor vessel head; only three-eighths of an inch of metal remained. This barrier protects against a reactor breach and a possible chain of events that could have led to a reactor meltdown. The hole could have been found and fixed earlier, but the plant's owner, FirstEnergy, requested that the NRC allow it to delay a mandated inspection. In October 2008 Davis-Besse workers also discovered a tritium leak.
This fleet of poorly regulated zombie plants is the real story of nuclear power. Building hundreds of new nukes to save us from climate change is a pipe dream--the time and expense necessary for that would be impossible to overcome in the decade or two remaining. And so the debate about the future of atomic power in the age of climate change functions mostly as a smoke screen behind which these old, leaky, crumbling plants are being pushed to the limit of their endurance. Half the fleet has already been relicensed and many up-rated to run at more than 100 percent of their designed capacity. To avoid dangerous accidents over the next two decades, the industry must be subject to real oversight. For that to happen, the NRC must be reformed.
There will likely be one more opening on the commission. If the risk of a real nuclear disaster is to be diminished, Obama must nominate a robust safety- and transparency-minded commissioner who will stand up to the powerful companies that own the zombie nuke fleet.

Christian Parenti, a Nation contributing editor and visiting scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (New Press), and is at work on a book about climate change and war.

Local Bias

Saturday, January 8, 2011