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Arming Ukraine? Sorry, but Europe Simply Isn’t On Board

by EmilWUNhxbb Posted on February 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Republican hawks have insisted from the start that President Obama isn’t being tough enough in his approach to the Ukraine crisis. And perhaps he isn’t. It’s a point that’s arguable by reasonable people.

But what’s not arguable is that regardless of what Obama would do if he had a truly free hand, he pretty clearly doesn’t have a free hand. Ukraine is, first and foremost, a European problem, and the leadership of Europe just isn’t on board with a more aggressive strategy against Russia:

Through nine months of struggle to halt Russia’s military thrust into Ukraine, Western unity has been a foremost priority for American and European leaders. Now, with the crisis entering a dangerous new phase, that solid front is in danger of collapsing.

….A growing number of U.S. officials, and some in Europe, particularly in countries bordering Russia, believe that the only way to dissuade Russian President Vladimir Putin from continuing what they see as an invasion of Ukraine is to raise the military cost to Moscow. That means giving the Ukrainians better weapons, they say.

….But the Germans, French and many other European leaders are equally convinced that arming the Kiev government will not halt Putin, but will increase carnage in a war that already has killed about 5,300 people and risk an all-out East-West confrontation.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, speaking at a security conference in Munich, Germany, made clear that not only would Germany not contribute arms, but it also opposed allies doing so. “Military means will lead to more victims,” she said, arguing that the West should apply a patient containment approach toward Russia.

I’m skeptical about providing arms to the Ukrainians, but I remain open to arguments that it’s the only way to stop Vladimir Putin’s aggression. However, there’s just no way that this will work without European cooperation. End of story. The US can’t pretend that acting on its own has even the slightest chance of success.

So the hawks need to stop obsessing over Obama’s alleged weakness, and instead look overseas. The truth is that Obama has been one of the most aggressive of the Western leaders in the fight against Putin, while it’s Merkel and her colleagues who have insisted on a less confrontational approach. If John McCain and his buddies want to arm the Ukrainians, they need to figure out a way to persuade Merkel that it’s the right thing to do. That might be less congenial for their tea party buddies, whose interest in Ukraine is pretty much zero aside from its role as a way of painting Obama as a weak-kneed appeaser, but it’s the only way they might get what they say they want.

So that’s their choice. Continue bashing Obama, which feels good but will get them nowhere. Or start pressing our European allies, which is boring and difficult and pays no political dividends—but which might actually get them closer to what they claim is their goal. Which is it going to be, boys?

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Arming Ukraine? Sorry, but Europe Simply Isn’t On Board

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Greek Charm Offensive Is Charming No One So Far

by DortheaBlackmor Posted on February 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis is apparently on a “charm offensive” to persuade his European counterparts—i.e., the Germans—to allow Greece to end its brutal austerity program and spend more money. The Germans, so far, are not charmed:

After a meeting in Berlin on Thursday with his German counterpart, Wolfgang Schaeuble, the two sides could not even agree on whether they had “agreed to disagree.” Schaeuble said they did. Varoufakis said they didn’t get that far. “We did not reach an agreement; it was never on the cards,” he said. “We didn’t even agree to disagree from where I’m standing.”

That’s not very promising, is it? Overall, though, my takeaway from this story is that the new Greek government, after winning office based on a very hardnosed platform of vilifying its European creditors, has decided in practice to adopt a fairly conciliatory negotiating strategy. The Times says that Varoufakis has “backed away from the party’s pledges to negotiate a debt write-down” and is instead merely seeking “a compromise that would benefit Greece and its creditors.”

So it’s sort of a good-cop-bad-cop routine: prime minister Alexis Tsipras stays in Athens and continues to insist that Greece won’t buckle under to European threats, while Varoufakis makes the rounds of finance ministries and tries to make nice.

Still, keep in mind something I mentioned a few days ago: “backing down” from demands to reduce Greece’s enormous debt doesn’t mean much, because the issue of the debt write-down has always been a bit of a charade. It’s an easy thing to demagogue, but everyone understands privately that Greece will never pay it all back. At this point, then, Greek debt is less a measure of what Greece actually owes other people than it is a crude means of political control: whenever Greece needs to roll over its debt, it’s an opportunity for Germany to hold out until they approve of Greece’s spending plans. This effectively gives them control of Greece’s budget, and they’ve insisted on huge spending cuts and a future path toward big budget surpluses.

And that’s what Varoufakis really cares about. Not the debt, which is basically just a symbol at this point, but control over Greece’s budget. He wants to reverse the austerity and increase spending, which he thinks will boost Greece’s economy and allow it to get back into growth mode. What’s more, he’s arguing—none too subtly, as it happens—that this is something important to all of Europe, not just Greece. After all, Greek unemployment is currently at 26 percent, and youth unemployment is nearly 50 percent. This is dangerous territory for any country. Here’s Varoufakis:

“Germany must and can be proud that Nazism has been eradicated here, but it’s one of history’s most cruel ironies that Nazism is rearing its ugly head in Greece, a country which put up such a fine struggle against it,” Varoufakis said. He was referring to Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn party, which came third in January’s elections and has 17 seats in the Parliament sworn in Thursday.

Translation: the Greek public won’t put up with this stuff forever. You may think Syriza is a radical far-left party, but there are worse things than far left parties. If we don’t get relief soon, the far right will be up to bat next. And that’s something nobody wants to risk.

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Greek Charm Offensive Is Charming No One So Far

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What We Know About the Anti-Terror Raids Across Europe

by ChauSopervwxed Posted on January 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Following the Paris attacks that left 17 dead and amidst warnings that there may be as many as 20 jihadist sleeper cells throughout the European Union, at least four European nations have launched anti-terror operations. From Belgium, where suspected Islamic radicals skirmished with police, to Ireland, where an alleged radical was arrested as he tried to enter the country, some 24 suspects have been arrested across Europe. Here’s what we know about the raids and arrests that have played out over the past couple days.

Belgium: Early Thursday evening, Belgian police shot and killed two men, and arrested a third, during an intense ten-minute gun battle in the eastern Belgian town of Verviers. Belgian police and prosecutors claim that these men, Belgian citizens, had recently returned from Syria, were heavily armed, and had imminent plans to attack police officers and police stations in Belgium. Their identities have not been released, but witnesses claim they were dressed all in black and were carrying black bags. Officers seized police uniforms, heaps of money, explosives, guns, and munitions from the suspects. No police officers were wounded in the shoot-out. “The operation was meant to dismantle a terrorist cell…but also the logistics network behind it,” Eric Van Der Seypt, a Belgian prosecutor, told reporters.

Following the stand-off, police in Belgium arrested 13 additional suspects throughout the country. According to Van Der Sypt, the investigation that led to the arrests was initiated before the Paris massacre occurred. The Belgian authorities are investigating any ties the Belgian suspects might have had with the Paris attackers—especially to Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who killed four hostages before he was gunned down by police at a kosher market north of Paris. Police are investigating whether Coulibaly may have purchased weapons from a Belgian arms dealer, after confirming that he sold the dealer a car belonging to his partner Hayat Boumeddienne, who remains at large. Right now, there are no direct connections.

France: In neighboring France, police reportedly arrested around 12 additional suspects in Paris in connection to the Charlie Hebdo shootings. These suspects allegedly have ties to the Kouachi brothers, who attacked the Charlie Hebdo offices, held up a gas station, and holed up at a print shop before police killed them. NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley reports that the suspects were members of the Paris attackers’ “entourage” and may have helped plan or finance the attacks.

Germany: In Germany, where tensions over massive anti-Islam, anti-immigration protests have grown over the past week, Berlin police reportedly arrested two men suspected of having ties to the Islamic State, or ISIS. The two men are believed to have been recruiting, raising money, and obtaining supplies for ISIS. Around 250 police officers stormed Berlin streets, searching 11 homes, in what police described as part of a months-long investigation into a small terrorist cell in Germany. However, police claimed they did not have reason to believe the group posed an imminent threat.

Ireland: The terrorism crackdown extended as far as Ireland, where a French-Algerian national, a suspected jihadist, attempted to enter Dublin at the airport. He is currently being held by the police and questioned about fake documentation, after the police were tipped off by international agencies monitoring the man.

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What We Know About the Anti-Terror Raids Across Europe

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We’re Destroying the Planet in Ways That Are Even Worse Than Global Warming

by GeorgetDabney Posted on January 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in the Guardian and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Humans are “eating away at our own life support systems” at a rate unseen in the past 10,000 years by degrading land and freshwater systems, emitting greenhouse gases and releasing vast amounts of agricultural chemicals into the environment, new research has found.

Two major new studies by an international team of researchers have pinpointed the key factors that ensure a livable planet for humans, with stark results.

Of nine worldwide processes that underpin life on Earth, four have exceeded “safe” levels: human-driven climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land system change, and the high level of phosphorus and nitrogen flowing into the oceans due to fertilizer use.

Researchers spent five years identifying these core components of a planet suitable for human life, using the long-term average state of each measure to provide a baseline for the analysis.

They found that the changes of the last 60 years are unprecedented in the previous 10,000 years, a period in which the world has had a relatively stable climate and human civilization has advanced significantly.

Carbon dioxide levels, at 395.5 parts per million, are at historic highs, while loss of biosphere integrity is resulting in species becoming extinct at a rate more than 100 times faster than the previous norm.

Graphic: Guardian; Source: PIK PR

Since 1950, urban populations have increased sevenfold, primary energy use has soared by a factor of five, while the amount of fertilizer used is now eight times higher. The amount of nitrogen entering the oceans has quadrupled.

All of these changes are shifting Earth into a “new state” that is becoming less hospitable to human life, researchers said.

“These indicators have shot up since 1950 and there are no signs they are slowing down,” said Will Steffen of the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Center. Steffen is the lead author on both of the studies.

“When economic systems went into overdrive, there was a massive increase in resource use and pollution,” Steffen said. “It used to be confined to local and regional areas but we’re now seeing this occurring on a global scale. These changes are down to human activity, not natural variability.”

Steffen said direct human influence upon the land was contributing to a loss in pollination and a disruption in the provision of nutrients and fresh water.

“We are clearing land, we are degrading land, we introduce feral animals and take the top predators out, we change the marine ecosystem by overfishing—it’s a death by a thousand cuts,” he said. “That direct impact upon the land is the most important factor right now, even more than climate change.”

There are large variations in conditions around the world, according to the research. For example, land clearing is now concentrated in tropical areas, such as Indonesia and the Amazon, with the practice reversed in parts of Europe. But the overall picture is one of deterioration at a rapid rate.

“It’s fairly safe to say that we haven’t seen conditions in the past similar to ones we see today and there is strong evidence that there are tipping points we don’t want to cross,” Steffen said.

“If the Earth is going to move to a warmer state, 5 to 6 degrees Celsius warmer, with no ice caps, it will do so and that won’t be good for large mammals like us. People say the world is robust and that’s true, there will be life on Earth, but the Earth won’t be robust for us.

“Some people say we can adapt due to technology, but that’s a belief system, it’s not based on fact. There is no convincing evidence that a large mammal, with a core body temperature of 37 degrees Celsius, will be able to evolve that quickly. Insects can, but humans can’t and that’s a problem.”

Steffen said the research showed the economic system was “fundamentally flawed” as it ignored critically important life support systems.

“It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future and people of my daughter’s generation will find it increasingly hard to survive,” he said. “History has shown that civilizations have risen, stuck to their core values and then collapsed because they didn’t change. That’s where we are today.”

The two studies, published in Science and Anthropocene Review, featured the work of scientists from countries including the United States, Sweden, Germany, and India. The findings will be presented in seven seminars at the World Economic Forum in Davos, which takes place from January 21 to 25.

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We’re Destroying the Planet in Ways That Are Even Worse Than Global Warming

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We have to build much smarter cities if we want to fight climate change

by ChanceKunkle Posted on January 13, 2015

We have to build much smarter cities if we want to fight climate change

By on 13 Jan 2015commentsShare

If we can develop better cities, we can make a big dent in future greenhouse gas emissions. That’s the gist of a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The 274 cities researchers looked at are going to need more energy as they grow — a lot more, especially if we continue on our current track. The cities’ energy needs are poised to triple between 2005 and 2050 — but, with forward-thinking urban and transportation planning, we could limit those energy needs so they’ll only double.

The type of city determines how best to proceed. And in the world’s many developing countries, the study finds, keeping cities compact and carefully structuring their transportation systems is crucial. At Climate Central, John Upton explains:

Of the overall opportunity to reduce projected urban energy use by 2050, which the researchers called the urbanization mitigation wedge, 57 percent was found to be in Asia. Another 29 percent was in Africa and the Middle East.

Improving urban and transportation planning in countries where the very concepts are often foreign would, experts agreed, be challenging. It’s common in developing countries for rickety homes and businesses to be built on underused land without obtaining permits or permission, resulting in sprawl that’s underserviced by sewer lines, roads and other infrastructure.

“In India, there is no urban form,” said Anshuman Khare, a sustainable development professor at Canada’s Athabasca University who grew up in India and has also worked and studied in Japan and Germany. “You look at Asia and say, ‘OK, what has to change there?’ I can’t say what has to change, because everything has to change.”

Evidence from China, where some cities, such as Shanghai, have been working to introduce Western-style transportation plans, suggest that the challenges could be surmountable, said Michael Replogle, the policy director at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, which helps cities around the world with transportation planning. Overcoming those challenges may require intensive assistance from foreign countries and cities where urban planning and building codes are taken for granted.

For cities in developed countries, the study says high gas prices could nudge future development in the right direction. Too bad those are gone now, yesterday’s news, from back when you were chuckling at Gangnam Style and, like, Doge.

And even if high gas prices return, the study’s authors suggest there’s little remedy for the most sprawling cities, many of which are here in America, where cars are more or less a necessity. The hope is that cities in developing countries will avoid making the same mistakes.

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We have to build much smarter cities if we want to fight climate change

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And Now For Some Dour Predictions For the New Year

by DNDHeikewgp Posted on December 29, 2014

Mother Jones

Tyler Cowen offers some economic guesses for the coming year. In a nutshell, he thinks Russia is doomed; American wage growth will remain stagnant; a resource crash will throw Canada and Australia into downturns; Abenomics will fail once and for all; Greece will cause chaos by voting itself out of the eurozone; China will decline; Latin America will decline; and Italy and France (and maybe Germany) will stagnate. On the bright side, India might do OK.

And that’s not all. We might have a stock market crash in the US. And maybe a nuclear bomb will go off somewhere. And we’ll have another outbreak of avian flu.

This public service announcement has been brought to you by the Doleful Society of Dystopic Downers. If you haven’t yet given up all hope, there’s more at the link. Including at least one cheerful prediction!

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And Now For Some Dour Predictions For the New Year

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World Leaders Cobbled Together a Last-Minute Climate Deal in Peru. Here’s What Happens Next.

by Herbert7219 Posted on December 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Climate negotiators from nearly 200 countries are on their way home from Lima, Peru, after a series of last-minute compromises produced an agreement that, for the first time, calls on all countries to develop plans to limit their greenhouse gas emissions.

As the two weeks of global warming talks drew to a close, familiar fault lines emerged between wealthy countries—which are disproportionately responsible for causing climate change—and developing countries, which will be disproportionately impacted by it. In the end, both sides made sacrifices. Developing nations failed to convince the United States other economic powerhouses to commit cash to fund climate adaptation efforts around the world. And the US lost a battle over a one-word change that made guidelines for countries’ climate commitments optional instead of mandatory. As a result, the agreement came out weaker than climate hawks had hoped for, because countries get plenty of wiggle room to potentially scale back their promises.

“I would say that whereas at the end of last week, the draft agreement was close to unambiguously positive, over the weekend it did get watered down,” said Harvard environmental economist Robert Stavins. (You can read his more detailed analysis here).

So what happens now? The Lima agreement is essentially a playbook for diplomacy in the run-up to next December’s major global warming talks in Paris, where countries will meet in an attempt to finalize the world’s first universal climate accord. Before that can happen, there’s still a whole lot of negotiating left on the table, at both the domestic and international levels.

First, every country is now supposed to come up with its plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, like the joint plan announced last month by the US and China. Guidelines for what those plans must include are pretty loose, but in most cases they’ll lay out an emissions reduction target, a timeline for reaching it, and a series of domestic policy measures to achieve it. The Lima agreement requires that the plans be more aggressive than a “business-as-usual” scenario.

The plans can also (but aren’t required to) include commitments for low-carbon economic development, pledges of financial assistance for developing countries, or really whatever else a country feels like sticking in there. Those plans are due to the UN climate committee no later than October 1.

Once every country has submitted its contribution, the UN will conduct an analysis of how far they go, collectively, toward slowing climate change. This will be like a report card grading the actual impact the Paris agreement is likely to have. Expect that by November.

At the same time, negotiators will be tinkering away on nearly 40 pages of draft text that will serve as an introduction to the patchwork of national contributions (see the “Annex” here). There are smaller meetings early in 2015—first in Bonn, Germany, and then in Geneva, Switzerland—where this will be the main task at hand. That document will be presented in May, then tweaked and (fingers crossed) finally approved in Paris.

Stay tuned over the next several months for commitments from key players like India, Russia, and Australia.

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World Leaders Cobbled Together a Last-Minute Climate Deal in Peru. Here’s What Happens Next.

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Ebola Panic Mysteriously Disappeared Last Tuesday

by JeffChevalier Posted on November 13, 2014

Mother Jones

This is from the LA Times yesterday, but I forgot to mention it. It’s worth a quick read:

A few short weeks ago, Ebola was public enemy No. 1.

About 1,000 people were being monitored by health officials. Several schools in Texas and Ohio shut down because of a single patient who boarded a plane. A cruise ship was refused permission to dock in Cozumel, off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. President Obama appointed an Ebola “czar.” Polls showed a majority of Americans were concerned that Ebola would spread out of control in the U.S.

On Tuesday, a fully recovered Dr. Craig Spencer was released from Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan. The U.S. was now Ebola-free for the first time since Sept. 5 — a milestone that barely seemed to register with a once-frenzied public.

How did we get here from there?

How indeed?

“October was a rough month for stigma and fear,” said Doug Henry, a medical anthropologist at the University of North Texas in Denton. “The cruise ship that was denied entry into a port, kids who weren’t welcome at school, parents who kept their own kids home — things got really bad here in Dallas.” To further complicate matters, the crisis occurred in the home stretch of the midterm election campaign. Some Democrats accused Republicans of stoking Ebola fears for political advantage.

Yep, it’s quite the mystery.

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Ebola Panic Mysteriously Disappeared Last Tuesday

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The Great Wage Slowdown Finally Takes Center Stage

by deqc16rl Posted on November 11, 2014

Mother Jones

I’m feeling better today, but still not really in good blogging condition. So just a quick note: it appears that the great wage slowdown is finally getting lots of mainstream attention. Why? Because apparently the midterm results have persuaded a lot of people that this isn’t just an economic problem, but a political problem as well. In fact, here’s the headline on David Leonhardt’s piece today:

The Great Wage Slowdown, Looming Over Politics

Josh Marshall makes much the same point with this headline:

Forget the Chatter, This is the Democrats’ Real Problem

Both are saying similar things. First, growing income inequality per se isn’t our big problem. Stagnant wages for the middle class are. Obviously these things are tightly related in an economic sense, but in a political sense they aren’t. Voters care far less about rich people buying gold-plated fixtures for their yachts than they do about not getting a raise for the past five years. The latter is the problem they want solved.

Needless to say, I agree, but here are the two key takeaways from Marshall and Leonhardt and pretty much everyone else who tackles this subject: (1) nobody has any real answers, and (2) this hurts Democrats more than Republicans since Democrats are supposed to be the party of the middle class.

I’d say #1 is obviously true, and it’s a huge problem. But #2 is a little shakier. Sure, Republicans are the party of business interests and the rich, but voters blame their problems on whoever’s in power. Right now, Democrats have gotten the lion’s share of the blame for the slow economy, but Republicans rather plainly have no serious ideas about how to grow middle-class wages either. They won’t escape voter wrath on this front forever.

I’m not going to try to say more about this right now. I just wanted to point out that this is finally starting to get some real attention. And that’s good: it’s one of the great economic trends of our time, and therefore one of the great political trends as well. For a short rundown of the other great trends of our time, I recommend this piece. I wrote it a couple of years ago, and I continue to think these are the basic battlegrounds our politics are going to be fought on over the next decade or two.

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The Great Wage Slowdown Finally Takes Center Stage

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Negotiating With Republicans != Negotiating With Tea Partiers

by KlaraGuzm Posted on November 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Megan McArdle was pretty unimpressed with President Obama’s press conference following the Democrats’ midterm defeat. “No one reasonable expected the president to grovel,” she says, but surely he could have adopted a more conciliatory tone?

Most notably, of course, he said he would take executive action on immigration by year’s end unless Republicans passed a bill. It’s certainly a bold negotiating tactic: You can do what I want, or I’ll go ahead and do what I want anyway. This is how you “negotiate” with a seven-year old, not a Senate Majority Leader.

I’m not sure that isn’t what Obama thinks he’s doing….But Mitch McConnell is not a seven year old….McConnell is not the proverbial Tea Party extremist who won’t negotiate; he’s an establishment guy, known as a strategist and a tactician, not an ideologue (which is why the Tea Party isn’t that fond of him). In short, he’s someone who can make deals. Responding to McConnell’s rather gracious remarks about finding common goals by announcing that you know what the American public wants, and you’re going to give it to them no matter what their elected representatives say, seems curiously brash. It might chill the atmosphere today when he sits down with congressional leaders.

I wonder if Obama even knows how to negotiate with Republicans….

I’m not here to defend Obama’s negotiating record. I’d rate it higher than McArdle, probably, but it’s obviously not one of Obama’s strong suits. Still, she’s rather pointedly ignoring the elephant in the room here.

As near as I can tell, Obama has regularly demonstrated the ability to negotiate with Mitch McConnell. Not perfectly, and not without plenty of hiccups, but they can do business when the incentives are strong enough. In fact, they did do business on immigration reform. A year ago the Senate passed a comprehensive bill 68-32. Here’s what Obama said about McConnell on Wednesday:

My interactions with Mitch McConnell, he has always been very straightforward with me. To his credit, he has never made a promise that he couldn’t deliver. And he knows the legislative process well. He obviously knows his caucus well — he has always given me, I think, realistic assessments of what he can get through his caucus and what he can’t. And so I think we can have a productive relationship.

The unnamed elephant in the room, obviously, is John Boehner and the tea party caucus in the House. Boehner has repeatedly shown that he can’t control his own caucus and can’t deliver a deal of any sort. That’s not because either Obama or Boehner are incompetent negotiators, it’s because the tea partiers are flatly unwilling to compromise in any remotely constructive way. So when Obama adopts a combative tone on immigration, it’s aimed at Boehner, who really does have the miserable job of trying to ride herd on a bunch of erratic and willful seven-year-olds—as he himself has admitted from time to time.

Does Obama know how to negotiate with Republicans? Sure. Does he know how to negotiate with tea party extremists? Hard to say. But then again, even John Boehner hasn’t figured out how to do that. Perhaps Obama’s playground style hit-them-over-the-head approach is about as good as it gets.

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Negotiating With Republicans != Negotiating With Tea Partiers

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