Noah Shachtman reports: Ever since WikiLeaks began releasing a series of documents about the surveillance system Trapwire, there’s been a panicked outcry over this supposedly all-seeing, revolutionary spy network. In fact, there are any number of companies that say they comb through video feeds or suspicious activity reports in largely the same way that Trapwire claims to do. What’s truly extraordinary about Trapwire was how it was marketed by the private intelligence firm Stratfor, whose internal e-mails WikiLeaks exposed.
The documents show Stratfor being less than straight with its clients, using temporary jobs in government to set up Trapwire contracts, and calling it all a “wet dream.” In their e-mails, executives at Stratfor may have been hyping up a surveillance technology. But what they really did was provide reconnaissance on the $25 billion world of intelligence-for-hire that’s ordinarily hidden from public view. In this case, the sunlight isn’t particularly flattering.
On Nov. 4, 2009, Fred Burton, the vice president of the private intelligence firm Stratfor, co-wrote an essay on emerging terrorist threats and the means to stop them. Particularly impressive, Burton wrote, was a new software tool called Trapwire, which works “with camera systems to help detect patterns of preoperational surveillance … to help cut through the fog of noise and activity and draw attention to potential threats.”
The essay was typical of the trend analyses, news summaries, and hot tips that Strator provides every day to its customers in government and in industry. For these services, Burton’s clients pay his firm handsomely; a single Stratfor enterprise license costs more than $20,000 (.pdf). These customers rely on Burton and his team to provide the latest word from flashpoints worldwide — and to explain what this torrent of information all means. They count on Stratfor to help make sense of the world.
What his customers reading that November 2009 essay may not have realized was that Burton was also marketing them a product. On Aug. 17 of that year, Stratfor and Trapwire signed a contract (.pdf) giving Burton’s company an 8 percent referral fee for any business they send Trapwire’s way. The essay was partially a sales pitch — a fact that Burton neglected to mention. [Continue reading…]
Chris Hedges writes: I was on the 15th floor of the Southern U.S. District Court in New York in the courtroom of Judge Katherine Forrest last Tuesday. It was the final hearing in the lawsuit I brought in January against President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. I filed the suit, along with lawyers Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran, over Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). We were late joined by six co-plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg.
This section of the NDAA, signed into law by Obama on Dec. 31, 2011, obliterates some of our most important constitutional protections. It authorizes the executive branch to order the military to seize U.S. citizens deemed to be terrorists or associated with terrorists. Those taken into custody by the military, which becomes under the NDAA a domestic law enforcement agency, can be denied due process and habeas corpus and held indefinitely in military facilities. Any activist or dissident, whose rights were once protected under the First Amendment, can be threatened under this law with indefinite incarceration in military prisons, including our offshore penal colonies. The very name of the law itself—the Homeland Battlefield Bill—suggests the totalitarian credo of endless war waged against enemies within “the homeland” as well as those abroad.
“The essential thrust of the NDAA is to create a system of justice that violates the separation of powers,” Mayer told the court. “[The Obama administration has] taken detention out of the judicial branch and put it under the executive branch.”
In May, Judge Forrest issued a temporary injunction invalidating Section 1021 as a violation of the First and Fifth amendments. It was a courageous decision. Forrest will decide within a couple of weeks whether she will make the injunction permanent.
In last week’s proceeding, the judge, who appeared from her sharp questioning of government attorneys likely to nullify the section, cited the forced internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II as a precedent she did not want to follow. Forrest read to the courtroom a dissenting opinion by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in Korematsu v. United States, a ruling that authorized the detention during the war of some 110,00 Japanese-Americans in government “relocation camps.”
“[E]ven if they were permissible military procedures, I deny that it follows that they are constitutional,” Jackson wrote in his 1944 dissent. “If, as the Court holds, it does follow, then we may as well say that any military order will be constitutional, and have done with it.” [Continue reading…]
David Axe reports: More secret bases. More and better unmanned warplanes. More frequent and deadly robotic attacks. Some five years after a U.S. Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle flew the type’s first mission over lawless Somalia, the shadowy American-led drone campaign in the Horn of Africa is targeting Islamic militants more ruthlessly than ever.
Thanks to media accounts, indirect official statements, fragmentary crash reports and one complaint by a U.N. monitoring group, we can finally begin to define — however vaguely — the scope and scale of the secret African drone war.
The details that follow are in part conjecture, albeit informed conjecture. They outline of just one of America’s ongoing shadow wars — and one possible model for the future U.S. way of war. Along with the counterterrorism campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen and the Philippines, the Somalia drone war demonstrates how high-tech U.S. forces can inflict major damage on America’s enemies at relatively low cost … and without most U.S. citizens having any idea it’s even happening.
Since 2007, Predator drones and the larger, more powerful Reapers — reinforced by Ravens and Scan Eagle UAVs and Fire Scout robot helicopters plus a small number of huge, high-flying Global Hawks — have hunted Somali jihadists on scores of occasions. It’s part of a broader campaign of jet bombing runs, naval gun bombardment, cruise-missile attacks, raids by Special Operations Forces and assistance to regional armies such as Uganda’s.
Trita Parsi writes: On August 12, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, called for an international declaration that diplomacy with Iran had definitively failed. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government itself declared the talks all but dead even before they began, but Ayalon’s explosive comments added fuel to the bizarrely public debate in Israel about whether to bomb Iran.
This debate has lingered for several years now, though currently it appears to be at a crescendo. But precisely because it’s yesterday’s news, both the markets and the international community seem to be treating it as yet another Israeli cry wolf moment.
Indeed, the timing of the latest round of public speculation and leaking by Israeli Cabinet ministers seems to have more to do with America’s election cycle than with any particular developments with the Iranian nuclear program.
It is no secret that Netanyahu prefers a Romney victory in November. His tensions with President Obama are well documented and cover a broad spectrum of issues — from the Iranian dossier, to the Palestinian conflict, to the Arab Spring.
Netanyahu appears to have Obama in a box in which escalation or mere threats of escalation by Israel can have no negative repercussions. If the threats result in — as they have in the past — even more sanctions and pressure on Iran, then that would be a win for Netanyahu. Sanctions cripple Iran’s economy and slowly weaken Tehran’s ability to be a potent challenger of Israel in the region. Sanctions also render a return to talks more unlikely, which means an increase in the probability of war.
If Obama, on the other hand, resists the pressure from Netanyahu and ends up in a public dispute with the Israeli government, then that would shine a light on the differences between Obama and Netanyahu. This, in turn, would benefit the Romney campaign, as it would open up Obama to further criticism of being insensitive to Israeli concerns. Romney would come across as being on the same page as Israel, whereas Obama would be out of sync with the Jewish state. Strategists in both camps believe that this would hurt Obama in key battleground states in the elections.
Consequently, there are few drawbacks to the Netanyahu government consistently increasing the pressure on Obama as we get closer to the elections. Obama’s options are limited, and all appear to end up benefiting Netanyahu.
But what if Netanyahu isn’t bluffing this time around? What if he views the likelihood of a second Obama term as high and as a result the window before the elections as his last best chance to strike Iran? Keen analysts of relations between the United States and Israel, such as former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East Colin Kahl, caution against believing that Netanyahu is crying wolf this time around.
What will Iran’s response be if Israel does attack? The government in Tehran takes pride in being unpredictable in such situations, but a few scenarios can be envisioned.
If the attack is unsuccessful or only moderately successful — that is, the nuclear program is damaged but not destroyed, and civilian casualties are limited — then, contrary to its stern warnings of a crushing response, Tehran may play the victim card.
Instead of responding militarily, Iran would take the matter to the United Nations and demand sanctions against Israel for taking illegal military action. A veto by the United States would prevent any meaningful punishment of Israel, but international sympathy would shift toward Iran. Tehran would then threaten to leave the Treaty of the Non-Proliferation on Nuclear Weapons and expel all inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. This would completely blind the world to any insight on the Iranian nuclear program and provide Tehran with a legal path to a nuclear bomb.
To prevent such a nightmare scenario, incentives would be offered to Tehran to remain within the NPT, including the lifting of sanctions. The international consensus around sanctioning Iran would unravel, and Tehran would find an exit from its current isolation.
Moreover, the regime would find a pretext to clamp down further on the indigenous pro-democracy movement and fortify its own grip on power. The higher oil prices following the attack would enrich Tehran’s coffers, and the focus of the Arab street would shift away from Iran’s losing proposition on Syria and Bashar al-Assad’s butchering of his own people and back to the more usual focus on Israel as the common enemy of the Muslim people. Iran’s narrative on Syria — that the uprising there is an Israeli ploy aimed at weakening the “arc of resistance” — would likely find new buyers in the Arab world.
And perhaps most important, Iran exiting the NPT would also be a reliable indication that the debate in Tehran has shifted toward building a weapon rather than just pursuing the option of building the weapon. The attack, in short, would increase the likelihood of an Iranian nuclear bomb. [Continue reading…]
USA Today reports: They could turn a too-close-to-call race into a landslide for President Obama— but by definition they probably won’t.
Call them the unlikely voters.
A nationwide USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll of people who are eligible to vote but aren’t likely to do so finds that these stay-at-home Americans back Obama’s re-election over Republican Mitt Romney by more than 2-1. Two-thirds of them say they are registered to vote. Eight in 10 say the government plays an important role in their lives.
Even so, they cite a range of reasons for declaring they won’t vote or saying the odds are no better than 50-50 that they will: They’re too busy. They aren’t excited about either candidate. Their vote doesn’t really matter. And nothing ever gets done, anyway.
“I don’t think Obama helped us as much as he promised,” says John Harrington, 52, a heavy-equipment operator from Farmington, Minn., who was among those surveyed. Since 2008, when Harrington voted for Obama, the financial downturn has forced him to sell his home in Arizona, move to Minnesota to be near a daughter and put him on the road to Nebraska, North Dakota and Iowa to find work.
His wife “loves” Obama and is sure to vote in November, but he’s not certain whether he’ll get there this time.
Even in 2008, when turnout was the highest in any presidential election since 1960, almost 80 million eligible citizens didn’t vote. Curtis Gans, director of the non-partisan Center for the Study of the American Electorate, predicts that number will rise significantly this year. He says turnout could ebb to levels similar to 2000, when only 54.2% of those eligible to vote cast a ballot. That was up a bit from 1996, which had the lowest turnout since 1924.
This year, perhaps 90 million Americans who could vote won’t. “The long-term trend tends to be awful,” Gans says. “There’s a lot of lack of trust in our leaders, a lack of positive feelings about political institutions, a lack of quality education for large segments of the public, a lack of civic education, the fragmenting effects of waves of communications technology, the cynicism of the coverage of politics — I could go on with a long litany.”
There’s also the relentlessly negative tone of this year’s campaign. The majority of TV ads don’t try to persuade voters to support one candidate but rather to convince them not to back the other guy.
Jeffrey Lewis writes: On Aug. 9, the Israeli newspaper Haaretzreported that U.S. President Barack Obama has received a new Special National Intelligence Estimate finding that “Iran has made surprising, significant progress toward military nuclear capability.” U.S. officials have refused to confirm that the new estimate exists — either on the record or anonymously — but the administration has asserted that its overall assessment remains unchanged since its last public statement this January, when James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said, “Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons … should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta reiterated this view on Tuesday, Aug. 14. Unfortunately, the White House’s concerted campaign to criminalize national security discourse has prevented officials from discussing the estimate with journalists, allowing the most alarmist conjecture to dominate public debate.
The “new” intelligence is probably old news, but that’s hard to see, especially when reporters and officials continue to misstate the judgments of the now famous 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear capabilities and intentions. Unless you have carefully read that report, you are almost certainly misinformed about what it says. Much of the discourse, even among foreign-policy “elites,” includes wildly inaccurate assertions, which in turn makes the entire discourse about Iran much, much dumber.
This is not the time to dumb down the discussion of Iran’s nuclear programs. There is growing support for military action, and we are entering the homestretch of a U.S. presidential election, when sober policy analysis will take a back seat to rhetorical machismo and blatant pandering to any ill-informed prejudice that might swing a few votes. I don’t know if time is drawing short, but my friends and colleagues are clearly wondering about the possibility. Injecting a little realism into this discussions depends, first and foremost, on understanding what the intelligence estimates do, and do not, say.
There have been at least four NIEs on Iran’s weapon-of-mass-destruction programs: in 2001, 2005, 2007, and 2011. (The 2005 document was a “memo to holders,” but for our purposes we can refer to all of them as NIEs.) The defining text is the 2007 NIE. In the popular telling of the story, the 2007 NIE reversed the findings of previous NIEs, revealing that Iran had no nuclear weapons program. This is, depending on your political inclination, a courageous act of dissent by an intelligence community desperate to stop George W. Bush’s warmongering administration from invading yet another country, or a cowardly effort by unelected bureaucrats to subvert the will of the people by undermining Bush’s determination to prevent the most dangerous weapons from falling into the most dangerous hands. Neither of these caricatures is remotely accurate. [Continue reading…]
The Associated Press reports: An Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program could trigger a bloody monthlong war on multiple fronts, killing hundreds of Israelis or more, the Israeli Cabinet’s civil defense chief warned in an interview published Wednesday.
It was the most explicit assessment yet of how the government sees events unfolding in the aftermath of an Israeli attack.
Matan Vilnai, who is stepping down as the “home front” Cabinet minister to become Israel’s ambassador to China, described the scenarios to Israel’s Maariv daily at a time of heightened debate about the Iranian nuclear threat.
Vilnai, a retired general who was deputy military chief of staff, has spent the past five years overseeing upgrades of Israel’s civil defense systems, including air-raid sirens, bomb shelters and a public alert system.
In the Maariv interview, Vilnai said “the home front is ready as never before.” Nonetheless, he said the country must be braced for heavy casualties in the case of conflict with Iran.
Vilnai said the government has prepared for the possibility of hundreds of rockets and missiles falling on Israeli population centers each day, with the expectation of 500 deaths.
“It could be that there will be fewer fatalities, but it could be there will be more. That is the scenario that we are preparing for according to the best experts,” he said. “The assessments are for a war that will last 30 days on a number of fronts.”
Reuters adds: Martin van Creveld, a military historian who is critical of the Netanyahu government’s Iran posture, posited a deterioration in Israel’s fitness to confront an enemy state since it absorbed Iraqi missile salvoes in the 1991 Gulf war.
“More than 20 years of fighting the weak has bred in Israel a revolting blend of aggression and self-pity,” he said, referring to outgunned Lebanese and Palestinians.
Van Creveld questioned whether Israeli morale was prepared for the costs of an Iran war, such as downed pilots. But retired air force chief David Ivry, who masterminded Israel’s 1981 bombing of Iraq’s atomic reactor, dismissed such pessimism.
Even were Iran to take 10 pilots captive, he said, “we’ll free 10,000 prisoners to get them back. If the country decides that its national security is at stake, then the price is paid.”
Philip Handleman, U.S.-based co-author of “Air Combat Reader – Historic Feats and Aviation Legends”, said he believed Israel was willing to tackle Iran though bereft of the long-range bombers and refueling planes available to the Americans.
“I don’t think Israel would be ‘banking on’ subsequent U.S. military involvement, though that might very well happen. If Israel strikes, it would be out of a pureness of heart, a very primordial survivalist instinct,” Handleman said.
Israel’s resilience has been underestimated in the past.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah used to compare it to a “spider’s web” – easily blown away. Then Hezbollah triggered the 2006 war with a cross-border raid which Nasrallah later rued, saying he would not have ordered it had he known Israel’s response would be that fierce.
There is ample indication Israel would similarly try to hit Iran and its allies hard and fast, hoping to curtail the fight.
“War is difficult and sad, and when it is unavoidable it should be embarked upon with all capabilities utilized so as not to become its victim,” Shimon Peres, Israel’s president and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, wrote in a weekend newspaper essay.
Nehemia Shtrasler writes: The Second Lebanon War taught us something new about the Israeli economy. In 2006, we were sure that the economy would get caught up in a crisis and deep recession following the barrage of rockets on the north, which we feared would hit Tel Aviv. But it turned out we were wrong. The economy was unusually strong and stable. It did shift down a gear for one quarter, but it returned to its previous pace of growth immediately afterward, as though nothing had happened. So maybe our economy will be able to survive an attack on Iran intact?
This time around, the Bank of Israel and the Finance Ministry are predicting that an attack on Iran would cause serious economic damage. They are concerned that the economy will ground to a long-term halt; they worry about bankruptcies and mass layoffs. The Bank of Israel is preparing to launch a program protecting the banks from a possible panic manifested by a mass withdrawal of money, which could put the banking system at risk of bankruptcy.
An attack on Iran would be condemned around the world. There are already countries, companies, labor associations and consumer groups that boycott Israel because of its occupation of the territories. An attack on Iran would broaden and intensify the boycott. There are also European companies that won’t trade with Israeli companies because of the risk they say Israel poses. And when that threat is actualized – when rockets fall on Tel Aviv – the rest of the world’s investors will also flee. So we should expect stocks and government bonds to drop sharply, and the deficit to rise in the wake of an increase in security expenses as tax revenue drops.
A military assault on Iran will also spell a sharp rise in oil prices, which will intensify the global recession and make us even less popular in Europe and the United States than we already are. Because if there’s anything that unemployed Spaniards or Greek demonstrators really don’t want right now, it’s a gas hike.
Iran’s response to an attack is expected to be far more significant than Iraq’s late and relatively minor response to the bombing of its nuclear facility in 1981: dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of rockets fired on Israel as an initial reaction, boosted by a drizzle of rockets over the long term. A few Shahab-4 missiles a day will be enough to cause immense damage to morale and to the economy. You can’t live a normal life under a daily threat like that. People will be scared to go shopping and the malls will be empty. Demand for goods and services will drop and factories will go bankrupt. Tourists will stop coming, investors will flee, the ports will be paralyzed and international airlines will stop landing here.
As a result, the shekel will drop sharply, inflation will rise, interest rates will be sky-high and unemployment will go up. One blow will follow another. At least housing prices will drop, though.
Under such a scenario, we will have no choice but to ask our only friend for help. But given the state of relations with U.S. President Barack Obama, there’s no reason for him to rush in to assist Israel. After all, he opposes an attack in the first place, and particularly doesn’t want one now, on the eve of presidential elections. It is this undermining of the alliance with the United States that is the most dangerous step of all.
In both his first and second terms of office, Benjamin Netanyahu has managed to make himself hated by the U.S. administration because of his manipulative approach toward the Palestinian issue. Now he, along with the rest of us, is reaping the fruit of that approach.
It appears that the Israeli public understands full well the degree to which we are dependent on the United States. It’s not just the $3 billion a year or the new military aircraft. Without a source of more weapons during wartime and without diplomatic protection, our situation will be frightfully dangerous. All it takes is for a U.S. president to imply that he’s reconsidering his country’s ties with Israel and we will become a pariah country to which no one will want to lend even a single dollar. Under such conditions, even international corporate giants like Teva won’t be able to get credit abroad.
But wait, isn’t it possible this whole doomsday scenario won’t take place and the dour predictions will turn out to be just as mistaken this time around as they were in 2006?
In light of the massive differences between the war in Lebanon and a military assault on Iran, one would have to be an incurable optimist to believe that’s the case. The doomsday scenario seems to be the most likely.
The Guardian reports: A former intelligence chief has been appointed as Israel’s new minister for homeland security, as speculation about a military strike targeting Iran’s nuclear programme intensifies.
Avi Dichter, 59, who headed Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, from 2000-05, will be confirmed in the new post at a special parliamentary session this week. Dichter has previously indicated a cautious approach to military action against Iran. In February, he said Israel should not act unilaterally: “Israel is not a superpower. We cannot lead the world offensive against Iran … We need to prepare, just in case nobody plans to do anything, but to lead it will be a total mistake.”
Two months ago, he said he was glad the former Mossad chief Meir Dagan had spoken out against a military strike.
Febrile speculation over whether the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and defence minister, Ehud Barak, are close to ordering military action in the coming weeks has dominated the Israeli media in recent days. In an article on Friday in Israel’s biggest-selling daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, commentators Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer wrote: “Insofar as it depends on Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, an Israeli military strike on the nuclear facilities in Iran will take place in the autumn before the US elections in November.”
Barnea later wrote that he and Shiffer had since been “bombarded with phone calls from people who asked if it was time to hide in the bomb shelters”. [Continue reading…]
Adele M. Stan writes: It’s official: The Republican Party is now officially a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers’ political enterprise. How else to explain Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s pick of Rep. Paul Ryan, Wis., as his running mate. Yes, that Paul Ryan — chairman of the House Budget Committee and author of the infamous Ryan roadmap budget plan, which promises to turn Medicare into a privatized voucher system, and yank health care from millions of children whose parents happen to be poor. And that’s just the beginning. In addition to a raft of cuts, the Ryan plan would end the Earned Income Tax Credit, which millions of parents count on.
It’s a plan that even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich deemed too “radical.” Asked by NBC’s David Gregory to respond to Ryan’s proposal, Gingrich famously said (video): “I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering. I don’t think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate.” (Of course that was before Gingrich walked back those remarks, apparently reminded by some savvy operative that he might not want to anger the Kochs, to whom Ryan, 42, is something of a youthful ward, having been the beneficiary of years of support from the Koch-founded Americans For Prosperity.)
In case anyone should miss the point that Ryan is a very Kochy guy, Romney did his big reveal of running-mate Ryan this morning aboard the U.S.S. Wisconsin, a decommisioned ship docked in the all-important swing state of Virginia. However important Virginia is to the electoral math, Wisconsin is a highly symbolic icon for the Tea Party. It’s not only Ryan’s home state; it’s the poster state of right-wing triumph, the place where Gov. Scott Walker successfully fended off a recall attempt made by progressives in response to a bill he rammed through the state legislature that all but ended collective bargaining for the state’s public employees. Much of the credit for Wisconsin’s right turn goes to Americans For Prosperity, which boasts a particularly aggressive Wisconsin chapter, which began building a network of activists there in 2005.
Ryan’s association with the group goes back almost that far. In 2008, he was granted the Wisconsin AFP chapter’s “Defending the American Dream” award, handed to him by a young county executive who served as emcee for those festivities — a guy named Scott Walker. Since then, he has made countless appearances on the group’s behalf, at anti-health-care reform rallies on Capitol Hill, on conference town halls across the country and at Americans For Prosperity and Americans For Prosperity Foundation events. (Just enter Ryan’s name into the search engine on the Amerians For Prosperity Web site, and you’ll come up with eight pages of citations.) In fact, Ryan was due to speak at last week’s conference sponsored by the AFP Foundation in Washington, D.C., forcing increased speculation about his running-mate prospects when he failed to show.
For Romney, the pluses in picking Ryan are these: the Tea Partiers, who are less than wild about Mittens, really love them some Paul Ryan — as does David Koch, who will be seated as a Romney delegate at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. Koch and his brother, Charles — the mbillionaire owners of Koch Industries, the second largest privately held corporation in the U.S. — are major donors, not only to political candidates, but to a range of right-wing think tanks and groups. In the post-Citizens United world, those donations add up to millions in political advertisements by all manner of non-profit groups. Already, Americans For Prosperity has made a $27 million air-time buy for running anti-Obama ads. [Continue reading…]
Want help going beyond the horse race? We’re gathering the best stories out there on Congressman Paul Ryan, his positions, and his background. Have other stories to share? Add them in comments.
Background
Fussbudget, The New Yorker, August 2012 This sweeping profile is a great introduction to Paul Ryan and his politics. Starting in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, it lays out the evolution of Ryan’s economic beliefs, and his rise through the G.O.P – from his early affinity to Ayn Rand to failed attempts at privatizing Social Security, to his Path to Prosperity budget plan, which would make radical changes in Medicaid and other social programs. The article also looks at the ways that federal-funded projects have helped Ryan’s hometown–and notes that Ryan’s plan “would drastically reduce the parts of the budget” that are funding exactly these kinds of projects.
Ryan shines as GOP seeks vision, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 2009 A broad look at Ryan from his home-state paper at a time when Ryan’s national profile was on the rise. Ryan discusses, among other things, how having gay friends led him to break with his party on a gay rights bill in Congress and his “real passion” — bowhunting.
The Legendary Paul Ryan, New York Magazine, April 2012 A look at how the Republican party rallied around Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity,” putting the newcomer’s fiscal agenda at the center of the 2012 presidential campaign well before voters had even chosen Romney as their Republican nominee.
On the paradox of Paul Ryan, The American Conservative, April 2012 What does Mitt Romney gain from Paul Ryan? Romney may be betting on a boost from conservatives who view Ryan as a hero for his aggressive stance on entitlements and federal spending, but as W. James Antle III points out, that may not be enough to win over grassroots conservatives. Antle writes that despite his anti-entitlements campaign, Ryan’s voting record “more closely resembles that of the Republicans who have lost to Tea Party primary challengers than that of a ruthless government-cutter.”
Man with a Plan, Weekly Standard, July 2012 The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes wrote a favorable profileof Ryan in July in the midst of veep buzz. The piece traces his entire career with a particular focus on how, in recent years, Ryan became “the intellectual leader of the Republican party.”
How Important is Altas Shrugged author Ayn Rand to Paul’s political philosophy? The Atlas Society, April 2012 In a 2005 speech to the Atlas Society, Paul said, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand…you can’t find another thinker or writer who did a better job of describing and laying out the moral case for capitalism.” According to the excerpts and audio of his speech posted on the society’s website, he also said that Rand was “required reading” for his interns and staff. But recently, Ryan has said while he had read Rand’s novels when he was young, his supposed obsession with her was “an urban legend.” “I reject her philosophy,” Ryan told Robert Costa at National Review in April. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview.”
Policy
A Closer Look at Ryan’s Budget Roadmaps, The New York Times, August 2012 As part of an in-depth look at Ryan’s polarizing House Republican budget plan, the New York Times highlights two studies of how the plan would affect Americans. One, a long-term analysis by the Congressional Budget Office of some of Ryan’s suggested changes to Medicare and Medicaid, found that, “Under the proposal, most elderly people who would be entitled to premium support payments would pay more for their health carethan they would pay under the current Medicare system.” The other, a study by the Tax Policy Centerof the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, found that “the tax cuts in Paul Ryan’s 2013 budget plan would result in huge benefits for high-income peopleand very modest—or no— benefits for low income working households.”
What’s Paul Ryan’s foreign policy? Foreign Policy, April 2012 While Ryan has a limited record on international affairs, he has spoken about everything from how to handle China (less hawkishly than Romney) to getting cosier with rising powers India and Brazil. Foreign Policy’s helpful overview says the overall picture that emerges is “a bit of a Rorschach test.” Ryan says the U.S. should stay deeply engaged– “America is the greatest force for human freedom the world has ever seen” — while he has also called for cutting funding for U.S. international aid.
Ryan’s personal finances and connections
Ryan is wealthy–but not by Romney standards. The congressman reported 2011 assets valued at between $2.4 and $9.3 million, according to an Associated Press report looking at his recently filed financial disclosure form. The money is spread in small chunks over various stock investments and in business interests in Wisconsin and his wife’s home state of Oklahoma. You can browse his assets here(.pdf). Ryan also filed an amendmentto his disclosure noting that his wife’s mother died in 2010 and the family gained interest in a trust worth between $1 and $5 million.
Paul Ryan’s Shrewd Budget Payday, Daily Beast, June 2011 The website takes a closer look at mining, mineral, and energy holdings owned by Ryan — primarily in his wife’s home state of Oklahoma — and how they would be positively affected by Ryan’s proposed tax policies. A Ryan spokesman told the Daily Beast: “These are properties that Congressman Ryan married into. It’s not something he has a lot of control over.” The piece also reports that relatives of Ryan have received federal farming subsidies.
Paul Ryan has got plenty of friends on K Street, Politico, August 2012 A brief look at the friends Ryan his wife Janna have made on K Street in their years in Washington, among them former Ohio congressman Mike Oxley (of Sarbanes-Oxley fame), who is now a lobbyist for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). Janna Ryan, a tax attorney, herself worked as a lobbyist for PriceWaterhouseCooper, the article reports.
Ryan’s Unlikely Alliance with Organized Labor Mother Jones, May 2011 Ryan’s family construction business relies on union labor. “I grew up in organized labor,” Ryan told the Milwaukee Magazine in 2005. “I have a lot of constituents who are in organized labor. I really do not have this ‘us against them’ mentality.” As a congressman, Paul has worked closely with local union leaders and fought to protect the wages of construction workers. While many of his policy plans are directly opposed to what unions want, some unions have continued to support him. Over the course of his career, the Carpenters & Joiners Union has given him $57,500—only slightly less than he has received from Koch Industries, according to The Center for Responsive Politics.
Correction: This post originally said that the Mother Jones article was published in November 2012. It was actually published in May 2011.
Marc Zell, an American-born settler living in Tekoa in the occupied territories who was formerly the law partner of neoconservative Doug Feith, in an interview with Philip Weiss presents what could be called Zen Zionism — the paradoxical idea that the only way Jews can continue making a positive contribution to the world is by being able to live separately from non-Jews.
The Observer reports: Sea ice in the Arctic is disappearing at a far greater rate than previously expected, according to data from the first purpose-built satellite launched to study the thickness of the Earth’s polar caps.
Preliminary results from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 probe indicate that 900 cubic kilometres of summer sea ice has disappeared from the Arctic ocean over the past year.
This rate of loss is 50% higher than most scenarios outlined by polar scientists and suggests that global warming, triggered by rising greenhouse gas emissions, is beginning to have a major impact on the region. In a few years the Arctic ocean could be free of ice in summer, triggering a rush to exploit its fish stocks, oil, minerals and sea routes.
Using instruments on earlier satellites, scientists could see that the area covered by summer sea ice in the Arctic has been dwindling rapidly. But the new measurements indicate that this ice has been thinning dramatically at the same time. For example, in regions north of Canada and Greenland, where ice thickness regularly stayed at around five to six metres in summer a decade ago, levels have dropped to one to three metres.
“Preliminary analysis of our data indicates that the rate of loss of sea ice volume in summer in the Arctic may be far larger than we had previously suspected,” said Dr Seymour Laxon, of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at University College London (UCL), where CryoSat-2 data is being analysed. “Very soon we may experience the iconic moment when, one day in the summer, we look at satellite images and see no sea ice coverage in the Arctic, just open water.”
The consequences of losing the Arctic’s ice coverage, even for only part of the year, could be profound. Without the cap’s white brilliance to reflect sunlight back into space, the region will heat up even more than at present. As a result, ocean temperatures will rise and methane deposits on the ocean floor could melt, evaporate and bubble into the atmosphere. Scientists have recently reported evidence that methane plumes are now appearing in many areas. Methane is a particularly powerful greenhouse gas and rising levels of it in the atmosphere are only likely to accelerate global warming. And with the disappearance of sea ice around the shores of Greenland, its glaciers could melt faster and raise sea levels even more rapidly than at present. [Continue reading…]
By Cora Currier and Suevon Lee, ProPublica, August 10, 2012
July was the hottest month ever in the continental U.S., and the past twelve months have been hotter than any such period on record. Half of all counties in the country have been declared disaster areas, mainly due to drought. We’ve rounded up some of the best journalism on the effects of rising temperatures. Got others you’re burning to share? Add them in the comments.
Profits on Carbon Credits Drive Output of a Harmful Gas, New York Times, August 2012Under a U.N. carbon credit program, manufacturers can get credits for reducing emission of greenhouse gases. But air-conditioner and refrigerator manufacturers realized they could profit from a waste gas produced while making coolant, and they started making and destroying more of it to earn credits. The result: more production of the original coolant, which also contributes to global warming and damages the ozone layer.
In Drought-Stricken Midwest, It’s Fodder Vs. Fuel, NPR, July 2012A U.S. law requires gas companies to buy a certain amount of ethanol, which is made from corn. That means ethanol factories are buying up the crop. Farmers who need corn for livestock, and who are already struggling with drought, say the system isn’t fair.
Wildfire: Red slurry’s toxic dark side,Denver Post, June 2012Hundreds of thousands of gallons of “red slurry” were dropped on wildfires raging in Colorado. The chemical mixture is effective at firefighting, but it’s also full of toxins, including ammonia and nitrates, which threaten the water supply and wildlife. For more background on the Colorado fires, read I-News Network’s account on how more people are moving into the state’s high-risk “red zones”, even as the frequency of fires has increased over the past decade.
Oysters in deep trouble: Is Pacific Ocean’s chemistry killing sea life?, The Seattle Times, April 2012Since 2005, millions of Pacific oysters in a Washington estuary have failed to reproduce and the oyster larvae have been dying. Though region-specific causes contributed to the decline, some scientists believe that greenhouse gases are leading to increased corrosive seawater sooner than expected.
The Great Oasis, The New Yorker, December 2011About a third of the earth is covered in desert, a percentage that increases each year thanks in part to climate change and unsustainable farming. The New Yorker’s Burkhard Bilger examines the science and politics involved in various countries’ efforts to stop desertification, from China and Israel to Oman and Nigeria.
Our Dying Forests, The Salt Lake Tribune, September 2011This multi-part series centers on the decline of the once-lush forestation in the Rocky Mountain West, where warmer winters and longer growing seasons have sparked an explosion of native beetle species that have destroyed 40 million acres of moisture-starved spruce, firs and aspen.
Extreme Heat Blanches Coral, and Threat is Seen, The New York Times, September 2010In 2010 many of the world’s coral reefs turned white in reaction to too-warm waters. Coral bleaching and die-offs often occur in years when El Niño or other unusual weather patterns contribute to hot ocean temperatures, but scientists say that global warming is also playing a factor in what they call “global bleachings.”
Losing Louisiana, The Times-Picayune, December 2008Rising sea levels pose a particular problem for Louisiana’s fragile coastline, where the land is sinking and protective wetlands have been ravaged by development and hurricanes. North Carolina’s shore is also seeing the impact of rising seas, as the Charlotte Observer covered in a recent series on coastal erosion.
Marsha B Cohen writes: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is probably the most notorious work of anti-Semitic propaganda ever written. First surfacing publicly in 1905 after several years in private circulation, the work was a fabricated transcript of a secret meeting of rabbis plotting to control the world, as Gary Saul Morson explains. Its initial purpose appears to have been to blame the Jews of Russia for the radical activity that was beginning to shake the foundations of the Tsarist Russian Empire. Translated into English, French, German, Polish, Spanish and Arabic, its unfounded claim that a global Jewish conspiracy seeks to rule the world has shaped and seeped into anti-Semitic propaganda for over a century.
The Protocols of the Elder of Las Vegas, on the other hand, is a 21st century work in progress, and it is no hoax. It’s about a casino magnate with an estimated net worth of just under $25 billion (the seventh richest man in the United States) who decides to devote a small portion of his vast wealth to a neoconservative agenda determined to thwart negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinians; prevent the reelection of an incumbent U.S. president; engineer the destruction of political liberalism; and reshape the political environments of the U.S. and Israel by funding the election of politicians who serve his own corporate and ideological interests. Following is a rough draft of the plot line so far. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: For Fatemeh, the pill she takes twice a day in her home in Iran means the difference between life and death. Earlier this summer when she contacted her friend Mohammad in the US to say she was running out of the medicine due to a shortage, the obvious thing for her fellow Iranian to do was to order it from the chemist next door and have it shipped directly to Iran. To the dismay of Fatemeh and Mohammad, the order was rejected because of US sanctions on trade with Iran.
This week, Standard Chartered bank was accused by US regulators of scheming with Iran to hide transactions, an accusation it denies. While the sanctions focus may currently be on big institutions, in the eyes of ordinary Iranians, it is they who bear the brunt.
“My friend suffers from Brugada syndrome [a heart condition] and has abnormal electrocardiogram and is at risk of sudden death,” said Mohammad, who lives in Moorhead, Minnesota. “There is one drug that is very effective in regulating the electrocardiogram, and hence preventing cardiac arrest. It is called quinidine sulfate and is manufactured in the US.”
Mohammad ultimately circumvented the problem by having the medicine ordered to his home address and sent to Iran through friends. “By the time she got the pills, her own supply was finishing within four days, what if we couldn’t send them in time? Who would be responsible if anything had happened to her?” he asked.
With the latest embargo placed on the importing of Iranian oil, sanctions are now tighter than ever. Western officials argue that sanctions are aimed at punishing the Iranian regime in the hope of forcing it to comply with international rules over its disputed nuclear programme, but many Iranians see things differently.
“Sanctions are affecting the entire country, but it is the people that bear the brunt and have the least ability to protect themselves from this pressure,” said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council and the author of the book A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran. “What is most concerning is that it is now increasingly clear that the people are the target,” he said.
According to Parsi, those advocating the punitive measures hope that pressure on the people will translate into pressure on the government. “That works in theory – in democracies. But in a non-democracy, such as Iran, the ability for people to pressure their government is limited,” he said. “Many in Washington acknowledge that we are conducting economic warfare. That means the entire Iranian economy is the battlefield – and ordinary Iranians are [seen as] enemy combatants.”
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