Friday, February 21, 2020

REPUBLICANS









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CC News Letter 20 Feb- An Open Letter To Noam Chomsky ON CAA, NPR, NRC





Dear Friend,

An Open Letter To Noam Chomsky ON his statement on India's CAA, NPR, NRC

Kindly support honest journalism to survive. https://countercurrents.org/subscription/

If you think the contents of this news letter are critical for the dignified living and survival of humanity and other species on earth, please forward it to your friends and spread the word. It's time for humanity to come together as one family! You can subscribe to our news letter here http://www.countercurrents.org/news-letter/.

In Solidarity

Binu Mathew
Editor
Countercurrents.org



An Open Letter To Noam Chomsky ON CAA, NPR, NRC
Co-Written by Angshuman Choudhury & Suraj Gogoi


We were particularly intrigued by your brief comment on how the “Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) poses intolerable threats to the indigenous people” in response to Kamei’s elaboration of the specific opposition of the people of Northeast to
the law, the narrative of “settler colonialism” and fears about demographic change in the region due to influx of migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh. Unfortunately, we believe that the email sent to you presented a grossly limited, selective and rather misleading narrative about the Northeast. Please allow us to elaborate.



Is Sharjeel Imam a symptom of bigger political malaise?
by Iqbal Ahmad


Jamia Coordination Committee and Shaheen Bagh Protestors promptly disassociated from Sharjeel. What did they fear? Was Sharjeel’s speech seditious enough? Did they differ from the method he floated to his audience? Is he some opportunist who is trying to fashion a radical audience for himself? The answer to all these question is NO. Then why the promptness?  The    pragmatic condemnation by JCC and Protestors was due to the possibility of disastrous political fallout considering popular
acceptance of the Hindutva among the masses.They feared  it would further demonise the community and shrink their political spaces to protest. Their anxiety is understandable but it is only tip of the iceberg.



Six months of being hunted, yet not vanquished | Stan Swamy
by Stan Swamy


The second half of 2019 (July – December) was both a very trying but sobering experience for me. Jharkhand police was after me and I was after the police !  The difference was the police acted illegally and I acted legally. Issue of ‘arrest warrant’ (June), declaration of me an ‘absconder’ (August), raid of my workplace cum residence and confiscation of my personal belongings (October) by the order of the lower court & action of the police was declared illegal by Jharkhand High Court (December).



Pardoning Julian Assange: Donald Trump, WikiLeaks and the DNC
by Dr Binoy Kampmark


District Judge Vanessa Baraitser has yielded to Assange’s team on the material produced at the pre-extradition hearing, potentially linking WikiLeaks to the highest deliberations in the White House.  The addition, along with the vast picture of surveillance targeting Assange, has the makings of a very compromising picture, indeed.



What Would You Do If?
by Joan Baez


A reading  from The Class of Nonviolence, prepared by Colman McCarthy of the Center for Teaching Peace

What Would You Do If?

in Life/Philosophy — by — February 20, 2020
Fred: OK. So you’re a pacifist. What would you do if someone were, say, attacking your grandmother?
Joan: Attacking my poor old grandmother?
Fred: Yeah, you’re in a room with your grandmother and there’s a guy about to attack her and you’re standing there. What would you do?
Joan: I’d yell, “Three cheers for Grandma!” and leave the room.”  Fred: No, seriously. Say he had a gun and he was about to shoot her. Would you shoot him first?
Joan: Do I have a gun?
Fred: Yes
Joan: No. I’m a pacifist, I don’t have a gun.
Fred: Well, I say you do.
Joan: All right. Am I a good shot?
Fred: Yes.
Joan: I’d shoot the gun out of his hand.
Fred: No, then you’re not a good shot.
Joan: I’d be afraid to shoot. Might kill Grandma.
Fred: Come on, OK, look. We’ll take another example. Say, you’re driving a truck. You’re on a narrow road with a sheer cliff on your side. There’s a little girl sitting in the middle of the road. You’re going too fast to stop. What would you do?
Joan: I don’t know. What would you do?
Fred: I’m asking you. You’re the pacifist.
Joan: Yes, I know. All right, am I in control of the truck?
Fred: Yes.
Joan: How about if I honk my horn so she can get out of the way?
Fred: She’s too young to walk. And the horn doesn’t work.
Joan: I swerve around to the left of her since she’s not going anywhere.
Fred: No, there’s been a landslide.
Joan: Oh. Well then, I would try to drive the truck over the cliff and save the little girl.
Silence
Fred: Well, say there’s someone else in the truck with you. Then what?
Joan: What’s my decision have to do with my being a pacifist?
Fred: There’s two of you in the truck and only one little girl.
Joan: Someone once said if you have a choice between a real evil and a hypothetical evil, always take the real one.
Fred: Huh?
Joan:: I said, why are you so anxious to kill off all the pacifists?
Fred: I’m not. I just want to know what you’d do if…
Joan: If I was in a truck with a friend driving very fast on a one-lane road approaching a dangerous impasse where a ten-month old girl is sitting in the middle of the road with a landslide on one side of her and a sheer drop-off on the other.
Fred: That’s right.
Joan: I would probably slam on the brakes, thus sending my friend through the windscreen, skid into the landslide, run over the little girl, sail off the cliff and plunge to my own death. No doubt Grandma’s house would be at the bottom of the ravine and the truck would crash through her roof and blow up in her living room where she was finally being attacked for the first, and last, time.
Fred: You haven’t answered my question. You’re just trying to get out of it…
Joan: – I’m really trying to say a couple of things. One is that no one knows what they’ll do in a moment of crisis and hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers. I’m also hinting that you’ve made it impossible for me to come out of the situation without having killed one or more people. Then you say, ‘Pacifism is a nice idea, but it won’t work’. But that’s not what bothers me.
Fred: What bothers you?
Joan: Well, you might not like it because it’s not hypothetical.
It’s real. And it makes the assault on Grandma look like a garden party. Fred: What’s that?
Joan: I’m thinking about how we put people through a training process so they’ll find out the really good, efficient ways of killing. Nothing incidental like trucks and landslides. Just the opposite, really. You know, how to growl and yell, kill and crawl and jump out of airplanes. Real organized stuff. Hell, you have to be able to run a bayonet through Grandma’s middle.
Fred: That’s something entirely different.
Joan: Sure. And don’t you see it’s much harder to look at, because its real, and it’s going on right now? Look. A general sticks a pin into a map. A week later a bunch of young boys are sweating it out in a jungle somewhere, shooting each other’s arms and legs off, crying, praying and losing control of their bowels. Doesn’t it seem stupid to you?
Fred: Well, you’re talking about war.
Joan: Yes, I know. Doesn’t it seem stupid to you?
Fred: What do you do instead, then? Turn the other cheek, I suppose.
Joan: No. Love thine enemy but confront his evil. Love thine enemy. Thou shalt not kill.
Fred: Yeah, and look what happened to him.
Joan: He grew up.
Fred: They hung him on a damn cross is what happened to him. I don’t want to get hung on a damn cross.
Joan: You won’t.
Fred: Huh?
Joan: I said you don’t get to choose how you’re going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you are going to live. Now.
Fred: Well, I’m not going to go letting everybody step all over me, that’s for sure.
Joan: Jesus said, “Resist not evil.” The pacifist says just the opposite. He says to resist evil with all your heart and with all your mind and body until it has been overcome.
Fred: I don’t get it.
Joan: Organized nonviolent resistance. Gandhi. He organized the Indians for nonviolent resistance and waged nonviolent war against the British until he’d freed India from the British Empire. Not bad for a first try, don’t you think?
Fred: yeah, fine, but he was dealing with the British, a civilized people. We’re not.
Joan: Not a civilized people?
Fred: Not dealing with a civilized people. You just try some of that stuff on the Russians.
Joan: You mean the Chinese, don’t you?
Fred: Yeah, the Chinese, try it on the Chinese.
Joan: Oh, dear. War was going on long before anybody dreamed up communism. It’s just the latest justification for self-righteousness. The problem isn’t communism. The problem is consensus. There’s a consensus out there that it’s OK to kill when your government decides who to kill. If you kill inside the country, you get in trouble. If you kill outside the country, right time, right season, latest enemy, you get a medal. There are about 130 nation-states, and each of them thinks it’s a swell idea to bump off all the rest because he is more important. The pacifist thinks there is only one tribe. Three billion members. They come first. We think killing any member of the family is a dumb idea. We think there are more decent and intelligent ways of settling differences. And man had better start investigating these other possibilities because if he doesn’t, then by mistake or by design, he will probably kill off the whole damn race.
Fred: It’s human nature to kill. Something you can’t change.
Joan: Is it? If it’s natural to kill, why do men have to go into training to learn how? There’s violence in human nature, but there’s also decency, love, kindness. Man organizes, buys, sells, pushes violence. The nonviolent wants to organize the opposite side. That’s all nonviolence is – organized love.
Fred: You’re crazy.
Joan: No doubt. Would you care to tell me the rest of the world is sane? Tell me that violence has been a great success for the past five thousand years, that the world is in fine shape, that wars have brought peace, understanding, democracy, and freedom to humankind and that killing each other has created an atmosphere of trust and hope. That it’s grand for one billion people to live off of the other two billion, or that even if it hadn’t been smooth going all along, we are now at last beginning to see our way though to a better world for all, as soon as we get a few minor wars out of the way.
Fred: I’m doing OK.
Joan: Consider it a lucky accident.
Fred: I believe I should defend America and all that she stands for. Don’t you believe in self-defense?
Joan: No, that’s how the mafia got started. A little band of people who got together to protect peasants. I’ll take Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance.
Fred:: I still don’t get the point of nonviolence.
Joan:: The point of nonviolence is to build a floor, a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink. A platform which stands a few feet above napalm, torture, exploitation, poison gas, nuclear bombs, the works. Give man a decent place to stand. He’s been wallowing around in human blood and vomit and burnt flesh, screaming how it’s going to bring peace to the world. He sticks his head out of the hole for a minute and sees a bunch of people gathering together and trying to build a structure above ground in the fresh air. ‘Nice idea, but not very practical’, he shouts and slides back into the hole. It was the same kind of thing when man found out the world was round. He fought for years to have it remain flat, with every proof on hand that it was not flat at all. It had no edge to drop off or sea monsters to swallow up his little ship in their gaping jaws.
Fred: How are you going to build this practical structure?
Joan: From the ground up. By studying, experimenting with every possible alternative to violence on every level. By learning how to say no to the nation-state, ‘NO’ to war taxes, ‘NO’ to military conscription, ‘NO’ to killing in general, ‘YES’ to co-operation, by starting new institutions which are based on the assumption that murder in any form is ruled out, by making and keeping in touch with nonviolent contacts all over the world, by engaging ourselves at every possible chance in dialogue with people, groups, to try to change the consensus that it’s OK to kill.
Fred: : It sounds real nice, but I just don’t think it can work.
Joan: : You are probably right. We probably don’t have enough time. So far, we’ve been a glorious flop. The only thing that’s been a worse flop than the organization of nonviolence has been the organization of violence.
This reading is from The Class of Nonviolence, prepared by Colman McCarthy of the Center for Teaching Peace, 4501 Van Ness Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20016 202/537-1372
 
Joan Baez was born in Staten Island, New York, on January 9, 1941. Baez first became known to the wider public as a distinctive folk singer after performing at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. After releasing her debut album in 1960, she became known for topical songs promoting social justice, civil rights and pacifism.

River in flood-ravaged UK town reaches highest level in 200 years following Storm Dennis
by Countercurrents Collective


The River Wye in Hereford has reached its highest level in at least 200 years in the wake of Storm Dennis lashing
the area with torrential rain. The River Taff in Pontypridd reached its highest level in more than 40 years and the River Usk reached the highest level since 1979. Britain will be lashed by more heavy rain this week in the wake of Storm Dennis, as some severely flooded areas are said to be in “uncharted territory”.



Is it Time for a New Labor Center in the United States?
by Kim Scipes


The failures of the labor movement in the US are legion over the past 40 years.  It’s not needed to repeat the failures nor the efforts to revitalize the labor movement, most of the latter which have been unsuccessful to date



Painting A True Christ: A Review of Terrence Malick’s Film “A Hidden Life”
by Edward Curtin


I say that “A Hidden Life” is a moving painting because its form
and content cannot be separated.  A true artist, Malick realizes that what non-artists call form or style is the content; they are one.  The essence of the story is in the telling; in a film in the showing.



Toxic Air: Pollution from fossil fuels costs 5.4% of India’s GDP annually
by Rohin Kumar


Coal fired power plants in India have repeatedly missed the emission deadline set by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change

Toxic Air: Pollution from fossil fuels costs 5.4% of India’s GDP annually

in Environmental Protection — by — February 20, 2020
(Coal fired power plants in India have repeatedly missed the emission deadline set by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change)
For the first time, Greenpeace Southeast Asia and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) have quantified the global cost of air pollution from fossil fuels, finding that it has reached an estimated US$8 billion per day, or 3.3% of the world’s GDP. While coal, oil and vehicle companies continue to push outdated technologies, public health and our communities are paying the price.
It is found that the China Mainland, the United States and India bear the highest costs from fossil fuel air pollution worldwide, at an estimated US$900 billion, US$600 billion and US$150 billion per year, respectively.
Report is an astonishing revelation that exposure to fossil fuel generated fine particulate matter (PM2.5) alone is attributed to an estimated 1.8 billion days of sick leave annually.
This report, ‘Toxic air: The price of fossil fuels’, assesses the impacts on global health and the economic cost of air pollution from the continued burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas. Using data published in 2019 – including the first study to assess the contribution of fossil fuels to global air pollution and health – the report provides a global assessment of the health impact of air pollution from fossil fuels in 2018 and a first-of-its-kind estimate of the associated economic cost.
Air Pollution from burning fossil fuels
Historically, energy from fossil fuels has dominated power generation (Figure. 2), but as the cost of establishing and maintaining renewable sources of power (such as wind and solar) continues to fall, These options are now frequently less expensive than the fossil fuel alternative.
Global active power plant capacity
[Data: Toxic Air: The Price of Fossil Fuel Report]
 Research by the International Renewable Energy Agency published in 2018 took into account the lifetime cost of electricity in its calculations of cost comparisons to generate power from renewable sources versus fossil fuels. Although in most parts of the world newly commissioned power plants that use renewable sources, such as wind and solar, will be cheaper or at a similar cost than from fossil fuels, including coal, oil and gas18, companies continue to push outdated technologies with the outcome that fossil fuels continue to dominate, creating air pollution when cleaner alternatives are readily available.
Evidence from public health studies suggests that exposure to an air pollutant or combination of air pollutants, such as PM2.5, NO2 or ozone, is associated with increased incidence of diseases including ischaemic heart disease (IHD), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), lung cancer, lower respiratory infections, premature birth (preterm birth), type II diabetes, stroke and asthma. Health impacts from air pollution generate economic costs from the cost of treatment, management of health conditions, and from work absences.
Commenting on the report Minwoo Son, Clean Air Campaigner at Greenpeace East Asia said, “Air pollution is a threat to our health and our economies. Every year, air pollution from fossil fuels takes millions of lives, increases our risk of stroke, lung cancer and asthma, and costs us trillions of dollars. But this is a problem that we know how to solve, by transitioning to renewable energy sources, phasing out diesel and petrol cars, and building public transport. We need to take into account the real cost of fossil fuels, not just for our rapidly heating planet, but also for our health.”
The properties and effects of air pollution vary from country to country; different locations are affected by different pollutants, pollution sources and environmental conditions. Combined with differences in population and lifestyle, the health impacts from air pollution change significantly depending on the geographical location. For example, a computer modelling study looked at seven different sources of PM2.5 and ozone air pollution: industry; land traffic; residential and commercial energy; biomass burning; power generation; agriculture; and natural. Using the model, the researchers calculated premature mortality resulting from air pollution generated by each of the seven sectors. Of premature deaths attributed to air pollution globally in 2010, almost one-third were attributable to exposure (while outdoors) to air pollution from residential and commercial energy, which was the principal source of air pollution-related premature deaths in India and China Mainland. Globally, land traffic was attributable for 5% of air pollution-related premature deaths and power generation for 14%.
The Indian Case
According to the report, India is estimated to bear 10.7 lakh crore (US$150 billion), or 5.4% of India’s GDP annually, the third highest costs from fossil fuel air pollution worldwide.
The analysis also suggests that an estimated one million deaths each year and approximately 980,000 estimated preterm births, equating to an annual economic loss of 10.7 lakh crore (US$150 billion) is attributed to air pollution from fossil fuel in India. Another source of economic costs is that approximately 350,000 new cases of child asthma each year are linked to NO2, a by-product of fossil fuel combustion. As a result, around 1,285,000 more children in India live with asthma linked to fossil fuel pollution. Exposure to pollution from fossil fuels also leads to around 49 crore days of work absence due to illness.
“The country spends around 1.28% of the GDP on health while air pollution from burning fossil fuels costs an estimated 5.4% of India’s GDP. This year the central government allocated only Rs 69,000 crore for the health sector in the union budget. This makes it clear that as a country we must fix our priority and stop burning fossil fuels which are harming our health and economy both,” said Avinash Chanchal, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace India.
It must be noted that coal fired power plants in India have repeatedly missed the emission deadline set by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change. In 2015, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) legislated new standards to restrict and reduce hazardous emissions from coal-fired power plants giving them two years timeline till 7th December 2017. MoP (Ministry of Power) and APP (Association of Power Producers) extensively argued for extending and diluting the norms using unsound arguments on science and timelines which helped them secure an extension for implementation of the norms running from 2019 to 2022 in a staggered timeline.
According to the phasing plan for installing FGD (Flue Gas Desulphurisation) 16410 MW capacity out of total 166472 MW should have installed it by December 2019 but only 8% of this target is  achieved so far which shows complete ignorance of public health emergency of air pollution in northern India by the power generators and the government.
Analysis of 440 plants across the country pointed out that bids for FGD have been awarded for only 36560 MW out of 166472MW which is only 22% of the target. Notices for inviting tenders (NIT) were issued for 99195 MW units only. The percentage of bids awarded by Central, State and Private sector were 38%; 2% & 4 % respectively out of the capacity to be retrofitted for respective sectors.
“Strict action must be taken against non-compliance of thermal power plants. The government must ensure the construction of new coal-fired power plants is halted and existing plants must be shut down in phases. Moving our energy generation sector from fossil fuels to renewables would help to prevent premature deaths and vast savings in health costs. A just energy transition to renewable energy is feasible, and we can’t afford to wait any longer.  Government and fossil fuel companies need to take action now.,” Chanchal concluded.
Rohin Kumar is a journalist


Educating Constitutional Morality
by Dr Venkatanarayanan S


Our education system should resolve to show India with all its diversity, as a political community inclusive of all members within the territorial limits of the political state, which could be of different religious, ethnic, racial, and cultural groups. Our societal insensitivity as reflected in the
violence against women and children, Caste discrimination, cultural and religious intolerance, burgeoning inequality and reducing scientific temper can be encountered only by strengthening our political nationalism. Thus we need to reorient our education in truly imbibing the Constitutional Morality among the younger generation for a better India.



Prof.C Kaseem and State Repression in Telangana
by Manikranth Ch


Very recently, the Telangana police charged Prof. C Kaseem with UAPA. Dr. Kaseem teaches at the Telugu Department of Osmania University in Hyderabad. He was elected as the General Secretary of Viplava Rachaithala Sangam – VIRASAM ( Revolutionary writers association) just a week before of his arrest. It is not so surprising that the Osmania University administration suspended him even though the accusations on him were not proven by the court yet.
















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CC News Letter 21 Feb- The Shaheen Bagh Movement





Dear Friend,


It is always inspiring to hear women at Shaheen Bagh as their spirit and energy still is an envy for all. Most of the time a movement more than 65 days old would get tired as the government or the critics of Shaheen Bagh would have thought but to their disappointment, the unity and fraternity at Shaheen Bagh is more inspiring and a great learning for all. This protest movement has created new hope and dynamic leadership where the women are the leaders

Kindly support honest journalism to survive. https://countercurrents.org/subscription/

If you think the contents of this news letter are critical for the dignified living and survival of humanity and other species on earth, please forward it to your friends and spread the word. It's time for humanity to come together as one family! You can subscribe to our news letter here http://www.countercurrents.org/news-letter/.

In Solidarity

Binu Mathew
Editor
Countercurrents.org



Shaheen Bagh movement is an inspiration to
understand peaceful democratic protests in India
by Vidya Bhushan Rawat


It is always inspiring to hear women at Shaheen Bagh as their spirit and energy still is an envy for all. Most of the time a movement more than 65 days old would get tired as the government or the critics of Shaheen Bagh would have thought but to their disappointment, the unity and fraternity at Shaheen Bagh is more inspiring and a great learning for all. This protest movement has created new hope and dynamic leadership where the women are the leaders



Shaheen Bagh means we need to strengthen Fight for public space
by Vidyadhar Date


One aspect ignored regarding the Shaheen Bagh protests on the citizenship issue in Delhi is the issue of denial of public space to people, increasing
restraints on acces to existing such spaces.Civil liberties groups urban planners should seriously study, take up these issues.The Supreme court raised questions on February 10 about protests on roads in Delhi . It would be pertinent to point to an assertion made by poet Mirza Ghalib in the same city . What he said in translation was `neither temple nor mosque, neither door nor threshold, it is the public road we are are sitting on, why should any rival dislodge us ?’



Not Just Communalist: Unpacking India’s New Citizenship Law and its Impact on the Indigenous Northeast
by Maya D. Cheynoux


In Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Manipur, the CAA’s demographic burden is disproportionate: even though northeastern states represent a mere 8% of India’s land mass,they are being asked to bear the weight of more than half of the newly
instated citizens, under the CAA.



Winter 2019-20 was so far the warmest on record in the contiguous U.S.
by Countercurrents Collective


The first two months of meteorological winter (December 2019 – January 2020) were the warmest on record for the contiguous U.S. in data going back to 1895. January 2020 the fifth warmest January on record in all 48 contiguous states. The states saw above- to much-above-average temperatures last month. This was the ninth consecutive January with temperatures at least nominally above the 20th century average for the month.

Winter 2019-20 was so far the warmest on record in the contiguous U.S.

in Climate Change — by — February 21, 2020


January Average Temperature Departures
The first two months of meteorological winter (December 2019 – January 2020) were the warmest on record for the contiguous U.S. in data going back to 1895. January 2020 the fifth warmest January on record in all 48 contiguous states. The states saw above- to much-above-average temperatures last month. This was the ninth consecutive January with temperatures at least nominally above the 20th century average for the month.
Thirteen states had a top-ten-warmest January, including every New England state except Vermont.
Dozens of cities east of the Mississippi River were reporting one of their warmest winters to date from December 1 through February 17, according to the Southeast Regional Climate Center. All of the big cities of the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, from Boston to Washington, D.C., have seen less snow than usual.
January was also quite damp for the Lower 48 and ranked in the wettest third of the 126-year climate record.
The National Climate Report, January 2020 by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Centers for Climate Information said:
The average January temperature across the contiguous U.S. was 35.5 degrees F (5.4 degrees above the 20th-century average) and ranked fifth warmest in the 126-year record.
January’s precipitation for the contiguous U.S. was 2.70 inches (0.39 of an inch above average), which ranked it in the wettest third of all the Januarys on record. January precipitation extended a rather wet 12-month stretch: February 2019 through January 2020 was the third wettest such period ever recorded, 4.99 inches above average.
Last month, much-above-average wetness was observed across the Pacific Northwest as well as portions of the central and southern U.S.
Washington and Oklahoma
Washington state experienced its fourth-wettest January, while Oklahoma saw its sixth wettest on record.
Great Lakes
Much-above-average temperatures were observed across much of the Great Lakes and Northeast as well as parts of the Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, the southern Plains and West.
Michigan Wisconsin Rhode Island
Michigan ranked fifth warmest, while Wisconsin and Rhode Island ranked sixth warmest. No state in the Lower 48 ranked average or below average for the month.
Temperatures during the first part of winter were warm enough across the Great Lakes to keep surface water temperatures above freezing across a large portion of the basin. As a result, lake-effect snow events become possible much later in the season than on average, which can lead to higher seasonal snowfall totals. Basin-wide ice cover spiked briefly at the end of January — approximately 35 percent of average for this time of year. Lake Erie, which averages just over 50 percent ice coverage at the end of January, was only 0.4 percent frozen on January 31.
Alaska, the contrast
In stark contrast to the record warmth experienced during 2019, the Alaska average January temperature was −6.2°F, 8.4°F below the long-term mean. This tied with 1970 as the 13th coldest January on record for the state and the coldest January since 2012.
Daytime highs
The nationally averaged maximum temperature (daytime highs) was warmer than average during January at 45.1°F, 4.6°F above average, ranking as the tenth warmest January in the 126-year record. Parts of the West, High Plains, Great Lakes and Northeast had temperatures, which were much-above-average for the month. Only a small pocket of below-average maximum temperatures was evident across the Four Corners region.
Overnight lows
The nationally averaged minimum temperature (overnight lows) during January was 26.0°F, 6.2°F above average and ranked as the third highest January average in the 126-year record and the warmest overnight low temperatures since the record warm January of 2006. Twenty-eight states ranked much-above-average with Michigan ranking third warmest and Wisconsin, Ohio and Rhode Island ranking fourth warmest minimum temperature for the month. No state ranked below-average for minimum temperatures during January.
Warm outpaced cold
Warm records in January outpaced cold records by a twelve-to-one margin. As of February 6, there were 3,731 warm daily high (1,381) and low (2,350) temperature records tied or broken during January. There were approximately 299 daily cold high (209) and low (90) temperature records set during the month.
Precipitation
The January precipitation total for the contiguous U.S. was 2.70 inches, 0.39 inch above average, and ranked in the middle third of the 126-year period of record.
During January, much-above-average wetness was observed across the Pacific Northwest as well as portions of the central and southern U.S. The state of Washington ranked fourth wettest while Oklahoma ranked sixth wettest on record.
The Great Lakes continue to be at or near or record water levels during January. A record wet 2019 around the Great Lakes contributed to these high water levels, which are not expected to recede for many months. If precipitation across this region remains above average, it will take even longer for the lake levels to fall. Lake Superior, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron set records for high water level during January.
An NPR report – “How Warming Winters Are Affecting Everything” – said on February 18, 2020:
“The cold seasons are warming faster than the warm seasons,” says Deke Arndt, chief of climate monitoring at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information. “The colder times of day are warming faster than warmer times of day. And the colder places are warming faster than the warmer places.”
In the U.S., that means winters in both Maine and Alaska are around 5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter on average since the early 1900s. One reason: The snowpack, which is a good reflector of sunlight, is melting earlier in the season. With fewer days of snow cover, sunlight is absorbed into the ground and warms the surrounding area.
The report mentioned some of the changes happening around the U.S.
CALIFORNIA
The nation’s largest economy and largest agricultural industry is heavily reliant on snow that falls high in the Sierra Nevada, which acts like a giant reservoir. The snowpack lasts through the winter and melts in late spring and early summer, sending a steady supply of water to farms and cities when they need it most.
But with warming temperatures, California’s snowpack is shrinking, both because of increased snowmelt and because more precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow. Across the West, snowpack has already shrunk by 15% to 30%.
“That can have profound ramifications, west of the Rockies especially, when the timing of snowmelt is really important to how we operate reservoirs and share water with each other,” says Arndt, of NOAA.
With runoff flowing earlier in the year, California’s reservoirs may not be able to capture enough to supply the state during the long dry summer. For one thing, reservoirs cannot be kept completely full during winter because they might be overwhelmed by floodwaters. And when warmer winter storms cause rain to fall on top of California’s snowpack, it dramatically increases the risk of devastating floods.
Warmer winters are also affecting the fruits and vegetables that California sends around the country. The state produces the majority of the country’s supply of almonds, wine grapes, walnuts, pistachios and peaches. But many of those crops require a certain amount of cold weather, what is known as “chill hours.” Without that, pollination can be delayed or incomplete, reducing the crop that farmers get at harvest time.
According to one study, cold temperatures that many orchard crops need could decrease by as much as 60% in California’s Central Valley by 2100. Apples, cherries and pears, which require the longest period of cold weather, could be hit the hardest. That has many in the agricultural industry looking for ways to adapt, whether it is breeding more heat-tolerant trees or finding chemicals that can help trees bloom on a predictable schedule, even when the winter weather is anything but.
SOUTHEAST
For decades, the Southeast actually got cooler while the rest of the country warmed. But now it is warming too, and that includes winters, with the length of the freeze-free season increasing in some places by as much as a week and a half.
That is a problem for farmers, who need cold temperatures for their plants to set fruit. The winter of 2016-2017 was too warm for Georgia peaches, for instance, and about 80% of the crop failed.
Blueberries — a bigger crop in the Peach State than peaches are — also struggle.
“When you talk to blueberry producers and peach producers, they’re definitely looking at new hybrids that are more welcoming to low chill hours and different kinds of weather patterns,” says Pam Knox, an agricultural climatologist at the University of Georgia.
An unusually warm January in Atlanta has also been a headache for beekeepers. If it is not cold enough, honeybees fly out of their hives and queens might start laying eggs. As they expend energy, the bees eat more of the honey they stored for the winter. If their calendar gets too out of whack from the blooms they need for nectar, they risk starvation.
Then there are the mosquitoes that can carry vector-borne diseases. Different species have different needs, but in general, cold winter temperatures kill them or slow down their reproduction cycles.
It is already warm enough in the South for the mosquito species that can carry dengue, chikungunya and Zika. In some parts of Florida, the mosquitoes can be active year-round. According to the latest National Climate Assessment, dengue cases could go up across the Southeast in the summer, and West Nile will likely increase too.
NORTHEAST
In Maine, skiing, snowmobiling and ice fishing are an important part of the winter economy. Greg Sweetser, of the Ski Maine Association, says ski areas are preparing for climate change by expanding into summer businesses, such as mountain biking.
“It’s an insurance policy to some degree,” he says. “The climate is changing, it’s unclear how incremental the change will be, so ski areas are being proactive.”
Ice fishing is already seeing days shaved off its season in southern Maine, because the window for when lakes freeze over is shortening, says Mark Latti of the state’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. And one of Maine’s largest lakes, Sebago, used to freeze over every other year, he says. “Now it’s once every three years or so.”
Warmer winters have also helped fuel the expansion of a pest that affects outdoor enthusiasts throughout the year: ticks.
Deer ticks transmit several diseases, including Lyme, which has grown from a few hundred cases in Maine more than a decade ago to a high last year of more than 2,100. Cases of another tick-borne disease, anaplasmosis, have also surged in the state to more than 680, up from just single cases in the early 2000s.
Deer ticks first appeared in southern Maine in the mid-1980s, but researchers at the Maine Medical Center Research Institute’s Lyme and Vector-Borne Disease Laboratory say their range now extends to the northern reaches of the state.
Vector ecologist Chuck Lubelczyk says warmer winters also help create a more hospitable climate for other species and the diseases they carry. The lone star tick has already been found in Maine, dropped by migratory birds from the south. Historically, it has not been able to survive the winter, but that is changing.
“This tick is slowly moving its way up the Eastern Seaboard,” Lubelczyk says, and is now established in southeastern Massachusetts. “If it does arrive and gets established in Maine,” he says, it will be “a game-changer, because it is highly aggressive.”
MIDWEST
Generally, warmer Midwest winters have implications from agriculture to recreation.
Freezing stops the microbes in soil from breaking down organic matter. Todey says that this contributes to the quality of Iowa’s dark, rich cropland. Soils father south, where it is warmer, lose organic matter because bacteria, fungi and other critters keep munching through it all winter long.
Todey says another problem is when the temperature warms after a hard frost and then rain falls onto frozen ground. That is bad because it can cause soil to wash away.
A freeze can also help protect future crops.
“There are certain pests and diseases that cannot survive cold temperatures. They simply die off,” says Rick Cruse, a soil scientist at Iowa State University. But “as the temperature warms, there are more of those that survive.”
Warm winters are even worse for certain fruit and nut trees, which require chill hours during the winter. If they do not get enough of those, they will not produce the following season.
Michigan’s cherry trees have struggled with erratic winter weather. And the repeated freeze-thaw cycles of the 2018-2019 winter, among other weather anomalies, destroyed Iowa’s chestnut crop last year.
MOUNTAIN WEST
The most visible impact of warming winters in the Mountain West is on the forests. Millions of trees have died from pine, spruce and pinyon ips bark beetles over the past three decades.
Normally, bark beetles die off in freezing temperatures. “When you have periods of temperature that do not reach the lethal level for the insects, that’s when you start seeing increased survival of the population,” says Jose Negron, a research entomologist with the U.S. Forest Service.
Warmer temperatures and record-low precipitation can also make trees more susceptible to infestation. The most damaged areas are in and around Rocky Mountain National Park and parts of the San Juan Mountains, the West Elk Mountains and the Sawatch Range.
“Forty to 50 percent of the mature spruce in the state has been killed during the epidemic,” says Seth Davis, an assistant professor of forestry at Colorado State University. Davis’ recent study found that warmer winter temperatures meant slightly bigger spruce beetles that emerged earlier and flew around longer.
While beetle outbreaks of this size have happened in the past, warmer temperatures might have an impact on their frequency. The impacts are complex, says Davis, but not necessarily all negative. Fewer trees mean more light reaches the forest floor, where flowers now grow. His research finds this is benefiting bee populations.
Another noticeable impact of warmer winters is on the region’s important ski industry.
Ski areas at lower elevations, as in California, feel these changes the most. “They’re the ones that are going to be seeing, really, a loss of skiing altogether in 50 years or more,” White says.
TEXAS
In recent years, warmer winters have caused Texas’ famed bluebonnet wildflowers to appear months before people expect to see them.
The climate shift also allows migrating monarch butterflies to survive in Texas later than usual.
“In cold winters, they’ll have two or three sightings along the Gulf,” says Chip Taylor, director of Monarch Watch. In a warm year, “you’ll get butterflies that are sighted from Florida all the way to over to the middle of Texas and even into the San Antonio, Austin area.”
The great migration of monarchs to Mexico already faces many pressures. Taylor thinks that continued warming during their breeding season and migration and over the winter may one day help end it altogether, leaving small “islands” of nonmigrating butterflies around the Gulf Coast.
Then there are the Mexican free-tailed bats that gather each year outside San Antonio, one of the world’s largest bat colonies. They are also a nightly summer tourist attraction in downtown Austin.
“They shouldn’t be here,” says Austin wildlife officer Sarah Whitson. Most bats usually migrate to Mexico or become inactive in the fall, but she says more have stuck around longer the last several winters.
“It’s great if there’s food sources here throughout the winter,” she says. But she worries what could become of the bats if a sudden cold snap kills off the bugs they eat.
Bats play a key role in agriculture, helping to control pests and to fertilize and pollinate some crops. Changing migration patterns could also hurt crops that depend on them, creating what scientists call a “mismatch.”
Researchers are seeing more mismatches as a result of climate change, says Norma Fowler, a biology professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “You can get plants that bloom before the pollinators are available,” she says. “You can get birds that come north before the insects are out for them to eat.”
ALASKA
On Alaska’s western coast, thick winter sea ice has long protected remote villages from storms. But that ice cover has been freezing later and shrinking to record lows, allowing strong waves to eat away at land made fragile by thawing permafrost. After years of struggle, the village of Newtok late last year started moving residents to safer ground farther inland.
Inupiat on Alaska’s North Slope use sea ice as a platform from which to hunt bowhead whales and walruses. Diminished ice in the Arctic is making those harvests more difficult.
Poor ice formation is also making it riskier for Alaskans who rely on ice roads, built on some of the state’s rural rivers during winter, to move freight and other goods. In recent years, residents have blamed warm temperatures for the deaths of a number of people whose snowmobiles or all-terrain vehicles fell through thin ice.
The state’s oil industry needs hundreds of miles of ice roads over land for its operations, which are specially designed for freezing conditions. Companies are investing in technology to help them cope with steadily shrinking winters.
Alaska had an unusually cold January this year, but the state is warming twice as fast as the global average. In Anchorage, a city defined by its winters, this means residents are recalibrating their relationship with the coldest season.


Viral Losses: Australian Universities, Coronavirus and Greed
by Dr Binoy Kampmark


This unsustainable system of ceremonial graft has found itself jerked by the recent travel ban imposed by Australia on those coming from
China.    In place since February 1, the Covid-19 travel ban has seen a parting of ways between Australia’s universities and the government.  Had Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison perhaps reflected on the consequences of such a ban for the tertiary industry, a more measured approach to the virus might have taken place.  Instead, Australia faces a potential exodus of students to other markets, leaving its blubbery university sector prime for trimming.



‘The Donald Trump I know’: Abbas’ UN Speech and the Breakdown of Palestinian Politics
by Dr Ramzy Baroud


A precious moment has been squandered, as Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, had the chance to right a historical wrong, by reinstating Palestinian national priorities at the United Nations Security Council on February 11, through a political discourse that is completely independent from
Washington and its allies.

‘The Donald Trump I know’: Abbas’ UN Speech and the Breakdown of Palestinian Politics

in Palestine — by — February 21, 2020
A precious moment has been squandered, as Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, had the chance to right a historical wrong, by reinstating Palestinian national priorities at the United Nations Security Council on February 11, through a political discourse that is completely independent from Washington and its allies.
For a long time, Abbas has been a hostage to the very language that designated him and his Authority as ‘moderates’ in the eyes of Israel and the West. Despite the Palestinian leader’s outward rejection of the US ‘Deal of the Century’ – which practically renders Palestinian national aspirations null and void – Abbas is keen to maintain his ‘moderate’ credentials for as long as possible.
Certainly, Abbas has given many speeches at the UN in the past and, every single time, he has failed to impress Palestinians. This time, however, things were meant to be different. Not only did Washington disown Abbas and the PA, it also scrapped its own political discourse on peace and the two-state solution altogether. More, the Trump administration has now officially given its blessing to Israel to annex nearly a third of the West Bank, taking Jerusalem ‘off the table’ and discarding the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
Instead of directly meeting with leaders of the various Palestinian political parties and taking tangible steps to reactivate dormant but central political institutions such as the Palestinian National Council (PNC) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Abbas preferred to meet with former Israeli right-wing Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, in New York, and to carry on regurgitating his commitment to a by-gone era.
In his UN speech, Abbas said nothing new which, in this instance, is worse than not saying anything at all.
“This is the outcome of the project that has been introduced to us,” Abbas said, while holding a map of what a Palestinian state would look like under Donald Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’. “And this is the state that they are giving to us,” Abbas added, referring to that future state as a ‘Swiss cheese’, meaning a state fragmented by Jewish settlements, bypass-roads and Israeli military zones.
Even the term ‘Swiss cheese’, which was reported in some media as if a new phrase in this ever-redundant discourse, is actually an old coinage that has been referenced repeatedly by the Palestinian leadership itself, starting with the onset of the so-called peace process, a quarter of a century ago.
Abbas labored to appear exceptionally resolute as he emphasized certain words, like when he equated the Israeli occupation with the system of apartheid. His delivery, however, appeared unconvincing, lacking and, at times, pointless.
Abbas spoke of his great ‘surprise’ when Washington declared Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital, subsequently relocating its embassy to the occupied city, as if the writing was not already on the wall and that, in fact, the embassy move was one of Trump’s main pledges to Israel even before his inauguration in January 2017.
“And then they cut off financial aid that was given to us,” Abbas said in a lamenting voice with reference to the US decision to withhold its aid to the PA in August 2018. “$840 million are held from us,” he said. “I don’t know who is giving Trump such horrid advice. Trump is not like this. Trump that I know is not like this,” Abbas exclaimed in a strange interjection as if to send a message to the Trump administration that the PA still has faith in the US President’s judgement.
“I would like to remind everyone that we have participated in the Madrid peace conference, and the Washington negotiations and the Oslo agreement and the Annapolis summit on the basis of international law,” Abbas recounted, signaling that he remains committed to the very political agenda that reaped the Palestinian people no political rewards whatsoever.
Abbas then went on to paint an imagined reality, where his Authority is supposedly building the “national institutions of a law-abiding, modern and democratic state that is constructed on the basis of international values; one that is predicated on transparency, accountability and fighting corruption.”
“Yes,” Abbas emphasized, as he looked at his audience with theatrical seriousness, “We are one of the most important countries (in the world) that is fighting corruption.” The PA leader, then, called on the Security Council to send a commission to investigate allegations of corruption within the PA, a bewildering and unnecessary invitation, considering that it is the Palestinian leadership that should be making demands on the international community to help enforce international law and end the Israeli occupation.
It went on like this, where Abbas vacillated between reading pre-written remarks that introduce no new ideas or strategies and unnecessary rants that reflect the PA’s political bankruptcy and Abbas’ own lack of imagination.
The PA President, of course, made sure to offer his habitual condemnation of Palestinian ‘terrorism’ by promising that Palestinians would not “resort to violence and terrorism regardless of the act of aggression against us.” He assured his audience that his Authority believes in “peace and fighting violence.” Without elaborating, Abbas declared his intention of continuing on the path of “popular and peaceful resistance,” which, in fact, does not exist in any shape or form.
This time around, Abbas’ speech at the UN was particularly inappropriate. Indeed, it was a failure in every possible way. The least, the Palestinian leader could have done is to articulate a powerful and collective Palestinian political discourse. Instead, his statement was merely a sad homage to his own legacy, one that is riddled with disappointments and ineptitude.
Expectedly, Abbas returned to Ramallah to greet his cheering supporters once more, who are always ready and waiting to raise posters of the ageing leader, as if his UN speech had succeeded in fundamentally shifting international political momentum in favor of Palestinians.
It has to be said that the real danger in the ‘Deal of the Century’ is not the actual stipulations of that sinister plan, but the fact that the Palestinian leadership is likely to find a way to co-exist with it, at the expense of the oppressed Palestinian people, as long as donors’ money continues to flow and as long as Abbas continues to call himself a president.

 Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

Why No Retired Generals Oppose America’s Forever Wars
by Danny Sjursen


Today, generals don’t seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement. And more’s the pity…

Why No Retired Generals Oppose America’s Forever Wars

in Imperialism — by — February 21, 2020
There once lived an odd little man — five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet — who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself. For all but a few activist insiders and scholars, U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history. Yet more than a century ago, this strange contradiction of a man would become a national war hero, celebrated in pulp adventure novels, and then, 30 years later, as one of this country’s most prominent antiwar and anti-imperialist dissidents.
Raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and educated in Quaker (pacifist) schools, the son of an influential congressman, he would end up serving in nearly all of America’s “Banana Wars” from 1898 to 1931. Wounded in combat and a rare recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor, he would retire as the youngest, most decorated major general in the Marines.
A teenage officer and a certified hero during an international intervention in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900, he would later become a constabulary leader of the Haitian gendarme, the police chief of Philadelphia (while on an approved absence from the military), and a proponent of Marine Corps football. In more standard fashion, he would serve in battle as well as in what might today be labeled peacekeeping, counterinsurgency, and advise-and-assist missions in Cuba, China, the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, France, and China (again). While he showed early signs of skepticism about some of those imperial campaigns or, as they were sardonically called by critics at the time, “Dollar Diplomacy” operations — that is, military campaigns waged on behalf of U.S. corporate business interests — until he retired he remained the prototypical loyal Marine.
But after retirement, Smedley Butler changed his tune. He began to blast the imperialist foreign policy and interventionist bullying in which he’d only recently played such a prominent part. Eventually, in 1935 during the Great Depression, in what became a classic passage in his memoir, which he titled “War Is a Racket,” he wrote: “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service… And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.”
Seemingly overnight, the famous war hero transformed himself into an equally acclaimed antiwar speaker and activist in a politically turbulent era. Those were, admittedly, uncommonly anti-interventionist years, in which veterans and politicians alike promoted what (for America, at least) had been fringe ideas. This was, after all, the height of what later pro-war interventionists would pejoratively label American “isolationism.”
Nonetheless, Butler was unique (for that moment and certainly for our own) in his unapologetic amenability to left-wing domestic politics and materialist critiques of American militarism. In the last years of his life, he would face increasing criticism from his former admirer, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the military establishment, and the interventionist press. This was particularly true after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded Poland and later France. Given the severity of the Nazi threat to mankind, hindsight undoubtedly proved Butler’s virulent opposition to U.S. intervention in World War II wrong.
Nevertheless, the long-term erasure of his decade of antiwar and anti-imperialist activism and the assumption that all his assertions were irrelevant has proven historically deeply misguided. In the wake of America’s brief but bloody entry into the First World War, the skepticism of Butler (and a significant part of an entire generation of veterans) about intervention in a new European bloodbath should have been understandable. Above all, however, his critique of American militarism of an earlier imperial era in the Pacific and in Latin America remains prescient and all too timely today, especially coming as it did from one of the most decorated and high-ranking general officers of his time. (In the era of the never-ending war on terror, such a phenomenon is quite literally inconceivable.)
Smedley Butler’s Marine Corps and the military of his day was, in certain ways, a different sort of organization than today’s highly professionalized armed forces. History rarely repeats itself, not in a literal sense anyway. Still, there are some disturbing similarities between the careers of Butler and today’s generation of forever-war fighters. All of them served repeated tours of duty in (mostly) unsanctioned wars around the world. Butler’s conflicts may have stretched west from Haiti across the oceans to China, whereas today’s generals mostly lead missions from West Africa east to Central Asia, but both sets of conflicts seemed perpetual in their day and were motivated by barely concealed economic and imperial interests.
Nonetheless, whereas this country’s imperial campaigns of the first third of the twentieth century generated a Smedley Butler, the hyper-interventionism of the first decades of this century hasn’t produced a single even faintly comparable figure. Not one. Zero. Zilch. Why that is matters and illustrates much about the U.S. military establishment and contemporary national culture, none of it particularly encouraging.
Why No Antiwar Generals
When Smedley Butler retired in 1931, he was one of three Marine Corps major generals holding a rank just below that of only the Marine commandant and the Army chief of staff. Today, with about 900 generals and admirals currently serving on active duty, including 24 major generals in the Marine Corps alone, and with scores of flag officers retiring annually, not a single one has offered genuine public opposition to almost 19 years worth of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars. As for the most senior officers, the 40 four-star generals and admirals whose vocal antimilitarism might make the biggest splash, there are more of them today than there were even at the height of the Vietnam War, although the active military is now about half the size it was then. Adulated as many of them may be, however, not one qualifies as a public critic of today’s failing wars.
Instead, the principal patriotic dissent against those terror wars has come from retired colonels, lieutenant colonels, and occasionally more junior officers (like me), as well as enlisted service members. Not that there are many of us to speak of either. I consider it disturbing (and so should you) that I personally know just about every one of the retired military figures who has spoken out against America’s forever wars.
The big three are Secretary of State Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson; Vietnam veteran and onetime West Point history instructor, retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich; and Iraq veteran and Afghan War whistleblower, retired Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis. All three have proven to be genuine public servants, poignant voices, and — on some level — cherished personal mentors. For better or worse, however, none carry the potential clout of a retired senior theater commander or prominent four-star general offering the same critiques.
Something must account for veteran dissenters topping out at the level of colonel. Obviously, there are personal reasons why individual officers chose early retirement or didn’t make general or admiral. Still, the system for selecting flag officers should raise at least a few questions when it comes to the lack of antiwar voices among retired commanders. In fact, a selection committee of top generals and admirals is appointed each year to choose the next colonels to earn their first star. And perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that, according to numerous reports, “the members of this board are inclined, if not explicitly motivated, to seek candidates in their own image — officers whose careers look like theirs.” At a minimal level, such a system is hardly built to foster free thinkers, no less breed potential dissidents.
Consider it an irony of sorts that this system first received criticism in our era of forever wars when General David Petraeus, then commanding the highly publicized “surge” in Iraq, had to leave that theater of war in 2007 to serve as the chair of that selection committee. The reason: he wanted to ensure that a twice passed-over colonel, a protégé of his — future Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster — earned his star.
Mainstream national security analysts reported on this affair at the time as if it were a major scandal, since most of them were convinced that Petraeus and his vaunted counterinsurgency or “COINdinista” protégés and their “new” war-fighting doctrine had the magic touch that would turn around the failing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, Petraeus tried to apply those very tactics twice — once in each country — as did acolytes of his later, and you know the results of that.
But here’s the point: it took an eleventh-hour intervention by America’s most acclaimed general of that moment to get new stars handed out to prominent colonels who had, until then, been stonewalled by Cold War-bred flag officers because they were promoting different (but also strangely familiar) tactics in this country’s wars. Imagine, then, how likely it would be for such a leadership system to produce genuine dissenters with stars of any serious sort, no less a crew of future Smedley Butlers.
At the roots of this system lay the obsession of the American officer corps with “professionalization” after the Vietnam War debacle. This first manifested itself in a decision to ditch the citizen-soldier tradition, end the draft, and create an “all-volunteer force.” The elimination of conscription, as predicted by critics at the time, created an ever-growing civil-military divide, even as it increased public apathy regarding America’s wars by erasing whatever “skin in the game” most citizens had.
More than just helping to squelch civilian antiwar activism, though, the professionalization of the military, and of the officer corps in particular, ensured that any future Smedley Butlers would be left in the dust (or in retirement at the level of lieutenant colonel or colonel) by a system geared to producing faux warrior-monks. Typical of such figures is current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley. He may speak gruffly and look like a man with a head of his own, but typically he’s turned out to be just another yes-man for another war-power-hungry president.
One group of generals, however, reportedly now does have it out for President Trump — but not because they’re opposed to endless war. Rather, they reportedly think that The Donald doesn’t “listen enough to military advice” on, you know, how to wage war forever and a day.
What Would Smedley Butler Think Today?
In his years of retirement, Smedley Butler regularly focused on the economic component of America’s imperial war policies. He saw clearly that the conflicts he had fought in, the elections he had helped rig, the coups he had supported, and the constabularies he had formed and empowered in faraway lands had all served the interests of U.S. corporate investors. Though less overtly the case today, this still remains a reality in America’s post-9/11 conflicts, even on occasion embarrassingly so (as when the Iraqi ministry of oil was essentially the only public building protected by American troops as looters tore apart the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in the post-invasion chaos of April 2003). Mostly, however, such influence plays out far more subtly than that, both abroad and here at home where those wars help maintain the record profits of the top weapons makers of the military-industrial complex.
That beast, first identified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is now on steroids as American commanders in retirement regularly move directly from the military onto the boards of the giant defense contractors, a reality which only contributes to the dearth of Butlers in the military retiree community. For all the corruption of his time, the Pentagon didn’t yet exist and the path from the military to, say, United Fruit Company, Standard Oil, or other typical corporate giants of that moment had yet to be normalized for retiring generals and admirals. Imagine what Butler would have had to say about the modern phenomenon of the “revolving door” in Washington.
Of course, he served in a very different moment, one in which military funding and troop levels were still contested in Congress. As a longtime critic of capitalist excesses who wrote for leftist publications and supported the Socialist Party candidate in the 1936 presidential elections, Butler would have found today’s nearly trillion-dollar annual defense budgets beyond belief. What the grizzled former Marine long ago identified as a treacherous nexus between warfare and capital “in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives” seems to have reached its natural end point in the twenty-first century. Case in point: the record (and still rising) “defense” spending of the present moment, including — to please a president — the creation of a whole new military service aimed at the full-scale militarization of space.
Sadly enough, in the age of Trump, as numerous polls demonstrate, the U.S. military is the only public institution Americans still truly trust. Under the circumstances, how useful it would be to have a high-ranking, highly decorated, charismatic retired general in the Butler mold galvanize an apathetic public around those forever wars of ours. Unfortunately, the likelihood of that is practically nil, given the military system of our moment.
Of course, Butler didn’t exactly end his life triumphantly. In late May 1940, having lost 25 pounds due to illness and exhaustion — and demonized as a leftist, isolationist crank but still maintaining a whirlwind speaking schedule — he checked himself into the Philadelphia Navy Yard Hospital for a “rest.” He died there, probably of some sort of cancer, four weeks later. Working himself to death in his 10-year retirement and second career as a born-again antiwar activist, however, might just have constituted the very best service that the two-time Medal of Honor winner could have given the nation he loved to the very end.
Someone of his credibility, character, and candor is needed more than ever today. Unfortunately, this military generation is unlikely to produce such a figure. In retirement, Butler himself boldly confessed that, “like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical…”
Today, generals don’t seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement. And more’s the pity…
Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch regular, is a retired U.S. Army major and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and now lives in Lawrence, Kansas. He has written a memoir of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge and his forthcoming book, Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War, is available for pre-order. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet and check out his podcast “Fortress on a Hill.”
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Originally published in TomDispatch.com
Copyright 2020 Danny Sjursen

What about Kashmiri Pundits? Three Decades of Exodus
by Ram Puniyani


This January 2020, it is thirty years since the Kashmiri Pundits’ exodus from the Kashmir valley took place. They had suffered grave injustices, violence and humiliation prior to the migration away from the place of their social and cultural roots in Kashmir Valley. The phenomenon of this exodus had been due to the communalization of militancy in Kashmir in the decade of 1980s. While no ruling Government has applied itself enough to ‘solve’ this uprooting of pundits from their roots, there are communal elements who have
been aggressively using ‘what about Kashmiri Pundits?’, every time liberal, human rights defenders talk about the plight of Muslim minority in India. This minority is now facing an overall erosion of their citizenship rights.



IMA Writes To Minister On Worsening Air Quality
Press Release


Indian Medical Association writes to Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar, asks to include all non-attainment cities in National Clean Air Programme .IMA has also demanded the ministry to increase the number of monitoring stations across the country












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The GOP just tried to kick hundreds of students off the voter rolls

    This year, MAGA GOP activists in Georgia attempted to disenfranchise hundreds of students by trying to kick them off the voter rolls. De...