Fukushima: From the West Wing 03/26/2012
Posted by Vaughn in Global, Policy.Tags: Crisis Management, Fukushima Disaster
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Photo Credit: Foreign Affairs
OF THE MOST harrowing stories from last year, the terrible series of events behind the Japanese earthquake that led to a cataclysmic tsunami, which then led to an unforeseen overwhelm of the emergency safety system at three of the six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant (after they had miraculously survived the quake), were tops on a rather remarkable list of news events. The tsunami and the subsequent reactor meltdown triggered visions of science fiction’s end-times in our heads; first with images of families being separated by Mother Nature’s angry water-borne hand, live on T.V., and then with news of the degenerating meltdown crisis, radiated food supplies and stories of an unprecedented radioactive plume that dwarfed Chernobyl.
The situation was the worst of the sums of all fears concerning nuclear energy, crises and crisis management. One of the nation’s largest energy company’s operating in the affected prefectures — directly charged with the oversight of Fukushima Daichi, as it belongs to them — Tokyo Power Electric Company (T.E.P.C.O.), had been highly-criticized and second-guessed by the international community (and even by myself on Twitter). What those who were critical believed, it seems, was that there was a decision by the Japanese government to sublimate any potential panic and downplay the severity of the Fukushima Daichi disaster, especially when the official Japanese government advice for its citizens and foreign workers in the areas were found to be quite different than that of the United States government, which prioritized being much more cautious. One of the main points where questions arose was in the benchmarks for minimal safety distance from the reactors for evacuations with the Japanese officials recommending a 12-mile evacuation zone, while American officials recommended a 50-mile zone for its citizens in the area, which included two military bases housing the greatest percentage of the 90,000 Americans in the potentially affected areas.
A recent Foreign Affairs article penned by Jeffrey A. Bader, senior director of the National Security Council, gives us a new view — from within the halls of American power — and he provides some illumination on the matter, a year later. Of his findings and implications, one of the primary is that the handling of information distribution to the outside by the Japanese government should be understood within an expanded context of how many more people the Japanese government had to accommodate in their evacuations — into already densely packed areas — and how that differed from the U.S. Government, since the American government families were much smaller in number, and responsibility dwindled as they left areas affected by the meltdown, by either returning to the United States or to other bases.
We had to decide whether to declare a larger evacuation zone around Fukushima than Japan did. Modeling conducted by the NRC and the DOE indicated that an evacuation zone of 50 miles would be more consistent with U.S. standards than the Japanese zone of 12 miles, so the administration recommended that all U.S. citizens in the 50-mile zone leave. The discrepancy attracted unwelcome attention and subjected the Japanese government to some criticism. Of course it was considerably easier for us to err on the side of caution, since we had almost no Americans in the area and no responsibility to house or take care of them once they departed, whereas the Japanese had several million people there, all of them the government’s responsibility if they moved.
Further, in understanding that there were longer term implications in every decision and information release — as far as their optics politically and their logistical tail (i.e. providing shelter and water for swaths of still unaccounted) — and the dynamic and unprecedented nature of dealing with that rarest medley: an earthquake, a tsunami, a meltdown at a key national nuclear power plant and the possible longer lasting effect of a large radioactive leak; one can understand how the Japanese government may have appeared to be less forthright and timely with its information and response, to the outside, but it was merely attempting to gain a grasp of all of those scenarios it had burning at once, and with accurate details. Comparing the situation to what is known of Bader’s experience in dealing with it through the National Security Council, the inability to accurately measure radiation levels and find applicable models were an issue that had a great effect on the decision-making. According to Bader, even the American government had widely off-base measures.
Because of the unpredictability of the situation at Fukushima, we needed to draw up contingency plans for the evacuation of all Americans from Tokyo and the bases in the event that the situation warranted it. That was normal and proper, although extremely unlikely. But once Pacific Command began planning for a noncombatant evacuation that, in theory, could involve 90,000 people under panicked conditions, the information would inevitably leak.
It leaked quickly. Stories ran in U.S. military media and the Japanese press that suggested that evacuation was a real possibility. I called the chief of naval operations, Admiral Gary Roughead, with whom I had had very good interactions in the past. I told him of my dismay at the way the story was percolating. I said that I was as strongly in favor of protecting American servicemen’s health as anyone, but that we needed a scientific basis for decisions. We also could not be casual about the future of the alliance by allowing for a whimsical decision-making process. Roughead understood. Within an hour, he had called in the defense press and made unequivocal statements to the effect that our forces were not going anywhere, and that evacuation was not in the cards.
These daily crises in response to wildly speculative assessments and reports were testing our patience, not to mention our sleep cycles. We needed a firm scientific basis for decisions. Fortunately, Holdren and the DOE were about to produce one.
Working with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Holdren developed a series of models based on plausible worst-case scenarios. They depicted simultaneous meltdowns at one or more reactors and complete drainage of the spent fuel pools at two reactors. The results for such worst-case scenarios, assuming unfavorable wind patterns from the reactor site and a lack of precipitation, suggested that radioactive plumes in excess of EPA standards would not reach within 75 to 100 miles of Tokyo, and that we would have several days’ notice before such a contingency could develop. In other words, there was no plausible scenario in which Tokyo, Yokosuka, or Yokota could be subject to dangerous levels of airborne radiation.
Still, the feeling among some of those watching the disaster unfold via the international 24-hour cable news networks and N.H.K., was that the Japanese government had dropped the ball in many ways. And that may still be true, but the utterly unique crisis had no contextualizing event to glean lessons from, and which is why it was so difficult. Towards the end of the nuclear reactor crisis, it had become so bad that T.E.P.C.O. and the Japanese government were gladly accepting septuagenarian and sexagenarian volunteers to work the plant as they handled the meltdown’s effects. The idea was that any radiation exposure to these older volunteers with experience in the matter, were least likely to be adversely affected by such exposures since their life-spans were presumably towards their end. It was a scary and disturbing thing to hear. As of now the global community has begun to reassess nuclear power as a result, with the European Union ordering a risk assessments of all of its members.
Read “Inside the White House During Fukushima” at Foreign Affairs [Here]
Read “Fukushima’s Fate Inspires Nuclear Safety Rethink” at New Scientist [Here]
View the aftermath of the Fukushima meltdown via Cryptome’s “eyeball” series [Here]
Simulating Syrian Intervention? 01/11/2012
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Global, Policy, Politics.Tags: Bashar al-Assad, Foreign Policy, Global Security, Syria
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I RECENTLY READ that the Ministry of Defense (M.O.D.), Britain’s equivalent to the Department of Defense, is having an issue with keeping its recruits’ attention. (Not a real surprising story there.) The M.O.D.’s inability to keep the attention of its potential canon fodder is not being blamed on Britain’s deployment to horrific war zones — after all this is in the job description and what these young men have been sold, and have been buying [my own self included, in a smaller sense] for centuries, as a rite of passage — but because M.O.D.’s war simulators were not fully engaging potential grunts into the peaked interest necessary to compel full commitment to the nation’s military defense. Those boys, mostly; they’d probably rather let DICE and Activision virtually teleport them to the pixelized counterparts of the countries that the West are currently entangled with.
Those who game or follow entertainment business news, will know that Activision and DICE are the names attached to two firms who currently control the first-person shooter/combat simulation market with their current Battlefield 3 (part of the Battlefield series) and Modern Warfare 3 (a part of the Modern Warfare behemoth) titles, respectively. The games, to a lesser degree, are a crash-course in urban warfare, general sniper tactics — the latter, particularly online — and the all-out mayhem soldiers should (somewhat) expect in fighting. But this cannot be stressed enough, that this only to a degree. (You’re in a cushy room, for God sakes.) There are none of the tragedies of war, there are no days and weeks spent in terrible weather conditions on patrol, nor the 50-70 pounds of gear, no dying friends, no complicated interactions with locals who may be resistance fighters: No left behind family left to pick up the pieces of a shattered promise to go through life together. The article is important, though, because it tells the novice and those outside of the subculture of combat simulations’ gamers, in general, what this type of gaming has become.
Troops are so used to playing high-quality commercial games set in combat zones that they tend to lose concentration unless the MoD simulations look equally realistic. This has become an important issue at the MoD, which is increasingly turning to digital simulations to help prepare soldiers for duty.
Thousands of troops sent to Afghanistan have been trained on Virtual Battlespace2, a spin-off from a commercial game that can, for instance, test their responses when they come under mortar attack from insurgents.
Though the military stresses that these games only supplement traditional methods, it reflects the way technology is transforming military training. With budgets being squeezed across the MoD, simulations are also a comparatively cheap way of giving troops a “virtual” taste of what they might come up against in a warzone.
- “Ministry of Defence Forced to Update Its War Games for Xbox Generation,” The Guardian
The modern video game experience trumps what many of the advanced militaries of the world can produce in order to train their soldiers for battle, and commercial gaming has unexpectedly become an unofficial augment to government’s official means of recruiting, as war culture products have been, since there has ever been a thing called “culture.” The reason it’s such an uphill slog for governments’ recruiters versus the more realistic vision presented by the gaming industry, particularly those two big-name companies just mentioned, is the profit motive of gaming companies to produce the most realistic experience to date, with each iteration becoming better than the other, as the bar is raised year by year. And as pointed to in the article, the gaming industry as a whole is able to spend more money on perfecting their simulations than the government.
All of this has produced a dialogue between the M.O.D. and private gaming firms to specifically help produce better products for the government. In the United States this has already happened to some degree, when the U.S. Army actually released a game called America’s Army, to decent reviews and sales. So it is quite evident that the military branches of Western governments have a particularly high regard for the ability of games to recruit and to simulate, which is why I didn’t scoff when I read about a video game being used to seriously discuss potential outcomes with a hypothetical military operation in a current hot-spot.
Foreign Policy recently ran a feature article — “The Syrian Invasion” — discussing the outcomes of a game that simulates military intervention in Syria, a nation currently embroiled in a civil uprising that has Syria’s regime and president, Bashar al-Assad, tightening his vice-grip on his slipping power and the melting of his version of law and order. Combat Mission: Shock Force, simulates a fictional 2008 invasion of the country in response to state-sponsored terror. It’s not equivalent to what the Modern Warfare and Battlefield series have become in the culture, but the game is realistic. It primarily focuses on the larger strategic elements of such a war, however, more than the moves of individuals or squads in space, in order to squeeze off rounds and move through tight quarters to meet objectives.
Produced in 2007, the game, as the author of the article says, “shows the hallmarks of considerable research into the forces of the combatants and the capabilities of the weapons they use.” Generally, though, it’s about command and control and the decisions and factors involved in determining the success of such a combat enterprise. The game allows for several options in regards to how one might choose to invade Syria to face a melange of elite forces using the old Iraqi “Republican Guard” tag, fedayeen units and conscripts armed with souped Soviet-Era mechanized weaponry and Kornet missiles. One can go in with the U.S. Marine Expeditionary Brigade, a U.S. Army Stryker light-armored vehicle element or a multi-national coalition led by Germany, comprised of Britain, Canada and the Netherlands.
The results of the simulations varied, but the outcomes and the way in which the battles unfolded was a range with a core theme of N.A.T.O. units attempting to move dug-in Syrian fighters. According to the article’s author, at times it appeared to play out like Iraq at the beginning of the insurgency in 2003 with Syrian forces made up of conscripts and fedayeen fighting with rocket-propelled grenades and machine-guns, and at other times, the fighting looked like Lebanon in 2006 with Syrian commandos ducking-in-and-out using Kornet anti-tank missiles and fighting in a guerrilla style. What was found — as pointed out, in a still somewhat limited simulation system that doesn’t take into account drone intelligence operations assisting Western generals, or the auxiliary forces that would find their way to fight in support of Syria such as Hezbollah – was that military intervention in the country could become a mixed bag, highly dependent on which Syrian military shows up.
If it is the Syrian military that cowardly fires at civilians to squelch dissent and hasn’t fought a real opposing force in 30 years, then there would be some somewhat non-damaging Western losses, from a public perception sense. But if the Alawite-dominated Syrian force that decides it must fight to the end engages, primarily motivated by the consequences of what a loss would mean to their people in a Shia dominated land following a regime change; politically damaging numbers could conceivably be racked up against any Western coalition of fighters. While intervention in Syria hasn’t been prominently discussed, it has been pondered by some, and after the limited handling of Libya, it seems unlikely that a full intervention would ever take place. But if this video game simulation that factors in many of the things generals would have to, tells us anything, it’s probably that doing anything like this could be a courageously stupid coin flip.
Read “The Syrian Invasion” at Foreign Policy [Here]
Police: ‘Keeping the Peace’ Through Military Ways? 11/07/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Defense, Journalism, Law and Order, Policy.Tags: Militarization, Police, The Atlantic
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Photo Credit: National City Police Department
To assist them in deploying this new weaponry, police departments have also sought and received extensive military training and tactical instruction. Originally, only the largest of America’s big-city police departments maintained S.W.A.T. teams, and they were called upon only when no other peaceful option was available and a truly military-level response was necessary. Today, virtually every police department in the nation has one or more S.W.A.T. teams, the members of whom are often trained by and with United States special operations commandos. Furthermore, with the safety of their officers in mind, these departments now habitually deploy their S.W.A.T. teams for minor operations such as serving warrants. In short, “special” has quietly become “routine.”
ANYONE who has watched any National Geographic Television or Discovery Channel all-access program following law enforcement, or have witnessed them in action, or unfortunately have dealt with them first hand, will have noticed something: There is increasingly little difference between cops and the appearance of our modern infantrymen, deployed in war-zones.
The trend towards beefing up our police, military-style, started with Special Weapons and Tactics (S.W.A.T.) teams and high-priority, specialized gang units in big metropolitan areas, and was probably given momentum by watershed events like the violent and televised North Hollywood shootout in 1997; between bank robbers in full body armor, toting fully-automatic rifles, and woefully under-armed Los Angeles Police Department officers, that seemed to bring about imagery from the film Heat.
But it is mostly the great effect of 9/11 and the constant specter of myriad forms of terrorism that could potentially require military-type firepower, lurking just around the corner, that is mostly responsible for this new approach. Nationally, law enforcement had been reminded time and again, that in many ways they were not as well-equipped as they should be, to meet the challenges of modern-day policing. (And because Americans love their guns, it has increasingly fostered an arms race between cops and criminals, who can purchase an easily-converted-to-automatic AK-47 or an AR-15 at a gun show, and with some savvy and evil enterprise, load it with explosive rounds or those meant to pierce through body armor.)
As any global security analyst will tell you, law enforcement was and is considered one of the first lines of defense against terrorism. That is until the days after 9/11, when George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” and the focus shifted towards our military. Under the old paradigm, the basic nuts and bolts of thwarting terror was laid at the police’s doorstep: doing good detective work, showing a presence, working with the community to be vigilant, and so on. But our dramatic intelligence failure on 9/11 and the two successive wars to address Islamist terror — if one counts Iraq as having this justification — and the creation of several agencies under the new Department of Homeland Security, all have conferred this fight largely to the domain of the United States military and the national-security-industrial-complex.
This, in turn, has changed the posture of America’s law enforcement. The police, now feeling even more under-prepared to handle all of its duties along with the addition and prioritization of the staving of potential terror plots, began to invest in military-style weapons, adopt its tactics, consult with the military’s special operations units for training (as though they are some opposing guerrilla force to a dictator in a banana republic), and now work to absorb the military mindset. In The Atlantic‘s “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police,” Arhtur Rizer, a former officer and the article’s author, explains that the justification behind this “weapon inflation” is primarily safety.
What was once considered tactics or weaponry only to be used in special circumstances, say like a S.W.A.T. team or the application of once-limited, but now readily available, assault rifles, are being regularly employed in the more routine parts of policing. But as pointed to in “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police,” there are some legitimate civil liberty concerns because of this, as a recent mishap in a botched raid involving an innocent ex-Marine named, José Guerena, who served two tours in Iraq implies:
Within moments, and without Guerena firing a shot–or even switching his rifle off of “safety”–he lay dying, his body riddled with 60 bullets. A subsequent investigation revealed that the initial shot that prompted the S.W.A.T. team barrage came from a S.W.A.T. team gun, not Guerena’s. Guerena, reports later revealed, had no criminal record, and no narcotics were found at his home.
Sadly, the Guerenas are not alone; in recent years we have witnessed a proliferation in incidents of excessive, military-style force by police S.W.A.T. teams, which often make national headlines due to their sheer brutality. Why has it become routine for police departments to deploy black-garbed, body-armored S.W.A.T. teams for routine domestic police work? The answer to this question requires a closer examination of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy and the War on Terror.
The chief concern in regards to this escalation of firepower and this new mentality among the police is that the organizational culture in the military and its operational philosophy of: identifying if someone is a threat and neutralizing them, and if so, do it with limited civilian casualties; is unlike that of the police, whose role is to “keep the peace,” uphold the law and the rights’ of citizens, even those it suspects. If the police changes its posture from “keeping the peace” and treats everyone as criminals, the way the military treats everyone as a potential combatant, it creates more situations such as that of José Guerena, where excessive and lethal force is sometimes just the cost of doing business, and where suspects no longer have the rights that they are supposed to, as the officers become judge, jury and executioner.
When law enforcement begins to adopt the soldiers’ mentality, it tends to forget its original goals of maintaining a good solid relationship with its public, while upholding the laws when they are broken, along with the most important rights of the individual. This is not to understate the difficulty of their jobs or minimize their optimal chances for safety by not having them bring as many resources to bear as possible, as Arhtur Rizer put it:
The point here is not to suggest that police officers in the field should not take advantage of every tactic or piece of equipment that makes them safer as they carry out their often challenging and strenuous duties. Nor do I mean to suggest that a police officer, once trained in military tactics, will now seek to kill civilians. It is far too easy for Monday-morning quarterbacks to unfairly second-guess the way police officers perform their jobs while they are out on the streets waging what must, at times, feel like a war.
Notwithstanding this concern, however, Americans should remain mindful bringing military-style training to domestic law enforcement has real consequences. When police officers are dressed like soldiers, armed like soldiers, and trained like soldiers, it’s not surprising that they are beginning to act like soldiers. And remember: a soldier’s main objective is to kill the enemy.
Read “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police” at The Atlantic [Here]
A Telling Answer on Inequality 10/21/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Economics, Journalism, Policy, Politics.Tags: Inequality, Politics, Scientific American
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Photo Credit: We Are the 99 Percent
AS THE OCCUPY WALL STREET movement gains steam and 68 percent of millionaires, according to The Wall Street Journal, now say that they actually support more taxes on their earnings, a recent article in Scientific American implies a retreat on the idea of increasing taxes on the nation’s top earners, in a key sector. While a vast majority of the one percent — despite our currently personally beneficial tax situation — feels that a country in need should have those most able of it to pitch-in just a bit more, there has been a surprising attitudinal adjustment with working-class Americans.
In the article “The Last Place Paradox,” Scientific American reporters Ilyana Kuziemko and Michael I. Norton, Ivy League business school professors who co-authored a paper of the same title, found that among the nation’s blue collar, support for income redistribution (taxes) fell, marking this odd shift of millionaires, generally, approving to be taxed, while potential beneficiaries of such taxes believing it is unfair to tax them. Between 2008 and 2010 — the most recent years of data available — support for such measures actually “plummeted.”
My first inclination was to presume that the drop was due to the demagoguery of President Obama as a “socialist re-distributor” by his opponents on the right, but that presumption does not square with who is primarily in fundamental opposition to the government addressing large-scale income inequality; our have-nots in this winner take all system.
While the working-class is a demographic that is known to vote against its general interests, and those actions are thought to be an expression of their aspiration – for example, voting for policies that favor the wealthy, because they innately believe that they will be the wealthy someday, or their kids will be — it turns out that their motivations in regards to flagging support for re-distribution efforts, is actually motivated by a fear of being met at the same economic rung, or lapped, by those below them.
Our recent research suggests that, far from being surprised that many working-class individuals would oppose redistribution, we might actually expect their opposition to rise during times of turmoil – despite the fact that redistribution appears to be in their economic interest. Our work suggests that people exhibit a fundamental loathing for being near or in last place – what we call “last place aversion.” This fear can lead people near the bottom of the income distribution to oppose redistribution because it might allow people at the very bottom to catch up with them or even leapfrog past them.
How does last-place aversion play out with regard to redistribution? In our surveys, we asked Americans whether they supported an increase to the minimum wage, currently $7.25 per hour. Those making $7.25 or below were very likely to support the increase – after all, they would be immediate beneficiaries. In addition, people making substantially more than $7.25 were also fairly positive towards the increase. Which group was the most opposed? Those making just above the minimum wage, between $7.26 and $8.25. We might expect people who make just below and just above $7.25 to have similar lifestyles and policy attitudes – but in this case, while those making below $7.25 would benefit if the minimum wage were raised to, say, $8.25, those making just above $7.25 would run the risk of falling into a tie for last place.
The writers replicated this finding in lab tests where an artificial income distribution was created and subjects are shown their position within it, and where each rank is separated by just $1.00 USD. The subjects were then given $2.00 USD to either give to those below them in the distribution or above them, meaning giving to those below them would make those recipients jump past them in position, relative to the scale. While most gave the money to those below them, regardless of those recipients jumping their position, those in the penultimate (or second-to-last) and would thus become the lowest in the income distribution, were the least likely of all to give to those below them.
While these finding are not necessarily indicative of how things actually work in America, because of a number of factors, but primarily that it’s not always certain that everyone knows their position on the economic scale, as seems to be the case, since most Americans consistently identify themselves as “middle class,” it is an important finding that provides some very strong explanations as to why the G.O.P. is undeniably successful in attracting blue-collar workers, beyond just their economic aspirations to be wealthy. And beyond that, as said by the writers, this experiment and its finding portends a key effective strategy on the part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, because instead of dividing the income distribution among several strata, which would then produce potential supporters of the cause competing against each other, it focuses on one large group versus another, smaller group. As the writers said:
Framing the issue this way focuses the attention of people at the bottom of the distribution on those at the top – rather than on each other – and implicitly suggests that anyone not in the top 1 percent (“them”) is one of “us.” While it is too soon to tell if OWS has staying power, their rhetoric has the potential to reframe the discussion on redistribution and inequality.
Read “The Last Place Paradox” at Scientific American [Here]
His Lost Situational Awareness 07/20/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Editorial, Policy, Politics.Tags: Politics, President Obama
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WE are now even more ensconced in this remarkable fix: the economy has been putrid for years and shows little signs of improvement, and with no actual assistance from the government, other than a largely de-fanged stimulus; that lets those who do not believe in the already accepted hallmarks of Keynesian economics — that when a country is in a situation like ours and no one is willing to spend, the government must — say, “Look, in fact, it doesn’t work.” And this may actually be a commentary on the setup of our political system and its dogmatic allegiances that separate facts from the discussion; a system which is proving to be not well-equipped to handle crises of this kind, magnitude and scope, since it is based on limiting the actual amount of policy change that can be made. (Not to mention an obstructionist Republican contingent, which blunts necessary and deliberately dramatic measures.)
The corporations are now holding onto their cash — $2 trillion USD — while upping their productivity and still turning profits at an unprecedented level in the midst of a global economic downturn, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Depression; the exact opposite of what we need them to do. And the political conversation in America is so polarized as a result of the fragmenting of the information consumers to outlets that only parrot their views — and which stoke the flames of partisanship, that reason has left — and now neither side of the political divide is willing to talk to one another, and even centrists are forced to choose sides. And this is exacerbated by a faction within the right, the “Tea Party,” that magnetically pulls its moderates towards a cartoon version of the G.O.P. to look like that idiotic neocon character in Dr. Strangelove, and ultimately enforces a militantly arrogant ignorance about the most fundamental of modern notions from climate change, to the birthplace of an already elected U.S. president; to how to respond to such an economic crisis, in spite of experts’ opinions.
It is a Democratic president saddled with all of this, a totality of factors that almost makes it impossible to govern the country out of its mess. I mean, we are still hearing questions about his birth certificate and from those who look to de-legitimize him in every way, from race-coding him into an anti-colonialist revolutionary, to the idea of who is “American,” yet for some unbelievably insane reason, he still looks to compromise with a bunch unwilling to even meet him half-way and ultimately has him giving much of the pot, usually, just to get just a third of what he wants. And the problem is, what he wants is usually some lessened form of what is ideally best for us all (based on reason and well-proven historical political data), but the environment has made this not so in many minds. What is he left to do? Since he is a believer in government, in democratic values, in debate and in consensus building?
The forces aligned against him are many and so vast and deep within our culture (example: rugged individualism versus a distrust of European-style socialism), both individually and institutionally, that he is already fighting what might be a Sisyphean battle, yet he doesn’t seem to be consciously aware that it is thus, and it is necessary that he respond more forcefully. For a guy so aware of everything socially and culturally to the point of it sometimes being a problem (e.g. I believe that he is reluctant to put on even a stern face, because of the implicit stereotypes of being an “angry black man”), why is he now so unaware of this situation? He at his core wants to sensibly play the middle, but now is not the time, particularly since there is no middle; just right and wrong. This has been talked about over and over by the pundits, but the president has to channel F.D.R. and talk about the “Do-Nothing Congress” and the political atmosphere we all now inhabit. As Ronald Dworkin at The New York Review of Books, NYR Blog, points out in “How FDR Did It“:
We now have a President we can admire and respect. But he seems unaware that his opponents are not patriots anxious to help govern through a decent consensus but fanatics who would destroy the country if that would lead to his defeat. We think he should understand that this is a time for confrontation not compromise. He should therefore remember the words of another president running for reelection in the middle of an even graver economic catastrophe, words that seem eerily relevant now.
Here is Franklin Roosevelt, in Madison Square Garden, in 1936:
For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.
President Obama might recall that Roosevelt won re-election by the largest majority before or since.
July 7, 2011 2:38 p.m.
Burn Bags, Disney, Pizza and Plastic 01/07/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Defense, Global, Journalism, Media, Policy.add a comment
TO TRANSPORT the huge heaps of “burn bags” crammed with discarded secrets, N.S.A. turned appropriately enough to Florida’s Disney World. In Fantasyland and the rest of the Magic Kingdom, accumulated trash is transported automatically by underground conveyor belt to a central disposal waste facility. Similarly, burn bags from N.S.A., the intelligence community’s Fantasyland, are sent down a Rube Goldberg-like-chute-and-conveyor-belt-contraption known as the Automatic Material Collection System. The 6 1/2-foot wide conveyor then dumps the bags into a giant blenderlike vat that combines water, steam and chemicals to break the paper down into pulp. The pulped paper is processed, dried, funneled through a fluffer, and finally, fifteen minutes later, baled. Within a few weeks the documents that once held the nation’s most precious secrets hold steaming pepperoni pizzas. In 1998, the agency took in $58, 953 in profit from the sale of its declassified pizza boxes.
Problems arise, however, when thick magnetic tapes, computer diskettes, and a variety of other non-water soluble items are thrown into the burn bags. Once a week, destruction officers assigned to Crypto City’s Classified Material’s Conversion Plant have to use rakes, shovels, and hacksaws to break up the “tail,” the clumps of hard, tangled debris that clog up the room-sized Diposall. Among the stray items that have found their way into the plant are a washing machine motor, a woman’s slip, and an assortment of .22-caliber bullets. Because this residue, totaling more than fifty-two tons a year, still may contain some identifiable scrap bearing an N.S.A. secret, it is left to drain for about five days and then put in boxes to be burned in a special incinerator.
N.S.A. was able to turn an additional thirty tons of old newspapers, magazines, and computer manuals into pizza boxes as a result of spring cleaning dubbed the “Paper Chase,” in 1999. But paper is not the only thing N.S.A. recycles. It also converts metal from the tiny chips and circuit boards in the agency’s obsolete computers into reusable scrap. So many computers hit the junk pile every year that the agency is able to recycle more than 438 tons of metal annually from the small components.
- James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
Read an excerpt from Body of Secrets at Random House [Here]
Our Next-Door Narco Wars 12/09/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Global, Journalism, Policy, Politics.add a comment
Photo Credit: The New York Review of Books
I GREW UP in the Los Angeles area, in the capital city of a next-door-to-L.A. county, and the main culprit city, which helped it lead the nation in per capita murders for a span of years, and not just because it was the largest city in the largest county (by size) in the nation, but primarily because of the gang violence that was, in part, fueled by hard times, the city’s drug trade and the revolving door of criminal enterprises between it and Los Angeles.
So when I think back on my upbringing compared to my peers at university, or most of the people I know, I realize that I come from a dramatically different environment and outlook, despite being just as middle class as them; simply because the kids I played basketball with at school, my friends, part of my immigrant family’s struggles with drugs and violence, or the areas I traversed when I first started driving and hanging out after class, were these very blocks where much of this city’s violence occurred. And in that small way, I became part of a larger social theory.
In African-American studies there is a notion known as “linked fate”: the premise that blacks, no matter how much they are physically separated from the “underclass” — this term is fraught with negative connotations to me — of their population, are always connected psychically, psychologically and socially to it; and thus never truly finding a cover from the buffeting of the life outside the middle class, lower middle class and even working class, and particularly knowing that its lot is in some way forever associated to those who are not as fortunate as them. It’s a rather dramatic realization, if one thinks about it, because most social and ethnic groups operate on some level of class divisions that allow for their distancing from typical, categorical lumping, but it’s argued that this is less so for African-Americans for a number of reasons. (Like, say, perhaps, racial profiling providing a reminder, or being just a generation removed from a hard-scrabble life.)
And for Los Angeles, Mexico and the southern border cities of America, my personal story and the social theory of “linked fate” are being played out quite well. Los Angeles, San Diego and all of the conglomeration of areas of California known as the Southland, and the many towns in Arizona and Texas, are never too far removed from the narco-terror problems of Mexico and all of Mexico’s population. No matter the city and its affluence; they are never disconnected from the realities of the ever-gripping hand of the illegal drug trade and its unbridled force of violence and the vortex of lives it enraptures.
It is estimated that 28,000 people have died on the streets of the nation since 2006, the year Felipe Calderon was elected, as a result of the drug trade and perhaps the “drug state.” (The country relies heavily on its receipts from the drug trade, as the cash flow is undoubtedly welcome in a nation with very few employment prospects.) That number of 28,000 is gruesome in and of itself, but it does not take into account just how violent life there is. Surely, the “others” who have been forgotten are the ones who have been raped or kidnapped in the nation, just because of the wanton lawlessness and rule of the drug cartels who hold elements in the government, police and army, it seems. Nor does the estimated figure project those killed across the borders in any of the towns in America from California to Arizona, Texas and the rest of the American southwest, which happen to be perfectly logical points of entry for smuggling operations.
The problem, beyond the most obvious one of how to stop it and prevent it, is how to report it and help others understand its dimensions and scope? With numbers this large and swelling, with violence so absurd that it seems to be a play on a grind-house film (without the sense of humor), how do journalists tell the gruesome, rough-hewn reality without producing disinterest or indifference? Nikolas Kristof at the New York Times once pointed out that in reporting the problems of Darfur, he had to being to personalize the coverage, focusing on individuals within the conflict and how it was personally affecting their lives; else the sheer numbers would produce an abstraction in the mind of his readers.
We, the people in charge of telling the story, know far too little ourselves about a clandestine upstart society we long viewed as marginal, and what little we know cannot be explained in print media’s standard eight hundred words or less (or broadcast’s two minutes or under). And the story, like the murders, is endlessly repetitive and confusing: there are the double-barreled family names, the shifting alliances, the double-crossing army generals, the capo betrayed by a close associate who is in turn killed by another betrayer in a small town with an impossible name, followed by another capo with a double-barreled last name who is betrayed by a high-ranking army officer who is killed in turn. The absence of understanding of these surface narratives is what keeps the story static, and readers feeling impotent. Enough time has passed, though, since the beginning of the drug war nightmare that there is now a little perspective on the problem. Academics on both sides of the border have been busy writing, and so have the journalists with the most experience. Thanks to their efforts, we can now begin to place some of the better-known traffickers in their proper landscape.
“The Murderers of Mexico,” The New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books has an interesting piece on this problem now being ironed-out. As the writer of the piece explained, covering the problems in Mexico is not easy, because of the culture involved: what with the “double-barrelled names” running into each other; the limited time or space to cover the ever-depressing and nuance-needed reporting now, the numbers, the reasons behind the strategic killings, and even how the more random happened, and so on. For years, everyone who could and had the ample courage needed to do so reported on the problems of the Mexican drug trade, but maybe were ill-equipped to do so. And the drug trade and its terrorists’ ways had to have had a chilling effect for even some of the most hardened and experienced. Journalists are intimidated, killed and so forth. Not to mention, the heinous acts of the cartels alone — even without their targeting of journalists — would scare any normal person without icy nerves and an iron stomach. And if these stories were never reported or accurately reported, the political pressure on both sides of the border is somewhat lessened. And so, it is necessary to praise these most undaunted of journalists, who cover the problem now, with great ability.
But moreover, it isn’t just a matter of if the reporting itself is accurate and able to fish out the truth from the convulsion of the details, coming from even those with experience: those reporters who are not struggling with the similar and double-barreled names, the myriad family connections and networks spread across the country and on both sides of the borders, or the weird ritual practices of the killings by some in the cartels, their own mythologies and so on, but also how the narrative is framed. This is not just a problem for Mexico, it is a problem for us, or perhaps more precisely, a problem that is the result of us. For all of the Minute Men Project volunteer sentinels and anti-Mexican rhetoric spewers of the fringe right, they miss the point. This is not about culture, this is about money for both sides of the fence, from the way we Draconianly handle drug offenses for a prison-industrial complex, to Mexico’s healthy economic gains from the drug trade, to the resources our government spends on drug interdiction and the war, that keeps people employed, and probably a host of things I’ve yet to think about .
As most right-wing politicos and a sundry of economists often go to the well of “letting the market being the judge, jury and advocate” for any number of things; if the politicians and policy-makers ever applied such a capitalist model to the drug-enforcement problems of Mexico, they’d be far from wrong. Because the fact of the matter is, if there were no American demand or even a somehow diminished demand for illicit drugs (maybe through de-criminalization and the legalization of some drugs to place better governmental controls and truly focus on prevention), and if our policy makers were more honest about our need to treat and rehabilitate our nation of abusers, as purely a matter of long-term solutions to an ever-expanded, profligate, hopeless “War on Drugs,” then we’d do all of us and our neighbors to the south a great deal of service.
The simple lack of collaboration between our two nations, engulfed in this battle against the cartels with no regard for anything, with each side of the divide looking at the other with plenty of glint-eyed blame, and the Mexican government, for the most part afraid to respond to the cartels, has only made the situation worse, since we are incoherently addressing a rather complex problem. As seen in “The Murderers of Mexico” and the Mexican army’s own fear and reticence to respond to the grotesque massacre of 72 migrants for no clear reason on August 23, of this year, just 100 miles away from their base, by the “Zetas,” a muscle group and franchise employed by trafficking cartels, after hours of a heated affair; the authority of Mexico on this matter has been lost altogether, and the drug cartels now run the nation with carte blanche, able to murder in slews in now even the most absurdly asinine way, doing so just because, with no relevance to their operation, just force of habit.
Read The New York Review of Books, “The Murderers of Mexico” [Here]
The Climate Change Deniers 11/12/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Global, Media, Policy, Politics.add a comment
THE CLIMATIC RESEARCH UNIT EMAIL fiasco of last year, spurred on by The Telegraph‘s James Delingpole, at his blog, as well as a small sector of the scientific community, a number of less-than-credible politicians and (only God knows why) even lesser-trained media folk — who oddly believe that they can suitably speak on it — have brought climate change skepticism to an increasing relevance. These are curious media-friendly figures who believe that man’s influencing of climate change is either obviously or somewhat negligible, based on marginal evidence and arguments which are put out primarily by oil companies and only a handful of contrarian scientists. Most of this high-profile anti-climate change phalanx argue that changes on the climate front are just a random trend that go on as a part of Earth’s processes, and are isolated from human activity: Or that the sample set to determine whether or not man has an influence upon the climate is far too narrow, considering it is based only on the recent distribution of temperature, and does not factor in the distribution of temperatures over the Earth’s 5 million years, along with the amount of data we have on climate change since industrialization.
These notions often make me wonder why then the argument from these folk — regardless of any evidence that is pro or con to the issue — is that nothing should be done in regards to impacting the possible influences of man on our climate? Why is this line of thinking logical to them? Why is it because they believe climate science is largely unproven; that nothing should be done to thwart its potential catastrophe? Why not err on the side of caution? Ironically, climate skeptics argue “climate science” to be largely uncertain, and yet their response to its “uncertainty” is to be very unapologetically certain? Moreover, they are just so certain in their idea that not doing a thing in regards to our influence on climate, is quite reasonable? (Other than continue to study it, if they are a politician.)
And so I am befuddled as to why rarely to never, in these media debates that have played out over time, is that the obvious counter argument to their notion, brought up: That regardless of political and philosophical positions, it would still be prudent and greatly beneficial on many levels, and even for human technological progress — despite the jury being out on the science behind climate change [so the opposition's argument goes], since fossil fuels are a limited resource that has been consumed for 100-plus years — for all of the nations of the world to still look to address the possible impact of climate change; even if the evidence is causal or even cooked? (As many climate change skeptics wanted to argue because of the email controversy.) Is this not smart, since the consequences of our influence on climate change, and its possibility to become catastrophic, would be absolute murder to almost all life on the planet?
Currently it is but a small number of scientists, relative to the overwhelming majority, who believe that climate change is merely a part of a normal temperature ebb and flow pattern on Earth, or some variation of that theory. According to a Pew Research poll taken in 2009, 84% of all scientists believed in climate change. That figure for scientists who believe in climate change theory should be overwhelming evidence in and of itself, considering the supposed controversy behind the issue, yet the specter of climate change being caused by industrialization also being a great threat to humanity, national security, global security and such, still apparently does not trump the extremely poor rationale of those who are not open to looking into addressing the externalities’ problem of burning of fossil fuels, when they are not proven to them to have an adverse effect on the ecology, and would hurt business interests and (their scare tactic) employment of “the little guy.”
The Guardian‘s resident environmental writer, George Monibot, has, because of this growing cadre of high-profile climate change deniers who ultimately threaten the future of humanity with their rhetoric (overly-dramatic as this statement seems), compiled a short list in 2009 of the top offenders in the climate change front during the highly-questionable Heartland Institute‘s “International Conference on Climate Change“; and the list is an excellent shorthand for the “who, what and for whom” of the figures who shill for what would be a losing future for us all, if they ever gain true traction.
Read George Monibot’s “The Top 10 Climate Change Deniers” [Here]
A Problematic Statement 10/20/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Editorial, Global, Policy.add a comment
Photo Credit: International Herald Tribune
RECENTLY, a post at the liberal-friendly think tank, Center for a New American Security, “abu muqawama” blog, drudged up a part of the “W. Bush” war doctrine, though not the one we normally associate him with: of preëmptive strike based on a dramatically low-set bar, known as the one percent doctrine, that seems to have slip the mind of many. In the run-up to Afghanistan, Bush No. 43 made the statement:
We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.
The statement, at the time, seemed to be what was needed in our nation’s moment of vulnerability and what, frankly, many had probably hoped to hear. The posturing was par for the course for an administration in a war-footing and who was known to indulge in a kind of cowboy-like imagery, in the midst of crisis, which played very well in Peoria, as they say. But, in retrospect, did the statement ultimately create an ever-expanding problem for our government in the prosecution of the “Global War on Terror”? If we were willing to go anywhere and bring America to the terrorists, then wouldn’t this be a forever enterprise; a “forever war“? (To borrow a phrasing from the title of a Joe Haldeman book and the personal tome on Iraq, by Dexter Filkins.) There isn’t actually anything wrong with the statement in my mind, as any nation knowing and willfully sheltering terrorists, should be considered a national security threat. Except, there is a problematic exception: Pakistan.
As abu muqawama points out:
And whatever you think of the former president, not distinguishing between transnational terror groups and the individuals, groups and states that sponsor them makes a high degree of sense. What to do, then, about a country that, on the one hand, supplies much of the intelligence that allows the United States and its allies to target al-Qaeda but, on the other hand, most certainly also sponsors transnational terror groups to promote its own foreign policy? That’s our Pakistan problem in a nutshell, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that U.S. policy toward Pakistan is schizophrenic, with us alternating between sticks and carrots, creating a dynamic that, from the Pakistani perspective, must make little sense and certainly fails to establish a coherent and enduring structure of incentives for collaboration.
Pakistan specialists talk of Pakistan’s strategic triangle and the way it relies on the possession of nuclear weapons, a robust conventional army, and state-sponsored terror groups to advance Pakistani interests. I can understand how a smart old Pakistan hand like Ryan Crocker could then argue we should support Pakistan anyway, but at some point, support for the Pakistanis is just going to cease making sense to Americans and their representatives in the Congress. Americans will begin to wonder how we got from the president’s words on 11 September to this. And it might not take another terror attack, emanating from Pakistani soil, to change the relationship.
Many ‘Climate Change’ Lobbyists Are Evil 05/01/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Editorial, Global, Journalism, Policy, Politics.comments closed
Photo Credit: Retrofuturs
NOW don’t be alarmed by the lede. I am no skeptic of the great warming that has created more and more storms with increased intensity over the last couple of decades, most likely producing the watershed moment of Katrina. And I do not believe that it is sensible to conduct any more research — as some very thick-headed politicians who are beholden to business and are espousers of anti-rationalist thought would want you to believe — since there is nothing else that will augment an already Titanic-size body of evidence: the ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising and there are now more warmer days than ever; all of which occurred after industrialization.
[Supplement: In fact, according to this graph of historical temperature and precipitation trends since 1950, provided by Harris-Mann Climatology, the hottest years on record have all been recorded in my cohort's -- Generation Y's -- lifetime. Looking at the red line, indicating Earth temperatures, one sees a frighteningly sharp incline towards "Much Above Normal," at least seven times, counting the peaks, since 1980. It does, admittedly, sink to just below "Above Normal," six times in that same span. But this is still disconcerting isn't it, considering that the temperature hasn't been below "Above Normal" in that period, and is now resting at "Much Above Normal"?]
This “warming trend” as fringe skeptics still characterize it — implying that the Earth has naturally gone through these cycles, which accounts for the current evidence – has hurt crops and is doing strange things to the ecosystem of the ocean. Furthermore, I am not, in the post’s title, actually speaking about the multitude of folks running around with a much-needed sense of urgency, looking to effect change in the glacial movement on climate change policy.
I am only talking about the wolf in sheep’s clothing that was my one serious point of contention with the Obama run to the White House as, prepare for an understatement, the incestuous business-political machine necessitated it for the-then-future No. 44. That is the power of the “clean coal” movement and its lobbyists, who not surprisingly managed to get the closest mainstream, “truth-telling candidate” to make a concession, and support a mentally blunted, foolishly-technologically-hopeful solution to our problem of producing environmentally safe energy . And they now use his pro-”clean coal” stump speech in their ads:
“Clean Coal” is a fabrication of marketing produced by the various industries who stand to make a profit by continuing the nation’s dependence on a “dirty burning”energy resource. Recently, the power and influence of the Clean Coal “movement” that relies on yet developed technology, a mixed bag of hypotheticals — such as yet found effective scrubbers for smoke stacks — and other “ifs,” was pointed to in a Mother Jones‘ article on K Street’s booming sector of climate change lobbyists. My problem is not exactly with the lobbying, however, since it is now the reality that money has become equated to free speech and it is therefore “protected” by the Constitution; regardless of whether it is donations from an individual (quite sensible), or from a corporation (completely asinine); but with the type of lobbying, and the causes that they are advocating.
Photo Credit: Mother Jones
If K Street were flooded with lobbyists of a different stripe on the matter of climate change — lobbyists who actually care for the environment and are very, very honest in their intent to thwart it — then my qualms would be assuaged. I know that lobbying even with its tremendous downsides is a part of our democratic process, and with a consistent money flow and tenacity and constituency, it can work wonders; (see: senior citizens and Medicaid and Social Security, as prime examples). However, the most powerful lobby now on the issue of climate change is the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. (The link is to their official site, here is a more honest review via the Center for Media and Democracy: SourceWatch Wiki of them.) “ACCCE” is a conglomeration of companies from multiple industries which include rail, mining and manufacturing. *So, you know, the most “trustworthy” folks in regards to the environment, with little to gain from lobbying for policies in the climate change arena to be unambitious, and rife with notions of clean-burning fossil fuels. (*Sarcasm is all over that last sentence.)
According to Mother Jones, “Agents of Climate Change“:
For a long time, the climate change debate in Washington took place along predictable lines: industry on one side, environmentalists on the other. But now, with the prospect of actual legislation passing Congress, and the attendant opportunities for political and financial gain, the competition has erupted into a giant free-for-all. Since 2003, the climate lobby has grown by more than 400 percent, to a total of 2,810 lobbyists — 5 to every lawmaker.
The largest players are still formidable: The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a collection of power companies and mining, rail, and manufacturing interests, spent $9.95 million lobbying Congress and the White House last year, more than any other group devoted solely to climate change. But there are now also 138 lobbyists representing alternative energy technologies. Environmental and health lobbyists numbered fewer than 50 six years ago; there are now 176. (Still, the alternative energy and environmental lobbyists put together are outnumbered more than 7-to-1 by those for major industries.)
Read Mother Jones‘s “Agents of Climate Change” [Here]
