Month: March 2015

Donald Trump should get off the pot and run for president as a Republican. I am for this.

Donald Trump announced plans Wednesday to form a presidential exploratory committee.

“I am the only one who can make America truly great again,” the Republican businessman and reality television star declared in a statement announcing the move.

While a step short of a formal campaign launch, the formation of an exploratory committee allows him to begin raising money and hire staff as he weighs a White House bid.

He’s threatened to do this so many times that’s it is easy to dismiss him now, but he did recently announce that he’s not looking to re-up his contract from The Apprentice, so he’ll be needing some way to get the attention he craves.

In the latest issue of the Washington Monthly, Steven Waldman recounts the history of “pay-as-you-can” student loans from the infancy of the idea in Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign to its fulfillment during Obama’s presidency.

It’s largely forgotten that Clinton coupled income-contingent college loans to his national service proposals, but the idea was that college debt shouldn’t dissuade people from taking lower paying jobs in the service of the country.

Clinton was able to create AmeriCorps and get some statutory authority to pursue income-contingent loans, but divisions within the education community and his own coalition prevented him from getting very far.

Flash-forward to Obama. A combination of new legislative authority (including some signed into law by George W. Bush) and more aggressive action by Obama has made the income-based repayment plans start to flower. The volume of income-based loans more than doubled from 2013 to 2014, to $102 billion in loan volume, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

It’s still overly complex, and there are several variants of the approach, but the key is that borrowers don’t have to pay more than 10 percent of their income. And if they are still paying after twenty years, the remaining debt would be wiped out. What’s more, if they work in government or some nonprofit jobs, the remaining debt would be wiped out after ten years.

Income-based loans don’t just help the Ivy Leaguer who wants to try Teach for America. They are also ideal for a forty-year-old parent who has decided to work part time to take care of his kids and therefore has less income to pay back loans—or a working-class student who took on debt going to school at night only to find that the customer service job he wanted has been outsourced to India. It helps not only those who choose public service but also those who struggle for reasons of global economics, family raising, or bad luck.

Implicit in all of this is a fairly radical principle: If you have tried for twenty years to make a solid income and still can’t, we’re going to give you a retroactive subsidy. Until now, financial aid was based on the income of the parents or student at the time of schooling. Under this system, a judgment about a subsidy will occur a second time, at the end of twenty years.

It’s a good policy change and it’s flown mainly below the radar. In the end, it will be an important and positive part of President Obama’s legacy.

Let me ask you a question. Do you think anybody who is in their right mind could disagree with the following:

For the transition from prison to life outside to be successful, it needs to be gradual. If someone needed to be locked up yesterday, he shouldn’t be completely at liberty today. And he shouldn’t be asked to go from utter dependency to total self-sufficiency in one flying leap. He needs both more control and more support. Neither alone is likely to do the job.

Let’s look at some facts. Our incarceration rate is five times higher than it was in 1975. It’s seven times higher than the rate in Canada and Western Europe. Half of all black men who don’t have a high school diploma do time in prison before they reach the age of 30. Our homicide rate is by far the highest among countries with advanced economies. Prisons are astronomically expensive and paying for them is crowding out more promising investments, including in higher education.

We can’t reduce our prison population to anything close to what it was forty years ago unless we’re willing to flood our streets with violent criminals because more than half of the people in our prison system have committed violent crimes, and even more have violent histories. More still entered prison without a history of violence but have learned violence or gang life while serving time.

We need a new way of transitioning people from prison to society. Roughly 50% of the people we release from prison are back behind bars within three years.

When you look at these numbers, a graduated re-entry program is just common sense. Inmates should be given their freedom in stages, and they should have a lot more support while they’re going through the process.

Check out Mark Kleiman, Angela Hawken, and Ross Halperin’s proposals at Vox. They’re trying to start a conversation that we all need to have.

If Bradley Burston is any indication, the Israeli left is feeling pretty demoralized and quite angry this morning.

This week, push came to shove.

This week, we saw how things really work. How our prime minister really thinks. What he’s willing to do, how far he’s willing to go, how many of us he’s willing to sell out, slander, abuse, for the sake of hanging on to the thing that matters to him more than anything: his job.

After this week, we can never again say that we didn’t quite know who Benjamin Netanyahu is.

As an Israeli, I am ashamed that my prime minister is a racist.

Likud defied expectations and the polls and did much better than expected in the elections yesterday. But there’s no question that Benjamin Netanyahu went into panic mode and resorted to extremely nasty tactics. Most significantly, he promised never to resuscitate the two-state solution. He also did his best to scare his voters into going to the polls by complaining about high Arab-Israeli participation in the election process. Most discerning people never believed that Netanyahu supported a two-state solution, but there was some value in that being his “official” position. I don’t think anyone is really surprised that Netanyahu doesn’t see Arab-Israelis as legitimate citizens, but he broke the seal by coming out so openly against them on Election Day.

So, Mr. Burston is correct to write that the elections were revealing, even if they only revealed what most people already suspected. Even the outcome of the elections were a validation of what most people already thought, which is that the old Israel is gone, killed off by demographic change. It’s no longer really a European colony, as the Ashkenazi have lost their dominant cultural position.

And this means that the divide between Israeli Jews and American Jews is going to grow. The partial boycott of Netanyahu’s speech was a canary in the coal mine. Netanyahu’s promise to kill the two-state solution was a mine explosion.

Just look at how silly this looks:

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini released a statement congratulating Benyamin Netanyahu oh his election victory Wednesday.

“Yesterday, the Israeli people voted in general elections. I congratulate Benyamin Netanyahu for his victory. I look forward to the formation of a new government,” the statement read.

It continued by noting “The EU is committed to working with the incoming Israeli government on a mutually beneficial relationship as well as on the re-launch of the peace process.”

The re-launch of the peace process? That’s a total detachment from reality, but it shows that Israel is now completely alienated from its European roots. It will have to go it’s own way from now on as a fully Middle Eastern country, and its traditional Western friends will drift away.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. I’m watching a little Spring Training baseball, trying to get in the mood after a frigid winter. There are a lot of things to write about today but I think I need a nap. Maybe I’ll do some late night writing after I get some early evening zzz’s.

What’s on your mind?

Yesterday, Pakalolo posted an important diary at Daily Kos about the recently discovered acceleration in melting underneath the floating ice shelf ice sheet which supports the massive East Antarctica glacial field known as the Totten Glacier.

The findings about East Antarctica emerge from a new paper just out in Nature Geoscience by an international team of scientists representing the United States, Britain, France and Australia. They flew a number of research flights over the Totten Glacier of East Antarctica — the fastest-thinning sector of the world’s largest ice sheet — and took a variety of measurements to try to figure out the reasons behind its retreat. And the news wasn’t good: It appears that Totten, too, is losing ice because warm ocean water is getting underneath it. […]

The floating ice shelf of the Totten Glacier covers an area of 90 miles by 22 miles.

The Totten glacier already releases the most water of any glacier in Antarctica with an yearly amount of ice melt “equivalent to 100 times the volume of Sydney Harbour every year.” As Pakaloo’s diary noted yesterday NASA and the University of Texas published a study in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Geoscience that “shows shows the discovery of 2 seafloor troughs that bring in warm ocean water to the base of the Totten Glacier.”

These troughs are essentially created by denser, warmer saltier water conveyed from valleys on the ocean floor to the ice shelf. The warmer water they convey is, in effect burrowing upward, thinning the ice from below and creating the risk of cracks in the ice shelf that liekly will destabilize the Totten Glacier and the large Totten Cachement area seen below (image from Pakalolo’s diary of March 16, 2015):

Should the Totten ice shelf break away or the glacier collapse, it would release enough water to raise the oceans an average of 11 feet. This risk is on top of the studies published last year that showed that melting from major ice shelves in West Antarctica has accelerated as well, and for the same reasons: “Warmer ocean waters are pushing up from below and bathing the base of the ice sheet.” The rate of melting of those ice shelves in West Antarctica has dramatically accelerated over the last twenty-three years.

The researchers found that the [West Antarctica] ice sheet contributed about 4.5 millimeters, or 0.18 inches, to global sea-level rise from 1992 to 2013, with more than 70 percent of the loss occurring in the second half of that time period — meaning the rate of loss is accelerating. […]

“We now show that the ocean is the major contributor of heat” to West Antarctica, said lead study author and oceanographer Sunke Schmidtko of the University of East Anglia in Britain. “And it’s not just the shelf itself — it’s something that happens offshore in the global ocean.”

This could ultimately prove to be one of the most important geophysical processes on the planet, for the simple reason that the ice sheet of West Antarctica would, if it collapsed entirely, contribute about 3.3 meters, or nearly 11 feet, to global sea-level rise, Alley said.

Ironically, the potential 11 feet rise from melting of the West Antarctica ice shelves is the same amount predicted should the Totten Glacier collapse. And this is not just a pie in the sky prediction anymore. Large cracks in the Larsen-C Ice Shelf in West Antarctica have already been observed (image from Pakalolo’s diary of March 9, 2015):

The same process, a warming ocean in the Southern Hemisphere, is not only generating ice loss and the threat of ice shelf collapse in West Antarctica, but it is also having the same effect on a major floating ice shelf in East Antarctica.

In its alignment with the land and the sea, the Totten Glacier is similar to the West Antarctic glaciers, which also feature ice shelves that slope out from the vast sheet of ice on land and extend into the water. These ice shelves are a key source of instability, because if ocean waters beneath them warm, they can lose ice rapidly, allowing the ice sheet behind them to flow more quickly into the sea. […]

The availability of warm water, and the observed melting, notes the study, “support the idea that the behaviour of Totten Glacier is an East Antarctic analogue to ocean-driven retreat underway in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The global sea level potential of 3.5 m flowing through Totten Glacier alone is of similar magnitude to the entire probable contribution of the WAIS.”

Even more troubling is that the rate of sea ice melt is more rapid than expected and is clearly linked to climate change. We can’t predict exactly how soon these unstable ice sheets will detach from the mainland of Antarctica, but the fact that evidence of their thinning and cracking should give all of us pause for great concern.

As one scientist who reviewed the studies of the West Antarctica ice shelves noted:

“For long-term stability and small sea-level rise, accelerating mass loss is not reassuring,” said Pennsylvania State University glaciologist Richard Alley, commenting on the paper, which was published Tuesday in Geophysical Research Letters. […]

“There are strong reasons to believe that if the thinning goes too far, it might cross a threshold and then accelerate much more rapidly,” he said.

I think it is safe to say that with the further discovery of the same process at work in East Antarctica with respect to the Totten Glacier and Totten Cachement, that threshold is likely to be crossed sooner than anyone expected, even those in the scientific community who have been conducting this research.

Unfortunately this news that getting little traction in traditional media for reasons that are all to familiar to those of us who pay attention to the issue of climate change and its ongoing consequences, both those occurring now, such as the category five cyclone that devastated the island nation of Vanuatu in the Pacific, to the severe and long-lasting drought on our own West Coast that has brought California to the point where its reservoirs have only one year’s worth of supply left in them..

I know that outrage over the absurd and dangerous actions of Republicans such as Senator Tom Cotton and his fellow travelers are the red meat of that brings eyeballs to this site, but Climate Change is literally the most significant event of the 21st Century. It is the one overriding issue that most threatens human civilization and the mass extinction of species, all of whose fates are interconnected with our own. Its effects, from wars to famines to droughts to floods to mega-storms, etc., are already happening before our eyes in real time. Those effects will only worsen as sea levels rise as melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets accelerates.

The national and local media ignore the problem, and conservative websites sites and “news outlets” deny and mock these stories. So if we don’t do what’s necessary to call attention to the impacts of climate change, present and future, who will?

Anecdotal evidence suggests that Arab-Israeli turnout is very high in the Israeli elections. It appears high enough that Netanyahu is using it as a battle cry.

Likud is troubled over high voter turnout in the Arab community. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently uploaded a video to his Facebook page in which he said: “The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls. Left-wing organizations are busing them out. We have no V15, we have Order 8 [code for emergency call up to IDF reserve duty], we have only you. Get out to vote, bring your friends and family, vote Likud in order to close the gap between us and ‘Labor.’”

This, of course, elicited a stinging response:

Avigdor Lieberman on Twitter: “Netanyahu also knows that if the Arabs are voting in droves, only a strong Lieberman can stop them.”

…

Joint List candidate and MK Dov Khenin petitioned the Central Elections Committee to remove the Likud campaign that casts Arab voters in a negative light.

“A prime minister who campaigns against voting by citizens belonging to an ethnic minority is crossing a red line of incitement and racism. This is especially severe on Election Day, when the message to Israeli citizens is to participate in the elections, vote, and take part in the democratic system. A statement like that, issued by the prime minister, shows that he has completely lost his way and that he is ready to break all the principles of democracy to safeguard his regime.”

Meretz chairwoman Zehava Galon also slammed the prime minister, sharing his Facebook post and commenting laconically, “Serious warning: Israeli citizens are voting in the elections.”

Also, the Central Elections Committee issued an injunction that will prevent Netanyahu from having a live broadcast this evening.

Did you know that the Israelis have the day off from work today?

What a country!

It’s almost amusing to read the minutes of a meeting Gorbachev held with his top aids in 1986 to discuss how to get the hell out of Afghanistan. I say “almost” amusing because what happened in Afghanistan during that war and ever since is a staggering tragedy. Still, I wish George W. Bush had read this memo on September 12th, 2001.

Don’t you?

(One in a series of posts on George Fredrickson’s 2002 book, Racism: A Short History.)

If, as French historian Léon Poliakov wrote (and Fredrickson cites), “For the organization of Christianity it was essential that the Jews be a criminally guilty people” (p. 18), and that fundamental anti-Judaism laid the groundwork for the rise of antisemitism, then the same is not true for white-over-black racism.  Quite the contrary.

The first convert to Christianity recorded in the New Testament (Acts 8:27 ff.) was an Ethiopian.  The late medieval myth of Prester John, a non-European Christian monarch who would join European Christians in the struggle against Islam, located the king in Ethiopia.  Nativity scenes represented one of the three Magi (Gaspar) as a black man.  Black saints—like Gregory the Moor—were venerated.  There’s even the surprising case of St. Maurice who “quite suddenly turned black—at least in the Germanic lands“.  (p. 28)  While medieval European culture tended to associate “blackness with evil and death and whiteness with goodness and purity”, Fredrickson argues this can be exaggerated, asking rhetorically, “If black always had unfavorable connotations, why did many orders of priests and nuns wear black instead of white or some other color?” (p. 26)

Fredrickson traces the beginnings of European antiblack racism to the Iberian peninsula in the late Middle Ages, before the rise of modern Spain and while the Muslim Kingdom of Granada still controlled much of the Mediterranean coast:

“In southern Iberia the most conspicuous slaves of light-skinned or tawny Moorish masters were black Africans, and it was natural for Christians, as well as Muslims, to begin to associate sub-Saharan African ancestry with lifetime servitude.  When Portuguese navigators acquired slaves of their own as a result of their voyages along the Guinea Coast in the mid- to late fifteenth century and offered them for sale in the port cities of Christian Iberia, the identification of black skins with servile status was complete.” (p. 29)

All of this happened roughly at the same time Europeans stopped enslaving one another.  Increasingly the European economy was based on ownership of property (especially land).  By contrast, the African economy was based non-ownership of land and ownership of people.  As the Portuguese pushed further south along the west African coast throughout the 1400s, they found a vigorous local slave trade already in existence.  Fredrickson concludes, “…the initial purchase and transport of African slaves by Europeans could easily be justified in terms of religious and legal status without recourse to an explicit racism“. (p. 31)

crossposted at: masscommons.wordpress.com

Nice observation from President Obama, this has been clear for quite some time, what took the president so long to understand this terror threat to the Western world?

President Obama Speaks with VICE News plus video

Start section on Islamic State at 11m42s  

Iraq’s crisis: Don’t forget the 2003 U.S. invasion | June 16, 2014 |

In Washington and elsewhere, pundits and politicos are indulging in the blame game. Some accuse the Obama administration of being too keen to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011; others harp on the provocative Shiite sectarianism of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which has created conditions for Sunni extremists like ISIS to flourish.

Curiously, quite a few of the most outspoken critics were prominently involved in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Rarely in their current diagnoses do they acknowledge the tumult unleashed after the toppling of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In a lengthy piece posted to his personal Web site, former British prime minister Tony Blair went so far as to dismiss the legacy of the war he helped start. “We have to liberate ourselves from the notion that `we’ have caused [the current crisis]. We haven’t,” Blair wrote. He added: “The fundamental cause of the crisis lies within the region not outside it.”

Blair has been widely criticized for his comments in the U.K., where there’s a sharper conversation on the consequences of the Iraq war and the reasons invoked more than a decade ago to justify the invasion.

Time: Obama Says `We Don’t Have a Strategy Yet’ for Fighting ISIS | Aug. 2014 |

See my earlier diaries about these events …

○ Returning to Nixon’s ‘Twin Pillar’s Policy’ and Regional ‘Gendarmes’
○ In Joe Biden’s Own Words of Truth; Our Arab Allies Funded ISIS!
○ Flawed Reasoning and Misleading Projection On ISIL Origin
○ Turkey In Alliance with ISIS – Undermining Obama’s Policy In Iraq
○ Clinton’s 21st Century Statecraft and the Land of the Two Rivers
○ Syria Expendable In Joint US-Israel ME Power Schemes | Dec. 28, 2013 |