EFTA00951257.pdf

From: Gregory Brown To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bcc: jeevacation@gmail.com Subject: Greg Brown's Weekend Reading and Other Things.... 01/06/13 Date: Sun, 06 Jan 2013 17:16:17 +0000 Attachments: No_Easy_Answers_in_Mali_NYT_Editorial_December_30,_2012.pdf; Mali overview BBC_News.pdf; Mali_overview_NYT_December_31,_2012.pdf; Can:GolbalizaJon_Survive_2013_Robert_J_Samuelson_TWP_12_31_12.pdf; What_will_replace_the_globalization_model_David_Smick_TWP_October_16,_2012.pdf; Republicans_Adrift_Richard_Cohen_TWP_December_31,_2012.pdf; Bryan_Stevenson,_We_Need_to_Talk_About_an_Injustice_TED_November_20,_2012.pdf; Fixing_the_economy,_a_new_focus_for_Congress_Katrina_vanden_Heuvel_TWP_Decemb er_31,_2012.pdf; Key_points_offiscal_cliff_deal_Reuters_01_02_2013.pdf; Thefall_of_the_universal_bank_The_Economist_11-21-2013.pdf; Top_Ten_Greentech_VC_Deals_of_2012_GreemtechMedia_01_02_2013.pdf; Moyers_&_Company_Anthony_Leiserowitz_on_Making_People_Care_About_Climate_Ch ange_01_04_13.pdf; Bill_Moyers_Essay,_The_Gun_Lobby's_Firepower_01_14_13.pdf Dear Friends.... Welcome to my first weekend readings of 2013 and as many of you know, I am a huge fan of the columnist, Bill Moyers and this week on Moyers & Company, Bill discusses climate change with research scientist, lecturer and Director of The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, Anthony Leiserowitz. Bill ends this week's show on an essay on the Gun Lobby Firepower. If you have the time, I strongly urge that you either read the attached transcript or use the links below to see both. CLIMATE CHANGE httpjAttioyetn segment ntho -lelserowitz-on•making•people-care-about•climate-changd Bill starts by suggesting that the world should open their eyes because Climate Change caused by global warming is the one crisis that could make all the others irrelevant. In the past several weeks two major scientific reports concluded that unless we slow the release of global emissions from fossil fuels, slow it enough to keep the planet's temperature from rising by two degrees Celsius, (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the earth's polar ice sheets will melt away -- with catastrophic consequences, such as Hurricane Sandy and the other extreme weather of the past two years, is just the beginning. Because four, five degrees, that doesn't sound like very much as we see the temperature change more from night to day, I would like you to think about it as how the human body responds to temperature changes. Your body is usually at, 98.6 degrees. If your temperature rises by one degree you feel a little off, but you can still go to work. You're fine. When it rises by two degrees and you're now feeling sick, you're probably going to take the day off because you definitely don't feel good. And in fact, you're getting everything from hot flashes to cold chills, okay. At three you're starting to get really sick. And at four degrees and five degrees your brain is actually slipping into a coma, as you are close to death. Obviously there is a no correlation between human body and the planet's temperature, but like the human body the planet is a finely tuned organism and climate change caysed by temperature change causes radical consequences. Currently we are already scheduled, unless we change direction to go through the two-degree mark. And in fact, we're heading on towards three degrees, four degrees and perhaps even six degrees centigrade warmer than in the past. Unfortunately the world after two and especially after three degrees starts getting much more frightening, EFTA00951257 and that's exactly what the scientists keep telling us. But will we pay attention to those warning signs? We are no longer talking about what can happen in 2050 of 2100, climate change is happening now and we are currently hurtling towards the tipping point of no return. BILL MOYERS: There was a destructive typhoon in the Philippines recently as you know that killed over a thousand people, caused massive damage and left over a million people displaced. And as fate would have it at that very time delegates from around the world were meeting in Doha for the climate change conference. And the representative from the Philippines, while there hearing about this typhoon back in his home made this very impassioned plea. MR. YEB SANO (the Philippines representative: There is massive and widespread devastation back at home. Hundreds of thousands of people have been rendered homeless, and the ordeal is far from over. Madame Chair, we have never had a typhoon like Bopha, which just wreaked havoc in a part of the country which has never seen a storm like this in half a century. And I am making an urgent appeal, not as a negotiator, not as a leader of my delegation, but as a Filipino. I appeal to the whole world. I appeal to the leaders from all over the world to open our eyes to the stark reality that we face. I appeal to ministers. The outcome of our work is not about what our political masters want. It is about what is demanded of us by seven billion people. I appeal to all — please, no more delays, no more excuses. Please let Doha be remembered as the place where we found the political will to turn things around. And let 2012 be remembered as the year the world found the courage to do so. To find the courage to take responsibility for the future we want. I ask of all of us here, if not us then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where? BLL MOYER'S ESSAY: The Gun Lobby's Firepower Even as sadness turns to outrage over the Newtown tragedy, andpowerful coalitions ofleaders and celebrities speak out, those who produce, push, andpromote guns continue unfazed and unabated. In this broadcast essay, Bill reports on how the NBA and gun merchants continue to strong-arm Congress and state legislatures into keeping any and all discussion ofsensible gun control off the table. http://billmoyers.corn/segment/bill-moyers-essay-the-gun-lobbys-firepower/ BILL MOYERS: You may remember that we spoke about guns just a few days before Christmas, following the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. So did Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association. WAYNE LAPIERRE: The only way, the only way to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. BILL MOYERS: Listening to LaPierre, my jaw dropped, and it occurred to me that he might well have plagiarized his vision of a wholly armed nation from another "man of the people" of forty years ago, the protagonist in the famous sit-com "All In the Family." When a local TV station comes out in favor of gun control, Archie Bunker hits the airwaves with a rebuttal, which he watches at home with his family. ARCHIE BUNKER in All In The Family: Good evening, everybody. This here is Archie Bunker of 704 Hauser Street, veteran of the big war, speaking on behalf of guns for everybody[...] Now I want to talk about another thing that's on everybody's minds today, and that's your stick-ups and your skyjackings, which, if that were up to me, I could end the skyjackings tomorrow. MICHAEL •MEATHEAD' STIVIC in All In The Family: You could? ARCHIE BUNKER in All In The Family: All you got to do is arm all your passengers. He ain't got no more moral superiority there, and he ain't going to dare to pull out no rod. And then your airlines, they wouldn't have to search the passengers on the ground no more, they just pass out the pistols at the beginning of the trip, and they just pick them up at the end! Case closed. EFTA00951258 BILL MOYERS: Case closed. Except that Archie Bunker's a fictional character, created by Norman Lear, who knew better. Not Wayne LaPierre--he's real and he means business. Big business. Every time we have another of these mass slayings and speak of gun control, weapon sales go up. And guess what? As the journalist Lee Fang reports in The Nation magazine, "For every gun or package of ammunition sold at participating stores, a dollar is donated to the NRA." So naturally, in a country where even life and death are measured by the profit margin, the cure for gun violence becomes, yes, more guns. Bigger profits. Never mind that just before LaPierre spoke, three people were shot and killed outside Altoona, Pennsylvania. Or that early on Christmas Eve morning, in Webster, New York, two volunteer firemen were called to the scene of a fire, then executed by an ex-con who allegedly set the blaze and murdered them with the same kind of assault rifle used against those school kids and their teachers in Newtown. Or that on New Year's Eve, in Sacramento, California, reportedly in a fight over a spilled drink, a 22-year-old opened fire in a bar, killing two and wounding two others. In fact, in just those few weeks since the Newtown slaughter of the innocent, more than 400 people have died from guns in America. That should boost the last quarter profit margins. So not surprising, the merchants of death are experiencing a happy new year. We can't forget. We mustn't relent. We have to keep talking about this, because Wayne LaPierre and the NRA are insidious and powerful predators. Have you seen the reports in both the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Washington Post of how, 16 years ago, the NRA managed to get Congress to pull funding on gun violence studies at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention? And just two years ago, NRA henchmen even snuck a provision into the Affordable Care Act that prevents doctors from collecting information on their patients' gun use. As Wayne LaPierre's brazen call for an armed populace makes clear, the odds don't favor common sense. There are always members of Congress willing to do the gun lobby's bidding as they profess their love of the second amendment and wait like hungry house pets for the next NRA campaign donation. Every American a gun-toter is a frightening vision of our future. It doesn't have to be, if only we stop and think about where the Wayne LaPierre's would take us. That's what a fellow named Frank James did. He stopped, he thought, he changed directions. He's a pawn shop owner in Seminole, Florida, his youngest child is six. Frank James told a local ABC station he has decided to stop selling guns. FRANK JAMES on ABC Local News: It'll probably cause my business to go out of business because it was a big part of it, but I just couldn't live with myself. I thought, wow, this is crazy. As a gun dealer myself, I'm like, yes, we need more gun control. Guns are getting into the wrong hands of the wrong people. BILL MOYERS: He also said "I'm not going to be a part of it anymore. Conscience wins over making money." Thank you, Mr. James. Andfor those he believe that more guns is the answer to reducing gun violence, I asked why don't we allow passengers to carry guns on airplane? The answer is obvious. Keeping all guns off of all airplanes has stopped gun violence, so Mr. LaPierre here is the evidence. The President signing the compromised bill that allowed the country to avoid the "fiscal cliff" other than extending the unemployment benefits for another year — is worthless as it did not do one thing to solve the initial problem — cutting the deficit and when the Congressional Budget Office scored it, they said that it will add $4 trillion to the national debt. Additionally in two months we will be going through this same dance — a fiscal showdown in late February, when the two-month delay in the sequester coincides with the deadline to raise the country's $16.4 trillion debt limit. Conservatives are upset because the new bill does not do anything to address government spending, especially the unsustainable entitlement programs. But for strategic reasons, I understand that these are the only cards that the Democrats and the President can play during the February negotiations. But my problem is that none of the parties are willing to address the ever growing defense spending which is more than 27% of the nation's budget. And they also totally ignore corporate taxes and EFTA00951259 loopholes. What about economic inequality and tax fairness? Finally, the $620 billion in additional revenues is $62 billion a year, which is not nearly enough of a revenue raise to off-set the requirement of huge cuts in social programs, without seriously hurting children, poor and the elderly. Especially when almost no Republicans will raise any more taxes to fix the deficit problem, which was suppose to be the initial issue. Compromise for the sake of compromise, is a failure when it doesn't fix the problem.... Let's remember that the Bush Tax Cuts were suppose to be temporary. And worse all that they produce is a larger deficit with almost all of the economic benefits going to the very rich and corporations. As for Conservative Republicans and Grover Norquist who refuse to acknowledge that supply-side economics does not work in a vacuum and refuse to give an inch on raising revenues from increasing taxes, shame on you. How can you negotiate a compromise when one side truly believes that their position is the only truth/way and refuse to negotiate an inch? How either side spins the outcome of this latest compromise, both the process and its temporary solution, makes everyone losers, especially the American people. Shame on Congress.... Shame on both Parties... Shame on the media... And shame on our President, who in the end should of and could have done more, even if it ment going over the cliff for weeks or months.... Because we need long-term solutions, not temporary fixes, no matter how painful things become in the short-term. Whatever your feeling are about the bill that Congress approved and the President signed this week to avert $600bn in automatic tax increases and spending cuts known as the "fiscal cliff" Here are the key details: • Postpones the first installment of automatic spending cuts for two months while Congress works on a plan replace them. • Raises $620bn in revenue over 10 years through a series of tax increases on wealthier Americans. • Permanently extends tax cuts enacted in 2001 under former Republican President George W. Bush for income below $400,000 per individual, or $450,000 per family. Income above that level would be taxed at 39.6pc, up from the current top rate of 35pc. • Above that income threshold, capital gains and dividends tax rates would return to 20pc, from 15pc. Caps personal exemptions and itemized deductions for income above $250,000, or $300,000 per household. Raises estate tax rate to 40pc for estates of more than $10m per couple, up from the current level of 35pc. Includes a permanent fix for the alternative minimum tax. Extends unemployment insurance benefits for one year for two million people. • Extends child tax credit, earned income tax credit, and tuition tax credit for five years. • Extends research and experimentation tax credit, and the wind production tax credit through the end of 2013. Extends 50pc bonus depreciation for one year. • Avoids a cut in payments to doctors treating patients on Medicare - the "doc fix." As some of you know I am a devotee of TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences -- the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh UK each summer -- TED EFTA00951260 includes the award-winning TED Talks video site, the Open Translation Project and TED Conversations, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize. This week i have included a talk by Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice. Bryan Stevenson is a public-interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated and the condemned. He's the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based group that has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent prisoners on death row, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults. One recent victory: A ban on life imprisonment without parole sentences imposed on children convicted of most crimes in the United States. In this talk Brian challenges TED, his audience and everyone else to understand that the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends toward justice. That we cannot be full evolved human beings until we care about human rights and basic dignity. That all of our survival is tied to the survival of everyone. That our visions of technology and design and entertainment and creativity have to be married with visions of humanity, compassion and justice. And more than anything, for those of us who share this belief, we keep our eyes on the prize and hold on. Stevenson: "I actually believe that the TED community needs to be more courageous. We need to find ways to embrace these challenges, these problems, the suffering. Because ultimately, our humanity depends on everyone's humanity. I've learned very simple things doing the work that I do. It's just taught me very simple things. i've come to understand and to believe that each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. I believe that for every person on the planet. I think if somebody tells a lie, they're not just a liar. I think if somebody takes something that doesn't belong to them, they're not just a thief I think even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer. And because of that there's this basic human dignity that must be respected by law. I also believe that in many parts of this country, and certainly in many parts of this globe, that the opposite ofpoverty is not wealth. I don't believe that. I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice. Andfinally, i believe that, despite the fact that it is so dramatic and so beautiful and so inspiring and so stimulating, we will ultimately not be judged by our technology, we won't be judged by our design, we won't be judged by our intellect and reason. Ultimately, you judge the character of a society, not by how they treat their rich and the powerful and the privileged, but by how they treat the poor, the condemned, the incarcerated. Because it's in that nexus that we actually begin to understand truly profound things about who we are." I invite you to download, link-up and see this TED talk, as well as read the transcript: http://www.smittisonianmag.com/video/Bryan-Stevenson-on-the-Injustices-in-America.html One of my father's favorite sayings was that "history is always re-written by the winners." Nowhere is this truer than here in the United States. From the false nobility of the Civil War, to the bravery of immigrates who settled the West with the Indians portrayed as savages, to the assertion by Republicans who still claim that the Bush Tax Cuts were and economic success and the universal theme of American exceptionalism of being first and best in everything. Oliver Stone's new 10-part documentary series, "The Untold History of the United States," based on historian Peter Kuznick 750-page companion volume of the same name, currently airing Mondays on Showtime is exceptional. This new one-hour series features human events that at the time went under reported, but crucially shaped America's unique and complex history. The first chapter explores the birth of the American Empire by focusing on Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. Through examination of key decisions during World War II, discover unsung heroes such as American Henry Wallace and explore the demonization of the Soviets and the series continues through dropping the bomb, the Cold War, Viet Nam and ending with decisions made by the Bush/Cheney Administration. In mainstream settings we are taught about World War II and its aftermath as if it were a straight moral course taken by the USA. By way of example, consider the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945. Most EFTA00951261 mainstream sources in the USA insist, without question, that the use of the atomic bombs was essential to ending the war without massive US and Japanese casualties. Yet few mainstream sources point to the real fear that the Japanese High Command had: the entry of the Soviet Union into the war and its devastating impact on Japanese troops in Manchuria and Korea (and the possible invasion of Japan by Soviet troops). Stone presents what can be called a "counter-narrative"through an in-depth investigation and use of archival footage leading the viewer to ask a very simple, yet profound question: Was the usage of the atomic bombs aimed at ending World War II or, in the alternative, putting the world on notice—and the Soviet Union in particular—of the power possessed by the USA? As Stone proceeds, the story becomes more complicated, interesting and certainly eye- opening. The devastating impact of the domestic Cold War on progressive social movements is something with which we live to this day since, as Stone demonstrates, the Cold War anti-communism was not aimed at any alleged 'communist menace' but at forces at home that were attempting to deepen the reforms that had started with Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal." One can conclude from the series that the dominance of the super-rich, the so-called 1 percent, illuminated by the Occupy Movement, is in many ways the direct outgrowth of the blunting of movements for social justice first during the early Cold War, and then later in the 1970s and1980s; in the last case with a new and different form of repression. The series also focuses on many of the usual suspects including Truman, Joseph McCarthy, The Shah of Iran, Dwight Eisenhower, Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev , JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev and the lesser known players including Robert Oppenheimer, John Foster Dulles, General Curtis LeMay, Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Don Rumsfeld and many others in the Clinton, Reagan, Clinton and Bush Administrations, as well as Potsdam, the Manhattan Project, Bay of Pigs, Yalta and WMDs. A few tidbits: - The seeds of the Cold War began in 1917 when the UK and British sent 10,000 troops to help put down the Russian Revolution, to kill it in its cradle as — "strangle it in its cradle,"Churchill says. So that enmity between the U.S. and the Russian/Soviet government goes back to that point, which is central at the conflict — at Versailles. And they have two visions: you've got Wilson's vision and you've got Lenin's vision for the world. - Henry A Wallace, probably the most Liberal VP in US history is chased off the ticket by Conservative Democrats. - Prior to the start of WWII the Soviet Union was urging the United States and the Western capitalist nations to rise up against Hitler, to stop Hitler, as the Soviets understood what he was a serious threat. But there were people in the West who didn't want to stop Hitler, because they hated communism more than they hated fascism, and they were hoping that Germany would destroy the Soviet Union. - Until the attack of Pearl Harbor Hitler and Germany had a lot of support in the US, including Joseph Kennedy and Henry Ford gave Hitler $50,000 every year on his birthday, and he was awarded the highest honor a foreigner could be given by the Third Reich. - Roosevelt had a suspicion of the English empire and was trying to balance the Soviet interests with American interests as well as British interests. As such he didn't want to be taken for a ride and save England to have England re-colonize the world, which is what they did. - Harry Truman became president it was a bit of an accident. The ugly story is how the party bosses who ran the Democratic convention put him on the ticket and when he inherited the presidency, he wasn't prepared for it. And that Truman used the "N" word in referring to Blacks. - Khrushchev first proposed both a test-ban treaty with the goal of the elimination of all nuclear weapons. - At the time of the over throw of Fulgencio Batista foreign business interests controlled 80% of Cuba's wealth, with United Fruit Company, having gobbled up 1.9 million acres of land in Cuba for the cultivation of sugar. - In Indonesia, Kennedy's policy represented a break from Eisenhower's efforts to overthrow socialist Achmed Sukarno who wanted greater control over mineral resources. - Kennedy, during the last few months of his life confided to insiders that he wanted to shut down the war in Vietnam, starting after getting re-elected in 1964 and getting all American troops out of by 1965. - The recurring theme that the USA is deathly afraid of seeming weak, and will kill anyone, anything, to prove they aren't. EFTA00951262 - Gulf of Tonkin incident was 100% 183's fantasy - McNamara held grudges against Vietnam even unto the day he died - The Vietnam War bombings were to bomb "anything that moved under them" and that all people under planes were to be seen as the enemy - The US had concentration camps in Vietnam during the majority of the war. These were not POW camps, but literal concentration camps (like the kind the Brits used on the Boers in South Africa) where entire villages were sent to camps and guarded by corrupt SVA troops. - Eisenhower was DEEPLY worried that he made a deal with the devil with the Military Industrial Complex - The "boom" we had in the 60s and 70s was all war profiteering In the book, ^The Untold History" adeptly chronicles the devastating humanitarian costs of the Vietnam War and its expansion into Laos and Cambodia and has an excellent section on the abuses of power of the Nixon administration as well as its détente policy. The book goes on to effectively chart the growth of the neoconservative movement in the Vietnam War's aftermath, provides a thoughtful analysis of Jimmy Carter and his links to the elitist Trilateral Commission and demonstrates the lack of intellectual acumen of both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who were unfit for office. The authors also chronicle how neocon intellectuals helped to subvert nuclear arms control agreements with the Soviet Union and deceived the public in their push for war with Iraq in 1991 and again in 2003. The Reagan administration's support for death squads in Central America provided a preview of the murderous violence promoted by chicken-hawks (most had gotten draft deferments in the Vietnam era) during the War on Terror. After his election victory in 2008, Barrack Obama took over management of a "wounded empire" and failed to hold Bush administration officials accountable for their crimes, while escalating the Af-Pak war and robotic drone strikes that have killed many innocents. Supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement, Kuznick and Stone emphasize that Obama's regressive policies in both foreign and domestic policy were a product of his reliance on large corporations for campaign financing and also leadership failings. It is only through pressure from below that real change might be achieved. I was so blown away watching the series, I purchased the 750 page hardback book that is the companion to the Showtime documentary series, authored by both Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick. -- It challenges the prevailing orthodoxies of traditional history books in this thoroughly researched and rigorously analyzed looks at the dark side of American history. In reading reviews by conservatives, (with one reviewer calling it "Utopian socialist pabulum" and another "use of scapegoating and simplistic story lines make falsehoods easy for some people to dIgest,"I feel that even with its obvious liberal bias, it gives readers (the audience) another way of looking at American History since WW1, especially living in a country where Creationism is taught as science in Texas schools. I am sure that many of the assumptions of what could have been employs a bit of a cinematic/literary license, but both the series and the companion book provides an enormous amount of facts and alternative narratives for serious consideration, especially when no one can refute that Henry Wallace (who is often skipped over in history books) would have substantially different decisions than Harry Truman. And though flawed, Untold History of the US should succeed in reorienting our perspective. Oliver Stone's "Untold History of the US" - Excellent MUST WATCH show WEEKEND READING With conflicts still brewing in Sudan and Somali, and a full blown civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo both the international news media and public outside of the African Continent have almost ignored the fact that there were two coup d'etat in the country of Mali in 2O12. Landlocked (Surrounded by Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger, Algeria and the size of Texas & California combined), with a population of approximately 12 million, Mali is one of the poorest in the world, as a result of decades of draughts, rebellions and a coup since its independence from France in 1960. After years of one party rule, Mali held its first multi-party election in 1992 with Alpha Oumar IConare winning a second term in 1997 — 2OO2. In 2OO2 Amadou Toumani Toure was elected President and in 2006 he government signed an Algerian-brokered peace deal with Tuareg rebels EFTA00951263 seeking greater autonomy for their northern desert region. Tuareg was reelected in 2007. A Saharan branch of al-Qaeda was quick to move into this increasingly lawless area, and seized control of the Tuareg north after the March 2012 military coup by mutinous soldiers in the capital, Bamako , effectively seceding from the rest of Mali and establishing a harsh form of Islamic law. In the days after the military coup, the Tuareg rebels seized much of the desert expanse in northern Mali, declaring it an independent state called Azawad. But the Tuareg rebels — called the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, known as the M.N.L.A. — were then pushed into the background by the fierce ascendancy of radical Islamists, who have imposed a strict form of Shariah law on the region and now control the principal towns of Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal. The Islamists have also embarked on a campaign of destroying religious shrines that has drawn condemnation from the United Nations and the International Criminal Court. The group is trying to stamp out what it sees as examples of decadent Western influence, and has gone after the monuments that have symbolized Timbuktu's eminence as a center of broad-minded Islamic teaching for centuries. In the wake of the Islamist takeover, more than 90,000 Malian refugees have fled to camps in Mauritania's remote eastern edge. Some of the Tuareg rebel leaders have taken refuge in Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital. In interviews, several said that despite considerable military assets and deep knowledge of the tricky desert terrain, the Tuareg would not take up arms against the Islamists unless they received assistance, diplomatic recognition and unspecified guarantees from outside powers. On July 18, the government of Mali formally asked the International Criminal Court to investigate atrocities attributed to groups of armed rebels, including Islamic extremists. While much alarm has been expressed about the extremist ministate in northern Mali, the situation in Bamako, the capital, is dire in its own way, with a worsening climate of repression and intimidation. Hooded gunmen have abducted and beaten journalists at night. Soldiers who opposed the military junta have been tortured or forcibly "disappeared." Those who beat the country's elderly interim president have escaped without charges. Rather than taking on the Islamists who have seized northern Mali, the military in the south appears intent on striking back at rivals who carried out a failed countercoup in late April. The extremist Islamist militias that seized control of northern Mali have given sanctuary to notorious terrorist groups like Nigeria's Boko Haram and Algeria's Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a group that Washington suspects may have been involved in the September attack on the American consulate in Libya. Needless to say, neighboring countries are understandably eager to help Mali's army expel these militias. This month, the United Nations Security Council unanimously approved a resolution supporting an African-led military force of 3,30o to begin preparing for that mission. But there are formidable obstacles, the biggest being the political ambitions and military ineffectiveness of Mali's army. The resolution also calls for contributions to finance the operation, estimated to cost more than $200 million a year, though it is unclear which nations would be willing to pay. Washington played a useful role in the Security Council deliberations by insisting on an initial period of planning and attention to human rights concerns before any military action takes place. The transformation of northern Mali into a sanctuary for terrorists and the subjection of its people to medieval cruelties are a threat to the entire West African region. But even with the Security Council vote, it seems unrealistic to expect an effective solution anytime soon. This week in the New York Times editorial — No Easy Answers in Mali - the title speaks for itself.... For more information please read it and the other attached pieces on Mali. EFTA00951264 As Robert Samuelson wrote this week in The Washington Post— Can globalization survive 2013? For decades, growing volumes of cross-border trade and money flows have fueled strong economic growth. But something remarkable is happening; trade and international money flows are slowing and, in some cases, declining. David Smick, the perceptive editor of the International Economy magazine, calls the retreat "deglobalization." What's unclear is whether this heralds prolonged economic stagnation and rising nationalism or, optimistically, makes the world economy more stable and politically acceptable. To Americans, some aspects of deglobalization will seem delicious. Take manufacturing. Globalization has sucked factory jobs from the United States. Now, the tide may be turning. Just recently, Apple announced a $100 million investment to return some Mac computer production home. Though tiny, the decision reflects a trend. General Electric's sprawling Appliance Park in Louisville once symbolized the United States' post-World War II manufacturing prowess, with employment peaking at 23,000 in 1973. Since then, jobs have shifted abroad or succumbed to automation. But now GE is returning production of water heaters, refrigerators and other appliances to Appliance Park from China and Mexico. Year-end employment is reckoned at 3,600, up 90 percent from a year earlier, writes Charles Fishman in an excellent article in December's Atlantic. Nor is GE alone, Fishman notes. Otis is moving some elevator production from Mexico to South Carolina. Wham-O is shifting Frisbee molding from China to California. The main reason for the revival of manufacturing revival in the US is that China's labor cost advantage has eroded. In 2000, Chinese factory wages averaged 52 cents an hour, but annual double-digit percentage increases will bring that to $6 an hour in high-skilled industries by 2015. Although wages of U.S. production workers average $19 an hour, there are other non-wage factors that favor the United States. American workers are more productive; automation has reduced labor's share of expenses; and cheap natural gas further reduces costs. Finally, higher oil prices have boosted freight rates for imports. It is said that by 2015, China's overall cost advantage will shrivel to 7 percent. As important, it says, the United States will maintain significant cost advantages over other developed-country manufacturers: 15 percent over France and Germany; 21 percent over Japan; and 8 percent over Great Britain. The United States will be a more attractive production platform. Imports will weaken; exports will strengthen. Economist predict between 2.5 million and 5 million new factory jobs by 2020. (For perspective: 5.7 million manufacturing jobs disappeared from 2000 to 2010.) For years, the world economy has been wildly lopsided: China and some other countries ran big trade surpluses; the United States was perennially in massive deficit. Similar imbalances existed in Europe. Now, slumps have dampened the American and European appetite for imports. The upshot is that "China and others are recalibrating their export-led economic strategies" to focus more on domestic demand, argues economist Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute. That's good, he says; the world economy will be more balanced. Likewise, erratic capital flows have triggered past financial crises. Slower flows may promote stability. The search for larger markets and lower costs drove investment, trade, economic growth and job creation around the world. That's weakened, and there's "no new model to replace it." Domestic demand will prove an inadequate substitute. Central banks (the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan) have tried to fill the void with hyper-easy money policies. Smick fears damaging outcomes: currency wars as countries strive to capture greater shares of stagnant export markets and burst "asset bubbles" caused by easy money. In October 2012 David M. Smick wrote in The Washington Post — What will replace the globalization model? Economist are saying that the globalization model of the past 30 years is cracking up as the growth of total global exports has collapsed. And there appears to be no new model to replace it. Even China and India, which were thought able to decouple from the weakness of the industrialized world, have fallen victim to the EFTA00951265 seizing up of global trade. As a result the world is at the edge of a currency war with at least 12 countries beyond China manipulating their currencies against the dollar for trade advantage. Financial liberalization, including the free flow of capital, is also under worldwide assault. Banks are rapidly becoming more nationalistic. This trend is heightened by regulatory bathers implemented in the wake of the global financial crisis and the subsequent euro-zone crisis. It is now more difficult for investment capital to move across borders. The euro zone is at the heart of this deglobalization trend. European banks have traditionally been the source of roughly 80 percent of trade financing in emerging markets. Now these severely undercapitalized banks are forced to bring that capital home, and it is not clear that U.S., Japanese or Chinese banks are in a position to fill the gap. Capital scarcity combined with the need for banks to retain more capital are inhibiting global trade financing and ratcheting the deglobalization trend into higher gear. The U.S. economy can limp along under these conditions, but achieving the level of robust growth needed for full employment will be difficult. The rise of geopolitical tensions from globalization's collapse will increase U.S. investor nervousness, contributing to a debilitating risk-averse environment. The globalization period that began in the late 1970s, slowly progressed in the 1980s and soared to extraordinary heights after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall led to a doubling of the global free-market labor force — from 2.7 billion to 6 billion. In the United States alone, globalization led to 40 million new jobs under both Republican and Democratic presidents. Gary Hufbauer of the Peterson Institute has pointed out that America has been "11 trillion richer each year because of globalized trade." During this period, the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed from roughly 800 in 1979 to over 13,000 by the end of 2007, as the brunt of the financial crisis was hitting. To match that stock market success in percentage terms over the next three decades, the Dow would have to far exceed 175,000. In 2003, the peak of the era of financial globalization, financial services accounted for an absurdly high percentage of the U.S. stock market's earnings — 30 percent — and 40 percent of corporate U.S. profits. Our regulatory guardians of systemic risk were asleep and the bubble burst. Yet now we have the opposite scenario. Our banks are broke, overregulated, risk-averse and unwilling to fuel much of an economic expansion. So what is the economic model that will replace globalization? Until then, maybe we should use this period to rebuild our country's infrastructure. In the opt-ed — Republicans Adrift — in The Washington Post this week columnist Richard Cohen, describes a Caribbean cruise for 600 Republicans sponsored by National Review, the conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley — to serve as a metaphor for political party in total confusion. Having expected a huge Republican victory because of the predictions of Karl Rove, George Will and other conservatives soothsayers they looked for a reason/excuse for how Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan loss the election. "Minorities came out like crazs" Kevin Hassett, a former Romney economic adviser, told them. "White people didn't get to the polls. There are far more African-Americans voting than they expected." Imagine! Who "they" might be is not exactly clear. But what is clear is that to the cruising Republicans, there is something weirdly topsy-turvy about minorities gaining the political clout once held in perpetual trust for the majority. In the article by Joe Hagan in New York Magazine, that is the source of Cohen 's piece, he describes how the passengers both feared and hates Barrack Obama, seeing him as a nightmare president who will destroy America both economically and morally. An economic cataclysm is imminent, and the nation has wandered into an icky swamp of immorality. "I'm afraid," a passenger told Hagan. "Write that. We're scared to death." Cohen concludes that — "conservatism today is both intellectually exhausted and nearly indefensible. It is the movement of the ideologically ossified, of gun zealots and homophobes, of the immigrant-phobic and the adamantly selfish. It insists that government must be small (an impossibility!), education must be local (a EFTA00951266 stupidity) and that debt, no matter what the reason, is immoral and reckless. The movement has lost its reliable monster. Godless communists have been replaced by the church ladies of Planned Parenthood. History giggles. Nothing good happens when Republicans leave land. In 2008, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker wrote about the voyage of the M.S. Oosterdam, which chugged up the Alaska coast carrying a tour group from the Weekly Standard. At Juneau, conservative notables, including Fox News commentator Fred Barnes, lunched with the governor, Sarah Polio — and, as men often do on shore leave, swooned. Her remarkable qualities — "how smart Polio was," according to Barnes — and her considerable beauty left most of them a bit addled. A buzz went up. The zeitgeist was alerted. In due course, she was John McCain's running mate. Only the voters saved us from a debacle. The National Review cruise encountered no such star of tomorrow. Instead, the emphasis was on yesterday. These passengers were people who had — and maybe still have — a sense of possession about America. It was once theirs. It once looked like them and acted like them and thought like them. No more. In more ways than one, they were out to sea." In an interview published Sunday in Britain's Daily Telegraph former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman (R), who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, had harsh words for his party. "The party right now is a holding company that's devoid of a soul and it will bead up with ideas over time and leaders will take their proper place," he said. "We can't he known as a party that'sfear-based and doesn't believe in math," he added. "ln the end it will come down to a party that believes in opportunity for all our people, economic competitiveness and a strong dose of libertarianism." Also in a recent interview with The Huffington Post, he took issue with the obstructionist policies of the GOP, describing them as "thwart the opposition, stymie the opposition, obfuscate, be a flamethrower, go out there and destroy the system, and here we are." He ended this interview, "in my party, compromise cannot be seen as analogous to treason, which it has been recently." When you have vilified the opposition and the president for years based on the superiority of your own being and ideology, then are soundly rejected and then continue on as if you were and are still right with no lessons learned — how can you believe in your own moral compass or have a real vision, other than everyone else is wrong and you are right, especially if you use Rovian prospectives as your basis. ****** As Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote in The Washington Post this week, in the article — Fixing the economy, a new focus for Congress, the current melodrama over the "fiscal cliff" will drag on as Washington heads toward another "debt ceiling" faceoff that will climax over the next eight weeks or so. This current farce that captivated the media should fool no one. This is largely a debate about how much damage will be done to the economic recovery and who will bear the pain. There is bipartisan consensus that the tax hikes and spending cuts that Congress and the White House piled up to build the so-called fiscal cliff are too painful and will drive the economy into a recession. So the folderol is about what mix of taxes and spending cuts they can agree on that won't be as harsh. Largely missing is any discussion of how to fix the economy, to make it work for working people once more. Just sustaining the faltering recovery won't get it done. We're still struggling with mass unemployment, declining wages and worsening inequality. Corporate profits now capture an all-time record percentage of the economy; workers' wages have hit an all-time low. A little constriction, or a lot, won't do anything to change that reality. Inequality: Clearly — as even the International Monetary Fund has recognized — extreme inequality saps the effective demand needed for a robust economy. EFTA00951267 We need to rebuild a middle class if we want to again have a vibrant, growing economy. That requires a lot more than repealing the Bush tax breaks for the top 2 percent. We should be lifting the minimum wage, empowering workers to bargain for a fair share of the productivity and profits they help to generate, and limiting CEO pay packages that give them multimillion-dollar incentives to ship jobs abroad or plunder their own companies. Congress and the White House might also imitate the Federal Reserve and keep pressing the stimulus pedal until we move much closer to full employment. Catastrophic climate change: Gross domestic product registers growth when people go to work picking up the pieces after a climate disaster, but Americans suffer rather than benefit. It's long past time for the United States to get serious about global warming, make the investments needed to capture a lead in the green industrial revolution that is sweeping the world, end the subsidies to Big Oil and King Coal, and help the movement to clean energy. Fixing health care: The wrongheaded agonizing over whether to cut scholarships for poor students or lay off food inspectors ignores the gorilla in the accounting books. Our long-term budget deficits are a consequence of our broken health-care system. If we spent per capita what other industrial nations spend on health care (with, incidentally, better health results), we would be projecting surpluses. This isn't about stripping 65-year-olds of Medicare; it's about taking on the drug and insurance companies and hospital complexes that drive up our costs. Affordable health care is a right, not a privilege. Rebuilding America. While Washington hyperventilates about cutting spending, the excesses of this conservative era have starved society of essential building blocks. A high-wage economy needs a modern, efficient, world-class infrastructure to be competitive. Families depend on e