Tag Archives: Infrastructure

Assumption of US Dominance Has ended; Imperial Decline is Looming

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By Danielle Ryan

Source: Covert Geopolitics

Iran, China, and Russia are challenging the US in the seas and skies. It’s a symptom of America’s declining global influence.

In his new book about the decline of US global power, historian Alfred McCoy writes, that faced with a fading superpower, incapable of paying its bills, other powers will begin to “provocatively challenge US dominion” in the seas and skies.

This is happening already with what appears to be increasing regularity, although perhaps “provocative” is not the right adjective to describe it.

The American military has been the chief provocateur in the seas and skies for decades, entering foreign airspace and territorial waters with impunity, expecting no retaliation. Now, powers like China, Iran and Russia are more actively challenging the US’s unchecked behavior.

In January, Iran detained ten American sailors overnight after two US Navy boats entered Iranian territorial waters. American exceptionalists were dismayed at Iran’s apparent show of disregard for US power, many blaming the incident on Obama’s “weakness.”

In May, US officials accused Beijing of an “unsafe intercept” when Chinese planes buzzed an American spy plane flying off the coast of China. Later that month, two US nuke ‘sniffer’ aircraft were intercepted by Chinese planes in the East China Sea. In July, Chinese jets again drove off an American spy plane flying over the Yellow Sea. Just last week, a US ship fired warning shots at an Iranian boat in the Persian Gulf after the craft approached within 150 yards and ignored American warnings to stay away.

Those are just a few examples from a spate of recent incidents that have seen US boats and planes intercepted or harassed. Not to mention, Russian and American jets are always buzzing and chasing each other off over the Baltic and the Black Sea.

This willingness to confront the US military may be indicative of the wider, aforementioned problem for Washington: Its global influence is waning, the country and its military are enjoying less respect and clout internationally, and rising powers are beginning to assert their own national interests more forcefully.

The assumption of US dominance in regions like the Western Pacific and South China Sea has ended. In Europe, Russia has not been shy about challenging the seemingly endless eastward expansion of NATO. In the Middle East, too, Russia has come to be seen as an equal to the US in terms of clout, influence and the ability to arbitrate in regional conflicts. Despite its archipelago of more than 800 bases across the world, the US can no longer dictate to the world in the way it once could.

All these powers, that the US has worked so hard to keep in check, are continuously being pushed toward each other by a common goal: to end US domination and build a more multipolar world.

Most often, these developments are portrayed as “muscle flexing” and “aggressive” by Western media, while American efforts to maintain global hegemony are seen almost exclusively as benign and crucially important for democracy and world peace.

Among American politicians and pundits, there’s a temptation to pick someone to blame for this diminishing power. Republicans often want to blame “weak” Obama, while Democrats prefer to blame George W. Bush. In future years, the focus of their blame will undoubtedly shift to Donald Trump for compounding the image of the once-superpower now in the midst of a flailing and embarrassing decline from within.

If we had to pinpoint the most significant turning point or catalyst, it would probably be the invasion of Iraq under Bush. But it’s not about one president or policy. What sets an empire on a path toward decline is rot from within the system. That system does not change with elections, no matter how radical the candidates.

It is the system Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in a 1953 speech, two months into his presidency. Despite his military background, the former Supreme Commander of Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe warned against “a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.”

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said.

In his farewell address eight years later, Eisenhower warned again: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

But it’s not just the overuse of the military causing the problem. There are other trends which will eventually affect America’s global decline.

US infrastructure is crumbling. About 56,000 bridges across the country are marked as “structurally deficient.” The country cannot boast a single airport which ranks among the top 20 in the world. More than two-thirds of American roads are “in dire need of repair or upgrades” — and the American Society of Civil Engineers has given the overall condition of the country’s infrastructure a “D+” grade.

Recent OECD literacy, science and math tests have seen students from Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan come out on top, while the US trails 20 or 30 places behind. Over the long run, trends like this may contribute to the US losing its reputation for cutting edge technology and innovation. All of these factors contribute to imperial decline.

Like any declining empire in denial, the top priority becomes to preserve its status at any cost. A desperate attempt to preserve that dominance can be seen in Washington’s haphazard, erratic and nonsensical foreign policies. This is not at all president-specific. Each of the last four presidents has been foreign policy failures.

When speaking of the decline of American empire, people often assume it will happen in one big bang. We wake up one day, and the empire has suddenly fallen. Empires don’t rise or fall in a day. In reality, it can be so slow you barely notice it until it’s no longer possible to correct the course.

The US has, in the past 17 years, invaded Afghanistan, invaded Iraq, launched a “humanitarian” intervention in Libya which destroyed the country, fueled a proxy war in Syria and aided Saudi Arabia’s slaughter of Yemen. Now, the Trump administration appears to be angling for a war with Iran.

Contrary to the official narrative, none of this has been to do with democracy or fighting for human rights. It has been a scramble to maintain America’s status as the world’s top-decider and go-between.

China, which is forecast to have a bigger economy than the US by 2030, has managed to quietly expand its influence and strengthen its military without deploying it abroad or starting pointless wars. Meanwhile, the US has overextended itself around the globe to little avail. It has alienated powers like Russia and Iran by constantly saber rattling in their directions, slapping sanctions on any nation which fails to do its bidding — ultimately encouraging its so-called enemies to unite against it.

The growing willingness of other countries to outwardly challenge US power on the seas and in the skies may just be a visible example of the results.

“Since 1991, we have lost our global preeminence, quadrupled our national debt, and gotten ourselves mired in five Mideast wars, with the neocons clamoring for a sixth, with Iran,” wrote Pat Buchanan in a recent piece for The American Conservative.

Americans concerned at the direction their country is taking should ask themselves whether continuing on the current course will be worth it.

History would argue it is not.

There are some sectors in the alternative media who are laughing at the efforts of the Eastern Alliance towards a multipolar world. Yet, they could not present a more viable alternative. They can describe the problem so eloquently, yet they seem to dwell more on the “hopelessness of the situation.”

We consider them part of the problem, and you are the solution.

Trump proposes huge hike in military and police spending

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By Patrick Martin

Source: WSWS.org

The Trump administration sent instructions to federal agencies Monday proposing a $54 billion increase in spending for the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security, to be offset by $54 billion in cuts for other agencies, mainly those involved in domestic social services and regulation of business.

Trump’s budget outline sets the stage for his first address to Congress on Tuesday. It provides further evidence that the Trump administration will be dedicated to radically rolling back social spending to finance a dramatic escalation of military operations, both in the neo-colonial wars in the Middle East and against the United States’ ‘great power’ rivals: China and Russia.

Federal departments are being told to file budget requests for the fiscal year that begins October 1, 2017 based on the numbers they were given by the Office of Management and Budget. Each agency will be responsible for working out the cuts required to meet proposed reductions, while the Pentagon, CIA and DHS will propose expanded operations with the additional funds they are to be awarded.

There were no details made public about the exact budget ceilings given to each federal department, but White House officials made it clear that foreign aid programs in the State Department and anti-pollution regulation through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would suffer some of the largest cuts.

The total budget of the EPA is only $9 billion, so many other domestic programs are certain to be hard-hit, involving such departments as Education, Labor, Transportation, Agriculture (which includes food stamps), Housing and Urban Development and Health and Human Services.

The biggest federal social programs, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, are not affected by the budget order, which involves only funding for so-called discretionary programs, those financed through annual congressional appropriations. Entitlement programs, where benefits are paid out automatically to those who establish their eligibility, are covered by a separate budget process.

OMB Director Mick Mulvaney appeared at the White House press briefing Monday afternoon to explain the action taken by the Trump administration. He emphasized that setting what he called the “top-line budget number” for each department was only the start of a protracted process.

The OMB will use the figures from each department and agency to prepare a budget outline to be submitted to Congress on March 16. A full budget will not be ready until sometime in May, Mulvaney said. He also indicated that while spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid were not addressed in the action taken Monday, “entitlement reform”—i.e., cuts in these critical programs—would be a subject of discussion with congressional leaders later in the budget process.

Press reports identified the three White House officials who have played the main roles in the initial budgeting: Mulvaney, who was confirmed on February 16 as budget director; National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, the huge investment bank; and Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, the former chief executive of the fascistic Breitbart News site, who exercises increasingly broad sway over all White House policy decisions.

While no details have yet been released of what the $54 billion increase in military-police spending will pay for, the scale of the increase, in and of itself, shows the real character of the Trump administration. This is to be a government of war abroad and mass repression at home.

Trump himself touched on this theme in typically rambling and unfocused remarks to a meeting of the National Governors Association Monday. “We never win a war,” he said. “We never win. And we don’t fight to win. We don’t fight to win. So we either got to win, or don’t fight at all.”

He continued, telling the governors, “My first budget will be submitted to the Congress next month. This budget will be a public safety and national security budget, very much based on those two with plenty of other things, but very strong. And it will include a historic increase in defense spending to rebuild the depleted military of the United States of America at a time we most need it.”

Additional money for the Pentagon is likely to go to a dramatically increased tempo of operations in Iraq and Syria. Defense Secretary James Mattis delivered proposals to the White House Monday for an offensive against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), as required by an executive order issued by Trump last month. No details are available yet, but any acceleration of the bombing campaign, let alone the deployment of significant numbers of the US ground troops, would increase the cost of that war by many billions.

The $54 billion increase would also presumably include funds for the construction of Trump’s planned wall on the US-Mexico border, as well as a massive increase in spending on detention facilities for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants to be rounded up under the executive orders already issued by the White House.

The federal budget is operating under the constraints imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act, the bipartisan legislation negotiated by the Obama White House, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and a Democratic-controlled Senate. This set up the so-called sequester process, under which all discretionary spending is subject to a budget freeze, for both domestic and military programs.

Each year, increased spending for programs under the sequester has been worked out on the basis of roughly equal increases for domestic and military programs. Last year, for fiscal year 2016, Congress approved $543 billion for domestic discretionary programs and $607 billion for the military. The Trump White House plan would thus represent a cut of about 10 percent for domestic programs, and an increase of nearly that amount for the military.

Any significant change in the sequester process would require support from congressional Democrats, particularly in the Senate, where the Republican party holds only a narrow 52-48 edge, and any major legislation would require a 60-vote majority to pass.

Several congressional Republican leaders criticized the White House plan as insufficiently skewed to the military. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry of Texas issued a statement criticizing the “low budget number” and adding, “The administration will have to make clear which problems facing our military they are choosing not to fix.”

Senator John McCain of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, declared that the Trump plan is “a mere 3 percent above President Obama’s defense budget, which has left our military underfunded, undersized and unready.”

For all the statements by Trump and the Republicans bemoaning the supposedly “depleted” state of the US military, the United States spends more on its armed forces than the next 15 countries in the world combined. The military budget is only inadequate if the mission of the US military is assumed to be the conquest of the entire planet and the subduing of all armed resistance from any quarter—which is actually the perspective of the American ruling elite.

How the Super-Rich Will Destroy Themselves

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HangTheBankers

By Paul Buchheit

Source: Nation of Change

Perhaps they believe that their underground survival bunkers with bullet-resistant doors and geothermal power and anti-chemical air filters and infrared surveillance devices and pepper spray detonators will sustain them for two or three generations.

Perhaps they feel immune from the killings in the streets, for they rarely venture into the streets anymore. They don’t care about the great masses of ordinary people, nor do they think they need us.

Or do they? There are a number of ways that the super-rich, because of their greed and lack of empathy for others, may be hastening their own demise, while taking the rest of us with them.

1. Pandemic (Because of Their Disdain for Global Health)

“A year ago the world was in a panic over Ebola. Now it’s Zika at the gate. When will it end?” –Public health expert Dr. Ali Khan.

It could end with a global pandemic that spreads with the speed of the 1918 Spanish Flu, but with a virulence that kills over half of us, rich and poor alike. Vanderbilt University’s Dr. William Schaffner warned us a decade ago, “You’ve got to really invest vast resources right now to protect us from a pandemic.” Added infectious disease specialist Dr. Stephen Baum, “There’s nobody making vaccines anymore because the profitability is low and the liability is high.”

The flu is just one of our worries. It has been estimated that less than 10 percent of the budget for health research is spent on diseases that cause 90 percent of the world’s illnesses. According to a study in The Lancet, of the 336 new drugs developed in the first decade of this century, only four of them were for diseases impacting third-world peoples. World Health Organization director Margaret Chan lamented the long decades of disregard for the African-centered effects of the Ebola virus: “Ebola has historically been confined to poor African nations. The R&D incentive is virtually non-existent. A profit-driven industry does not invest in products for markets that cannot pay.”

The super-rich had better make sure their anti-chemical air filters are also anti-viral.

2. Terrorism (Because of Global Inequality)

In The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett document some of the most frightening effects of inequality: higher levels of crime and violence, impacting all classes of people.

Inequality is worst at the global level, and the victims of global greed are getting more violent. The World Protests report concluded that the most recent decade represents one of the most agitated periods in modern history — comparable to pre-Civil-War days, World War 1, and the Civil Rights era. According to expert Scott Atran, terrorism primarily appeals to young men who are bored and underemployed; for them, “jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer.”

The terrorism of the future could easily take the form of the viral killers mentioned above. As Dr. Khan notes, “A deadly microbe like smallpox — to which we no longer have immunity — can be easily recreated in a rogue laboratory.”

3. Drought (Because of Their Denial of Environmental Destruction)

National Geographic’s 2012 Greendex Survey reveals a remarkable human response to environmental damage: “[Those] demonstrating the least sustainable behavior as consumers, are least likely to feel guilty about the implications of their choices for the environment.” Citizens of Mexico, Brazil, China, and India tend to be most concerned about climate change, pollution, and species loss, while American, French, and British consumers are more concerned about the state of the economy and the cost of energy and fuel.

Even worse than denial is the outright suppression of climate-saving technologies, as, for example, by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which wants to charge the “freeriders” who install solar panels on their roofs.

The result of this environmental contempt, according to a Columbia University study, is the prospect of “drought beyond the sub-tropics and into the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, regions of globally important agricultural production.”

The super-rich can while away the hours in their underground bunkers watching videos of the good old days when the earth was cool.

4. Atrophy (Because of the Debt-Induced Collapse of Innovation)

A Small Business Administration study found that only 2% of the Millennial Generation are entrepreneurs (self-employed or business owners), compared to 6.7% of Baby Boomers and 5.4% in Generation X. According to the Kauffman Foundation, 20- to 34-year-olds made up over a third of all new business startups in 1997, but less than a quarter of them today. The super-rich have manipulated the financial system to the point that would-be entrepreneurs, many of them young and deeply in debt, are unable or unwilling to take chances on new startups.

Yet on a global scale youth entrepreneurship is on the rise. America is exceptional in its entrepreneurial decline.

5. Decay (Because of Their Disregard for Our Crumbling Infrastructure)

The corporate elite may face further business collapse if they continue to ignore the breakdown in our nation’s infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that every American household is losing $3,400 per year in disposable income due to infrastructure deficiencies.

The tens of billions of dollars already being paid for additional transportation and storage costs may not kill the capitalists, but the losses to China and other fast-developing nations will surely deflate their stock prices and their egos.

How the Super-Rich Could Help Themselves

Amidst all the talk of unity and prayer and peace, a solution exists: job opportunities and affordable housing. The super-rich could prolong life for all of us, including themselves, if they recognized the need to support a strong society. If not, they’ll be ensconced in their bunkers with their children at their sides, with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

Five Ways America Is Like a Third-World Country

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By Nathan Wellman

Source: U.S. Uncut

The United States of America is possibly the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. However, many third-world countries actually surpass America in many of the most vital gauges for measuring human development.

Here are five of the most jaw-droppingly unforgivable ways in which America is lagging behind the rest of the world:

1. America’s criminal justice system is broken

The U.S. represents only 5% of the world’s population, but this one country comprises 25% of the world’s prison population. According to the NAACP, a disproportionate 58% of America’s prisoners are African-American or Hispanic despite these demographics only adding up to about 30% of the U.S. population.

The only nation that imprisons a greater percentage of its citizens than America is North Korea. The U.S. jails 716 people for every 100,000 Americans, according to the International Center for Prison Studies. That’s nearly twice as many as Russia (484 prisoners per 100,000), and far more than Iran (284) or China (121). For context, the U.S. only jailed around 100-200 people per 100,000 citizens in the 1970s, and the incarcerated rate is only getting worse today, even as crime rates fall. A staggering 60% of prisoners are in jail for nonviolent drug charges.

Inside prison, about 600 victims are raped every day, according to an estimate from the Justice Department. An in-depth DOJ investigation found that of the approximate 217,000 prisoners raped each year, 17,000 were juveniles.

2. Gun Violence is an epidemic

America has 20 times more murders when compared to the average rate of the developed world. Even terrorism-plagued Iraq has half the murder rate of the U.S. Over half of the deadliest mass shootings from the last 50 years happened in America, and 79% of those shooters got ahold of their guns legally. Some American cities, particularly New Orleans and Detroit, even surpass many Latin American countries, which suffer from some of the highest gun violence rates in the world.

3. Healthcare costs too much and delivers too little

America is the only developed country that does not ensure healthcare to all of its citizens. Even in the wake of the Affordable Care Act, millions of poverty-stricken Americans have no medical insurance because Republican governors have refused to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government is paying the cost and the simple measure would actually save money for their states.

Life expectancy in many American counties is lower than Nicaragua, Algeria, or Bangladesh. The U.S. is unusual among developed countries in that Americans die in the tens of thousands as a direct result of a lack of health insurance. America also spends twice the percentage of our GDP on healthcare than the average wealthy country for these substandard results.

America also suffers from the highest infant mortality and teen pregnancy rate in the developed world.

4. Inequality is rampant

Researchers have shown that economic inequality directly correlates to public distrust in government representatives, as well as a decrease in health and well-being.

Unfortunately, the U.S. has the worst rates of income inequality in the world, according to the 2015 Global Wealth Report conducted by Allianz. The wealthiest one percent of Americans own nearly half of the nation’s wealth invested in stocks and mutual funds, and the overall gap between rich and poor has only grown since the recession, with almost all income gains going to the top 1% since 2009.

Despite the idea of America being a meritocracy, those born in the poorest 20% of the American population have less than a 3% chance of making it to the top quintile.

5. Infrastructure is crumbling

America is quite literally falling apart.

One study concludes that the U.S. needs to invest $3.6 trillion into infrastructure over the next six years. One out of every nine American bridges (66,405 bridges) have been labeled “structurally deficient.”

Water runs through dilapidated wooden pipes in certain parts of South Dakota, Alaska, and Pennsylvania. Some of Detroit’s sewer lines still used today were originally constructed in the mid-1800s.

A whopping 45% of Americans have no access to public transit, and the construction of the infamously still-incomplete Second Avenue subway line in New York City has been hit with delays dating all the way back to World War II.

 

America certainly has and continues to achieve greatness in many ways. But if we want to truly earn our oft-proclaimed slogan of “Greatest Country in the World,” these fatal flaws in our system must be acknowledged and addressed. Otherwise, the emperor will continue to parade about with no clothes, and we run the risk of being completely surpassed by a world marveling at our oblivious nakedness.

America: Dangerous Curve Ahead

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dangerous-curve

By Helaine Olen

Source: The Baffler

At some point in the early 1980s, a large yellow placard began turning up in the back window of cars proclaiming “Baby on Board.” At first it seemed a joke, an inadvertent high-sign that the driver was someone who took this parenthood thing a little too seriously. Even as the shiny placards became omnipresent, a lot of us dismissed them as yet another badge of Baby Boomer self-importance.

Of course we were wrong. It’s now conventional wisdom that the Baby on Board sign was one of the precursors to a more widespread change in parenting from a time when, to us, children appear to have been neglected to our present situation in which doting over children is every parent’s self-congratulatory purpose in life. But those Baby on Board announcements dovetailed with something else too, something we don’t normally connect them with: the decline in the United States’ spending on infrastructure. As we were begging people to give special consideration to this babied-up car or that screaming station wagon, even as we were increasingly crazed with protecting our own individual children, we were not exactly securing their future.

According to a report released last year by the Council on Foreign Relations, spending on transportation went from more than one percent of the gross national product in the 1960s to just under one percent by 1980. That latter percentage point, which would have seemed at the time to be low, is now considered a 35-year high point. If you are looking for a common point of reference for our nation’s crumbling bridges—which received a C+ for maintenance from the American Society of Civil Engineers for 2013—or train derailments, like last week’s fatal Amtrak wreck outside of Philadelphia, look hard at that number. The most recent grade for our overall infrastructure? A D+.

The collapse in public funding for our transportation needs did not lead to anger by the vast majority of the population, however. While our leaders ran the country off the road and into the ditch, we coped. And truly, no one seemed to want to pay the tax bill to fill potholes, but we were happy to spend more and more of our money on things ranging from ridiculous bright yellow signs begging other drivers to take care of our children to purchasing ever larger cars and trucks that we thought would keep us personally safe, and damn everyone else.

Those driving SUVs certainly thought they would receive a safety boost, and didn’t seem to care that it came at the cost of driving a weaponized car known for a design that actively and provably caused disproportionate damages in collisions. As New York Times Hong Kong bureau chief Keith Bradsher noted in his 2003 book High and Mighty: The Dangerous Rise of the SUV, market research showed many consumers buying the behemoth automobile were “self-centered,” willing to “endanger other motorists so as to achieve small improvements in their personal safety,” adding “the public perception that SUVs provide considerable protection in a crash has been an important factor in their sales for many years.”

And if something did go wrong in an SUV? Well, the sad tale of Ellen Brody, the suburban New York City woman who drove her Mercedes SUV onto the tracks at a notorious Westchester County Metro-North crossing this past winter during a massive traffic jam, is instructive. Six people—including Brody—died when the safety gates came down and, apparently discombobulated, she drove onto the tracks instead of backing up.

But inquiries into how and why Ellen Brody ended up making her fatal wrong move seem almost designed to obfuscate the fact that if it hadn’t been this luckless woman, then it would have been someone else on those tracks eventually. As it turns out, there have been transportation reports going back to 1970 begging for investment in the area and recommending sane reforms such as eliminating the crossing entirely or at least adding gates and lights to make the sight lines significantly safer for drivers. None of it happened.

The Amtrak derailment last week is bringing us more of the same blame game. There’s the open question of why the train’s engineer permitted the train to reach 106 miles-per-hour as it approached a curve with a speed limit of 50 miles-per-hour, for example. And the accident exposes the political lobbying that persistently enervates our society, possibly preventing the installation of a safety system that would have slowed this train automatically. These are all legitimate and important lines of inquiry to pursue. But the search for individual villains and lunge toward stop-gap safety solves is also a wreckage clearance and scrubbing operation, allowing us to forget that the number one cause of the Amtrak accident is the United States’ tax and spending policies and priorities that have left us with transportation system falling apart a little more every day. The kids grow up, the world spins in reverse.

Hmm. What about those goddamn Baby on Board signs? A survey from 2012 found they might have contributed to an increase in car accidents by blocking driver sight lines. Self-absorption left too many of us blind to the curve ahead.

Helaine Olen is the author of Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry, a contributing editor for Pacific Standard, and a regular Slate contributor.