Legends of the fail

Paul Krugman writes: This is the way the euro ends — not with a bang but with bunga bunga. Not long ago, European leaders were insisting that Greece could and should stay on the euro while paying its debts in full. Now, with Italy falling off a cliff, it’s hard to see how the euro can survive at all.

But what’s the meaning of the eurodebacle? As always happens when disaster strikes, there’s a rush by ideologues to claim that the disaster vindicates their views. So it’s time to start debunking.

First things first: The attempt to create a common European currency was one of those ideas that cut across the usual ideological lines. It was cheered on by American right-wingers, who saw it as the next best thing to a revived gold standard, and by Britain’s left, which saw it as a big step toward a social-democratic Europe. But it was opposed by British conservatives, who also saw it as a step toward a social-democratic Europe. And it was questioned by American liberals, who worried — rightly, I’d say (but then I would, wouldn’t I?) — about what would happen if countries couldn’t use monetary and fiscal policy to fight recessions.

So now that the euro project is on the rocks, what lessons should we draw?

I’ve been hearing two claims, both false: that Europe’s woes reflect the failure of welfare states in general, and that Europe’s crisis makes the case for immediate fiscal austerity in the United States.

The assertion that Europe’s crisis proves that the welfare state doesn’t work comes from many Republicans. For example, Mitt Romney has accused President Obama of taking his inspiration from European “socialist democrats” and asserted that “Europe isn’t working in Europe.” The idea, presumably, is that the crisis countries are in trouble because they’re groaning under the burden of high government spending. But the facts say otherwise.

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At Occupy camps, veterans ring the wars home

Tina Dupuy as visited five occupations camps including one in Canada, and at each of them has spoken to veterans. In Zuccotti Park, she met Army Specialist Jerry Bordeleau, 24, and at Occupy DC, Michael Patterson, 21, who belongs to Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Their presence became national news when Iraq vet and former Marine Scott Olsen’s skull was fractured by a non-lethal round fired by police in Oakland in late-October. A week later in New York, around 30 vets held a solidarity march from Zuccotti Park to the Stock Exchange. They had a rally at the park afterward where Bordeleau spoke. “This is the first major movement for social change we’ve seen in this country since the ’70s,” he said to me.

At Occupy DC, a painting of Scott Olsen in uniform is draped on the side of a tent. He’s become a symbol of the Occupation Movement — he fought overseas only to be injured when exercising his “freedom” of peaceful assembly at home. His name has become a shorthand to talk about why so many vets are at Occupy Wall Street.

“There’s a reason Scott Olsen got shot in the head,” says Patterson, looking down at his chain-restaurant hot cocoa. “Because he was out front.”

Patterson still sports a military haircut and a bit of the Army swagger. He also has a touch of that telling hyper-awareness war vets sometimes display; he’s a little twitchy, a little intense. He tells me he has PTSD and has been self-medicating with weed. He says it helps. What’s also helped is being a part of this protest movement. “This is the only peaceful solution,” he says. “If this movement doesn’t work, our country is not going to make it … We’re just not going to make it.”

Patterson became an interrogator in Iraq straight out of high school. His mother had to sign his enlistment papers. He turned 18 in Basic. “We’re an industrialized nation who’s a third world country. The super wealthy elite pretty much control our democratic process and everyone here is pretty much fighting for scraps and that’s not right,” he says.

I ask him what was the switch for him and when. He explained that it was WikiLeaks. It was the footage of the Apache helicopter gunning down Iraqis released by WikiLeaks in April of 2010. Up to that point he had been interrogating Iraqis and using what he describes as psychological torture. He was 10 years old when the World Trade Center was hit. He wanted to fight terrorism in Iraq. He bought into the whole thing, he tells me. He had been looking forward to signing up ever since the 5th grade and then, suddenly, last November, he found himself watching a video of his fellow soldiers gunning down Iraqis on the street and it all changed for him.

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The war on drugs looks more than ever like a real war

Foreign Policy reports: The secret is out: America’s war on drugs is now more like a real war than ever before. This week, the New York Times reported that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s paramilitary capabilities include "five commando-style squads," mixing law enforcement and armed conflict across Latin America.

It’s an operation that hasn’t spread to Mexico — yet. But as the expense of the status quo in that country mounts, with no end in sight to what over the past five years has become the world’s most disastrous narco-conflict, U.S. policymakers are feeling growing pressure to take the fight south of the border. Mexico’s pivotal position in the drug trade has grown so vexing — despite unprecedented international cooperation — that national political figures in the United States are pushing publicly to make Mexico the next step in indulging the military temptation.

The paramount concern is that Mexico will become a magnet for America’s enemies abroad. In October, the U.S. Justice Department alleged that Iranian operatives — one a U.S. citizen — had plotted to work with a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador by bombing a Washington restaurant. Texas Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of Congress’s Homeland Security Oversight, Investigations, and Management Subcommittee, urged in response that "every tool available" must be used "to stop the advancement of Mexican drug cartels inside the U.S."

What, specifically, does that mean? Fresh light has been shed by eye-opening developments elsewhere in politics. As Paul McLeary of Defense Technology International reported in October, Republican Rep. Connie Mack of Florida used an Oct. 4 hearing on the Merida Initiative — the security agreement between the United States, Mexico, and other Latin American countries on combating the drug trade — to promote an "ink spot" counterinsurgency campaign in Mexico. On the presidential campaign trail, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who had previously called for deploying drone aircraft to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border, opined on Oct. 1, "It may require our military in Mexico working in concert" with Mexican troops "to kill these drug cartels and to keep them off of our border and to destroy their networks." U.S. defense secretary and former CIA chief Leon Panetta recently announced that President Barack Obama has nominated Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV to be commanding general of U.S. Army North, headquartered at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Caldwell’s current assignment? Combined Security Transition Command, Afghanistan.

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Guantánamo: the most expensive prison in the world

The Miami Herald reports: Guards get combat pay, just like troops in Afghanistan, without the risk of being blown up. Some commanders get to bring their families to this war-on-terror deployment. And each captive gets $38.45 worth of food a day.

The Pentagon detention center that started out in January 2002 as a collection of crude open-air cells guarded by Marines in a muddy tent city is today arguably the most expensive prison on earth, costing taxpayers $800,000 annually for each of the 171 captives by Obama administration reckoning.

That’s more than 30 times the cost of keeping a captive on U.S. soil.

It’s still funded as an open-ended battlefield necessity, although the last prisoner arrived in March 2008. But it functions more like a gated community in an American suburb than a forward-operating base in one of Afghanistan’s violent provinces.

Congress, charged now with cutting $1.5 trillion from the budget by Christmas, provided $139 million to operate the center last year, and has made every effort to keep it open — even as a former deputy commander of the detention center calls it “expensive” and “inefficient.”

“It’s a slow-motion Berlin Airlift — that’s been going on for 10 years,” says retired Army Brig. Gen. Greg Zanetti, a West Point graduate who in 2008 was deputy commander at the detention center.

Both its location and temporary nature drive up costs, says Zanetti. While there, he wrote a secret study that compared the operation to Alcatraz, noting that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had closed it in 1963 because it was too expensive.

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Taliban target mobile phone masts to prevent tipoffs from Afghan civilians

The Guardian reports: Afghanistan’s communications infrastructure has become the latest casualty of the intensified war between Nato and the Taliban, with mobile phone companies reporting crippling attacks on their network of transmission masts.

The onslaught came in the wake of a decree by Hamid Karzai ordering phone companies to defy insurgent demands to shut down transmission networks in large parts of the country during the night.

The mobile phone networks are a key battleground in the war on the Taliban as the vast majority of anti-insurgent tipoffs from Afghan civilians are made at night, through phone calls.

The phone industry says the damage has been so great that the numbers of hours of coverage available to all phone users has fallen significantly – the first time there has been such a fall.

After a decade of explosive growth in public access to phones, which are now part of everyday life for millions of Afghans, the falloff is an extraordinary change of fortunes for an industry that is often cited as one of the country’s biggest post-2001 success stories.

The Taliban began attacking transmission masts in 2007, but the damage was limited and the attacks were often aimed only at extorting money from companies.

But since mid-summer attacks have soared, with up to 30 towers being destroyed or damaged in one 20-day period. Previously a loss of five would be considered a bad month.

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How the 99 percent beat Keystone XL

Jamie Henn writes: On Thursday afternoon, President Obama announced that the State Department will be sending plans for TransCanada’s controversial Keystone XL pipeline back to the drawing board. Most analysts think the 12- to 18-month delay will cause enough cost overruns and missed contracts that TransCanada will have to scrap the project altogether.

Keystone XL was going to be another fuse to the largest carbon bomb in North America: the Canadian tar sands. The tar sands are the dirtiest fuel on the face of the planet, and our top climate scientist says fully exploiting them could be “essentially game over” for the climate. We haven’t defused the bomb yet, but fighting Keystone has taught us a lot about how to dismantle it.

This fight started in indigenous communities in Canada and quickly spread down the pipeline route to ranchers in Nebraska and farmers in Texas. National environmental groups picked up the beat a while back. But it was the bravery of 1,253 people that transformed Keystone XL from a regional fight into the most important environmental question facing President Obama before the 2012 election.

For two weeks this August, one person after another was led away from the White House in handcuffs protesting Keystone XL. The sit-in united a uniquely diverse movement, from consummate D.C. insiders to indigenous leaders to Tea Party supporters. I was arrested on the second Wednesday with an architect from Philadelphia, a lawyer from National Resources Defense Council, and Darryl Hannah.

From those 1,253 people, the movement quickly spread. Protests met President Obama at nearly every public campaign stop. Groups of 50 to 100 people started visiting Obama for America offices to say, “We’re not going to donate or volunteer for your campaign until President Obama lives up to the promises he made in 2008, stands up to Big Oil, and kills this pipeline.” Hundreds of people were arrested in Ottawa to turn up the heat on the Canadian government. And this Sunday, more than 12,000 people surrounded the White House in a Keystone XL protest.

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Young U.S. Jews aim Occupy movement at Birthright Israel

Haaretz reports: As the various “occupy” movements spread across the United States, headed by the massive Occupy Wall Street events, a group of young Jewish Americans is taking the notion of the “99%” against the ruling “1%” to debunk what they see as the hypocritical U.S. Jewish leadership.

In a mission statement titled “Occupy the Occupiers: A Jewish Call to Action,” the Young, Jewish, and Proud (YJP), described as the youth wing of the left-leaning Jewish Voice for Peace movement, called out to young Jews to “stand up to the 1% in our own community, the powerful institutions that support Israel’s corporate-backed military control of the Palestinian people and act as the gatekeepers for our community.”

In one event meant to demonstrate the kind of grass-roots dissent shown in other “occupy” events, YJP members disrupted a New York event sponsored by Birthright Israel Alumni Community, using the now famous “human microphone” to interrupt a speech by venture capitalist and author Steven Pease.

Speaking of the incident to the YJP website, one participant, Liza Behrendt, said the event was meant to protest the Birthright program – in which Jewish youths are given a tour of Israel.

“Birthright is a symptom of a larger structural problem in the Jewish institutional world in which our version of the 1%, a handful of wealthy donors including people like the Schustermans or Sheldon Adelson, is able to dictate the social and political agenda of the 99%. That’s because Jewish institutions are so dependent on the 1% for funds,” Behrendt said.

Behrendt criticized Birthright as “free propaganda trips for predominantly middle and upper class American Jews while urgent needs in the United States and Israel go unmet.”

“At the same time, within the dominant Jewish institutions, like Hillel, critical thinking about Israel is not only discouraged but actively suppressed,” she added.

Another participant, Carolyn Klaasen, quoted on the movement’s website as referring to the event, said that the recent “occupy” movement made her feel that “such actions are far more in line with Jewish tradition than this event, which lifted up as a model of ‘success’ people like illegal settlement builder Lev Leviev who profit from exploitation of others.”

“That is part of the problem we’re protesting in the Occupy movement,” Klaasen added.

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On Iran, the U.S. has a broken national security process

Reza Marashi writes: After weeks of hyping intelligence on the military aspects of Iran’s nuclear program, the Obama administration’s public statements on the recently released International Atomic Energy Agency report are curiously moderate. Off the record, U.S. officials say that not all of America’s intelligence findings were included in the I.A.E.A. report — which aims to reflect international consensus. This fact speaks to a larger challenge — that the United States faces a credibility problem. Key countries do not share Washington’s assessment of Iran, and thus it’s unlikely that the U.S. will disclose more substantial information.

Some administration officials would like to see harder evidence made public — if for no other reason than supporting calls for more “crippling” sanctions on Iran. But U.S. intelligence agencies reportedly oppose more detailed disclosures for fear of jeopardizing intelligence-gathering and sources. The U.S. is therefore unlikely to secure more robust U.N. sanctions when it makes its case to the Security Council.

More important but less understood, however, are two longstanding and increasingly dangerous institutional problems within the U.S. government that this case has brought to the fore: an overreliance on intelligence and under-utilization of diplomatic resources when formulating Iran policy. By treating diplomacy with Iran as a reward to be earned rather than the vital national security tool that it is, American politicians have been administering a self-inflicted wound.

The recent allegations against Iran show the critical role that intelligence can play in helping policymakers gather information and make decisions on the most challenging issues. However, intelligence is not meant to be taken in isolation — and when it comes to America’s Iran policy, it almost always is.

While serving in the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs, I learned the 10 percent rule: intelligence is meant to make up approximately 10 percent of the overall information used to analyze strategic issues. The remaining 90 percent consists of embassy reporting and unclassified, open-source information.

As a whole, this symbiotic process is meant to provide a balanced, broader context to policymakers. Intelligence is supposed to be the missing piece of the puzzle — not the only piece. Overreliance on intelligence to support key policy decisions results in skewed or incomplete analysis that lacks the fuller context needed for sound decision-making. As this information vacuum grows over time, so too does the likelihood of misperceptions, miscalculations and dangerous mistakes.

Intelligence is not a substitute for the critical work of diplomats on the ground — and perhaps no foreign policy issue demonstrates this more forcefully than Iran. Simply put, a vital national security process has been broken for over three decades, and American politicians are exacerbating rather than repairing it.

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Palestinians may push for U.N. vote they expect to lose

The Guardian reports: The Palestinians are resigned to losing their battle for majority backing within the United Nations security council for their application for full UN membership but may still press for a vote next week in an attempt to discomfort countries who abstain or vote against.

The security council is to meet in New York on Friday to consider a report on the Palestinian bid. However, the Palestinians have failed to muster the required two-thirds majority among its 15 members, thus sparing the US the need to use its veto to prevent the application being approved.

The Palestinians will also officially receive the report on Friday and the leadership will meet to decide future steps, according to a Palestinian official. “There will definitely be no vote [at the security council] tomorrow,” he said.

One of the options for the Palestinians to consider is to demand a vote next week, knowing they will lose. “Let these countries publicly justify why they will not support a Palestinian state,” said the official. The British foreign secretary, William Hague, looked “deeply uncomfortable” in the House of Commons this week when explaining Britain’s decision to abstain in any vote, he added.

Another option is to take their case to the UN general assembly without a security council vote. The Palestinians are expected to win the support of more than two-thirds of the UN’s 193 countries, but the general assembly can only approve upgraded observer status rather than full membership.

However, enhanced “non-member state” status may allow the Palestinians access to international bodies such as the international criminal court.

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Why is the Oakland Police Department hiding the truth about its violent crackdown on the Occupy protests?

Joshua Holland writes: After three notably violent crackdowns on protesters in as many weeks, Oakland Police Department officials have refused a request by the ACLU of Northern California to release police reports documenting their use of force as required by law.

“We saw events that we found extremely troubling, and which violated provisions of Oakland’s own crowd control policy,” Linda Lye, a staff attorney with ACLU of Northern California told AlterNet.

After recent police actions in Oakland gained national attention, “there was a lot of lip service paid to transparency and accountability and the public’s interest in monitoring the situation,” she said. “But then OPD proceeded to say that it was invoking one of the statutory exceptions to the Public Records Act for the vast majority of our requests.”

The exception officials cited exempted documents prepared pursuant to a criminal investigation, but, says Lye, “these records weren’t notes of a detective working on a murder case. These were very different records — they’re reports documenting the use of force during a massive police enforcement action, and many are required pursuant to routine reporting procedures under Oakland’s own policies.” She added, “Not only does the law require that they release the records, but the overall situation demands that they do so.”

A legal observer from the National Lawyers Guild told AlterNet that they had received “numerous reports of excessive force” after riot police evicted the encampment in front of City Hall during the early morning hours of October 25. According to Lye, one of the difficulties sorting out exactly what happened stems from the fact that, according to reports, as many as 17 police agencies were involved in the raid, which, according to the National Lawyers Guild observer, resulted in a head injury requiring hospitalization and three broken hands.

The following evening, as protesters regrouped, police dispersed crowds with round after round of teargas, flash-bang grenades and “less lethal” projectiles. Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen suffered a traumatic head injury when he was struck by some sort of projectile – reportedly a teargas canister – in the melee. As a group of people rushed to drag the unconscious Olsen to safety, police threw a flash-bang grenade into their midst.

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Citizen journalism challenges police and leads the media

Robert Mackey writes: The Oakland Police Department is investigating two incidents of apparent misconduct by officers during a protest last week, which were recorded by activists and posted online.

One of the brief clips, which shows a police officer firing a beanbag round directly at an activist with a camera in his hand, is shocking but similar in kind to other clips that have appeared to show the use of excessive force against protesters inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement in recent weeks.

The other video, which records the last 57 seconds of a confrontation between a filmmaker and a police officer waiting to deploy on a quiet side street, shows no violence, but might say more about the potential for citizen journalism to change the power dynamic between citizens and the police.

The clip begins with the filmmaker, known as BLK PXLS, asking an officer to explain why he has covered the nameplate on his uniform with dark tape, in apparent violation of a section of the California penal code. After the officer refuses to reply, the filmmaker appeals to a superior officer who eventually pulls the tape from the officer’s uniform.

The video ends with a message from the filmmaker encouraging others to follow his example: “If you see cops not serving the people or participating in officer misconduct, film it! Hold them accountable!”

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Yes, it is Wall Street’s fault

Gene Lyons writes: So here’s my question: If the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 effectively caused the Wall Street meltdown of 2007 by forcing banks to make bad home loans to improvident poor people (and we all know exactly who I mean), how come it took 30 years for the housing bubble to burst?

Next question: If fuzzy-thinking Democratic do-gooders enacted such laws in defiance of common sense and sound economics, why didn’t Republican Presidents Reagan, Bush I or Bush II do something? Was Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., secretly running the country?

Exactly how did the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in the United States — the investment bankers and corporate execs who host the $1,000-a-plate fundraisers, scoop up the Cabinet appointments and ambassadorships, and party down at White House galas — end up having less power over the U.S. economy than unskilled day laborers in Newark, N.J., or Oakland, Calif.?

Maybe some “resident scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute, or another of the comfortable Washington think tanks devoted to keeping Scrooge McDuck’s bullion pool topped-up, can teach us how things got so upside-down. Because under normal circumstances, the national motto is neither “e pluribus unum” nor “In God We Trust.”

It’s “Money Talks.”

Money was talking big-time last week. Clearly annoyed by the unkempt ragamuffins of Occupy Wall Street, New York’s dapper billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg delivered himself of a conspiracy theory so absurd that it had previously been confined to such dark corners of American life as the Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity programs and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

“I hear your complaints,” Bloomberg said. “Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp … [T]hey were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will … And now we want to go vilify the banks because it’s one target, it’s easy to blame them and Congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves.”

Actually, “annoyed” is too mild to describe a sophisticated Wall Street player like Bloomberg resorting to so crude and poisonous a political lie. He can’t possibly believe it. For all its ragtag, hippie-dippie aspects, Occupy Wall Street must have people at Manhattan’s most elegant dinner parties running scared.

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We’re spending more on nukes than we did during the Cold War?!

Adam Weinstein writes: On April 5, 2009, President Barack Obama took the stage before 20,000 people in Prague’s Hradcany Square to offer an ambitious global vision. “Today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” he told the open-air audience in the former Eastern Bloc capital. “To put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same.”

The timing of his bold promise seemed perfect. Russia was ready to whittle down its destructive power; a year later, Obama and President Dmitri Medvedev would sign a treaty limiting both countries to 1,500 active warheads—though still enough to annihilate millions of people, a 50 percent reduction to each nation’s atomic arsenal. Back home, lawmakers on Capitol Hill were scrutinizing the federal budget for unnecessary spending, and nuclear weapons no longer appeared to be off limits.

Even the military brass was moving away from relying upon nuclear deterrence. The Pentagon’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (PDF) concluded that “[t]he massive nuclear arsenal we inherited from the Cold War era of bipolar military confrontation is poorly suited to address the challenges posed by suicidal terrorists and unfriendly regimes seeking nuclear weapons.”

But shrinking America’s nuclear arsenal has turned out to be far easier said than done. Despite the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) cuts, federal spending on the atomic stockpile is actually beyond Cold War levels, driven by congressional hawks and powerful nuclear labs eager to “modernize” the arsenal and fund projects that could spark a new arms race.

During the Cold War, the United States spent, on average, $35 billion a year on its nuclear weapons complex. Today, it spends an estimated $55 billion. The nuclear weapons budget is spread across the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Homeland Security, and the government doesn’t publicly disclose how much it spends on its various aspects, from maintaining our nuclear arsenal to defending against other countries’ nukes. Altogether, it spent at least $52.4 billion on nuclear weapons in 2008, the last year anyone attempted to piece together the total cost, according to the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. (And that doesn’t include classified programs.) That was five times the size of the State Department’s budget, seven times the EPA’s, and 14 times what the DOE spent on everything else it does.

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