Tag Archives: international

Does Financial Literacy Matter?

by Joellen54X Posted on July 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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We recently received the grim news that American schoolkids are behind their international peers when it comes to financial literacy. We can add this to the pile of grim news about American schoolkids being behind their international peers in math, science, reading, and every other subject imaginable.

Is this actually true? Well, it depends on which tests you rely on and which countries you compare to. And when you disaggregate by income and race you often end up with different results. Still, it’s a good horror story, and one we can’t seem to get enough of. The financial literacy debacle fits right in.

But forget for a moment whether American high school students really suck at financial literacy. The Economist raises an entirely different question: does it even matter?

Perhaps most important, courses in personal finance do not appear to have an impact on adult behaviour. As Buttonwood has pointed out, the knowledge that students acquire in school when they are in their teens does not necessary translate into action when they have to deal with mortgages and credit-card payments later in life. One study, for example, found that financial education has no impact on household saving behaviour. As a paper by Lewis Mandell and Linda Schmid Klein suggests, the long-term effectiveness of high-school classes in financial literacy is highly doubtful. It may simply be the case that the gap in time is too wide between when individuals acquire their financial knowledge, as high-school students, and when they’re in a position to apply what they have learned.

Now, I’ve long had my doubts whether any of the actual knowledge I learned in high school matters. Habits matter. Basic skills matter. The ability to figure out how to figure out stuff matters. Learning to sit still and concentrate for half an hour at a time matters. But trigonometry? Catcher in the Rye? The history of the Gilded Age? That’s not so clear. Maybe financial literacy falls into the same category.

Alternatively, it may be that education has little impact on our behavior in general. We all know that the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more, and yet that knowledge does us little good. Most of us overeat anyway. Likewise, even if we know that interest charges on credit card debt can eat us alive, we might just go ahead and buy that snazzy new big-screen TV anyway.

Who knows? Maybe education outside of (a) basic skills and (b) highly specific skills used in our professions really doesn’t matter much. If that turned out to be true, I can’t say it would surprise me an awful lot. Being a Renaissance Man may be overrated.

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Does Financial Literacy Matter?

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Watch the Ads Obama Is Airing in Central America to Keep Kids From Coming to the US

by LynetteF1 Posted on July 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Preparing for his dangerous trip north, a Central American teen stops to pen a letter to his uncle in the United States. He writes that his mom is telling him to think hard about the risks: the gangs on the trains, the cartels that kidnap migrants, the days of walking through the desert. But those roadblocks, he writes, are worth it: “I see myself earning a bunch of money in the United States, and my mom here without any worries.”

More MoJo coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.


70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


What’s Next for the Children We Deport?


This Is Where the Government Houses the Tens of Thousands of Kids Who Get Caught Crossing the Border


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


“In Texas, We Don’t Turn Our Back on Children”

So begins a new public service announcement aimed at keeping Central American kids from joining the tens of thousands of unaccompanied child migrants who have been apprehended by US authorities in the last year. The PSA soon turns dark, though: After the teen says goodbye to his mother, and his uncle puts down the letter he’s been reading, the camera pulls back from a close-up of the boy, dead on the desert floor. A narrator urges viewers: “They’re our future. Let’s protect them.”

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) developed the TV ads, as well as posters and marimba-infused radio spots, as part of its million-dollar Dangers Awareness Campaign. Rolled out shortly after Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to Guatemala in June, the campaign is an attempt to counter rumors that unaccompanied kids will be allowed to stay in the United States. The ads emphasize that the journey is extremely dangerous and that children won’t get legal status if they make it across the border.

The campaign will run for 11 weeks, CBP spokesman Jaime Ruiz told the Associated Press. “We want a relative that is about to send $5,000, $6,000 to a relative in El Salvador to see this message and say, ‘Oh my God, they’re saying that the journey is more dangerous,'” Ruiz said. “We try to counter the version of the smuggler.”

Here’s the other televised PSA, in which two silhouettes—a would-be migrant and a smuggler—discuss heading north, the smuggler turning increasingly aggressive and his shadow occasionally turning into that of a coyote, the slang word for a smuggler:

(Notably, CBP created slightly different versions of each of the stories for El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the three countries that have sent the most unaccompanied minors to the US. Watch them all here.)

This type of campaign isn’t anything new. For years, the Mexican government has produced ads about the dangers of walking through the Arizona desert, and several years ago the Department of Homeland Security, as part of CBP’s Border Safety Initiative, distributed CDs to Latin American radio stations with sad songs aimed at slowing immigration from the south. With so many variables at play, it’s virtually impossible to measure their effect.

But with more than 57,000 unaccompanied kids apprehended in the United States since October—a situation that CBP head R. Gil Kerlikowske called “difficult and distressing on a lot of levels” when speaking to members of the Senate homeland security committee on Wednesday—the government seems willing to try anything.

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Watch the Ads Obama Is Airing in Central America to Keep Kids From Coming to the US

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Joe Biden’s World Cup Gift to Brazil: A Chilling Torture Memo

by LaraLafferty Posted on July 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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When Vice President Joe Biden visited Brazil for the start of the World Cup soccer tournament last month, he brought along something of an odd gift for President Dilma Rousseff: a collection of State Department cables and reports that included a chilling account of state-sponsored torture. The documents were from 1967 to 1977 and covered assorted human rights abuses conducted by the military dictatorship then ruling Brazil—a government that was supported by the Nixon administration and its foreign policy poobah Henry Kissinger.

Brazil has been examining its dark past through the work of the Brazilian National Truth Commission, and the 43 documents turned over by Biden are meant to help the commission uncover the dirty deeds of the recent past. As the National Security Archive notes, these records report on “secret torture detention centers in Sao Paulo, the military’s counter-subversion operations, and Brazil’s hostile reaction in 1977 to the first State Department human rights report on abuses.”

And one document stands out: a 1973 cable from the US embassy in Brazil to State Department headquarters titled, “Widespread Arrests and Psychophysical Interrogation of Suspected Subversives.” The report noted that arrests by military forces of regime critics—mostly university students—had recently increased, and that “the detainees are being subjected to an intensive psychophysical system of duress designed to extract information without doing visible, lasting harm to the body.” The cable reported that Brazilians suspected of being “hardened terrorists…are still being submitted to the older methods of physical violence”—such as the use of electrical shock devices and being tied to and hung from a suspended bar—”which sometimes cause death.” But the main point of the cable was that the Brazilian military had developed “a newer, more sophisticated and elaborate psychophysical duress system…to intimidate and terrify the suspect.”

The cable then detailed, in a rather clinical fashion, this process:

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State Department Report on Brazilian Interrogation Abuses (PDF)

State Department Report on Brazilian Interrogation Abuses (Text)

The cable noted that detainees with “good connections” inside and outside the government were usually spared this torture.

This document is a rare step-by-step description of government-backed torture. Yet it contained no criticism of the regime or the practice. It reported that public reaction to a recent wave of arrests “has been mild thus far and is likely to continue to be subdued.”

The cable was in sync with the Nixon/Kissinger policy of not getting worked up about torture conducted by military regimes Washington favored. (See Kissinger and Argentina.) And a cable sent to Foggy Bottom a year earlier by William Rountree, then the US ambassador to Brazil, noted that though the US embassy in Brazil had “on appropriate occasion and in appropriate manner” informed the Brazilians that the US government did not condone “excesses in the form practiced in Brazil,” Rountree believed the United States had to make this case without “unduly jeopardizing our relations with this country or causing a counter-productive reaction on the part of the” government of Brazil. In this cable, Rountree said that he strongly supported the State Department’s opposition to legislation then under consideration in Congress that would cut off US funding to Brazil as long as the government engaged in torture.

Rountree explained, “Given Brazilian pride and sensitivity about sovereignty, efforts by any branch of US government or by US political figures to bring pressure on Brazil would not only damage our general relations but, by equating reduction in anti-terror measures with weakness under pressure, could produce opposite of intended result.” In other words, the United States shouldn’t lean too heavily on the torturers of Brazil.

The Brazilian Truth Commission, which has posted the documents Biden handed over, has been at work for two years, and Biden, when he was in Brazil, promised that the Obama administration would mount a broader review of top-secret CIA and Defense Department documents that might be useful to the commission. So the World Cup has given Brazil more than just a soccer tournament; it has highlighted the nation’s effort to come to terms with its recent past of government abuse and violence—and Washington’s own effort to acknowledge its support of that regime.

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Joe Biden’s World Cup Gift to Brazil: A Chilling Torture Memo

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A Scary Super Typhoon Is Bearing Down on Japan…and Its Nuclear Plants

by FlorentButton Posted on July 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Japanese forecasters are calling it a “once in decades storm.” And at Kadena Air Base, a US military installation on the island of Okinawa, one commander dubbed the storm “the most powerful typhoon forecast to hit the island in 15 years.”

Super Typhoon Neoguri, currently sporting maximum sustained winds of nearly 150 miles per hour and just shy of Category 5 strength, is heading straight at Japan’s islands, and its outer bands are currently battering the island of Okinawa. Here’s the forecast map from the Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center. As you can see, the forecast for tomorrow brings the storm up to maximum sustained winds of 140 knots (161 miles per hour), or Category 5 strength (click for larger version):

Joint Typhoon Warning Center.

The Western Pacific basin, home to typhoons (which are elsewhere called tropical cyclones or hurricanes), is known for having the strongest storms on Earth, such as last year’s devastating Super Typhoon Haiyan. July is, generally, when the Western Pacific typhoon season really starts getting into gear, but August, September, and October are usually busier months.

Neoguri will weaken by the time it strikes Japan’s main islands, but as meteorologist Jeff Masters observes, “the typhoon is so large and powerful that it will likely make landfall with at least Category 2 strength, causing major damage in Japan.”

One pressing issue is the safety of Japan’s nuclear plants. In the wake of the 2011 tsunami and the subsequent disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, it’s important to consider whether a similar vulnerability arises here.

Fukushima is located north of Tokyo on Japan’s largest island, Honshu. By the time the typhoon reaches that point, it is forecast to be considerably weaker. But there are a number of other reactors spread across the islands; perhaps most exposed will be the southwestern island of Kyushu, where the current forecast has the typhoon making its first major landfall.

According to reporting by Reuters, there are two nuclear plants on the island. A company spokeswoman for Kyushu Electric Power Co. told the news agency that it “has plans in place throughout the year to protect the plants from severe weather.”

Will that be good enough? According to Edwin Lyman, senior scientist in the global security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, the good news overall is that Japan’s nuclear plants are currently shut down, awaiting permission to restart as they institute stronger safety protections, including the construction of higher seawalls. A shut-down plant is still not without risks, because “you still have to provide cooling for the fuel,” says Lyman. But overall, he thinks that the newer protections, combined with the fact that the plants have been cooling while shut down, suggests less vulnerability than existed in 2011.

“I would say that they’re probably in a better position than they were to withstand massive flooding from a typhoon, and the fact that the reactors have been shut for some time, increases the level of confidence,” Lyman says. “But there’s still issues, and we’ll just have to hope that if there’s a massive flooding event at one of the reactors, that the measures they’ve already put into place will be adequate to cope with them.”

Here’s a stunning NASA image of Neoguri, snapped yesterday:

Typhoon Neoguri on July 6 NASA

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A Scary Super Typhoon Is Bearing Down on Japan…and Its Nuclear Plants

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Caribbean Coral Reefs “Will Be Lost Within 20 Years” Without Protection

by JeanneMinaya Posted on July 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Most Caribbean coral reefs will disappear within the next 20 years unless action is taken to protect them, primarily due to the decline of grazers such as sea urchins and parrotfish, a new report has warned.

A comprehensive analysis by 90 experts of more than 35,000 surveys conducted at nearly 100 Caribbean locations since 1970 shows that the region’s corals have declined by more than 50 percent.

But restoring key fish populations and improving protection from overfishing and pollution could help the reefs recover and make them more resilient to the impacts of climate change, according to the study from the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the United Nations Environment Program.

While climate change and the resulting ocean acidification and coral bleaching does pose a major threat to the region, the report—Status and Trends of Caribbean Coral Reefs: 1970-2012—found that local pressures such as tourism, overfishing and pollution posed the biggest problems.

And these factors have made the loss of the two main grazer species, the parrotfish and sea urchin, the key driver of coral decline in the Caribbean.

Grazers are important fish in the marine ecosystem as they eat the algae that can smother corals. An unidentified disease led to a mass mortality of the sea urchin in 1983 and overfishing throughout the 20th century has brought the parrotfish population to the brink of extinction in some regions, according to the report.

Reefs where parrotfish are not protected have suffered significant declines, including Jamaica, the entire Florida reef tract from Miami to Key West, and the US Virgin Islands. At the same time, the report showed that some of the healthiest Caribbean coral reefs are those that are home to big populations of grazing parrotfish. These include the US Flower Garden Banks national marine sanctuary in the northern Gulf of Mexico, Bermuda and Bonaire—all of which have restricted or banned fishing practices that harm parrotfish.

The Caribbean is home to 9 percent of the world’s coral reefs, but only around one-sixth of the original coral cover remains. The reefs, which span 38 countries, are vital to the region’s economy and support the more than 43 million people, generating more than $3 billion annually from tourism and fisheries and much more in other goods and services.

According to the authors, restoring parrotfish populations and improving other management strategies could help the reefs recover. “The rate at which the Caribbean corals have been declining is truly alarming,” said Carl Gustaf Lundin, director of IUCN’s global marine and polar program. “But this study brings some very encouraging news: the fate of Caribbean corals is not beyond our control and there are some very concrete steps that we can take to help them recover.”

Reefs that are protected from overfishing, as well as other threats such as excessive coastal pollution, tourism and coastal development, are more resilient to pressures from climate change, according to the authors.

“Even if we could somehow make climate change disappear tomorrow, these reefs would continue their decline,” said Jeremy Jackson, lead author of the report and IUCN’s senior adviser on coral reefs. “We must immediately address the grazing problem for the reefs to stand any chance of surviving future climate shifts.”

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Caribbean Coral Reefs “Will Be Lost Within 20 Years” Without Protection

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British Brewer Still Bitter Over American Revolution

by Unacoomt Posted on July 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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British actor and writer Stephen Merchant, who you can thank in-part for creating the original version of The Office, has a challenge for you this 4th of July: imagine if his people had won the war for independence. He’s tired of acting like he’s not bloody pissed that each year we celebrate beating his little country. He’s so pissed in fact that he’s made the following ad for Newcastle Brown Ale. Watch his plea, as he begs of you to image how “great” Great Brtiain 2 would be. And then, enjoy a hoedown, just to spite him:

Source:  

British Brewer Still Bitter Over American Revolution

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Is Climate Change Destabilizing Iraq?

by JulioSteiner Posted on June 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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

This winter was not a good one for farmers in the Fertile Crescent.

A punishing drought hit most of Syria and northern Iraq during what’s normally the wettest time of the year. In the mountains of eastern Turkey, which form the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, snow and rain were less than half of normal. The region has seen one of the worst droughts in decades.

Drought is becoming a fixture in the parched landscape, due to a drying trend of the Mediterranean and Middle East region fueled by global warming. The last major drought in this region (2006-2010) finished only a few years ago. When taken in combination with other complex drivers, increasing temperatures and drying of agricultural land is widely seen as assisting in the destabilization of Syria under the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Before civil war broke out there, farmers abandoned their desiccated fields and flooded the cities with protests. A series of UN reports released earlier this year found that global warming is already destabilizing nation states around the world, and Syria has been no exception.

With the ongoing crisis in Iraq seemingly devolving by the day, it’s not a stretch to think something similar could already be underway just next door.

One of the most devastating droughts in decades hit Syria and Iraq in 2007-2008. Scientists have linked the drought to climate change. NASA

Could there be a connection between climate change and the emerging conflict in Iraq?

The short answer is a qualified yes, according to Frank Femia of the Center for Climate and Security, a Washington-based policy institute advised by senior retired military and national security leaders. He explained in a phone interview:

It’s far too early, considering this is happening in real time, to figure out what is motivating ISIS and its members. Certainly, the natural resource stresses in the region make things worse. Terrorist organizations can try to control those resources and gain significant influence and power. You can’t say climate change is causing ISIS to do what it’s doing, but it climate change certainly has a role to play in the region.

Increasing temperatures may also be playing a role in the recent uptick in violence. A study published last year in the journal Science showed a strong connection between high temperatures and political instability, like civil wars, riots, and ethnic violence, though the cause is not well known. A previous study has linked dehydration with decreased cognitive performance and increased levels of anxiety.

Sure enough, this year has been unusually hot so far in Iraq with the March-April-May season ranking as the warmest on record across much of the country. (Reliable records from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration date back to 1880.) The emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria around the same time may just be an interesting coincidence, but the implications are important enough for us to consider a broader connection.

It’s getting hot in Iraq. National Climatic Data Center

The United Nations lists Iraq as “one of the Arab region’s most vulnerable countries to climate change.” In 2004, just after the American-led regime change, a Congressional Research Service report cited “rapid population growth coupled with limited arable land” and “a general stagnation of agricultural productivity” after decades of conflict and mismanagement during the final Saddam years as the main reasons Iraq grew more reliant on imports of food amid international sanctions and the oil-for-food program. A major drought from 1999-2001 also hampered the country’s ability to feed itself. Since then, conflict has raged and the climate has grown even more extreme, with alternating severe droughts and heavy rainstorms. From the United Nations Development Programme in 2009:

Iraq’s wheat production this year was down 45 percent from a normal harvest, with similar reductions expected in the coming year. As a result, the country has experienced a massive loss of seed reserves for future planting, forcing the country to significantly increase food imports at great cost to the economy.
Meanwhile, farmers are abandoning their fields en masse and moving to urban centres, a trend that has placed more stress on cities in Iraq that are already struggling to provide basic social services and economic opportunities to growing urban populations. As a result, social tensions and the risk of crime have increased.

Sound familiar? As in neighboring Syria, it’s increasingly clear that Iraq is drying out, an effect that’s long been predicted as a result of the human-caused build up of heat-trapping gases like CO2. Since 1973, Femia says, parts of Iraq and Syria have seen “some of the most dramatic precipitation declines in the world.” Citing projected stark declines in rainfall and continued population pressure and upstream dam building, a study released earlier this year made the case that the Tigris and Euphrates rivers may no longer reach the sea by 2040.

Much of Iraq’s climate is similar to California’s Central Valley, with a long summer dry season and a rainier, more productive winter. That’s helped Iraq serve as the breadbasket of the region for millennia, but no longer. Like Bakersfield, Baghdad is intensely dependent on river water from upstream for irrigation of most of its crops. After decades of war, not nearly as much water is getting through.

This year’s major drought has coincided with the rise of ISIS, which has already used dams as a weapon of war, threatening downstream agriculture and electricity production during its march to gain control of vast swaths of territory in Syria and northern Iraq. From Al Arabiya:

In Iraq, ISIS, reportedly in control of the strategic Mosul dam, has declared its intention to deprive Shiite regions from water. Further electricity shortages hit Southern Iraq, where the consecutive governments have failed in restoring basic services since 2003.

The declines in rainfall already seen in Syria and Iraq are on the order of scientists’ predictions but have generally come faster than climate models anticipated. According to retired US Navy Rear Adm. David Titley, the combination of worsening drought and violent conflict now spreading across the region “is a classic case of unintended and unforeseen consequences.”

Global warming might be affecting the rational processes at people working at Slate. You might want to open a few windows. You all are clearly breathing your own fumes. More…

For all the debate over climate change, those in the national security realm are moving surprisingly full-speed ahead. In this year’s Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon listed the impacts of climate change, like drought, as “threat multipliers.” As Femia put it, “the US military doesn’t have the luxury of planning for the short term.” Now that the Department of Defense has listed climate change as a national security threat, Femia says, “they have an obligation and duty to address those issues.”

For Femia, the way forward in Iraq and other parts of the region is by working at reducing one of the root drivers of Middle East conflict: water scarcity.

In post conflict situations, issues of disarmament and new political foundations and the relationship between various ethnic groups, those are all critical and need to be part of any solution. But if conflict resolution doesn’t involve natural resource management, you’re setting the stage for future instability.

The government of Iraq has named 2014 as a national Year of Environment in an attempt to prioritize the rehabilitation of the country’s degraded lands after years of conflict. Let’s hope they’re not too late.

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Is Climate Change Destabilizing Iraq?

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Yet More Benghazi Conspiracy Theories Are Only a Day Away

by RoseanneQVJ Posted on June 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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After a year of planning, US commandos have captured one of the militia leaders thought to be a ringleader in the Benghazi attacks. For political junkies, however, it was the 17th paragraph of the Times story that drew the most attention:

Mr. Obama’s Republican critics, who have sought to portray the Benghazi attack as an administration cover-up and efforts to prosecute those responsible as weak, were cautious in their initial response to news of Mr. Abu Khattala’s capture.

Indeed. I wonder just how long that caution will last? I’d give it no more than 24 hours. More than likely, it’s just a publicity stunt meant to draw attention away from the IRS/EPA/ISIS/Iran. Amirite? In turn, all of those things are publicity stunts meant to draw attention away from Benghazi. It’s like a finely tuned Swiss watch, isn’t it?

By the way: does anyone know why this guy is referred to as Mr. Abu Khattala on all references in most news stories? It’s never shortened. I’ve never noticed that with any other Arabic name.

UPDATE: Sorry about that. I thought I had seen “Mr. Abu Khattala” used repeatedly elsewhere too, but apparently not. Only in the New York Times, where it’s house style.

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Yet More Benghazi Conspiracy Theories Are Only a Day Away

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7 Talking Points You Need For Discussing the Iraq Crisis

by SheilaWozniak Posted on June 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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1. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney invaded Iraq with no clear and comprehensive plan for what to do after the invasion and the end of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Weeks before the war, the administration stated there was no reason to fear that sectarian conflict would ensue after Saddam was booted.

2. Following the invasion, the Bush-Cheney administration decided to prohibit the Sunni-dominated Baath Party from participating in a post-Saddam government and decommissioned the existing Baathist-led military. This caused deep resentment among Sunnis, especially former military commanders and soldiers (who would now be available for an armed opposition). The move had the effect of banishing Iraqis with governing and security experience from the post-Saddam order. That would be good for chaos and conflict.

3. The Bush-Cheney deciders, having decimated the Sunni ruling establishment, backed the creation of a government led by hard-line Shiite religious parties, including the party of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The Maliki regime has been corrupt, authoritarian, and incompetent—and allied closely with the Shiite government in Iran. (Iran was a key sponsor of Maliki when he was in exile during the Saddam years.) The thuggish Maliki government, supported by the Bush administration and then the Obama administration, has treated the Sunni areas of Iran as enemy territory and refused to share power with Sunnis—stoking the deep-seated tensions between Sunnis and Shiites. (As the murderous Sunni ultra-extremists of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, have gained power in Mosul and other Sunni-dominated cities and towns, non-extremist Sunnis have sided with—or tolerated—the jihadists because of their shared hatred of the Maliki regime and the Iraqi military, which Sunnis in Mosul considered an occupying force).

4. President Barack Obama did not leave a residual force of American troops in Iraq after he withdrew US troops because Maliki would not sign a Status of Forces Agreement protecting US soldiers. Though Bush also did not negotiate a long-term SOFA, prominent Republicans, including Senator John McCain and Mitt Romney, have slammed Obama for failing to obtain such an agreement. But Fareed Zakaria reports that a senior Iraqi politician told him, “Maliki cannot allow American troops to stay on. Iran has made very clear to Maliki that it’s No. 1 demand is that there be no American troops remaining in Iraq. And Maliki owes them.”

5. The United States has provided much training and equipment to the Iraqi military—$25 billion in military aid—before and after the US withdrawal. Yet under Maliki the Iraqi army has not been professionalized and has committed repeated abuses against civilians, according to Human Rights Watch, including unlawful raids and arrests, torture, and indiscriminate shelling. When a relatively small band of jihadists attacked Mosul and Tikrit, four major divisions folded. Training and equipment does not help if soldiers strip off their uniforms and flee because they are not committed to the mission and the government.

6. More US assistance to Maliki and his military may not make the difference. (See No. 5.) Moreover, Iran has sent special forces to Iraq to assist Maliki—bolstering Iraq’s dependence on Iran. If the United States were to funnel additional military equipment (and more advanced equipment) to Maliki’s army, it could well end up with the ISIS jihadists (given the Iraq military’s habit to cut and run) or—get this—with the Revolutionary Guard of Iran. A good deal for Tehran. And if US air strikes are ordered in Iraq to assist Maliki, American fighter jets or drones would be deployed in a tactical alliance with Iran.

7. The current crisis is not the result of inadequate US support of Maliki and the Iraqi military. It is the outcome of Maliki’s failures, which have provided the evildoers of ISIS—a band that does threaten civilians and stability in the region—an opportunity, and these failures were enabled by the Bush administration and unaddressed by the Obama crew. Unless the basic dynamic is altered, any military action—whether taken by the United States, regional allies, and/or NATO—will be as effective as pounding sand.

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7 Talking Points You Need For Discussing the Iraq Crisis

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New White House Program Will Provide Legal Aid to Unaccompanied Migrant Kids

by JosefWOOZigzhlu Posted on June 10, 2014

Mother Jones

Last Friday, the Obama administration announced the launch of “justice AmeriCorps,” a new program that will provide legal support to unaccompanied migrant children facing deportation. As Mother Jones has reported extensively, the number of undocumented children caught illegally entering the US without a parent or guardian has more than doubled in recent years, to nearly 39,000 in 2013.

The new initiative is sponsored by the the Department of Justice’s Executive Office of Immigration Review and the Corporation for National & Community Service (CNCS), which runs AmeriCorps. According to a CNCS statement, around 100 lawyers and paralegals will be recruited to provide legal services and representation for unaccompanied kids under 16 facing removal hearings. Nonprofits in 29 cities with high immigrant populations will enlist and supervise the legal volunteers, who will commit to one year of service as AmeriCorps members. Attorney General Eric Holder called the program “a historic step to strengthen our justice system and protect the rights of the most vulnerable members of society.”

This marked the administration’s second major recent announcement regarding the influx of unaccompanied children. Last Monday, the White House announced the creation of a task force to ensure that federal agencies are “unified in providing relief to affected children,” as well as plans to relocate 600 kids from border holding cells to an emergency shelter at Naval Base Ventura County in Southern California.

In his statement, Holder noted that many of the children and teens who will be assisted by the new AmeriCorps program “are fleeing violence, persecution, abuse, or trafficking.” This description of the circumstances under which children migrate alone matches the findings of a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Of 400 unaccompanied migrant children interviewed, 58 percent “had suffered, been threatened, or feared serious harm” that might merit international protection.

As Wendy Young, executive director of KIND, a nonprofit that helps unaccompanied immigrant kids find pro bono legal support, told Mother Jones’ Ian Gordon, “This is becoming less like an immigration issue and much more like a refugee issue. Because this really is a forced migration. This is not kids choosing voluntarily to leave.” Deported children often return to the same dangerous or desperate situations they attempted to escape, further burdened with smuggling debt. The new initiative will attempt to curb this problem by training its members to identify signs of human trafficking and abuse in the children they serve.

Kimi Jackson, director of ProBAR, which provides legal services to detained children in South Texas, said in an email that “this initiative is a good step. Currently, the majority of kids appear in court and represent themselves without a lawyer. Attorneys for released kids are urgently needed.”

Although the program aims to serve the “most vulnerable” unaccompanied children, the 100 funded lawyers and paralegals will only be capable of providing assistance to a fraction of the 74,000 children anticipated to be apprehended by Border Patrol this year. CNCS estimates that 10,000 unaccompanied kids will appear in immigration court in the 29 participating cities in the 2015 fiscal year.

Link:

New White House Program Will Provide Legal Aid to Unaccompanied Migrant Kids

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