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There Will Never* Be an Israel-Palestinian Peace Settlement

by StellaMercier Posted on December 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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For many years:

Virtually every country in the world has condemned Israel’s settlements in the West Bank.
They have all repeatedly voted to say so in the UN.
The US has also opposed Israel’s settlements, but hasn’t officially said so in the UN.
And Israel has said very clearly that the UN is virulently anti-Israel (true) and they pay it no mind.

A few days ago one small part of this formula finally changed when the US abstained from a UN vote condemning Israel’s settlements on the West Bank. It was a parting blow from a lame-duck president who has been treated appallingly by Bibi Netanyahu, and the only surprising thing about it is that President Obama managed to hold his temper this long.

In any case, it’s entirely meaningless: Donald Trump will take office soon and Netanyahu claims to consider the UN illegitimate on this subject anyway. So why has everyone gone ballistic over it? Sure, there’s now an “official” UN resolution condemning the West Bank settlements, but what difference does that make? An “official” UN resolution is barely worth the minute or two it takes to read it. Even as a PR coup it doesn’t amount to much.

The whole Israel charade long ago ceased to interest me. I can hardly pretend to be any kind of expert, but my take is that the last chance for any kind of peace deal ended in the 90s. The huge influx of conservative Jews from Russia after the fall of the Iron Curtain, followed by the Second Intifada, turned Israel permanently against any kind of settlement with the Palestinians.

Because of this, I never blamed George Bush for not trying to broker a peace deal and never blamed Obama for not succeeding. Even people who are sympathetic toward Obama often say that he handled the Middle East badly—and the Israel relationship particularly badly—but I simply don’t see how he could have done any better. Netanyahu treated him with unconcealed contempt; was unapologetic about publicly undermining him; decided to ditch bipartisanship and openly team up with the Republican Party; and very plainly was never open to any kind of settlement at all. There is absolutely nothing Obama could have done to change that.

In any case, the following things are indisputably true:

Israeli leaders will never* stop building in the West Bank. It would be electoral suicide.
Israeli leaders will never give up the West Bank. It would be electoral suicide.
Israeli leaders will never formally annex the West Bank. It would be electoral suicide.

In other words, nothing is going to happen. Period. Israel is going to keep things as they are, fight off world opinion forever, and hope that maybe over the course of several decades they can slowly get all the Palestinians in the West Bank to emigrate elsewhere. It’s sort of like Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” on steroids.

And just in case you think this puts me on the side of the Arabs and Palestinians, forget it. To the extent that I stay even marginally on Israel’s side, it’s because the Arabs have acted even more abominably. They tried to invade Israel twice. They never cared a fig for the Palestinians except as a convenient poster child. (Jordan must have been the first country in history to lose territory in a war and be happy about it.) They never accepted Israel as legitimate, but for decades they’ve tacitly tolerated its existence because it gives them an easy way of stirring up demagogic hatreds that help prop up their own vicious regimes. The PLO was a murderous terrorist organization, and Hamas is worse. The intifadas were depraved and ruinous. And despite the fact that the Palestinians were clearly on the losing end of a war and needed to accept the best deal they could get, they remained delusional to the end. I’ve never bought into the revisionist history that Bill Clinton’s Wye River/Camp David/Taba negotiations were unfair to the Palestinians and Yasser Arafat was right to turn down the final proposal. He needed to accept it, and he probably knew it. He was just too cowardly to do it and too convinced that his own leadership was dependent on opposition to Israel.

Even in theory, there is literally no settlement that either the Israelis or the Palestinians would accept right now. This isn’t necessarily true forever, but it will be true for a good long time. We should all stop wasting our time on the fantasy that peace talks have any value.

*All uses of never in this post are figurative. Never is a long time. But in this case, it means many decades at a minimum.

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There Will Never* Be an Israel-Palestinian Peace Settlement

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Nine Things I’m Tired Of

by KrystalFremont Posted on December 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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To celebrate the Grinch version of Christmas, here’s my 2016 list of stuff I’ve gotten tired of over the past year. I’m not suggesting that nobody should use any of these memes in the future. Go ahead! Who cares whether I’m annoyed? Nor are they the the worst cliches or most overused examples in the world. They’re just things I’ve grown weary of. They are in no particular order. Enjoy!

  1. Side-eye tweets about “takes.” This is mostly annoying coming from people who all write takes themselves. Stop the self-hatred! Some people are makers (i.e. reporters) and some people are takers. You should revel in your role in the journalistic ecosystem.
  2. The madman theory. Yes, yes, we all know that Richard Nixon tried to make Russia and China think he was a madman who needed to be treated with kid gloves. This strategy lasted, what? A year? And it didn’t work. We’ve also heard it “explained” a thousand times by analogy to two cars speeding toward each other on a one-lane road, and one guy throws away his steering wheel. We get it.
  3. Correlation is not causation. If you’re a serious researcher making a serious point about a serious study, you’re fine. However, this usage is vanishingly rare. Most often it’s tossed off by someone who thinks it’s a brilliant riposte to anyone who demonstrates a correlation. Knock it off. It’s not nearly as smart as you think it is.
  4. Container shipping revolutionized world trade. This is a true fact. I know it’s true because people keep writing articles about it, as if it’s some kind of revelation. Maybe it was 20 years ago. Today, not so much.
  5. Van Halen’s brown M&Ms. If you don’t know what this is, Google it. As for the rest of you, please find some other example to make whatever point you’re trying to make.
  6. _____ is wealthier than the bottom 50 percent of the world. Look, the wealth of the bottom 50 percent of the world is zero. Everything is wealthier than the bottom 50 percent of the world. Headlines that use this format are nowhere near as amazeballs as many people appear to think they are.
  7. Ironic criticism of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner from people who go to it. I know: you think this shows that you’re a regular joe who’s in on the joke. It doesn’t. It just shows that you’re afraid of people thinking you’re part of the DC press corps.
  8. ____’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad ____. This is not the most overused cliche in the world, but it might be the laziest. You don’t even have to think of some kind of clever construction. You just fill in the blanks and call it a day. Let’s all give it a rest.
  9. Bloggers who complain about the press covering Donald Trump’s tweets even though they obsess over them too. These guys are the worst.

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Nine Things I’m Tired Of

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Raw Data: Working-Age Population Growth

by BOYSamanth Posted on December 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post reports that 2016 “had the lowest rate of population growth of any year since the Great Depression.” The US population, it turns out, grew by slightly less than 0.7 percent compared to 2015. There’s some good news and bad news about this. First the bad news: the working-age population is growing even more slowly than that. Here it is for the 21st century:

Our working-age population continues to grow, but only at a rate of about 0.5 percent per year. But here’s the good news: at least we’re not Russia. Their working-age population started declining half a decade ago and is now “growing” at the rate of -0.8 percent per year:

And then there’s Japan. Their working-age population is also declining, but it didn’t even start the 21st century in positive territory. Currently their working-age population is growing at the rate of -1.2 percent per year:

The working-age population in the US isn’t growing very fast, but it’s growing faster than almost any other developed country.

Originally posted here: 

Raw Data: Working-Age Population Growth

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This May Be Trump’s Most Frightening and Dangerous Tweet Yet

by GracielaFitzwate Posted on December 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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With one tweet on Thursday, Donald Trump proved how dangerous and unstable his presidency could be.

Out of the blue, Trump weighed in on one of America’s most important national security issues: nuclear weapons. He tweeted:

In just 118 characters, Trump seemed to be reversing decades of bipartisan policy aimed at stopping the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. For decades, the United States has worked with Russia, the other major nuclear power, to reduce both nations’ nuclear arsenals. Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama have each negotiated treaties with Russia reducing nuclear stockpiles. Today, the United States and Russia each possess about 7,000 nuclear weapons, and there continue to be efforts to shrink these stockpiles.

Yet with a single tweet, Trump suggested he would move in the opposite direction and expand the US nuclear arsenal. To what end? Trump did not follow up with any other thoughts. But many experts contend that nuclear weapons will not bring greater security to the United States, given that the greatest risks these days come from nonstate actors, crises in the Middle East, and cyberwarfare.

Moreover, global efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons—as enshrined in the international Non-Proliferation Treaty—are predicated on Washington and Moscow collaborating to downsize their nuclear arsenals. By declaring that the United States would enlarge its nuclear arms collection, Trump was undermining the attempts to stop the spread of these weapons throughout the world.

The Trump team’s response did not make the situation any better. Spokesman Jason Miller issued a statement saying Trump was referring to “the threat of nuclear proliferation and the critical need to prevent it—particularly to and among terrorist organizations and unstable and rogue regimes.”

Uh, no, he wasn’t. And, still, this was an illogical point. Adding more nukes to the US stockpile will hardly stop terrorists or rogue regimes from seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. Miller was replying with a non sequitur.

Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund and a nuclear arms expert, says, “Can a tweet start and arms race? This one just might have.” He adds, “There are groups like Heritage Foundation arguing to expand our nuclear arsenal. If Trump was reflecting their thinking for not just new weapons but more weapons and new missions, we are entering new and very dangerous territory.”

With this tweet, Trump gave new fuel to two questions: whether he intends to drastically change US policy on nuclear arms control, and whether he and his team are capable of handling serious matters. It doesn’t get much more serious than nuclear weapons, and here was Trump seemingly shooting from the hip, without any apparent deliberation, on a critical national security matter—and with his staffers then forced to issue a nonsensical statement to back him up. It was clown time…with nuclear weapons.

Trump has suggested in years past that he believes a nuclear war is inevitable. So any tweet from him on this subject deserves great scrutiny—at least as much as his tweets about Alec Baldwin, SNL, and the musical Hamilton. The posting of this tweet, and his staff’s inability to explain it, are frightening signs that Trump is not ready for the task of controlling weapons that can destroy the world.

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This May Be Trump’s Most Frightening and Dangerous Tweet Yet

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The weird way that Obama’s press conference was actually, sort of, about climate change.

by IngridPeebles79 Posted on December 16, 2016

In his final press conference of 2016, President Obama — in his usual, staid tones — fielded question after question about Russia’s alleged election interference.

But Obama also reminded us that at the heart of Russia’s economic interests and relative power is its backward status as a petrostate.

“They are a smaller country; they are a weaker country; their economy doesn’t produce anything that anyone wants to buy except oil and gas and arms,” he said. “They don’t innovate. But, they can impact us if we lose track of who we are. They can impact us if we abandon our values.”

The Washington Post calls Trump’s relationship with Russia “the most obscure and disturbing aspect of his coming presidency.” Trump’s choice of Exxon’s Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State only underlines this: At Exxon, Tillerson had deals worth billions of dollars with Russia, some of which can only move forward if the U.S. lifts sanctions on the country.

These deals are only worth billions, though, if fossil fuels maintain their value. The idea that there is a “carbon bubble,” and fossil fuel companies are dangerously overvalued, is a threatening proposition to a petrostate. And, most likely, a Trump administration.

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The weird way that Obama’s press conference was actually, sort of, about climate change.

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Here are three reasons the world didn’t completely suck this week.

by OrenAmaral Posted on December 16, 2016

In his final press conference of 2016, President Obama — in his usual, staid tones — fielded question after question about Russia’s alleged election interference.

But Obama also reminded us that at the heart of Russia’s economic interests and relative power is its backward status as a petrostate.

“They are a smaller country; they are a weaker country; their economy doesn’t produce anything that anyone wants to buy except oil and gas and arms,” he said. “They don’t innovate. But, they can impact us if we lose track of who we are. They can impact us if we abandon our values.”

The Washington Post calls Trump’s relationship with Russia “the most obscure and disturbing aspect of his coming presidency.” Trump’s choice of Exxon’s Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State only underlines this: At Exxon, Tillerson had deals worth billions of dollars with Russia, some of which can only move forward if the U.S. lifts sanctions on the country.

These deals are only worth billions, though, if fossil fuels maintain their value. The idea that there is a “carbon bubble,” and fossil fuel companies are dangerously overvalued, is a threatening proposition to a petrostate. And, most likely, a Trump administration.

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Here are three reasons the world didn’t completely suck this week.

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We Still Have 1,496 More Days of Trump to Go

by MizunoC36rm Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump was eager this morning to fight back against the news that Vladimir Putin worked hard to get him elected:

Greg Sargent comments:

By referring to this episode, what Trump is inadvertently revealing here is that, yes, the complaint about Russian hacking to hurt Clinton did in fact precede the election, and this was widely and publicly known. Of course, there is ample other evidence that Trump is fully aware of this. The intel community had publicly declared it weeks before the election. Trump had reportedly been privately briefed on it by U.S. officials. Trump was confronted with evidence of the hack at a debate with Clinton that was watched by tens of millions of people. At the debate, he cast doubt on the notion that Russia had hacked the materials to hurt Clinton. And yet, as Mark Murray points out, Trump himself widely referenced the material dug up in the hacks at rallies, where he used that material to — wait for it — try to damage Clinton.

Yeah, Trump knows all this. He just doesn’t care. He knows that most people have poor memories for this kind of stuff and are likely to believe him if he says nobody talked about the Russian hacking during the campaign. Give him a few months and he’ll be tweeting about how no one brought up health care during the election, so why are they all so upset about it now?

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We Still Have 1,496 More Days of Trump to Go

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Here’s the Moment Trump’s Future Secretary of State Received an Award From Putin

by JeannetteDme Posted on December 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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The wait is over: President-elect Donald Trump finally announced his nominee for secretary of state Tuesday morning: Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil CEO and official “friend” of Russia.

In June 2013, Tillerson and other oil company executives were awarded the Order of Friendship by President Vladimir Putin—a high honor previously bestowed upon a former basketball coach in Ohio and a Russian art collector in Minnesota. Tillerson received the award after signing an agreement in 2011 with OAO Rosneft, a Russian state-owned oil company that gave ExxonMobil and Rosneft access to Russia’s rich Arctic energy resources. (That relationship became more complicated when the United States slapped Russia with sanctions over its annexation of Crimea and interference in Ukraine in 2014.)

Watch Putin announce the award and declare a new period of “full-fledged cooperation” in this video (above), published originally in full by the Kremlin.

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Here’s the Moment Trump’s Future Secretary of State Received an Award From Putin

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"False Flag" Is About to Become the New Benghazi

by Emely18Ajlw Posted on December 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest from the New York Times correspondent in Moscow:

Carter Page, you may recall, was the guy who was a Trump advisor, and then he wasn’t, and then maybe he was. Or maybe not. It all seemed to depend on whether he was in Trump’s good graces at the time. In any case, he’s now the second Trump supporter to suggest that the hacks of Democratic Party emails were actually part of a false flag operation. And he goes even further than John Bolton, suggesting that the CIA orchestrated the whole thing.

So…is this about to become a standard talking point on the right? Is “false flag operation” going to be the new Benghazi? Stay tuned.

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"False Flag" Is About to Become the New Benghazi

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Trump will nominate ExxonMobil’s CEO to run U.S. foreign policy.

by LandonH3214 Posted on December 10, 2016

This may sound like a hyperbolic joke, but unfortunately it isn’t: Rex Tillerson will join Trump’s cabinet of corporate chieftains as secretary of state.

Much like Trump’s picks to run other key cabinet departments such as Treasury, Labor, and Housing and Urban Development, Tillerson has no experience in government.

What he does have is 41 years of experience working at our largest oil company, including 12 years running it. Tillerson typically maxes out in donations to Republican candidates and he has a cozy relationship with Trump’s favorite petrostate kleptocrat, Vladimir Putin.

Like Trump himself, Tillerson brings an array of potential conflicts of interest to his future job. Green groups are already raising questions about some of them.

How does he feel about U.S. sanctions on Russia, which cost his company lucrative drilling contracts? And what about the Paris agreement, which the U.S. State Department led the way in negotiating and which set carbon emission reduction goals that would force ExxonMobil to keep much of its massive oil and gas reserves in the ground? Trump opposes the climate deal anyway, but how might Tillerson’s oil business background influence the administration’s global climate policies?

Then there’s the fact that Tillerson’s company is currently under investigation from state attorneys general for allegedly lying to the public about the science of climate change. As 350.org Executive Director May Boeve put it in a statement, “Tillerson deserves a federal investigation, not federal office.”

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Trump will nominate ExxonMobil’s CEO to run U.S. foreign policy.

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