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FOCUS | This Month's Ultimate Enemy - The Islamic State |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=32362"><span class="small">Jack Shafer, Reuters</span></a>
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Tuesday, 26 August 2014 13:12 |
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Shafer writes: "When at war - or about to go to war - the state craves greater acquiescence from its citizens and greater powers, and granted that acquiescence and those new powers it grows ever larger."
Shakir Wahiyib with other ISIS fighters. (photo: Reuters)
ALSO SEE: Dempsey: We Will Act If ISIS Threatens US
This Month's Ultimate Enemy - The Islamic State
By Jack Shafer, Reuters
26 August 14
 t an Aug. 21 Pentagon press conference, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel claimed that the Islamic State “is as sophisticated and well-funded as any group that we have seen. They’re beyond just a terrorist group. They marry ideology, a sophistication of strategic and tactical military prowess. They are tremendously well-funded.”
Perhaps sensing that his comparison hadn’t reached sufficiently hyperbolic velocity to escape earth orbit, Hagel immediately amended himself.
“Oh, this is beyond anything that we’ve seen. So we must prepare for everything,” he said [emphasis added], thereby vaulting the brutal Islamic State over the Iranians, the North Koreans, the Russians, the Chinese, and all other entrants into the Number 1 slot in our ever-churning power-ranking of international enemies.
Hagel wasn’t so much fear-mongering as he was fear-tending. War is the health of the state, as Randolph Bourne observed a century ago. When at war—or about to go to war—the state craves greater acquiescence from its citizens and greater powers, and granted that acquiescence and those new powers it grows ever larger. Every now and again a foe like the USSR appears, one with 12,000 nuclear warheads ready for delivery, which makes the job of fear-tending simple. At other times, as was the case last week at the Pentagon, it takes a supreme act of rhetoric to instill exploitable fear in the public. The textbook example of this came several months after the 9/11 attacks, when President George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address amalgamated Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and North Korea, and “their terrorist allies” into a unified “axis of evil.”
When Hagel poured his “beyond and everything” summation last week, he did so into an emotional cauldron. Less than two days before, the Islamic State had released its execution video of journalist James Foley, terrorizing the people who wouldn’t watch it and mortifying those who did. In that environment, the secretary of defense could have said U.S. intelligence had determined that the Islamic State was kidnapping orphans and loading them on a streetcar-to-hell it had built in its spare time, and the American public would have believed him. I might have believed him!
I’m not accusing Hagel of consciously hyping the Islamic State threat for nefarious political purposes. His response was standard for national security officials who have been caught napping during a crisis—and without a doubt the eruption of the Islamic State constitutes a crisis. Hagel and President Barack Obama, who less than a year ago called the Islamic State the “jayvee,” weren’t prepared for the Islamic State’s breakout, so it stands to reason that they might want to stoke a panic.
When the press isn’t panicked about the Islamic State, it’s confused, as is the case at the Financial Times. Its Aug. 25 piece, “Opaque structure adds to the challenge of defeating Isis” (registration required) portrays the group as extra menacing because it is decentralized, unlike the centralized Al Qaeda. Authority is “dispersed” inside the Islamic State, Washington think-tanker Anthony Cordesman tells the FT, and this has allowed its members to take their own wild initiatives. If the Islamic State were as centralized as the old Soviet Union, the press would fear-monger the flip-side. They’d be talking non-stop about the existential threat posed by the organization’s monolithic face.
Brookings Institution scholar F. Gregory Gause III assesses the Islamic State without panic in a Aug. 25 piece, nullifying Hagel’s scary “beyond and everything” pronouncement. He describes the Islamic State as the beneficiary of the “new Middle East cold war.” As existing state authorities in the region have lost control of their borders, proved unable to provide services (and protection) to their populations, and failed forge a common political identity, the Islamic State has risen.
But this rise does not necessarily make Islamic State strong and fearful as much as it showcases the relative weaknesses of the Syrian and Iraq governments. For all its ferocity, the Islamic State has acquired no regional or great power ally, Gause continues, no open patrons. It depends almost exclusively on banditry and protection rackets for its survival. The group’s great skill so far has been in uniting almost the entire world against it, making potential allies of nations that can’t stand each other, such as the United States and Iran. This knack for uniting countries that have “parallel, if not identical interests,” Gause predicts, will probably do the Islamic State in.
Enemies exist, of course. But boogeymen don’t. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to sell you something.
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FOCUS | Back to School, and to Widening Inequality |
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Tuesday, 26 August 2014 11:30 |
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Reich writes: "American kids are getting ready to head back to school. But the schools they're heading back to differ dramatically by family income."
Economist, professor, author and political commentator Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
Back to School, and to Widening Inequality
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
26 August 14
merican kids are getting ready to head back to school. But the schools they’re heading back to differ dramatically by family income.
Which helps explain the growing achievement gap between lower and higher-income children.
Thirty years ago, the average gap on SAT-type tests between children of families in the richest 10 percent and bottom 10 percent was about 90 points on an 800-point scale. Today it’s 125 points.
The gap in the mathematical abilities of American kids, by income, is one of widest among the 65 countries participating in the Program for International Student Achievement.
On their reading skills, children from high-income families score 110 points higher, on average, than those from poor families. This is about the same disparity that exists between average test scores in the United States as a whole and Tunisia.
The achievement gap between poor kids and wealthy kids isn’t mainly about race. In fact, the racial achievement gap has been narrowing.
It’s a reflection of the nation’s widening gulf between poor and wealthy families. And also about how schools in poor and rich communities are financed, and the nation’s increasing residential segregation by income.
According to the Pew Research Center’s analysis of 2010 census tract and household income data, residential segregation by income has increased during the past three decades across the United States and in 27 of the nation’s 30 largest major metropolitan areas.
This matters, because a large portion of the money to support public schools comes from local property taxes. The federal government provides only about 14 percent of all funding, and the states provide 44 percent, on average. The rest, roughly 42 percent, is raised locally.
Most states do try to give more money to poor districts, but most states cut way back on their spending during the recession and haven’t nearly made up for the cutbacks.
Meanwhile, many of the nation’s local real estate markets remain weak, especially in lower-income communities. So local tax revenues are down.
As we segregate by income into different communities, schools in lower-income areas have fewer resources than ever.
The result is widening disparities in funding per pupil, to the direct disadvantage of poor kids.
The wealthiest highest-spending districts are now providing about twice as much funding per student as are the lowest-spending districts, according to a federal advisory commission report. In some states, such as California, the ratio is more than three to one.
What are called a “public schools” in many of America’s wealthy communities aren’t really “public” at all. In effect, they’re private schools, whose tuition is hidden away in the purchase price of upscale homes there, and in the corresponding property taxes.
Even where courts have requiring richer school districts to subsidize poorer ones, large inequalities remain.
Rather than pay extra taxes that would go to poorer districts, many parents in upscale communities have quietly shifted their financial support to tax-deductible “parent’s foundations” designed to enhance their own schools.
About 12 percent of the more than 14,000 school districts across America are funded in part by such foundations. They’re paying for everything from a new school auditorium (Bowie, Maryland) to a high-tech weather station and language-arts program (Newton, MA).
“Parents’ foundations,” observed the Wall Street Journal, “are visible evidence of parents’ efforts to reconnect their money to their kids.” And not, it should have been noted, to kids in another community, who are likely to be poorer.
As a result of all this, the United States is one of only three, out of 34 advanced nations surveyed by the OECD, whose schools serving higher-income children have more funding per pupil and lower student-teacher ratios than do schools serving poor students (the two others are Turkey and Israel).
Other advanced nations do it differently. Their national governments provide 54 percent of funding, on average, and local taxes account for less than half the portion they do in America. And they target a disproportionate share of national funding to poorer communities.
As Andreas Schleicher, who runs the OECD’s international education assessments, told the New York Times, “the vast majority of OECD countries either invest equally into every student or disproportionately more into disadvantaged students. The U.S. is one of the few countries doing the opposite.”
Money isn’t everything, obviously. But how can we pretend it doesn’t count? Money buys the most experienced teachers, less-crowded classrooms, high-quality teaching materials, and after-school programs.
Yet we seem to be doing everything except getting more money to the schools that most need it.
We’re requiring all schools meet high standards, requiring students to take more and more tests, and judging teachers by their students’ test scores.
But until we recognize we’re systematically hobbling schools serving disadvantaged kids, we’re unlikely to make much headway.
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8 Budget Cuts BofA's $12B Tax Dodge Could Restore |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7118"><span class="small">Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 26 August 2014 09:25 |
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Gibson writes: "The U.S. government patted itself on the back when Bank of America was ordered to pay a recent $17 billion 'historic' settlement. BofA knew the mortgages it packaged and sold to investors were bogus, and the bank agreed to pay the fine in exchange for not having its criminal executives locked up."
(illustration: Occupy Our Homes)
8 Budget Cuts BofA's $12B Tax Dodge Could Restore
By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News
26 August 14
 he U.S. government patted itself on the back when Bank of America was ordered to pay a recent $17 billion “historic” settlement. BofA knew the mortgages it packaged and sold to investors were bogus, and the bank agreed to pay the fine in exchange for not having its criminal executives locked up. The idea of this being an acceptable punishment is laughable, since $17 billion is just a fraction of the $89 billion in revenue BofA took in last year. But the most despicable thing about this settlement is that BofA is allowed to deduct $12 billion of that fine from their taxes. For criminals as heinous as bankers, a settlement like this one is just a cost of doing business. Here’s a list of just a few things Bank of America’s criminal tax deduction could pay for:
1. More Space Exploration
With a budget of only $18 billion, NASA still manages to show us pictures of Mars, launch satellites beyond our solar system, and discover Earth-like planets that may very well support life just a few hundred light years away. Instead of giving Bank of America a tax deduction, the U.S. government could give NASA a $20 billion budget through 2020 to further explore Mars, or even find evidence of life elsewhere.
2. More Early Childhood Education
Head Start currently has an $8 billion budget, with the essential task of providing high-quality early childhood education. A majority of the human brain’s development happens between ages 0 and 5, and much of what kids learn in their earliest years determines how they’ll develop during their years in K-12 schools. The 2013 budget sequester slashed $400 million, which threatened to deny early education to 70,000 kids around the country. Head Start grantees laid off providers of early childhood education and closed some facilities to cover the costs. Bank of America’s tax deduction could not only undo those cuts, but increase the Head Start budget by a billion a year for 12 years.
3. More Food Assistance for Women, Infants, and Children
The budget sequester also impacted the WIC program, which 9 million low-income women and children depend on for help buying food. WIC’s bare-bones budget of $7 billion could be supplemented by $3 billion a year for 4 years solely with Bank of America’s settlement deduction. This means almost 3 million more low-income families could have help feeding their kids all the way to 2019.
4. More Environmental Protection
The EPA has been responsible for providing safe drinking water through infrastructure grants, addressing climate change, cleaning air pollution, mitigating coal mine runoff, and enforcing safety standards for manufacturers of dangerous chemicals – all on a budget of roughly $8 billion. President Obama’s EPA budget recommendation for the following fiscal year is $310 million less than the EPA is used to. Instead of cutting down on environmental protection, Bank of America’s $12 billion tax cut could be used to increase the EPA’s funding to $10 billion a year through 2020. There are likely to be more man-made environmental disasters in the coming years, and the EPA will need all the funding they can get to address them.
5. More Food Assistance for Adults
When signing the recent farm bill, President Obama’s pen also cut the budget for the food stamp program by $8.7 billion. This means 850,000 low-income households will lose $1080 in food assistance each year. With wages stagnating and food costs rising, this cut needlessly punishes hungry people across America. In 2012, 20 percent of kids in 37 states and DC went to bed hungry. In that same year, nearly one-third of kids in New Mexico and Mississippi didn’t have consistent access to food in their homes. Bank of America’s tax deduction could reverse all of those food stamp cuts and provide an extra $4 billion to the food stamp fund on top of that. Which would you choose – hungry kids or big banks?
6. Correcting Damage to Retirees’ Pensions in Mississippi
When financial institutions like Bank of America wrecked the economy with their greed and incompetence several years ago, they did lasting damage to state pension funds. Mississippi’s Public Employee Retirement System (PERS) took a substantial hit due to Bank of America's intentional misleading of the state’s investors about their bogus mortgage-backed securities. BofA paid a paltry $315 million settlement in 2011 for its crimes, but its recent $12 billion tax deduction could instead be used to address 80 percent of PERS’s $15 billion in unfunded liabilities for retirees.
7. Creating 40,000 Good-Paying Jobs for 6 Years
America’s infrastructure has been given a D+ by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Roads, bridges, and public transit in America are vastly underfunded, and there have been many calls for a new WPA-style jobs program to give our infrastructure some badly-needed upgrades. Bank of America could do its part by using its $12 billion tax deduction to create 40,000 new jobs, at $50,000 a year, to repair some of America’s crumbling infrastructure. $12 billion could keep 40,000 people earning a decent salary for 6 years, and would compound into more job growth as those people circulate that new money in their communities. Some of our roads get fixed, and working people earn a living. Everyone wins.
8. Restoring Cuts to Schools in 6 States
Bank of America could spend its $12 billion to reverse recent budget cuts in states where schools have been put on the chopping block. $5.9 billion would restore funding for schools in Texas to pre-recession levels. Kansas’ billion-dollar education shortfall could also be corrected in the same stroke, along with Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett’s $1 billion in education cuts. New Jersey schools could have Chris Christie's $1 billion in education cuts restored. Another $1.3 billion could help Florida schools recover from Rick Scott’s budget cuts. Since Scott Walker has been governor of Wisconsin, the Badger State’s schools have suffered $2.6 billion in cuts. The U.S. government could, in one fell swoop, correct all of these cuts by simply denying BofA’s settlement tax deduction.
By allowing BofA to skate on its crimes and pay negligible, tax-deductible settlements, our government is enabling future financial crimes. In a just society, these bankers would do the same amount of jail time for their crimes as burglars and car thieves do for theirs. But at the very least, we can demand that our tax dollars go toward things actually deserving of funds, instead of handouts to the crooks that caused this mess.
Carl Gibson, 26, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
, and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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Paul Krugman, Shame on You |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5494"><span class="small">Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 25 August 2014 14:05 |
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Weissman writes: "Love him or loathe him, the Nobel Prize-winning Paul Krugman has become a rock-star economist both here in Europe and in the United States, and one of the most important public intellectuals of our time."
Paul Krugman being interviewed by Bill Moyers. (photo: Moyers & Co.)
Paul Krugman, Shame on You
By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
25 August 14
 ove him or loathe him, the Nobel Prize-winning Paul Krugman has become a rock-star economist both here in Europe and in the United States, and one of the most important public intellectuals of our time.
I happen to love Paul’s work, and have written enthusiastically about his popularization of British economist John Maynard Keynes. As I paraphrased their joint mantra for a rational economic policy:
When times are tough and the private sector pulls back, borrow or print money to stimulate demand. When growth returns, pay down the borrowing, an essential follow-through for both Keynes and Krugman. Timing is crucial, and now is the time to spend to promote growth, not to cut back in the name of austerity.
I was also inspired by Paul’s cut-glass opposition to the Bush-Cheney War on Iraq, and joined in spirit with Loudon Wainwright III in singing “The Krugman Blues.”
I read the New York Times, it’s where I get the news.
Paul Krugman’s on the op-ed page, that where I get the blues.
If only the Times had put Paul on the front page in the place of Judith Miller and her “journalistic” colleagues with their government sponsored hooey about Saddam Hussein’s long-gone Weapons of Mass Destruction.
All of which explains my “shock and awe” last week on reading Paul’s “Why We Fight Wars,” in which he expressed his thoughts on Ukraine.
“It’s only a guess,” he wrote, “but it seems likely that Vladimir Putin thought he could overthrow Ukraine’s government, or at least seize a large chunk of its territory, on the cheap – a bit of deniable aid to the rebels, and it would fall into his lap.”
Paul then echoed Justin Fox of the Harvard Business Review, who suggested that Putin may have gone to war to distract the attention of the Russian people from their slowing economic growth. Paul even added that Putin may escalate the War in Ukraine rather than lose face.
I would not put any of this past Putin, whom I see as a corrupt, kleptocratic, ultra-nationalistic and anti-democratic gay-basher more in line with Marine Le Pen and her Front National here in France than with anything that progressive Americans should ever support. But I find it absurd that one of America’s leading liberal thinkers could lay the entirety of the Ukrainian conflict at Putin’s feet without once mentioning some annoying bits of history. Whatever Putin does or does not think, he did not overthrow Ukraine’s legally elected government. Washington and its European allies did, as is documented in grim detail in “Meet the Americans Who Put Together the Coup in Kiev” (Part I and Part II.)
This was the immediate situation to which Putin was reacting, and that has to be part of the story whether one approves or condemns the way he chose to react. In fact, the unspeakable Putin was responding rather predictably to decades of American and European provocation.
Would Krugman and those who repeat the same patter deny that president George H.W. Bush and German chancellor Helmut Kohl tried to soft-soap Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev into believing that they would not expand NATO into the former countries of the Warsaw Pact?
Or that President Bill Clinton led the move to expand NATO eastward toward Russia?
Or that President George W. Bush picked up on Clinton’s covert support for the popular uprising against Serbia strongman Slobodon Milosevic and organized “color revolutions” in Ukraine and other newly independent nations along the border of the former Soviet Union?
Or that the Obama administration – with active help from Bill and Hillary Clinton – put together what participants called a second “Orange Revolution” to bring Kiev closer to NATO and the EU?
In the first Cold War, too many well-meaning liberals like Krugman bought into the idea that Washington and its NATO allies were simply responding to the threat of Soviet expansion, initially under Josef Stalin. Most historians now admit that the story was far more complex, and Krugman surely understands better than most how a Pentagon-based Keynesianism built up the Military-Industrial Complex that encouraged American support for the Cold War.
Knowing our past mistakes will not allow us to predict the mistakes of our future. But it should at least motivate us to look at the American and European role in Ukraine before playing guessing games about Vladimir Putin.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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ov. Rick Perry of Texas is running for president again. What are his chances? Will he once again become a punch line? I have absolutely no idea. This isn’t a horse-race column.
